Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Priced out of home ownership

bbc.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 1001 posts

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#411

Post by rcpt »

itake wrote: post #393
screye wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both are band aids for the real problem. Housing can't both be an investment and a basic need. You need to pick one or find an opinionated middle ground. If housing is an investment, then remove all protections and open up the supply. No height regulations, no minum parking regulations, no mandatory HOAs. No moratoriams or legal protections when loans default. If housing is a need, then regulate it like a limited res…

e: if you don't agree with my idea, please comment why instead of down voting. -- > Housing can't both be an investment and a basic need. Housing as investment is a beautiful solution to how many people fail to properly save for retirement. For many people entering retirement, their home is a huge part of the investment portfolio, because they always made sure to make that payment. If properties didn't appreciate, ol…

> if properties didn't appreciate, old people would not have the assets to retire on, then what?

The younger generations will find that out.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#412

Post by Chris2048 »

speeder wrote: post #104

I live in Portugal and here the situation is outright ridiculous. 1. There are a ridiculous amount of abandoned properties, when I walk the streets of major cities, sometimes more than half of the buildings even in expensive areas are boarded-up. 2. Meanwhile I am afraid of being homeless soon, I lost my job recently, and the unemployment benefit I can receive is literally half of my rent. Thing is, there is no "wors…

Is this also an issue in cities like Lisbon?

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#414

Post by itake »

rcpt wrote: post #395
itake wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree building housing is a symptom, and not the core problem. But I'm skeptical that increasing building or density would actually lower housing costs. If that were true, high dense cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Singapore, or Hong Kong would have much lower cost housing. Housing more people in a concentrated area creates more demand for services, which creates more demand for housing which jacks up prices. Pac…

Beijing, Tokyo and Singapore are not that expensive to live in. Especially if you're renting. Hong Kong has all sorts of crazy building restrictions and is a different story

The article is specifically about purchasing homes. Even the USA, it also is cheaper to rent than to buy. Buying a home in Singapore has a 6 year waiting list to access public housing with properties exceeding $1m SGD.

Taxes, Transportation and food costs are cheap, but property is not.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#415

Post by rcpt »

glitchc wrote: post #293

They're always the same reasons: - Properties in world-class cities are in demand globally - NIMBYism means it's hard to build new housing or increase density - Resource costs and wages are high in world-class cities The first one is a demand-side driver, the last two are supply-side drivers. There aren't any palatable solutions to reduce the impact of these drivers, at least not ones that do not negatively impact ot…

The reason is always tax policy. Real estate gets ridiculous advantages that other assets don't.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#416

Post by johngladtj »

tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

>Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause?

Do they all have zoning, urban planning requirements, and restrictions on what landowners can do with their property? Yes?

This isn't a complicated issue, this is 100% a self inflicted "problem" that can be solved with the stroke of a pen.

Pro-tip: abolish all restrictions on what landowners can build in the property. No licensing requirements, no filings, no nothing.

The sum total requirement for someone to build something anywhere should be them asking themselves "do I have permission from the landowner to do this?" And getting to work.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#417

Post by ivan_gammel »

throwaway22032 wrote: post #379
ivan_gammel wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Iirc, 20% of all bedrooms in UK are spare bedrooms in houses that are too big for their owners. This is indeed underutilization.

Underutilized would imply that it's literally useless dead space. I have more rooms in my house than people, they have purposes.

UK census differentiates between rooms and bedrooms, so indeed an unused bedroom is likely a dead space.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#418

Post by rcpt »

dahart wrote: post #333
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No-one can kick you out of your own home because they want to rent to someone they can charge more Property tax isn’t voluntary and as exogenous as a landlord. (Also eminent domain, to say nothing of most peoples’ mortgages.) > Not everything is a purely financial decision Making the largest leveraged purchase of your life for an emotional comfort object is irrational. That doesn’t make it wrong. But it ceases to b…

You pay property tax either way, it just might be rolled into your rent. You probably have years to pay missing property taxes, while landlords will wait nowhere near that long. Eminent domain is only exercised rarely, and doesn’t even compare to how often rents are increased, or how often people are evicted.

> You pay property tax either way, it just might be rolled into your rent.

No you don't. Property taxes are not incident on renters.

Extreme example in California

https://prop13.wtf/2023/05/06/prop13-is-not-passed-on-to-ren...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#419

Post by j7ake »

FactKnower69 wrote: post #310
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

1000%. I will never get tired of teaching people (it's news to every single one of them!) that at any given time, there are more than 20 empty housing units in the United States for every single homeless person on the street ( https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/ ). There is not , nor has there ever been , anything resembling a "housing shortage". We live in a post-scarcity world as far as housing is concerned, and…

Your statement aggregates across cities with different job opportunities and economic outputs. You need to look at specific cities with housing problems, and ask whether building more houses in that specific city would alleviate housing shortages.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#420

Post by sunshowers »

FactKnower69 wrote: post #310
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price infla…

1000%. I will never get tired of teaching people (it's news to every single one of them!) that at any given time, there are more than 20 empty housing units in the United States for every single homeless person on the street ( https://www.self.inc/info/empty-homes/ ). There is not , nor has there ever been , anything resembling a "housing shortage". We live in a post-scarcity world as far as housing is concerned, and…

This is simply not correct once you account for the fact that people do not like to be uprooted from the communities they're part of. We are simply not in a post-scarcity situation for housing, and YIMBYism is essentially correct.

Homelessness is the most visible sign of a much larger systemic problem. For example, it's quite likely that many homes today are overcrowded, and people don't have as much space to live as they desire. This is bad! Not as bad as homelessness, but depending on the specifics still quite bad. The good news is that building vertically permits more private space per person, so we don't just have to accept things getting worse.

Post reply on HN