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Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

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Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#401

Post by frankus »

jonahx wrote: post #396
estearum wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, which you should be rewarded for as a developer. I recommend 0% tax on improvements and 100% tax on land value.

Without land ownership, how is it decided who gets to develop what where?

The most popular proposal (from Henry George) is to maintain individual land ownership, but impose a land-value tax that approaches 100% of the land rent.

The result is that real estate basically sells for roughly what it would cost to rebuild whatever is built on the land.

There is still a premium charged (in the form of LVT) to allocate access to desirable locations, but the revenue goes to the government/community instead of the previous owner. And the eliminating the incentive for land speculation should actually reduce overall costs.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#402

Post by epistasis »

pc86 wrote: post #321
greenie_beans wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would love to hear a YIMBY consider the market forces/how capitalism works and not just reduce it to regulation. aka when it costs over $500k to build a single apartment unit and most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation burden driving up that cost.

If we're talking about home prices why are you talking about apartments? There are a lot of costs associated with apartment buildings that simply don't exist for SFH and MFH builds. Apartments are a different beast.

Indeed, there's an entirely separate, far more strict building code for apartments than for single-family detached housing.

This was an explicit goal of the designers of the early building code split: make single family homes as cheap as possible, and apartments as expensive as possible.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#403

Post by psadauskas »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #358
greenie_beans wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i would love to hear a YIMBY consider the market forces/how capitalism works and not just reduce it to regulation. aka when it costs over $500k to build a single apartment unit and most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation burden driving up that cost.

>it costs over $500k to build a single apartment unit and most of those costs are construction with very little of the regulation burden driving up that cost. What? What? I dare anyone here who's simping for regulation to try to develop from scratch something that does not benefit from the myriad of exemptions that apply to 1-few family residential development (because there'd be no political will for the racket if t…

I'm not sure what you're asking for here.

Used to be, the contractor would rent a trenchbox at his discretion. But that means "almost never", because the contractor that doesn't has lower prices than one that does, and just has to pay the occasional OSHA fine. But workers keep dying in trenches, so the government has to step in and make a rule "thou must always use a trenchbox".

We can't go back to "contractor's discretion", because then people die in easily preventable ways. The other alternative is MORE regulation, and the contractor has to do a soil study to know if they're required to use a trenchbox for this particular trench.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#404

Post by epistasis »

greenie_beans wrote: post #381
forshaper wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Permitting admin is part of regulation, which in turn is required for construction.

yeah for sure and i didn't say that isn't a cost. i said it's a small part of the cost, almost negligible compared to the cost to actually build

Is 10% negligible? 20%? How have you quantified this?

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#405

Post by rjsw »

altairprime wrote: post #364
pc86 wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to hear anyone say why "build more" isn't a valid answer to lowering the cost of housing. Even if new builds stay at exactly the same price they're at today, the price of older homes will decrease as supply increases. And I don't just mean in this thread, I mean ever. It's always hand-wavey "it doesn't work like that" when the evidence suggests that it does.

The underlying issue is that converting single-family suburbia to medium-density multifamily ‘ruins the neighborhood’, and cities don’t have the courage to eminent domain homes and replace them with apartment buildings themselves, so they outsource the housing function to the Free* Market, which is most definitely not interested in terminating the SFH market. Between the profitless-ness of apartments for the real est…

Commercial new-build apartments happen elsewhere in the world, plenty of them in my city.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#406

Post by shlant »

estearum wrote: post #391
shlant wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

really? you think it's not significantly effected by anything else? like amount of housing available?

Pretty much no.

and your evidence that property prices are almost entirely set by wages is?

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#407

Post by mamonster »

reducesuffering wrote: post #322
mamonster wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You cannot live in Musk's banking account. You have to have the actual physical structure, and current laws in hotspots like San Francisco and New York do their utmost to prevent new development. >Places like Austin, which are less restrictive, don't have this problem. Not really fair to compare 2 cities on the waterfront with no obvious space to build over to a city in the middle of Texas. San Francisco is even wor…

We've had the technology to build skyscrapers for over 100 years. They're illegal in 90% of the city

>We've had the technology to build skyscrapers for over 100 years. They're illegal in 90% of the city

Not a great idea for coastline cities. Will cause soil to sink and the more you build the faster it goes.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#408

Post by smallmancontrov »

estearum wrote: post #382
rootusrootus wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you remove landlords (but keep property managers, developers, etc In this scenario, who owns the property? And if you are advocating that everyone should own their home, what is the point of a property manager? What about the people who do not actually want to own their home?

They can be privately owned and have the land value (unearned value, by definition) simply taxed away. Or you can have the government own the land but do long-term (99 year) leases, like they do in Singapore.

Singapore has the correct approach. Land Value Tax is the incorrect approach.

LVT has the same vulnerability as property tax: owners can worm their way into the policy details and redirect the surplus back into their own pockets. Leases bypass this problem through the competitive bidding process.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#409

Post by selectodude »

epistasis wrote: post #353
selectodude wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You gotta look at the motivations. Rich people and activists can both agree that affordable housing requirements are a good thing. The higher the better. This makes the project not pencil out so everybody is happy - the homeowners who don’t want new neighbors and the activists who think that everything is gentrification. The only people who get screwed are the only people who don’t have a vote, the non-residents. Whi…

I would argue that the people who get screwed the worst are all the people who can barely afford to pay current rent. They get displaced when rents rise, having to move away from their friends, family, their kids' schools, etc. All because "activists" convinced them that their enemies are the people able to pay slightly more, rather than the system that says "only the X wealthiest people can live here, oh and we won'…

I’m always a bit confused how this is so difficult for people to understand. If I want to move into your neighborhood, there are two options - I move into new construction or I move into your house. There is no option C where I decide that because the housing stock is garbage, I decide to go somewhere else.

Re: Wages in America Are Too Low for the 30% Rule to Work for Renters Anymore

#410

Post by tmaly »

throwaway041207 wrote: post #158
WarmWash wrote: post #67

The problem is absolutley that housing is too expensive, which of course a bunch of realtors are not going to point out. Increasing wages will not fix the housing crisis, and will just drive prices higher. How convenient for a bunch of realtors...

In my neck of the woods (New England), home prices have doubled since March of 2020. I have yet to read a comprehensive overview of how this happened and how we get out of it. Of course, people went nuts offering over the asking price when interest rates were super low so I understand, to some degree, that baselines were reset. But the current housing market doesn't feel sustainable. I don't understand how a proper m…

If you look at the amount of money created since Covid, this explains a lot of this increase in asset prices.

But beyond that, interest rates are a big driver of what people can afford for a monthly mortgage. These rates may come down a little. However, the FED facility that was creating sub 3% rates was likely a once in a lifetime opportunity.

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