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If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

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Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#491

Post by camel_Snake »

fighterpilot wrote: post #197
snikeris wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I already pay a Land Value Tax to my town.

It's a Property Tax which is significantly worse than a Land Value Tax. Firstly it encourages urban sprawl, which is bad for the environment and bad for cost of living and housing access. Secondly it penalizes productive value add. Build something beautiful and you're punished for doing so. Thirdly it doesn't have the same logical justification as the Land Value Tax, which is to tax ownership of scarce, zero sum, exc…

You don't know that. There are places on the East Coast, namely Pennsylvania and Delaware that I can think of, that have implemented LVT. Normally they are hybrid approaches though.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#492

Post by iso1210 »

opportune wrote: post #406
iso1210 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

What if I told you that in many areas households don’t even need a single car? If you require large amounts of parking everywhere and commensurately large roads, everything ends up so spread out that car based transportation seems like a necessity. It’s a self perpetuating cycle. If you don’t require so much land to be dedicated to cars you can build things denser and lower or even remove the need for personal cars.…

> What if I told you that in many areas households don’t even need a single car?

That's in very dense urban cities. Given the numbers in question (low density 10 houses/acre) that's not going to be the case.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#493

Post by bradlys »

FredPret wrote: post #460
wolverine876 wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did the investor in that empty lot make the community richer?

Speculative investment without asset improvements like that is the worst kind, but it still serves to stabilize prices for other investors. At worst, the speculator loses their shirt and a more capable capital allocator gets to work with the money.

So.. investor helps other investors? Great. What about the common man?

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#494

Post by Spooky23 »

no-dr-onboard wrote: post #254
Spooky23 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a popular notion for the redneck crowd. It never happens because it the math just doesn't work out. State/local revenues boil down to: property taxes, sales/use taxes, excise taxes, fees and income taxes. The big revenue streams are property taxes (schools, towns), sales taxes (county/state), and income taxes (state). Fees mostly sustain individual programs and have limited revenue potential - you can't make a f…

Your language seems a bit elitist, even for me. Nonetheless, the content of what you said seems reasonable and sound. Thank you for helping me understand this.

Sorry if I came off a little strong. I used to serve on a school board. Things would get intense sometimes.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#495

Post by JohnWhigham »

bityard wrote: post #145

A.k.a. The Carvana model. This is what Carvana and other "no-haggle, no-test-drive" startups are doing with the whole used car market in many areas. They aggresively buy up all the used cars in an area (or at least as many as they can) from dealerships and private sellers in order to make themselves the only entity with used cars for sale. Which they happen to be selling at 20% above true market value. But hey, you c…

Middlemen leeching off of middlemen. Allow car manufacturers to sell directly to consumers and the problem will sort itself out.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#496

Post by meowster »

dang wrote: post #397
yabones wrote: post #102

Things went off the rails at the end... > Well, the banks are controlled by and in bed with the same cabal buying everything up. You think this will be corrected by market forces when it is a financial and political pincher movement pushed by the same cabal that stole the 2020 election & hid COVID Truth? You are fucked. https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402449561864577024 IMO, weakens the entire 'thread' and m…

This comment refers to the original URL, https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402434266970140676 , which we've since replaced with the article it points to (in keeping with the site guidelines).

There's an achive link in the top comment, and I think replying to that with the original URL would help rather than making fact of the change burried in the comments, but I can't reply to that archive link post.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#497

Post by iso1210 »

reallydontask wrote: post #449
iso1210 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

49 parking spaces for 49 houses seems like a disaster in anywhere other than the densest of US cities. Surely most houses have at least 2 drivers? 5 Acres is 2 Hectares, so that's about 25 houses per hectare. Typical new housing estates in the UK is about 25 hours per hectare, with minimum of 3 parking spaces (including a garage if given) for a 4 bed, and 2 for a 3 bed. Even that number of spaces is too low - especia…

>Minimum of 3 parking spaces for a 4 bed in the UK? This is certainly not my experience, unless you are counting on street parking and even then, that's a stretch I'm only thinking of new developments

I'm thinking 5 bed sorry, yes 2 spaces for 3/4, 3 spaces for 5 - at least in my local authority.

Given that almost always one of those is a garage which almost never has a car, reality is tons of on street parking (or rather on pavement parking)

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#498

Post by opportune »

mattmcknight wrote: post #438
opportune wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you that in many areas households don’t even need a single car? If you require large amounts of parking everywhere and commensurately large roads, everything ends up so spread out that car based transportation seems like a necessity. It’s a self perpetuating cycle. If you don’t require so much land to be dedicated to cars you can build things denser and lower or even remove the need for personal cars.…

It's just not like that in reality. There is a townhouse neighborhood near me with 1.25 spots per house, and it is a disaster. A lot of places are occupied by people with roomates, not families. It's the kind of place where most people need a car for their job- work trucks abound, people drive uber or doordash, etc. Not everyone takes a laptop to the office every day. The roads are nearly impassable, people park 1km…

Yeah, there is for sure a chicken-egg problem here. If the existing public transportation isn’t good then people will just not have enough parking. If everything is still spread apart, or there aren’t sidewalks or biking infrastructure, there won’t be walking or biking to the office or work site.

Although I will say, living in a neighborhood with very little parking, I am sure people who insist on owning a car anyway will think it’s a disaster too. But I love it because everything is close by and I can get around through a variety of non-car methods. But to get to that point takes time.

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#499

Post by dang »

maxwell wrote: post #469
dang wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comment refers to the original URL, https://twitter.com/APhilosophae/status/1402434266970140676 , which we've since replaced with the article it points to (in keeping with the site guidelines).

And that guideline often results in confusing, disjointed comment threads. Enforcing banal, insigificant titles diminishes meaningful discussion hinged on the actual point of the submission. Strangely, but anecdotally, the titles that I see getting changed are ones involving race, state actors, or corporations. What these moves feel like is censorship of story title that mention, for instance, Black people, the Chine…

> often results in confusing, disjointed comment threads

It can, which is why I posted replies to the relevant comments in this thread. It's still usually a net win, though, to replace a secondary/derived source with the article it's derived from, especially when the secondary/derived source is adding sensational spin.

> Strangely, but anecdotally, the titles that I see getting changed are

I think you may be getting bit by what I call the notice-dislike bias [1]. You (i.e. all of us) are much more likely to see, and to put emphasis on, the changes that you dislike or disagree with, and to de-emphasize, or simply not notice in the first place, the ones that seem normal or ok. This leads to false feelings of generality [2]. Your comment is well above the median in quality because you at least said "anecdotally"; most users who post general claims about HN don't seem to consider that there may be any bias in such perceptions at all!

From a moderation perspective I can tell you for sure that there's no singling out of any topics over others when it comes to applying the title guideline. Of course, titles on divisive topics are more likely to be inflammatory and therefore linkbaity, and thus 'hit' the guideline, but that's a skew in the data, not the moderators.

As for "censorship", that word has gotten diluted to the point that it seems to just mean "change I disapprove of". You can use it to describe HN title edits if you like, but I think it's a bit of a stretch.

[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... - it would be great to find a less lame name for this, but it's the best I've found so far

[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Re: If you sell a house these days, the buyer might be a pension fund

#500

Post by wwweston »

jedberg wrote: post #442
plank_time wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that old people should be driven out of their houses because younger, richer people deserve to live in their houses. I’m sure your feelings will change as you get older.

This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes. There are plenty of other solutions. Some states allow you to just pay the same amount each year and put the difference as a lien on the house until you sell. Some states have something like prop 13, but it is applied to entire counties. ie. They allow the ent…

> This was a red herring when prop 13 was passed, and is a red herring now. 49 other states don't have prop 13, and yet seniors aren't priced out of their homes.

Prop 13 is bad in at least half a dozen ways, but I'm not so sure this problem isn't coming elsewhere or even is absent. It seems to me California may have experienced a leading edge of metro dynamics that are going to come for other states soon.

> everyone's home gets reassessed for its value and then the tax rate is set so that the whole county goes up 1%.

That's interesting.

> And if you're still really concerned about old people losing their homes, at least support getting rid of Prop 13 for all non-primary homes

I think something like this is right (and wasn't this attempted by proposition a few years ago?). Residence-first real estate policy needs to include tax that increases on the number of properties owned (and maybe even more steeply in a supply constrained market).

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