Priced out of home ownership • Hacker News Board

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#711

Post by bobthepanda » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

Retric wrote: post #690

dleslie wrote: post #670

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 apartme…

5pc is considered the healthy level of vacancy because some apartments are always free as people move in and out.

It’s similar to how totally full employment is actually a sign of a labor shortage.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#712

Post by gaoshan » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:28 PM UTC

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…

Higher interest rates and/or regulations against excessive (however that is defined) ownership. Any regulation should focus on the bigger players as a priority.

The person with the second vacation home isn't a priority but the fund with hundreds or thousands (or 10s of thousands as is the case in the US) should be a focus.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#713

Post by anthonypasq » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

pif wrote: post #696

A utopic solution would be to learn, at last, how to have a thriving economy without increasing megalopolis. Housing prices are unaffordable in big cities, while abandoned properties are rotting in the countryside everywhere. It's time we start spreading the economy rather than concentrating the people.

cities are fundamentally more efficient and just a natural byproduct of the way capitalism allocates money and people.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#714

Post by apwell23 » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:30 PM UTC

all housing posts on HN can be summarized with this without reading any of the comments

all housing posts have the following discussions 1. housing shouldn't be an investment

2. 'local democracy' always turns into nimby

3. something about gentrification

4. something about govt incentives/disincentives: don't give tax breaks for homeowners, tax second home ownership ect .

5. something about airbnb

6. some comparisons with europe/denmark

pls let me know if i need to add anything to list

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40286434

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#715

Post by bobthepanda » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

mlrtime wrote: post #650

jltsiren wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Housing affordability is qualitatively different between Europe and the US. When a European city is expensive, it's usually only the central part that's expensive. Prices drop steeply as you get to the suburbs and satellite towns. In the US, suburbs and satellite towns are more likely to remain expensive, as long as you are within a semi-reasonable commuting distance. I guess that's because the US city is more likely…

I think you are close but slightly off. EU has historically better public transit and lower sprawl allowing more price points of housing while still a "reasonable" commute. US cities are vastly larger by land size, because America is larger allowing it, added with fewer public transit options. Look at Houston, massive sprawl and some of the cheapest housing in the country.

At this point many high COL cities have sprawled out as much as is reasonably possible and then some.

People now commute from Stockton to San Francisco which is already a 2.5hr drive.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#716

Post by jajko » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

esel2k wrote: post #149

I am not an economist but if we would treat house ownership something that is beneficial for the whole society (less traffic from commuters, less homeless etc) and remove the speculations/foreign investments around housing? Why not apply the following: - every house not used for primary living place is highly taxed (removing all speculative ownership) - charge foreign investors heavily (australia will do this soon) -…

Don't expect in a country like US where basic stuff like good education and healthcare are heavily charged and privatized to just move housing into basic human right category.

Other places, with surprisingly little success, can do and actually do it, but it magically doesn't solve underlying issues, so results don't move needle as much as expected.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#717

Post by ChumpGPT » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:31 PM UTC

Low Interest rates, High Immigration, Wage stagnation and not enough building. Demand outweighs supply and higher interest rates make it difficult for buyers and builders. Immigration puts strain on the both Housing and Rentals making it unaffordable for existing pop.

In places like Toronto, huge influx of people where the city doubled in size in a few short years not only putting strain on housing and rentals but everything (hospitals, roads, schools, you name it).

In places like Texas the huge influx of out state people drove up prices where housing in DFW basically doubled in price since 2019. Very much like what Toronto went through. Migration from high tax states to low tax states has now made low tax states high tax states and Texas is becoming very unaffordable quickly.

Don't know what the end game is. In Ontario, Canada what use to cost 200k 10 years ago now is 1 million. What use to cost 1 million is 5 plus million and there is no end to the madness. You have foreigners from Arab countries, China, India paying cash for 2-3 million dollar homes.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#718

Post by IanCal » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:32 PM UTC

ivan_gammel wrote: post #421

toasterlovin wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to conceptualize this, it's like every 5 bedroom house having 1 unused bedroom, perhaps being used as an office. Of course, most houses don't have 5 bedrooms, so in reality this is an extra bedroom for every 2 houses. Again, possibly being well used for another purpose. That doesn't seem like a lot of underutilization to me.

Rooms used for another purpose are not called bedrooms. See yourself: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/...

They can be. My house is a four bedroom house. One of those is used as an office.

Nothing in the ONS link says otherwise, they just ask

"How many bedrooms are available for use only by this household?"

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#719

Post by NoGravitas » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:34 PM UTC

nightski wrote: post #703

pif wrote: post #696

A utopic solution would be to learn, at last, how to have a thriving economy without increasing megalopolis. Housing prices are unaffordable in big cities, while abandoned properties are rotting in the countryside everywhere. It's time we start spreading the economy rather than concentrating the people.

This comment will not go over well on HN but I am in full agreement. I am actually extremely disappointed as I thought tech would enable a more dispersed society. Instead we received the opposite.

Infotech will let you work anywhere, but you still need fixed infrastructure that is only possible to efficiently provide in a centralized way. Even suburbs are a net economic drain given their infrastructure costs, never mind dispersed rural living.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#720

Post by Marsymars » Tue, May 28, 2024, 2:35 PM UTC

starbird3000 wrote: post #649

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…

Where I am there’s been a huge increase in houses being bought for cash by equity hedge funds, like 25% of houses going on the market. Nearby Kushner bought hundreds of houses in Baltimore. The impact of this is that house prices soared because no one can compete against a multi-billion-dollar company to buy a house, which artificially pushes up prices. Secondly, I’ve done a lot of engagement with policy makers and b…

> Anyway, the builders all say there is no financial incentive for them to build affordable housing, they make so much more on luxury buildings.

This is only really a problem insofar as building luxury homes reduces the throughput of new supply because they take longer to build than affordable housing. In terms of overall market effect, as long as you're not allowing places to sit empty, it doesn't particularly matter if you're adding new homes at the top or the bottom of the market.