491–500 of 594 posts
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I look at it this way: housing is a basic human necessity. Structuring it as a standard business is a detriment to society. Sure, being a landlord is a business, but the whole "maximize profits" thing and "charge what the market will bear" thing should not be allowed for housing.
And the free market shouldn't apply to private property because...?
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> Because my money should be just as good as yours? You have more money than me, so you deserve to take my place? That’s pure entitlement and leads to cities comprised entirely of millionaires.
This assumes the supply of housing can't increase. What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
> What mechanism do you propose instead for allocating scarce housing?
The one that we’re in the middle of talking about? Rent control.
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Totally wrong. A home has a lot of expenses beyond taxes, especially maintenance/upkeep. If the landlord just breaks even, where does the money to repair the roof come from? Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise thei…
Homes do have a lot of expenses but it depends on when you bought your home. If you have a cheap mortgage then rents can quite easily cover repair costs. Landlords also minimize the maintenance costs by cutting costs wherever they can. I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord. But, I think you are overly harsh and your comparisons misplaced. Ho…
> I also never said they shouldn’t make money - they absolutely should, otherwise nobody would want to be a landlord.
Correct, and that is why it is so important that the housing asset class remains competitive with alternative investments. If you force the return of housing to be less than other investments at the same risk level, it reduces investment in housing and in return creates more scarcity and higher rents, exactly what some of the people here seem to want to avoid yet don't understand that the policies they're arguing for is causing.
> Homes are quite inelastic and a necessity for everyone.
Yes, but homes in a particular location are not. If you want to live in Manhattan you have to be able to afford to live there. You don't get to claim living in Manhattan is a necessity for everyone and that therefore prices there must accommodate your financial circumstances.
> a landlord has far more “financial padding” to account for macroeconomic shocks compared to a renter
That is not universally true since smaller landlords typically have a pretty big mortgage to service for a long time. They don't have the flexibility to just not pay just because a tenant decides not to pay. A house is not easy to sell in an economic downturn and may even be underwater.
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Am I understanding your point correctly as you hoping that an increase in tax rates drives property values down enough thay aggregate tax amounts are reduced? The practical rental math in NYC is simple. Buy a $1M coop in a building with near zero costs. HOA will be at least 2k per month with the majority of that being property taxes. Thats your base rent. If you have a loan, add that to the base. You will not get che…
Your coop building is on the unfair side of the "eclectic sometimes regressive" property tax calculation the parent comment mentions. Large (10+) multi-family rental properties are taxed at a much higher rate than single-family and 2-4 family properties. Correcting this imbalance would lower property taxes on your coop building while still raising overall tax revenue for the city.
- Build more, destroy short term value of existing owners
- Lower taxes, hurt short term city functioning
- Lower interest rates, drive up inflation
The only “fun” solution IMO is cut taxes and cut jobs programs that don’t deliver city value. DOE is a welfare scheme at this point.
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Totally wrong. A home has a lot of expenses beyond taxes, especially maintenance/upkeep. If the landlord just breaks even, where does the money to repair the roof come from? Also, providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates, and as an investment must yield a return to make sense. Or do you expect stock investments to yield nothing and just retain their value too? Should companies not raise thei…
> providing housing is a service that should be done at market rates That's an opinion, not a fact. I don't share that opinion. Societies are healthier when people are housed, and when that housing is well-maintained. "Let the market decide" often doesn't get you that. > an investment must yield a return to make sense Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity. > There's…
However, to force a private party to provide a service at non-market rates to another private party doesn't seem right to me, and as I mentioned in other comments, causes a decrease in housing (and therefore makes the problem worse rather than better).
> an investment must yield a return to make sense > Agreed, but we can and should cap that return if not doing so leads to housing insecurity.
Again, if you cap the return, you cause a redirection of investment in housing to other asset classes, and effectively reduce housing. Your stated goal is in direct conflict of your desire to cap the return.
> There's a huge lack of financial literacy in some of these comments. > From you I'm seeing a huge lack of understanding about what capitalism is good and bad at.
How so? Feel free to elaborate.
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Actually we already had a solution to this, normalized remote work. If I can work remote for Citadel from a 6 bedroom house in North Dakota it’s a choice to rent a studio apartment in Manhattan. Not to mention the massive environmental benefits of taking cars off the streets. If you have mobility issues, working remote is a game changer. For those who need to use wheelchairs it’s miles easier to work from home. The n…
Instead of just building houses I'd consider building social networks - of the physical kind - which have shops, entertainment, and co-working spaces within walking distance. Not everyone loves the isolation of WFH, so you could replace "jobs" in the old factory sense, now long gone, with co-working spaces which include a social element but are basically still remote work. The big issue with the US housing market isn…
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> Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. If you build a city full of empty buildings in a place with minimal existing population like the Alaskan wilderness then obviously. But what if you double the housing stock in all the existing cities where people want to live? > Ground space is limited, so one solution is to build more…
> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. 100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle. If people were willing and able to commute that distanc…
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> Meanwhile now count the number of places you can draw a 100 mile radius where the median height of the existing buildings is even that tall. 100 miles? My dude, that is a circle from Poughkeepsie to the tip of Long Island. Forget one-story single-family housing, there is farmland in that circle. There are hundreds of square miles of state parks in that circle. If people were willing and able to commute that distanc…
Expecting 31,416 square miles of area with a median height of 5 stories would be wild. That's most of the entire Phoenix-Mesa-Scottsdale MSA (~37,000sqmi).
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> The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. So it is not simple. "Just build more" always comes up in those discussions, and while it does help (and has been proven to help), it is not the definite answer for the housing issues. Build a new city from the ground up with a bunch of cheap modern housing, walkable and all modern goodies and ... nobody will move. Peo…
It would of course be a functioning state's responsibility to plan urban/city development and economic incentives to move there. Regarding the ownership vs renter housing debate: I think Singapore may be an excellent example of a state doing it's duty: affordable state-owned housing and people are distributed per housing per the national demographics so you also build social coherence vs ghetto-fication.
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The solution is pretty simple: build and unreasonable amount of housing. And entirely new cities. America has enough land. We could build new infrastructure, give people lots of land or build houses like we did in the 40s and 50s. Of the price of a house was brought down to 1x the annual salary of the median individual income some of these problems wouldn’t exist. We need to flood the system with investment and inven…
America doesn't need new cities. There is an unbelievable amount of space wasted within every city and any urban planner can show you. Development policy in the 40s and 50s was backward and we continue to suffer the consequences today.