551–560 of 691 posts
One insidious bit here is that as lower-income people are priced out by increasing rents , they can't even go downmarket because of things like this: Investors Are Buying Mobile Home Parks. Residents Are Paying a Price https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/27/us/mobile-home-park-owner...
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I have good news for you! How many rentals are available is closely controlled in most parts of the US. This is one of the things zoning accomplishes. It's possible that the outcome may differ slightly from what you want, however. Rent controls are unfortunately very similar in key ways. They've been tried, and the results may not quite line up with what you might be hoping for.
> How many rentals are available is closely controlled in most parts of the US. Technically true, but practically false. Yes, zoning exists in most of the US. And yes, most people have no trouble converting a region to residential zoning. I've known people on both sides, and most of the problems are the opposite - people who want to run businesses in a residential zone. I've yet to meet a single person who couldn't g…
So yes, you're absolutely right, technically true. In practice, they fundamentally don't do what the user wants them to do because that's not what caps are capable of doing. The tools don't work that way.
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Being able to afford 20% down on a mortgage is something affordable to less people every year. With rates increasingly quickly, it's not going to be much cheaper if prices fall too.
So buy at 3.5% down. The more leverage you have - the more you're taking advantage of The Federal Reserve mandate that prices go up at least 2% per year. 2%x33 = 66% return GUARANTEED by yours truly, the Federal Reserve.
If this bothers you there is an extremely simple way to kick these guys in the teeth: approve new housing developments in your town! Housing investors fear nothing more greatly than they fear competition.
What's nuts is not just that investors get to buy homes, but that its tax advantaged to do so. Between prop 13 in California, to 1031 exchanges, there are plenty of reasons to invest in RE over even say the stock market. I don't get to do a 1031 exchange for my Meta stock into AAPL or something...
1031 exchange?
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> If home values crash where you live then you spent years putting money towards a worthless asset. It's still a roof over my head regardless of how much it's worth. And more importantly, how much it's worth is completely irrelevant unless/until you want to sell. And if you do want to sell, and home values have crashed, then the next house you buy will also be cheap!
The OP is talking about a situation where it would be cheaper to rent your home in the future, than make mortgage payments on it.
Yes, it often seems the rental cost will be less than your monthly payments, but do realize that you lose all the rental cost, but not all your monthly payment.
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High LVT means you pay a high tax on the land itself and little or no tax on what you do on top of that land. It encourages highly efficient land development which means increased supply of commercial and residential units (thus reducing rents), and it makes lots of speculation prohibitively expensive. Since holding undeveloped land is just as expensive as holding developed land, you’re going to want to put it to pro…
At the levels where an LVT is effectively coercive, it’s functionally indistinguishable from rent paid to the government for land you don’t actually own. I expect most citizens would recognize this and any effective LVT would be politically DOA.
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We have spent decades telling American families that homeownership is the safest investment. We then spent decades enacting policies to ensure this is true. Do we think investors were going to just sit that out and ignore a safe and government protected investment? Of course the more attractive we make home ownership as an investment, the more investors will flock to the market. We need policies specifically benefiti…
I sold my houses in a booming market for a $70,000 loss intentionally. It has a nice effect of lowering the value of all my neighbors homes and housed a deserving family. Little did I know when I went to claim the loss on my taxes: I could not claim the loss at all. Since it was an owner occupied house and not a house owned by a corporation, it did not count as a loss I could deduct from my income nor from my capital…
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And your nice, quiet suburb is unlikely to get many high-rises if it’s actually far enough away from the nearest city center, because it doesn’t particularly make sense to build towers in the middle of nowhere. By contrast if your suburb is nice and quiet despite being right next to a city because decades of policy have locked it in place and it’s pricing people out… too bad? Other people need housing too and outward…
Too bad? Hilarious. Stay in your concrete hellhole, and stop acting like you know what's best for everyone else. If I wanted to live like you, I'd live where you do. And no matter how much you want my area to change (because you clearly can't stand for people to live in ways you don't agree with) it's not going to.
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They’ve had it for a few years. It hasn’t done squat. Turns out having 10 people and 9 homes remains a problem, even if you enact more policies. They’ve tried everything, except build enough homes. I’m under the impression this is the popular modern across North America
> It hasn’t done squat. By what metric? I'm not sure that's accurate [0]. It looks like the vacancy rate has seen a steady decline and the money raised ($86.6m) helped Community Housing Incentive Program (CHIP) and Land Acquisition/Development opportunities. [0] https://vancouver.ca/files/cov/vancouver-2021-empty-homes-ta...