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Houses are for living, not for speculation

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Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#91
post #35
post #3

I wholeheartedly agree with this. My opinion is that governments should tax 2nd, 3rd and further housing so as to prevent people from accumulating residential buildings. If you want to live of your rents, buy a commercial or industrial building, speculate with that. But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary.

How do we feel about cottages or summer homes for people who live in poor weather climates? Is that a luxury that should be universally condemned? I woulnd't think those qualify as speculative but more like lifestyle money pits from what I have heard.

Usually when something like that is proposed seriously it isn't supposed to start from the second home already, but a bit further as there's very little social benefit in excessively taxing a flat inherited from your grandma waiting for your children to grow up either.

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#93
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, you need economics even when most of the money is used to pay for something productive rather than extractive.

but what's the difference between 'productive' and 'extractive'? Clearing huge swaths of land for agriculture is highly productive, in terms of making crops. Likewise irrigating huge swaths of arid land for agriculture is also highly productive. Are those 'extractive' or not?

The original turning the none used resource into a productive resource (your eg clearing land, irrigation etc etc) is productive.

Big land owners / PE / ... cornering all the available agricultural land / needed supply chain / economies of scale etc etc to extract more and more value of Scarce resource that has already been optimized is extractive.

The thing is that the word extractive makes it hard to have a good debate because pure extraction is rare (aka no need to add any extra labor to have the possesed "good" maintain or exceed its value vs inflation...

Personally in general I would prefer more usage of the word rent seeking (aka legally and finite resource captured market) and others.

As the current biggest problem in most countries in the world is housing and its cost for those who are renting and without any (realistic / statistical...) hope of ever entering the owners side that seems like something worth talking / voting for.

(I can get my beef from brazil / australia / ... But i can't get my land from there while living here.)

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But at least with owning stocks, I can vote in a bunch of proxy things every so often… which will keep me busy so I don’t have to think about all the money I lost :) I guess the housing equivalent would be an HOA, but honestly I would rather lose 90% of my money than sit through an HOA meeting…

I'm guessing this is a joke, but my advice would be not to purchase property subject to the tyranny of an HOA

Yes, just having fun :)

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but what's the difference between 'productive' and 'extractive'? Clearing huge swaths of land for agriculture is highly productive, in terms of making crops. Likewise irrigating huge swaths of arid land for agriculture is also highly productive. Are those 'extractive' or not?

The original turning the none used resource into a productive resource (your eg clearing land, irrigation etc etc) is productive. Big land owners / PE / ... cornering all the available agricultural land / needed supply chain / economies of scale etc etc to extract more and more value of Scarce resource that has already been optimized is extractive. The thing is that the word extractive makes it hard to have a good de…

Your argument is just one of perspective. From my view, clearing of land & irrigation is one of the greatest disasters of modernity. Extracting everything from land and rendering it barren and featureless. We traded biodiversity and ecosystems for increased food production. All to support a population of humans that is nowhere near any kind of population threat level. On the opposite exactly, human population has risen to levels unimaginable.

Your remaining arguments are endless handwaving and use of 'etc' so I won't be responding to those.

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#96
post #3

I wholeheartedly agree with this. My opinion is that governments should tax 2nd, 3rd and further housing so as to prevent people from accumulating residential buildings. If you want to live of your rents, buy a commercial or industrial building, speculate with that. But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary.

Lots of people in the thread pontificating about tax shelters, net worth, good investment strategies.

I suggest you do those things while homeless. Let me know how it goes.

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#97
post #3

I wholeheartedly agree with this. My opinion is that governments should tax 2nd, 3rd and further housing so as to prevent people from accumulating residential buildings. If you want to live of your rents, buy a commercial or industrial building, speculate with that. But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary.

What a funky way to address a supply problem. Just build more housing!

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#99

People want to exempt housing from the laws of supply and demand. The reason real estate is expensive is that there is not enough housing available for everyone to own a house that wants a house. If we want inexpensive housing, we need a massive project in this country to build housing. There is no other way to fix it. There is no way to shuffle around ownership of existing housing stock that is going to magically ma…

Houston added something like 500,000 people to its population and housing prizes went DOWN because they built more housing and their ratio of housing to people went up. Supply and demand.

Re: Houses are for living, not for speculation

#100
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am against "speculation" on any sort of real estate. On other hand I am not against real estate investments. And I don't think single family housing deserves any kind of special treatment. I see no reason why someone providing capital to build a building and then renting it out to cover cost of that capital, maintenance and building cost is unreasonable or bad thing. Issue really is when market is manipulated to ke…

> I see no reason why someone providing capital to build a building and then renting it out to cover cost of that capital, maintenance and building cost is unreasonable or bad thing. The problem is the scale of investment. For example, 3 companies own 19,000 houses, or 11% of the rental market, in the Atlanta, GA area[0]. The market is being "manipulated" in that investors with vast amounts of cash are outbidding fol…

3 companies own 19,000 houses, or 11% of the rental market

11% of the single family rental market. There are 200k rental apartments in Atlanta too.

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