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Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

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Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#71

Post by fallingknife »

dee-bee wrote: post #58
andyferris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the issue is the supply of rental (i.e. investment) properties is too low, do we want to encourage or discourage investment homes?

Who wants to rent? I imagine most would opt to own instead. Rent is certainly far higher than a mortgage would be, which makes little sense if you're trying to encourage ownership (as often is the story about the american dream)

Anybody who doesn't want to:

- put up a ton of capital

- take housing price risk

- enter into a long term commitment

- deal with maintenance and repairs

- deal with selling my investment every time I move

And that includes me. I want to rent. I want the landlord to take care of all that crap for me. And I'm tired of all these people complaining about it.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#72

Post by candiodari »

badcppdev wrote: post #57
TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

progressive property tax which will increase with amount of owned properties.

Quantity and value of properties. Which also means a wealth tax. To be clear I'm 100% in favour of this. The current economic trickle-up system is starting to cause serious problems. Large sections of populations everywhere are increasingly shut out of the capitalist system because they do not have ANY access to capital.

But does it matter? The way housing problems were always fixed was very simple and without any kind of tax: with the government building social housing, allocated according to social principles (you pay the same, but the size of the apartment is determined by the number of kids you have). A LOT of non-luxury housing. This has nearly stopped. These buildings were famously bad. First, they tended to be unfair and violate building codes, they were government projects (ie. cost a lot more than a luxury housing development despite being much worse), and since houses got allocated by the government to vulnerable groups, they tended to have safety issues in the first few years they existed.

But they fixed housing. A decade or so after they were built and things became somewhat stable around them.

The problem with tax, and any kind of economic system is very simple. Capitalism and communism, and the more creative options like mercantilism or militarism, we can argue about them for a long time, but fundamentally they divide up existing properties. Nothing more. We can use these systems to choose WHO is homeless, but they cannot lower the number of homeless.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#73

Post by raziel2p »

ajsnigrutin wrote: post #48
raziel2p wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A simple one would be progressive tax on house ownership. For each house/apartment/whatever you own, you pay N% more tax on it than the previous one.

But the higher taxes are then transoformed into higher rents, while at the same time, you still need more housing units in many areas.

I do think we still need to build more (correctly sized) housing, counteract urbanization, provide social housing, and I'm in favor of rent control in general. So don't get me wrong, I don't think progressive tax will solve the problem on its own. That being said:

Higher taxes could lead to higher rents, but that stops working once the supply of people willing to pay said higher rent is exhausted. At some point landlords won't be able to rent out their place with a profit, at which point you have 2 options: Leave it empty (which should also be illegal, IMO) or sell it (to people who would otherwise have to rent).

It could be that there is a potential never-ending supply of rich people wanting to pay rent to live in a place with ever-increasing rent and the gentrification that comes with it, but it seems unlikely to me.

In the Netherlands there were recently a set of tax changes increasing taxes on house ownership, which caused companies to sell apartments en mass. Housing prices dipped for a little bit, rent (in the private market) went up, but more people own their own place now. This is the direction you want to go, I think.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#74

Post by fallingknife »

TheLoafOfBread wrote: post #47
andyferris wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the issue is the supply of rental (i.e. investment) properties is too low, do we want to encourage or discourage investment homes?

progressive property tax which will increase with amount of owned properties.

Great. So now I will have to pay higher rent to cover this ridiculous tax. "Then you can buy a house" you will say. But I don't want to. I just want to rent, and I don't want to be forced into buying just because other people are consumed by envy whenever they see a landlord making money.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#75

Post by rhaway84773 »

pjc50 wrote: post #24
nelsonic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. What regulation would you propose?

"One residential property per person"? Or the more reasonable one owned + max one let out? ( Some holiday lets are entirely legit and necessary for some local economies, but the politics of that is very complicated and site-specific.)

No, holiday lets are not legit.

The world has survived most of its existence without needing holiday lets.

Because it has hotels.

Hotels that do not take up residential properties and pay appropriate taxes, etc. and prevent overtourism whixh has become one of the biggest issues in most tourist places.

You can eliminate holiday let’s and the world will do just fine. Any legitimate loss will be minor.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#76

Post by Ekaros »

praptak wrote: post #62
xdennis wrote: post #9

The problem isn't land owners it's landlords. Renting should be illegal and anyone caught accepting rent should lose his property to the renter. Owning a lot of land/houses isn't really the problem. It's when you're not using them that's the problem. You should just sell and not leech on society by renting.

> not leech on society by renting All income from capital is renting.

What really is difference between owning a stock and property? Or a bond...

If we ban renting, why not ban other type of capitalism as well?

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#77

Post by rhaway84773 »

giantg2 wrote: post #61
pjc50 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide. They also have different tax treatment. > individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing Who exactly has (a) enough money to build an apartment block and (b) not enough to put it in a corporate wrapper? (Admittedly the wrapper problem is a serious issue for any kind o…

The problem with the large companies is they are more likely to price fix and leave units empty. But I do agree they tend to be easier to deal with.

Some cities place an empty unit tax.

I’m not sure why that’s more popular in the US.

Not rented out a property for 3 months straight? Ok, pay 25% of the rent to the govt then.

Property prices will quickly find their market value (and we will know if the problem is genuinely a shortage of space then).

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#78

Post by fallingknife »

solatic wrote: post #35
nelsonic wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. What regulation would you propose?

Single-payer. One government agency is permitted to purchase construction of additional units, and also manage the long-term rental (pricing set at auction) of those units in a rent-to-own model, where "own" means the right to live in that unit rent-free until you die, at which point control reverts to the government agency, combined with laws that forbid owning/renting multiple residences. Add in some allowances lik…

Wow! That's worse than the CCP. I thought that all these other ideas on this thread to basically make everybody buy instead of rent were bad. But to force everybody to rent from the government is literally the worst housing arrangement idea I have ever heard.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#79

Post by indymike »

mschuster91 wrote: post #2

While I agree that landlords are vampires, that here is wrong: > But there is a stack of research a mile high that shows that the number one thing we need is a lot more housing supply There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2]. The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete. The problem is that ru…

> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid,

I live in a flyover state in the US. Quality electricity is not a problem, save for areas that are Amish and simply don't use it. Even there, electricity is at the curb, it's just never been run to a home. On the telecom front, most rural areas have WISPs, mobile carriers (5g home internet isn't bad) or local telecom companies (DSL & Fiber) that have also solved this problem. It did take almost 20 years to solve the internet issue, and there are some rural homes that are located geographically where wireless won't work well, but on the whole things are a lot better than you are saying. The real issue in a lot of small towns is that the homes are old and often expensive to maintain, there's little entertainment and most importantly, jobs are still a problem. Between remote workers moving out of the city and the trend towards more onshoring of manufacturing, small towns in my state are starting to show signs of life, finally.

> that this neglect is a direct cause of people losing trust in democracy is just the icing on the cake

Not sure if you meant to say "icing on the cake" here because it comes across that you are celebrating people losing trust in democracy.

Re: Housing Is a Labor Issue: Land owners are taking all the wage gains

#80

Post by FirmwareBurner »

kkfdkerpoe wrote: post #70
FirmwareBurner wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why is it so cheap? Well, unemployment is really high: The thing is nobody (with a stable job) wants to live in areas with high unemployment because of all the social issues those areas have.

Depends on the area. Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees. With adequate internet connectivity they can be perfect for remote workers.

>Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees.

Not true. Unemployment numbers don't account for retirees or children of school age or involved in education/trainings programs.

If an area has high unemployment it means only adults of working age not involved in any schooling, trainings or apprenticeship, who are able bodied to work but don't.

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