It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
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It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
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Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#2Cornering the market, or a sufficiently large portion of it, doesn't necessarily drive prices higher. Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans) are at least as much to blame.
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#3Have there been serious attempts at describing how a Georgist land tax would appraise the value of the land?
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#4The mistake made by Georgism is to assume that rent extraction is a bug. It's not. The economy is literally owned by rich people -- that's what capitalism is -- so rich peoples' opinion is the one that counts, and rich people want to get paid for being rich. Rent extraction is a feature not a bug. Georgism will never see political success due to this misunderstanding of political economy.
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#5No shortage of land in the US, but everyone wants to live in the same few places (for good reason), and those places have a lot of restrictions on what can be built where.
It's satisfying to blame a big bad "them" for this, but the problem is "us". We all want our properties to increase in value so we collectively conspire to suppress supply that would make our properties less valuable.
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#6Cornering the market, or a sufficiently large portion of it, doesn't necessarily drive prices higher. Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans) are at least as much to blame.
> Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans)
This is unfalsifiable voodoo. It can be used to describe practically any economic phenomenon.
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#7Cornering the market, or a sufficiently large portion of it, doesn't necessarily drive prices higher. Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans) are at least as much to blame.
Interest rates tripled in the past few years, and home prices continued their upward march throughout most of the U.S. Do you mean something else by "cheap credit"?
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#8So basically, if you're an individual, or a contractor who reinvests their earnings into the housing market, you face two challenges: getting competitive financing, and finding a plot of land to build on.
Question: is finance screwing up capitalism? Real estate is supposed to be one of the most competitive and dynamic markets. If you can turn even this very simple and basic market into a quasi-monopoly, then there is something fundamentally wrong with the whole economy. And it seems all fingers point to Wall Street.
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#9Absent from this article:
- Financing requirements & anticompetitive lending practices
- Municipal/state building codes and the regulatory capture thereof
- NIMBYism and activist urban planners
- The tyranny of the commute
Re: It's the land, stupid: How the homebuilder cartel drives high housing prices
#10Cornering the market, or a sufficiently large portion of it, doesn't necessarily drive prices higher. Demand plus cheap credit (and Wall Street shenanigans) are at least as much to blame.
Unless you are willing to hold the asset at 40% occupancy without changing prices because preserving the on paper value is more important than profiting from rent.
Then you get New York City.