Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

721–730 of 1001 posts

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#721

Post by parineum »

Someone1234 wrote: post #421
rgmerk wrote: post #165

It will make very little difference in the end. Australia's land tax system makes it effectively impossible for large corporations to own large chunks of residential property, but our real estate is amongst the world's most expensive and landlords are still awful - it's just that the landlords are hundreds of thousands of dentists and, yes, software engineers rather than corporate entities. If you want housing to be…

The problem with "increase supply" is that existing property owners rarely want that. In almost all cities land has run out, so the only way to actually increase supply is to increase density. That means fewer single-family-homes, and more townhomes, multi-family, condos, and apartments. The "American Dream" is a single-family-home, surrounded by other single-family homes, but even with urban sprawl we simply run int…

> In almost all cities land has run out

That's incredibly untrue. There are numerous cities, even in CA and NY, that have plenty of room for new single family homes.

The response to that is usually some variant of "eww, gross".

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#722

Post by sgc »

sapphicsnail wrote: post #246
sgc wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent would go through the roof and it would become even harder to get out of the rental trap. It's better to just have a very low hard cap on the number of properties anyone can own.

People being less likely to buy multiple houses is going to make it harder for people to buy a primary residence?

You think landlords won't pass their costs on to tenants? How do the tenants save when their rent is even more unaffordable than it is now?

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#723

Post by ghaff »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #587
ghaff wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, everywhere, it's about people wanting to live in some specific cities. Even a bit outside of those specific locations isn't necessarily particularly expensive. (Leaving aside ski resorts, especially nice college towns, and the like).

I don't know...some countries are just expensive full stop. Lausanne for example, and since public transportation is good enough, you can live outside of the city and still get to work...so those places just get expensive also. Australia I assume you mean the few places where people actually live in the country vs. the undeveloped outback?

I don't really have specific knowledge of Australia but within an hour or so radius of Boston/Cambridge (expensive cities), there are reasonably priced exurbs. (Also expensive suburbs/exurbs of course.)

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#724

Post by immibis »

noisy_boy wrote: post #561
gregw134 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a good start. Would be nice to add a gradually increasing tax on multiple home purchases, e.g. buying a third home has a 5% tax, 4th 15% tax, fifth 25%, and if you want a sixth home you have to build it yourself. Would prevent regular people from buying up dozens of homes to rent.

It should be much more punishing from the 4th home like 45%. One can understand 2/3 homes, e.g., one to live in and the rest as investment for retirement income. More than that is just greed. Also, if you don't live in one of your properties, either sell one to keep the total number within 3 or pay additional tax.

if you allow each person to have 1-2 investment homes then you have the exact same problem but now it's decentralised and more people (more voters) benefit from the problem continuing to worsen

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#725

Post by happyopossum »

felineflock wrote: post #604

The root cause for the low affordability seems to be that most people don't want to sell a house purchased at 3% interest and have to pay for a new one at 6%. That and zoning restrictions too contribute for the lack of supply.

There was a huge affordability problem 4 years ago when the rates were 3% too, so that’s clearly not the “root cause”. In fact, at the time HN was filled with people blaming the “free money” 3% rates for the lack of affordability…

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#727

Post by happyopossum »

raw_anon_1111 wrote: post #113

If I were renting a house, I would much rather deal with a business than an individual landlord. On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.

> On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.

Did you read the article? The impetus was a tweet where he called on congress to write and pass a law to this effect.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#728

Post by idiotsecant »

orangecat wrote: post #440
idiotsecant wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause. Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market. The problem is when people who want t…

Landlords owning property is not a problem. Correct. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce;…

You're inspecting entirely the wrong end of this spectrum. The problem isn't that the average person is being outbid by a trillionare on their two bedroom. It's that an corpuscular capital class has so much money that all assets are being wildly inflated, housing included, while simultaneously depriving more than half of the population of anything close to the capital to buy even the cheapest house. There is no 'being outbid' for the average American who makes a hair over 45k. It's a laughable impossibility to even be in the game. The system is broken and the average user of this site is way too comfortable to recognize it but it's a daily reality for almost everyone else, particularly the young generation.

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#729

Post by [deleted] »

cush wrote: post #664
pianopatrick wrote: post #601

I'd be fine with a policy of "you can rent housing you build" for American corporations. If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world. Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.

You can rent a home after you’ve personally owned it and lived in it for 10 years? That would cap any individual to 3-4 rentals in a lifetime

[deleted]

Re: US will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes

#730

Post by pianopatrick »

KumaBear wrote: post #719
pianopatrick wrote: post #601

I'd be fine with a policy of "you can rent housing you build" for American corporations. If a corporation thinks there is demand in some city, goes and build housing for that demand and then rents that housing, that is good for the world. Would be a better policy than letting corporations use their access to capital markets to outcompete individuals trying to buy a house.

Then it would be lucrative to buy up land and sit on it to hold a monopoly on the competition. Can’t build or rent what you can’t buy.

I suppose that depends on the way the property tax system works. Paying 1-2% property tax each year on empty land does not seem like a path to riches.
Post reply on HN