Earlier quoted context omitted.
Land is not cheap in the UK.
And unless your property is Freehold, you don't own the land at all.
To be fair, most properties in the UK are freehold.
Priced out of home ownership
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#512People 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…
The issue is always lack of building. Higher interest rates just mask the problem and hand more money to rich people for no effort. The problem is that the private housing production system responds to increased credit availability only at the margins and does not over produce. That’s largely because houses are still hand built and not really substitutable like a vehicle. You don’t generally have a choice of two hous…
Lack of building is not the problem - on the contrary.
You cannot realistically build enough so that the rents decrease.
And when you build you just fuel the vicious cycle of people -> opportunities -> people.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#513Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sorry to recommend you that, but i have experience with homelessness. You have two temporary solutions: - join a group of squatters (hopefully you already know someone) until you get your bearings. The less ideological ones often squat old industrial properties, or long-abandoned houses (its rough in winter, but in Portugal you should be fine). You might meet some Urbex guys, they're nice and always fine with fin…
I recently kayaked a stretch of the Tennessee River, between state parks, and within an hour of paddling I passed both a homeless riverside "tent city" [technically "public camping" on TWRA/state land] and then the most-expensive house for sale in our entire metro area (just around the same peninsula). These inholdings, both impoverished and not, were each having their respective parties (cheap beer in common) along…
In between San Francisco and San Jose, almost every underpass that has any underbrush potentially has a homeless settlement. There was an effort to clear some of these out but I saw several on my last bicycle ride in the area. Pre pandemic there were some on ramps that had tents just off the sidewalk for several hundred yards - it's our modern dystopia. There's a railway right of way near Facebook HQ in Menlo Park that had at least four cars parked way off the road in the brush with tents, and a few miles from Apple HQ there are lots of homeless people living on water/railway right of ways and in underpasses.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#514First of all, agreed that housing prices are insane, even two-income households struggle to buy in my city. But taking a more long-term view, in the US the owner-occupied housing rate about 65%, which has not changed a ton in the last 50-60 years (high was 69% in 2005 and low was 63% in 1965). Granted the market has changed a lot, we have much bigger houses, and more two-income families to pay for those more expensiv…
Not only has the owner-occupied rate stayed near constant, but that rate itself is an average of all income levels. If one just looks at the rate of homeownership among those making more than the median income (family/individual) ~$74K for a family (~55K individual), that number jumps up to 79%.
Given that this number doesn't take preferences into account, I think it's pretty reasonable that almost everyone (>80%) making at least the average (median) salary owns their home.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#515Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, at one time it was estimated that roughly 1/3 of Vancouver’s condo supply was vacant. So the city implemented an empty homes tax [0] and promptly raised $115,000,000 in tax revenue [1]. However, the tax is still far too low and it contains various loopholes that allows developers to hold condos empty for years until deep-pocketed buyers show up [2]. Vancouver isn’t unique. Housing is being traded like poker chip…
Vancouver has obscene housing prices because the city and the politically connected spend tens of thousands of hours fighting against any new housing, and any new supply. Just look at what happened when the Squamish Nation decided they were going to build high rises on the land they were given: https://reason.com/volokh/2024/03/14/canadian-indigeneous-na... The entire city and all of the NIMBYs cried about their "nei…
I think a lot of people still feel burned by the property crash in the 1990s, when you saw billboards on I5 driving up offering flats for $100k in 1997.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#516Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not the problem at all. Stop allowing people to buy multiple homes. Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.
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…
You don't have to remove the sensible regulations. You need to make enforcement of regulations and the approval process easy, low risk, fast, and cheap - instead of the typical multi-month (or year) bog down that most planning departments in major cities turn into. Removing things like natural spaces, parking, fire safety, and all the other stuff that city planners enforce to keep a city livable is not going to help in any long run situation.
Why is there not more funding for those departments to make approval/revisions a breeze and make building lower risk and cheaper for construction companies? Welp - home owners (and big construction/investment companies) are the ones who vote. I expect politicians know exactly what they're doing, keeping things a complicated swamp.
But without some sort of governing regulation, I fail to see how anyone benefits in the long run with the tragedy of the commons that would ensue.
Agreed on all the rest, especially Georgism.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#517A byproduct of large financial entities investing against each other in the market comprised of places where people need to live.
Maybe that was not in the public's interest.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#518I think it is a mistake to write an entire article without talking about supply and demand. Demographics are one of the lest surprising things in statistics, they can sometimes be predicted decades out from an effect arriving. Housing construction is similarly easy to observe. I'd personally bet that there is a gentle imbalance appearing between how much energy the average person can lay claim to vs. how much they ne…
Unfortunately, there is excess demand generated by non-human corporate entities. There is not a supply/demand problem among humans-who-need-a-place-to-live.
But there is investor demand for an investment vehicle that has the tax and asset benefits that homes offer.
The consequence is that the buying power in the market by humans-who-need-a-place-to-live is relatively weak when they compete against financial investment corporate entities.
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#519Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eliminate regulations and laws limiting supply.
Or increase planning department funding with higher emphasis on throughput. It's the bureaucratic delay (nearly a year for approvals or revisions in many places) that causes much of the pain, not the regulations themselves.
Funding bureaucracy only serves to increase the amount of bureaucracy
Re: Priced out of home ownership
#520Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot take: already own a house and live somewhere with a livable minimum wage. You are the one who sounds like you are completely unaware of your own privilege. You just said that where you live, if you were on minimum wage, you could "manage to" pay for half the price of renting. Think hard about what you just said here. You are saying that someone on minimum wage can't nearly afford to rent. But their problem is the…
I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning. You jumped straight there yourself, only arguing about cost of renting and not even touching ownership. For example in Chicago in the US, at least in the early 2010s, it was also flipped like in GP's area: My monthly mortgage payment was around a third of the rent I had been paying, for a far far better place.
> I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning.
I'm not sure that view really exists. Like, on a day-to-day basis early in your mortgage, _maybe_, but that's about it.