Live data from Hacker News

Who killed the rave?

ft.com

541–550 of 854 posts

Re: Who killed the rave?

#541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why doesn't someone introduce a legislation to tax vacant second homes at astronomical rates

Do you know who owns most real estate either directly or indirectly? Pension funds. And who wants to shake up their pension? Nobody. It's the most democratized form of asset ownership, literally everybody is going to get angry. And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to…

> And secondly... Are the second vacation homes really the problem? I'd guess the problem begins around 3rd or 5th, not the second one, which is a fairly common and usually also a good thing to have - for both the owner and the society.

I'm not sure if you mean owning one primary home and two vacation homes, or one primary home and one vacation home when you mention a "second vacation home," but either way this strikes me as out of touch.

In 2024, US home ownership rate is 65.6%. (https://www.bankrate.com/homeownership/home-ownership-statis...)

In 2022, 4.6% of housing was comprised of second homes. (https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/09/the-nations-stock-of-second...)

4.6% of 65.6% is 3%, meaning at most 3% of Americans own a second home (but this doesn't account for citizens that own 3 or more homes, so the actual percentage is even lower.)

I don't consider that to be common. I also wonder: why is it a good thing for society (or even most homeowners?)

Re: Who killed the rave?

#542

Probably a bunch of factors... Tier 1 city RE prices have made live entertainment venues harder to run profitably. GenZ studies have found a lower participation in "risky behavior" which late night clubbing may or not be considered. Mobile internet & smartphones seem to be killing all forms of live in person interaction. And finally electronic music of various forms used to be a niche, and now it's mainstream. In the…

Online dating. I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that. Women went along with it because, well, what was the alternative, and the contemporary culture encouraged it. Online dating has its problems, certainly, but the risks people took in the 70s, 80s, 90s were kind of insane by today's standards. And also the amount of unwanted attention women…

>I guarantee that only about one in five male clubbers were truly "only there for the music". Maybe fewer than that.

Clubs aren't really raves though. Yes, most single people going to clubs are looking to hook up - all a "club" really is, is a bar with a DJ. A real rave typically doesn't even sell alcohol. But I'd wager that most single people going to actual raves (in warehouses or outdoors) are either too high to even think about hooking up, or really are there for the music and to dance - at least through the 1990's and early 2000s. I'm in the latter group, I'm a guy who went to raves (in warehouses and outdoors) for the music, as did everyone else I knew. Nobody was trying to hook up, it was definitely about getting our dance on.

Re: Who killed the rave?

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said by today's standards.. women going home with some random guy without anyone even having a phone number for them. No mobiles, no net, no nothing. And in most cases that worked out fine, but today people would think it insane to even suggest that.

The enormous amount of fear that has been injected into society, seemingly permanently, disguised as "safety" (i.e. framing a negative as a positive) is one of, or perhaps THE, the most detrimental factors to the health of that society, and is actively harming the development of people growing up within it.

That's for a few reasons.

999 good or OK outcomes and 1 bad one can still be overall pretty damn bad, when scaled up to the level of a society. It becomes a Something Must Be Done scenario pretty quick.

And I suspect in this specific case, the ratio of bad experiences.. maybe not terrible, but just bad.. was a lot higher than 1 in 1000.

I mean, the flip side of that is, going home with a stranger in a big city is pretty much a total historical anomaly before the 60s sexual revolution (because of smaller communities as well as more conservative sexual attitudes), maybe some of it is just the pendulum swinging back.

Re: Who killed the rave?

#545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fantasy solution is that ALL businesses near expensive areas must pay a minimum wage high enough to rent a place (or a room) there. If the barista must be paid $109k to afford to live there, then let Starbucks jack the price of a plain black coffee to $17 for a small. Fewer people will be willing to pay this, Starbucks will go out of business and virtually nothing will fill its place. Suddenly these multimillion d…

I've had the same idea. 1 week of after tax wages must be enough to pay 1 month's rent within x miles on a y sq ft apartment. And people should be paid for commuting. Unpaid commutes to work are a huge hidden subsidy for businesses. They use tax funded roads to allow workers to live farther away in cheaper locations and don't have to compensate them for the time needed to get to their jobs.

Exactly, let the business owners argue with the landlords instead of the tenants. This existing system just forces the dirty work on the weakest and most vulnerable person in the chain: the employee/tenant. Let the two powerful stakeholders battle it out.

Re: Who killed the rave?

#546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like rent is so high in big cities that so many businesses are no longer possible. I think one solution to lower rent is a rule that for every month a rental property is vacant its book value declines by 10 times the rent.

My fantasy solution is that ALL businesses near expensive areas must pay a minimum wage high enough to rent a place (or a room) there. If the barista must be paid $109k to afford to live there, then let Starbucks jack the price of a plain black coffee to $17 for a small. Fewer people will be willing to pay this, Starbucks will go out of business and virtually nothing will fill its place. Suddenly these multimillion d…

Not sure I understand - is your goal to live in a barren wasteland? Because you can do that today, very cheaply.

Re: Who killed the rave?

#547

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All government interference—significantly restricting supply and then doling out free money/tax-breaks to pay for whats left. As if govt leaders never took an econ 101 class.

There is no supply restriction. We're close to the record-high number of housing units per capita, it's only a bit lower than in 2007, and we're likely to surpass it by 2026.

The calculation changes if you only include adults in the denominator - there is a lot more adults relative to children compared to the past. The solution is to remove the very much existent density and other supply restrictions - see: https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/04/th...

and

https://kevinerdmann.substack.com/p/household-size-and-the-h... which goes into more detail

Re: Who killed the rave?

#548
post #222
post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Supply can't possibly keep up when real estate is used as an investment. As an analogy to the dead internet hypothesis I present the dead real estate market hypothesis. Increasingly it's just investors buying and selling properties from each other. And it's not just a hypothesis. China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma i…

> China built enough homes to house its population twice over, yet it's not reflected in the prices. All because everyone and their grandma is investing in real estate. Yes, but this is reflected in China's vacancy rate: 22% by some estimates. In the US, home vacancy rates are sub-1%. Not saying people aren't treating homes as investments, but it seems clear we also have a supply issue. "Real Estate is Investment" sh…

I think this paradox makes sense to me when combined with the comments above. The best way to maximize return on real estate is to influence gov to restrict supply

Re: Who killed the rave?

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Real Estate is Investment" should naturally lead to overproduction as investment-only properties get built to satisfy that demand—as we see in China China had massive home overproduction because the goddamned totalitarian government told builders to build or else . It was not market forces. How do you suppose we do that in the US? Especially with this administration? In the US, builders don't build 100 starter home…

> How do you suppose we do that in the US? Exempt or lighten planning requirements for affordable housing construction. California is going in this direction now. There are other levers like subsidized financing for developers building homes targeting a certain price range as well as favorable tax treatment of those profits. A lot of these have would probably have some bipartisan support.

This is what they did in my county. If you build a house as the actual owner (not as an LLC or for rent or sale) and promise not to sell within 1 year there are no design, code, inspection or planning requirements.

Lots of people taken advantage of this here. It is a pressure release valve available to those who can't afford commercial construction or boomers wanting 5x the real value they paid for their home. You can build whatever you can afford without oversight so long as it's only for your family. Most people end up just dragging in budget prefab, but you get the odd earth bag house, shipping container, one man shop carpenter, or just rich people with weird design ideas not allowed elsewhere.

Of course the naysayers have screamed bloody murder about everyone dying in a fire, but this has been law for 2 decades now and none of the apocalyptic prophecies came true.

Re: Who killed the rave?

#550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this were true, we wouldn’t need to enforce the single family home through zoning.

'If this were true, we wouldn't need to protect our water bodies with EPA laws. Obviously people prefer polluted bodies of water, and it's the artificial EPA laws that prevent it.'

What this analogy says is that people don't want other people living at high density near them. This is expected, since those other people are going to be poor and often dark skinned. Needless to say "other people are pollution, yuck" is not a good argument for zoning.
Post reply on HN