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Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

economist.com

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Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#441

Post by throwaway908724 »

turtlebits wrote: post #356
throwaway908724 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, I wish. I'm speaking as someone who put all his retirement savings into index funds year after year, but then married someone whose job is related to real estate. Real estate feels more concrete and understandable to her than finance, so that's where our money goes now. It's not easy free money, and I don't know why you would think that any high-profile, low-barrier-to-entry investment would be easy free money.…

Are you spending an unreasonable amount of time managing property vs the rent you take in? I spend a max of an hour a month on average on property management. Find good tenants (reduce the rent if you have to). On average my tenants have had 3+ year leases with minimal management.

We've done significant remodeling between each tenant just to stay competitive with other properties coming on the market. Plus each tenant requests specific improvements for their business, so those need to be negotiated. Then you need to keep a close eye on construction, like every day on site, because it often happens that if the tenant is on-site with the contractors they'll try to get them to do things that you said no to.

Finding tenants has taken a significant amount of work as well. There are commercial brokers that act as matchmakers, but you still have to meet with the tenants, walk them through the space, talk about what kinds of modifications they want, figure out if the timelines are compatible, and do a little bit of due diligence. She does quite a few of these where the details don't quite work out because the tenant is looking for a different style of building, easier in-out for the parking, improvements we'd never agree to, etc.

The process of transitioning the properties to commercial was also time-consuming. Commercial has entirely different requirements, and upgrading the parking, accessibility, etc. took a lot of time, money, and back-and-forth with the city.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#442

Post by namlem »

nradov wrote: post #78
francisofascii wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you can't vote where you don't live. The large problem is the lack of appropriate land taxes in high cost municipalities. And you can't vote to change that until you live there, and once you live there, you are much less incentivized to vote against your self interests.

Most of the laws regarding property taxes are set at the state level, not the municipal level. In California, a voter in Modesto can influence tax rates in San Francisco. Local votes only control minor things like special additional school district assessments.

That's not true in most states, that's a California thing. Property taxes usually are set at the local level.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#443

Post by wonnor »

ChrisLomont wrote: post #439
idkyall wrote: post #122

Housing in the US has gotten to where it is due to horrible laws effectively allowing total tax avoidance for landlords. Take some investment property. You buy it at some basis price, let's say 500k. You rent it out for 15k a year. Each year you can offset your rental income against deprecation of the property and property taxes - meaning, you pay no income tax on your rental income. ~30 years later, you've deprecate…

>you pay no income tax on your rental income And are losing value on the property, which is the point of depreciation. >~30 years later, you've deprecated it down to an effective value of $0 An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap. All throughout your list you ignore all the costs involved in being a landlord. Have any friends that have tried it? (I do). Did…

>>~30 years later, you've deprecated it down to an effective value of $0

>An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap.

Are you really in good faith trying to argue that nobody will rent a house that is 30+ years old?

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#444

Post by [deleted] »

colinmhayes wrote: post #247
namelessoracle wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So a family on hard times should be forced to leave their grandmothers home when she dies and hope they can find a new one? Gentrification can easily push a property in the place they've lived their whole lives out of their price range. And the family home might not have been super well kept up so the "windfall" isn't as big as the property values in the area may reflect. This happens now with gentrification in big c…

Yes, if you can't afford your house you need to find a new one. The family will come out well ahead here because the tax would only be on a percentage of the houses value, they can use the proceeds to buy a new, cheaper house. No one has the right to live anywhere just because their grandma did.

[deleted]

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#445

Post by ChrisLomont »

dgs_sgd wrote: post #403
idkyall wrote: post #122

Housing in the US has gotten to where it is due to horrible laws effectively allowing total tax avoidance for landlords. Take some investment property. You buy it at some basis price, let's say 500k. You rent it out for 15k a year. Each year you can offset your rental income against deprecation of the property and property taxes - meaning, you pay no income tax on your rental income. ~30 years later, you've deprecate…

But this only works as long as the property's price is depreciating. Don't property prices generally trend up over time?

As long as the owner puts significant money into the property over time to fight depreciation. Entropy applies to houses after all.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#446

Post by namlem »

valarauko wrote: post #284
Loughla wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Holy cow, not even a little bit. This is so, so middle- to upper-middle income centered it's not even funny. 1st you are assuming people have one employer to worry about, not multiple. 2nd you are assuming people have a set schedule daily or weekly. 3rd you are assuming people have PTO. 4th you are assuming the employer will give any amount of shit about volunteerism. 5th you are assuming they won't be given a point…

I'm curious as to what the solution in this case is then. If election days were holidays, wouldn't the same people still have the same issues with employers? Do shift workers not work on holidays?

Early voting. Let people cast their vote for the two weeks preceding the election.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#447

Post by symlinkk »

11101010001100 wrote: post #372

Housing is another one of these systems (I don't have a name for), but once you have a house, you really don't care about many of the ills. The same for immigration. The same for college admission. The same for many jobs. Once you have what you want, the default is to not do anything to improve the system.

Not only do you not care, it actively benefits you to “pull up the ladder” and prevent others from getting on board.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#448

Post by namlem »

JasserInicide wrote: post #392
pochekailov wrote: post #14

Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowners, such as in Seattle, half of the votes come from people of > 65 years old (all of whom are homeowners, likely more than one home). Young people simply won't vote at all. There is very little incentives for the young people to vote. Even if you cancel all the…

Break out what "homeowners" actually is. It's increasingly becoming these shell companies and entities like Blackrock. We need to ban that shit immediately. The deed of a house should have a fucking person's name on it, not a company's.

Investment firms buying homes is a symptom, not a cause. The only reason they do that is because local government artificially inflate the value of homes through supply restrictions.

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#449

Post by nerfhammer »

wikitopian wrote: post #425

Let's surround single family urban homes with high density apartment complexes and low income housing, and then act big mad when those people paying all the taxes and propping up the local public schools up and leave. All of these trendy YIMBY schemes are great. All they need is a proviso requiring all the targets of the schemes to stick around while their neighborhoods and schools go downhill.

the alternative is the system we're evolving to where the landless class will owe the landowning class most of their productivity, forever

Re: Housing is at the root of many of the rich world’s problems (2020)

#450

Post by bitexploder »

wonnor wrote: post #443
ChrisLomont wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you pay no income tax on your rental income And are losing value on the property, which is the point of depreciation. >~30 years later, you've deprecated it down to an effective value of $0 An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap. All throughout your list you ignore all the costs involved in being a landlord. Have any friends that have tried it? (I do). Did…

>>~30 years later, you've deprecated it down to an effective value of $0 >An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap. Are you really in good faith trying to argue that nobody will rent a house that is 30+ years old?

Narrator: They were not arguing in good faith.

I know we like to give the benefit of doubt here on HN, but that crosses a line. Landlords are known to perhaps not take the best care of their property, but in general, even if a tenant totally trashes the place it isn't too hard to strip down whatever got abused and rebuild it. Same thing happened to us when we rented a property. Tenant did as much damage as you can imagine with pets and abuse short of ripping wires and pipes out of the walls. It was really annoying to fix, but not hard. In the [late] 2020 real estate market it was easy to sell it and the house appreciated like 30-40K since we sold it easily.

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