841–850 of 1001 posts
These shifts in the housing market are destroying the middle class as an increasing number of Americans will never own any equity in their residences over their lifetimes.
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They know that the current government planning regulations mean that getting anything built is extremely difficult. They know that due to supply and demand that this makes property a wise investment. Blame planning regulations. I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. Near me, someone is sticking up protest letters at bus stops c…
> I read recently that Japan and new Zealand scrapped various regulations and this led to stabilization / lower of property prices. I don't know about Japan, but that can't possibly be right about NZ. Nobody in our generation will ever be able to afford a home in Auckland. Land Value Tax sorely needed.
Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…
Development increases the value of land in the long run, that's nearly tautological; investors in land will benefit from this increase just like the developers themselves do. I think there's a high likelihood that the markets for "home with land" and "condo" diverge further in the future. Increased demand and density only increases the scarcity of single family homes with actual plots of land in popular areas.
There are a lot of vacant/under-utilized properties, especially ones zoned commercial, next to high-demand residential areas in my town. The owners seem to be just sitting on the property and waiting, vs actually fully making use of it currently.
I'd go a step further: why are we arguing about single-family homes when we have homeless people camped out around unused commercial and industrial properties? That's the property that's being wasted and could most-easily be re-utilized. If you have continual high demand it will be difficult to add supply fast enough once you run out of empty surrounding land (that's the biggest difference between the big coastal cities and the Phoenix/Dallas/Atlantas of the world) because it requires demolition and higher-density construction), but at the very least if you're in that situation, attack the empty areas harder!
(Whether or not there's ANY good sustainable long-term solution for perpetual demand growth is another question entirely...)
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Japan not so much scrapped various regulations as their regulations are just different - and nationwide. One of the effects of how their zoning classes work is that you don't have "residential-only" zones with no shops or other amenities - instead you have zones defined along the lines of maximum nuisance and with overlapping uses. You have a total of 12 zones, which start from "exclusively low rise residential" that…
Every now and then I watch one of these Japanese "video walk" channels on YouTube and find myself despairing at how wildly better their land use is than in the US. Obviously some of that is to be expected of an island nation versus a continent-spanning one. And yet, so much of Tokyo seems like it's built at the scale of a small-town main street: Between the major roads with their skyscrapers sit networks of pedestria…
Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…
Consider that: - Most American households own their home. - Homeowners vote at substantially higher rates than renters. - Home equity is one of the largest components of American wealth (roughly equal with retirement accounts). Taken together it's difficult to see how home values will be allowed to fall.
Do you have a reference for that? I'm interested to see how it breaks down. I have to assume this is true because of America's aging population.
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If you cherry pick data during COVID that's true. But it was the first year since 1900 with any decline and state forecasters say it's more to do with over 50,000 COVID related deaths and less migration from other countries (the largest source of population growth for CA for many years now) because other countries were locked down. As far as I know, no one expect that decline to be anything more than a very temporary…
California's population expansion clearly hit a wall back in 2017-2018, pre-pandemic. 2019 saw their population expansion de facto stop. The rate of growth has been dropping rapidly toward zero for much of the past decade, and they reached that line before the pandemic hit, it's not a new trend due to Covid. This decade it'll go negative. The exodus - a desperate flight from California's particularly horrible governm…
"You can tell that the government has failed and nobody wants to live their by the fact that it's too expensive" doesn't really add up to me...
Texas cities have lots of empty surrounding land to sprawl into further, which massively helps with supply and prices. This is not some magic feat of government. They're less dense, not more dense.
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A neighbor was complaining just the other day about a developer want to build two houses on a sliver of land in our small historic town. I've got no reason to support this. There's space to build an apartment building near me but no one want to do that (a building, in fact, burned down a while back and hasn't been rebuilt). Neighbors want no development. Developers want to build more of the ubber expensive houses the…
Of course, those regulations to support dense housing need to be supported by other things; like money for streets, sewer, water, etc. If the town's streets are already crowded with traffic and it's sewer system can barely keep up, then building dense housing it going to destroy the town. And for a town that is already "in place", adding a bigger sewer system is hard. Widening streets is even more difficult because y…
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And, at least in California, realtors will always push prices up. It’s pretty much never in their best interest to lower the price. Even the buyer’s agent gets paid a percentage of the sale price, so if they try to lower it they’d be essentially working against themselves. And this is without even accounting for all the schemes realtors create (like listing below market to get a lot of offers and create artificially…
Prices are set by supply and demand. Realtors don’t control that. Build 1-10 million 400 sq-ft studio apartments will solve the housing price problem. Existing inventory can cover families.
Here's why investors buy up houses: they know your neighbors will do the dirty work of artificially constraining the housing supply, which makes it a good investment. Here's one who comes right out and explains this: > Meanwhile, local opposition to building is so commonplace and the approval process so cumbersome, time consuming, and expensive, even when a proposed project complies entirely with requirements, approv…
I've been trying to build a house for myself. Going through all the hoops is not only cumbersome and expensive - but nearly impossible. I've run into legal tiff's between the county and nearby city. The city wants me to pay $40,000 for a sewer hookup for a single family dwelling when the sewer line is literally right along the road in front of where we will build the house. This is because the city has a beef to pick…
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It's a good thing that the value of your house is going up though, right? I suppose it might be upsetting to have to sell your house if it becomes too expensive, but that's a really nice problem to have imo.
> have to sell your house Not particularly, if every other house is too expensive for a normal person to afford.