471–480 of 562 posts
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It's not 20 years, but the old Circuit City building in Assembly Square (just outside of Boston) has been vacant for 11.
That does seem strange, it’s hard to imagine the financial and legal structure that would incentive the beneficial owners to let a desirable chunk of real estate sit idle for 11 years.
If you live in San Franscisco, have you noticed crime going up or staying the same?
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This doesn't pass the sniff test to me, at least for most COL levels. The only way that our household was able to reduce our food budget by eating out was to massively reduce quality in order to meet caloric needs. For roughly the equivalent quality of ingredients it was much cheaper for us to cook at home. And that's before we got a bigger house in a lower COL area with a chest freezer, which allows us to bank high…
> This doesn't pass the sniff test to me Is that because, based on other comments here, you're already invested in a kitchen and, as a result, are forgetting to factor in that substantial cost? But that would be like if you owned your own silicon fab. You would no doubt also wonder how anyone could afford to buy their processors from Intel for hundreds of dollars when you can make your own for pennies. But you're not…
So, my kitchen has a range, sink, dishwasher, and full-size refrigerator. It is small but it is a full kitchen. It is the smallest "room" in my apartment; I probably pay a few hundred dollars a month for it. The cost difference between cooking at home and eating out makes up for that in a couple of weeks for me.
Kitchens aren't that expensive.
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If the market will bare $3,100 for an apartment, then land lords will only get $3,100 for an apartment, regardless of the taxes owed.
If the market will only bear $3100/mo for an apartment today, that's in part because some less desirable apartment is renting for $3000/mo and that might be the case because that landlord can break even on cashflow and bank on the appreciation. Institute an LVT and those competing landlords may become cashflow negative, forcing some of those units off the rental market entirely (typically to sales to owner-occupants,…
Put another way, I think the main thing that is going to take hit as the LVT % increases is not renters or landlords, but the land value itself.
A piece of land that rents for $3100/mo may have landlords willing to pay $2000/mo for the land so they can break even after construction, overhead, etc. Absent any taxes, maybe they could pay the whole $2000/mo in interest on a loan to buy the property. As the amount of land taxes increases, the budget to make the loan payments decreases, which should reduce the property value (since the same logic should apply to all the potential purchasers).
It gets more complex once you add land speculation but I think the core logic remains the same - instead of being willing to pay $2000/mo for the property the developer might be willing to pay $2200 anticipating a speculative land return (without LVT, so higher property values), but that shouldn't change in general the market rental rate or if construction is viable, so I think the main difference with or without LVT would still be the land values.
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The numbers don't pan out until for buildings with fewer than 5 floors or so. I don't know the street, but this will almost certainly be a 3 story house, max.
Lots of historic reasons for why Canada and the USA build with wood, but beyond that and going forward, I expect we're going to see even more of a pivot toward wood buildings as both countries try to meet their climate goals. Concrete is a big CO2 emitter while wood is CO2 storage.
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There's a pretty big risk of market distortions then. I could easily see landowners adding whatever "improvements" the tax credit incentivizes, regardless of whether it benefits the tenant or increases the potential rent charged, and then passing the cost along to the tenant. Also see a booming cottage industry of contractors & paper-pushers to get the tax credit. I do agree that an LVT has psychological issues when…
> Much like how the U.S. became the pre-eminent global power through an innovative politico-economic system + immigration friendly policies + near complete genocide of the native population It's also invaded a crap-load of countries and defacto taken their natural resources And slavery.
See Japan, a de facto US vassal state after WW2 and what they've grown into. Similarly, Korea and Israel. Also, Germany and France. They are just smaller participants in an alliance.
United Fruit style things still happen but the dominant style of US hegemony is different from VOC or EIC style imperialism.
So if you want to live in SF with kids you'll have to pay at least 3000$ per month. Is the pay scale there just completely inflated for non-tech jobs due to the tech jobs and if not, where do the policemen, teachers, cleaners and so forth live? I can't imagine them earning a salary in which paying 3000$ per month is sustainable? Where do all people with "normal" jobs live?
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Housing is expensive in the city and some nearby suburbs ( mostly to the west and southwest), but less so the further away you are. Thanks to the RER train system even far away suburbs, with cheap or cheapish housing aren't that far away - e.g. i have colleagues with houses ( with big yards and two stories) in the 200k euros range south of Paris, in fancy-ish suburbs, and are 40-50 minutes from the office ( i live in…
Thanks for the input. Can you please tell me which are those suburbs with 200k homes outside of Paris? I'd definitely move there at that price, sounds like a steal. Though I'm a bit skeptical as 200k is enough for a house in Eastern Europe on the outskirts of Bucharest, but in Austria where I am now and average house outside of Vienna is way over 600K so the Paris suburbs you describe seem suspiciously cheap to me at…
Oakland relaxed a lot of zoning, and permitting regulations about 5 years ago, and so now you're starting to really see production sky rocket. This article [0] mentions 2019 was had 15x more units completed than 2018. And 3x the total units from 2013-2018 combined . Anecdotally, I have several friends who've all moved to Oakland in the last year or so. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, and maybe, hope…
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Faster-and-cheap...
They're building affordable housing, prefabricated.
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But property supply itself is a constrained effect of politics and the relative power of various social groups, not a unique and independent primary cause. If landlords can make a killing by constraining supply politically, they will. So the primary cause is the incentive system and the political environment which makes it possible for them to do that. It's all about how the reward functions are designed. So of cours…
It depends on your definition of "landlord". If by landlord you mean the typical NIMBY homeowner then sure it's true. But in practice landlords can make more money off of building more units vs squeezing out more profit from a smaller amount of units. So if you were a politician and followed the advice of the greediest landlord you would not end up with scarcity. The political environment doesn't listen to the greedi…
In cities with zoning constraints, developers are the only natural predators of landlords. They are entirely different skillsets, building new units requires managing an extremely difficult political process for permits, raising capital, working with contractors and labor, etc. Being a landlord requires very different analysis and skills.
There may be a few landlords with the capacity to cross over to development too, but it isn't many of them.