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Priced out of home ownership

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Priced out of home ownership

#731

Post by suoduandao3 »

derlvative wrote: post #707
Retric wrote: post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a lot of mental gymnastics to pretend people don't need places to live. More people are born, hence more housing is needed.

but it's not necessarily needed in dense urban centers. Plenty of laptop class people could secure housing in rural areas for a fraction of the cost of what they're paying now.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#732

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

WalterBright wrote: post #508
amelius wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another cause: people live until an older age.

Life expectancy increase has leveled off a while ago.

You don’t necessarily have to use “alive” as the metric though.

Do we know if older people are living unassisted in their homes longer? That’s all we really care about in this context. Or not even unassisted, but family members moving in and taking care too.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#733

Post by jajko »

lpapez wrote: post #294
deergomoo wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No-one can kick you out of your own home because they want to rent to someone they can charge more. No-one can tell you you can’t change the wallpaper in your own home, or remodel the bathroom, or get a dog. Not everything is a purely financial decision. A home is primarily a place to live, not an investment opportunity.

> Not everything is a purely financial decision. A home is primarily a place to live, not an investment opportunity. I am always shocked at how many people simply don't understand this. For example: no matter how many index funds I buy, I will still have to find a landlord who allows pets in their home if the current landlord decides to kick me out for a better tenant (whatever that means for them). I don't have to d…

A very US-centered view for sure, I see just tons of insecurity and other negative emotions. Europeans don't have this with such ferocious intensity.

One of happiest countries in the world - Switzerland, has minimal home ownership, people simply focus on more important matters in life (and rules and their actual enforcement are on next 10 levels compared to general US, yet nobody does biggest financial move in their lives based on those).

In this thread, I mostly see young folks frustrated that their easy investment chance evaporated, although it was never actually easy but people owned and desired to own radically less in the past. A bit of greed, a bit of FOMO, a bit of emotions described above. And an intense sense that a big, well-located house (not an apartment, hell no) is not everybody's right, but their basic human right enforced by some Geneva convention and UN forces. They will happily accept brutal communism with whatever else it brings just that they can get it too.

Or its one of those few topics where HN really isn't the best place to look for balanced opinions. I get it, I would maybe feel the same if I was in such situation bound with such mindset.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#734

Post by NoGravitas »

_gabe_ wrote: post #676
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #496

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices. lol. Yes, I remember at the 2022 landlords meeting we all decided to raise rents… because we never thought of that before!! Surely it has nothing to do with taxes and inflation, no, as a renter you should be shielded from that and we should pay it without passing it on!

Is the FTC unbiased enough for you?[0]. This is a real problem. Many landlords use the same software to determine how much to charge, this software is intended to maximize rent by fixing the price. [0]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix...

Or Business Insider?

https://www.businessinsider.com/apartment-rent-increases-lan...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#735

Post by tossandthrow »

ben_w wrote: post #652
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…

I think it's a different problem entirely. I've been looking at getting a house built, and that starts at about €200k*, but the land in Berlin is at least another €200k on top of that (and usually more). If I was willing to live in the back end of nowhere, I can get the land for almost nothing, halving the total cost. But then I'd be living in the back end of nowhere, and turning that into an interesting town (let al…

EUR 400k for a newly build home in the greater Berlin area seems like extremely affordable in my opinion.

Houses, like other goods, decrease in value over time. A new house should be significantly more expensive than a 50 year old house - just like a car.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#736

Post by francisofascii »

ayakang31415 wrote: post #238

I am sure people are priced out of "desirable" places. I don't think this can be fixed by oversupplying homes in specific areas. You need to incentivize people to move into low dense areas.

I think people already are going to less desirable places. People priced out of higher income first tier cities are coming into 2nd tier cities, which then makes the 2nd tier places unaffordable for the current population.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#737

Post by Earw0rm »

strken wrote: post #567
dzhiurgis wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is there maybe some other common cause? Immigration. It's not that immigrants buy up the houses (opposites, we tend to live cramped up in flat shares). It's that they support landlords profits (with cream on top of not knowing your rights) and have overall pressure on market. Building should at least match immigration/population growth. Also not building dense enough. Kiwis always tout "I wouldn't wanna live in a h…

The underappreciated problem with immigration is that it allows advanced economies to cover up issues that make raising kids difficult. A shrinking population crashes the housing market. A growing population powered by immigration rather than birth rate props up the housing market.

The irony being that (from a UK perspective at least), in the absence of immigration, childcare and senior care would be even less affordable than they are.

Somebody has to do this work: it's essential, as well as hard, unglamorous and badly paid, and societies must take their pick from:

- Family members, almost always women, who have to give up paid work.

- Paid labour from less educated parts of their existing/indigenous population.

- Migrant labour, whether temporary or permanent.

The great mistake of Brexit is that the UK has now replaced temporary migrant labour (Poles and so on, who'd mostly come here in their early/mid 20s, stay for ten/fifteen years and then go home to raise families and be closer to their elders) with permanent migrants from much poorer countries who won't want to go back if they can at all avoid it.

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#739

Post by NoGravitas »

roenxi wrote: post #556
xbar wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there is excess demand generated by non-human corporate entities. There is not a supply/demand problem among humans-who-need-a-place-to-live. But there is investor demand for an investment vehicle that has the tax and asset benefits that homes offer. The consequence is that the buying power in the market by humans-who-need-a-place-to-live is relatively weak when they compete against financial investmen…

If we have 100 houses and 99 people, it is just unlikely that anyone will have a problem finding somewhere to live. These non-human corporate entities don't have a real incentive to leave the houses empty. There is always a win-win deal to be had renting the house out. It is certainly possible to have situations where someone chooses to leave a house empty. If it is happening at scale then that suggests either tax or…

> These non-human corporate entities don't have a real incentive to leave the houses empty.

They may have such an incentive. In an idealized market where everyone has perfect information, they wouldn't, but we don't live in such a market. In practice, it may be more profitable to leave a house empty to drive up rent on your other properties, and to save the maintenance costs that tenants would bring, especially if you can indirectly coordinate with other large property owners: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

Re: Priced out of home ownership

#740

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

lief79 wrote: post #730
throwitaway222 wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

First two make sense ... rentals is really complex. How long are you willing to hurt those with the least amount of money. Maybe a home owners break, and a second weaker first rental/vacation home break would match the current approach (and dodge more of the individuals who'd kill the legislation for for your idea. Alternately, a discount for occupied properties. I was initially thinking corporate owned rentals or an…

Housing is such a unique thing that I think it should be treated differently when we talk in terms of 'capitalism', 'public services', etc. Everyone needs a house. Nobody can use more than one house simultaneously. Houses are incredibly expensive, but most of that cost is purely market-driven. Housing is, essentially, a zero-sum game.
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