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Priced out of home ownership

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Priced out of home ownership

#681

Post by ta1243 »

alkonaut wrote: post #664
ta1243 wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are no* 30 year fixed rate mortgages in the UK. The typical one is 5 years. I renewed last September for 5 years at 4.49% with about 80% LTV. The problem buying a house for me was always getting the deposit together while paying rent. Most people in the UK seem to rely on gifts from parents. * very few -- there are some very specialised brokers

Ok. Weird that there is such a lot of talk about the 30yr mortgages if no one has them. I'd also be completely unable to afford the deposit for the home I own now (£500k loans at 80% LTV or so). The key was of course buying a small flat, selling that, buying a larger flat with the profit from the first as deposit on the next, selling that. The "income" in terms of property value increase from these month over month f…

This is a story about the US market.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#682

Post by temporarely »

tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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 obvious answer is predatory finance capitalism.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#683

Post by jandrewrogers »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #461
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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…

Seattle is building far more than many other cities and rents are lowering as a result. Rents are up nationally, but down over 7% in Seattle. If you've visited recently, the amount of new construction and cranes is immense. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hyunsoorim/2024/05/20/here-are-...

The market in Seattle has become softer for sure but is not evenly distributed. In my area, the vacancy rate for apartments appears to be in the 10-20% range depending on the building and the incentives are becoming more aggressive. A bit more surprising, some housing prices in nice neighborhoods have also declined since a couple years ago (some areas have also increased). Renting makes a lot of sense in Seattle right now.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#684

Post by throwitaway222 »

tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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…

Absolutely agree. Everyone else that replied seems to disagree probably because they are landlords. Which is fairly high in HN. Oh I'M not the problem it's someone / something else.

The reason "not building" is not the issue, is because even brand new homes are being scooped up in investments.

Raise property taxes for all non-occupied, airbnbs, and fuck even rentals, and while it might cause rentals to temporarily go up, housing prices will drop like a brick. Make it unreasonable to rent out a home. Heck make it unreasonable to own a second home unless you're Bill Gates.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#685

Post by [deleted] »

bArray wrote: post #669
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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…

> 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 the UK, we have an issue with immigration that nobody wants to speak about. The birth rate in the UK is 1.49 in 2022 [1], meaning that housing demand should be going down. We build houses to last, and yet there is a massive shortage - why? In 2023 the ONS…

[deleted]

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#686

Post by nasmorn »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #481
nasmorn wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also they build with what is almost slave labor.

Blame the nearby countries providing no jobs, no education, and no future for these laborers instead. Also don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of people from the exact same countries who gain respectable middle class, stable jobs in UAE that their home countries don’t provide. I’m not here to defend every decision that UAE has made but they’ve done a lot of good for people who come from countries with unspeakably…

In the Roman Empire if you found a child that would otherwise die you could adopt it into your household as a slave since that was certainly better. Your logic is absolutely sound if you dispute the concept of human rights entirely.

The problem is you create a permanent underclass in the country since you take literally almost all rights from them. Including by the way the right to return where they came from.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#687

Post by PM_me_your_math »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #196
DGAP wrote: post #180

Stop subsidizing demand at the national level. Stop restricting supply at the local level.

That's not the problem at all. Stop allowing people to buy multiple homes. Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.

[dead]

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#688

Post by skidd0 »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #275
EduardoBautista wrote: post #123

Why doesn't the government build and sell housing at a small profit? Here in Dubai, the largest housing construction companies are or were government owned. It's one of the ways the government can have zero income tax despite oil being less than 1% of its economy. My only thought is that it's political, and some voters don't want their houses to lose value.

Right wing activists and government have pushed the idea that government is hopeless, can't do anything and shouldn't try, and aggressively tried to make government as limited and as small as possible. This is often labelled "starve the beast" strategy. They may well have a point, that government should only do things that only government can do, and that by declining to be involved they're leaving space for private…

Both "wings" is how we got here. This is not an issue from a single party.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#689

Post by ToucanLoucan »

xyst wrote: post #659
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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…

It’s a multitude of factors - limited supply in certain (most?) markets, “cheap money”, supply chain factors with certain common building materials, “corporate owned homes”. One thing that has definitely not helped is hostile building codes that prevent density. In some cities in the US, building height is constrained by the nearest single family home. Then there’s the parking minimums for buildings that allocate mor…

While it is a multitude of factors, a bunch of those factors could be solved in an instant with a simple new regulation: a cap on how many homes a single entity/person can own, with steep taxes applied to every home above that cap. This would flood the market with homes as investors and corporate landlords moved to unload inventory and the prices would fall drastically. One could even have a cap that lowers over a long period of time to avoid shocking the market too hard with stock and keep current homeowners relatively stable, but ultimately, we can't keep letting corporations and wealthy people lock up perfectly usable housing behind private property nonsense. It's literally killing people.

Ultimately, these empty homes are investments and sometimes investments fail, and if they're big enough sometimes those failed investments cause people to lose a lot more than what they invested. That's literally the definition of investment risk. We can't keep doing status quo with this shit while the market continues to sail further and further out of reach of all the people who actually need what it's selling.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#690

Post by Retric »

dleslie wrote: post #670
tmnvix wrote: post #274

People 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…

Under utilization can be measured as a factor of the vacancy rate; which influences both home pricing and rental pricing. Here in Canada, the desirable places to live all have relatively low vacancy rates for residential housing, and have for quite some time. Ie, it's rare to see cities with vacancy rates for apartments exceeding 3%, let alone a healthy 5%.[0] The CMHC estimates that by 2030 we will need 3.5M additio…

Vacancy rates should be lower where the total inventory increases and people’s ability to predict the market increases. That’s also going to be places people want to live.

Consider a city of 10 million people vs 1,000 small towns of 10k people. The variability for demand in those small towns is higher and vacancy rates can’t drop below zero. So some towns hit 0 while others might be 20%. But in a city if some apartment complex is full people just go to the apartment down the street.

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