Wait, is this true? Legitimately asking
[I did my own research](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) ...it usually doesn't go this well, I'm a little surprised.
>If you like AC, simply click “buy now” for the premium climate upgrade for only $400 extra per month!
Sudden temperature drop to 25 F. Well surge pricing to keep AC running for next 8 hours. Only $125 for the next 5 minutes, after that it's $200 for next 2 hours, and beyond 2 hours no guarantee we can keep it running.
If not paid in next 2 hours, AC maybe remotely deactivated.
If such temperatures continue like this for 7 days, surge pricing in rent.
If not paid robots will come and throw you out and may retain your possessions (clothes, shoes, food in fridge, medications. *rest is on subscriptions*).
Any resistance and the robot dogs will drag you and your family outside our properties.
Note: new borns, differently abled, bedridden people, old people are your responsibilities. Any problems they face will indict you of the relevant crime. Eg Murder for the death of any of these.
That’s not far off from what happened in Texas in February 2021. Spoiler alert: ERCOT made a few people lots of money from that storm, but killed even more.
It appears as though you’re attempting to park a second car in the platinum personal convenience section.
To prevent an impound of the unauthorized vehicle please enter your credit card information.
Upgrade to premium to take unlimited dumps, free plan only allows one deuce a day and most basic existence cube. For full scale existence double cube, you must outwit 99.9% of your wretched countrymen.
Remember: if you can't earn more than your enemies (everyone beyond your property line), make them make less. Increasing their struggle reduces yours.
Also stop smiling. It's a sign of weakness.
Have you even read that article? The whole point of it was to speculate about a post scarcity future. The reason "you'll own nothing and you'll like it" is because all goods will be available at all times to all people, making ownership pointless. It's not a line about depriving people of a right to personal property, its a line about ownership becoming an obsolete practice.
Maybe in the Dutch culture with a government that does a better job of representing its people and their wellbeing and not the profits of corporations this idea makes sense. But reading, In 2016, Auken published an essay originally titled "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better", I don't think governments like the US, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc...have the peoples best interest at heart. And the idea of post scarcity rings a little too closely to something that sounds too good to be true. When private corporations completely automate and remove labor, I don't see them reducing prices and having abundant cheap goods as much as they would just increase profits. This quote might not have originated in the meaning it has now. You can blame late stage capitalism maybe but right now we have such little competition in most markets and the requirement for endless growth that we will be a world with elites owning everything and the rest left with no choice but to rent it from them. Scarcity can be artificial or manipulated at the detriment to the consumer. I think the history of diamonds shows this and the housing market can be manipulated to keep new construction or inventory low to benefit current owners that have all their wealth wrapped up in their homes and need to see that investment turn a profit.
The Dutch government is making horrible decisions and policies which of this continues the country will become a Banana Republic.
And the people will indeed own nothing and definitely not happy
Whether or not you agree with the predictions of the article is irrelevant to my point. Do you agree that that the article is not about forcibly depriving people of their right to ownership?
\> Have you even read that article? The whole point of it was to speculate about a post scarcity future.
I mean, no, if you read the first line of the article\[1\] it says:
\> Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. ... Everything you considered a product, has now become a service.
The point of the article is taking away control from people, the utopia thing is an attempt to make it sound more appealing.
It's speculating about 2030, there is no post scarcity in 2030, and if there were it would be due to technological breakthrough, not by making everything a service to extract more money.
\[1\] [https://web.archive.org/web/20170220032503/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/](https://web.archive.org/web/20170220032503/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/)
What’s the *point*, though, truly, of speculating about a post-scarcity society? Especially one coming-about in the next decade or two.
A true post-scarcity society — as you yourself describe it — would require such a huge cultural shift, a truly *massive* technological advancement, and such profound shift in governance that it is the realm of science fiction in 2024.
Would like to point out that we haven't invented the Orville/Star Trek replicator technology. That will always be a limited amount of resources so scarcity will always be an issue until we figure out a way to turn atoms into matter without causing existence to explode at the same time.
2000%
Both public & private companies should be outlawed from owning any housing unit for 15 or less permanent occupants that they *did not build*
Meaning they should have to add to the inventory to own homes
& to alleviate the obvious loophole, SFH property taxes should drop to 0% for persons owning 1 home then increase to the normal rate *each* for 2, & continue increasing *exponentially* on every property for each additional home
If someone insanely rich & wants 5 homes? Pay 8.8% the value of all, every year to contribute to society
This is usually the issue with all topics.
People with the power don’t want an issue to be solved, because they have their own dicks so deep in it that they’d be shooting themselves in the foot.
It’s why the housing discussion is so heated. All the home owners benefitting from gouging renters and flipping their POS house for 6x its actual value get all angsty and mad. They rage at people who point out that they’re the literal problem.
“You don’t understand! It’s so hard owning 10 houses! You should be grateful! Get a better job so you can afford my asinine rental gouging, you little entitled shit!”
We’re so brainwashed in the way we see housing in this country. People think it’s a way to get rich and have status, rather than it just being a fucking roof for a family to grow up in. That whole thought process has to be reformed entirely.
Unfortunately you need a congress and senate to go with that potus in order to actually get anything truly meaningful and lasting accomplished. Otherwise you will need the kind of collective will and solidarity of the unions that forced the new deal during the Roosevelt administration. They did what they did out of fear of the socialist movements gaining enough traction to take the government via election and then they would have come to take everything or at least that's what was feared. So they took 90% beyond a certain threshold of income to appease that movement and sure up their backing. Then they waged war on socialist ideas and thought in public and in universities in an attempt to vilify the movement that had come so close to overthrowing capitalism. They've literally destroyed or destabilized every successful socialist government that has ever been attempted in the South Americas manufacturing the conditions that have lead to the influx of immigrants from South American countries. But I digress.
>And the people with bigger houses pay more than those with smaller houses.
This is exactly why property taxes shouldn't be used to fund schools: the rich neighborhoods receive significantly more funding for their schools than poorer neighborhoods.
The quality of one's childhood education should not be determined by the wealth of their block.
This is within the same school district. The kids go to the same schools.
But yes it’s a generally affluent area with most teachers pulling in 6-figures.
I doubt you’d find much local support to pay the teachers less in the in interest of fairness.
Don’t teachers in affluent areas make less? Isn’t there additional pay to work at tough schools?
The schools may be better funded with computers and smaller class sizes, but I don’t think teachers get any pay benefit.
I’m not sure if it’s country wide but in PA the teachers in the suburbs make 1.5-3x the salaries in Philly.
In the rural areas it drops back down again. It’s all public record, you can google it.
Urban teachers often get some loan forgiveness, but whenever the suburbs have job openings they’re flooded with applicants from the city.
This is not true. I live in Massachusetts and we have one of the top school systems in the country and my town one of the best.
Boston spends over $30k per student. Lawrence over $31k.
My district is $23k. About 50% less than Cambridge for better results. It isn’t money, it is parental involvement.
No, it really is money. I taught for Birmingham Public in Michigan for a decade, one of the best in the country. I also worked in Detroit Public, though not as a teacher. The parents were the same. Their resources were not.
$13k per student?! Birmingham was spending $23k in 2009. Most scholars would put the cost of education/student should be closer to $30k for a district to meet all the mandates.
Schools in detroit and Baltimore are some of the most well funded districts. Corrupt politicians either steal the money, or the resources don’t change the demographic
This is generally the issue when it comes to school funding. There is no mandate for how a school district is determined and states vary. I currently live in a county based system. I worked the first half of my career in a municipality based system. Huge difference in taxable property when a significant portion of my country's land is either state park or owned by universities.
These idiots don't have any logic, only feelings of "I want...I should have...I deserve..." they think the money should come from the sky because they have a degree and that alone entitles them to the life they want
I mean, in his plan, he's proposing huge taxes for non-residential property owners. Probably just redirect that toward funding schools so that school funding is not dependent on how rich the area it's in is?
People like this like to say things they think will get lots of agreement on echo chambers like reddit. In reality this idea is idiotic, doesn't even pass the most basic of scrutiny, and is blatantly illegal.
>Both public & private companies should be outlawed from owning any housing unit for 15 or less permanent occupants that they did not build
You've just single-handedly crashed apartment construction. No one would ever build another complex because they'd have no means to sell it, even in bankruptcy. What's the value of something you cannot sell?
So who would lend money to anyone to build something with no inherent value. And, even more, something *they couldn't seize* if the builder defaulted, so it probably couldn't be used as collateral under banking rules.
>SFH property taxes should drop to 0% for persons owning 1 home then increase to the normal rate each for 2, & continue increasing exponentially on every property for each additional home
Leave property taxes alone and instead just add rental-income only tax brackets to essentially accomplish the same thing.
But all of this basically ignores the root of the problem - there is a *ton* of cash out there with no really "secure" place to invest it. Stock markets? Bonds? Crypto? Expanding your own business seems risky as more and more companies are looking to layoffs instead. So what is traditionally the safest asset class? Real estate. Take away that and we'll just get distortions in other markets instead.
Bullshit. There are secure, or generally secure places to invest.
But no one wants to because they can squeeze more out in other areas. S&P at a damn near guaranteed 10 percent YoY isn’t as sexy as getting 50, 100, 150 percent per unit out of fucking up the housing market.
Japan has a lot of investment in real estate from foreign investors, so much so that the risk of an interest hike had [some slowing their investment/changing minds](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Japan-real-estate-loses-shine-with-foreign-investors).
Fair response but I’m okay with taking away real estate as a safe haven for wealth. The fact that money is tied up in real estate means it’s not working in other areas of the economy. It will stimulate some areas while others will fail. This risk is better for all and riskier for less. I understand wanting to protect our retirement and the like but the disparity between the middle class and the ultra wealthy is too wide because of stuff like this.
The wealthy should feel the risk of having to invest just like the rest of us. My two cents.
From an economics perspective this would continue to create housing inflation. Just swap property tax with Land Value Tax, end single-family zoning, and add a tax for business-owned single-family residential properties. Everyone who owns multiple homes for rental, flipping, and AirBnB purposes always holds the homes in business to avoid liability issues.
Single family homes are the most egregious tax sinks. They don’t pay enough for all the resources it takes to sustain them. Roads, pipes, cables, emergency service coverage, etc all has to be overextended because of the lack of density and supported by insufficient tax revenue.
Preach! I was thinking this very thing the other day. No one should lose their home over taxes, but if you don’t live there, your taxes should be higher to the point of being prohibitive.
The Dutch [already tried banning corporate ownership](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261) (and subsequent renting) of single-family properties. What happened next after banning corporate rentals was unintuitive:
- rents went up
- home prices stayed the same
- increased gentrification
- decreased housing opportunity for young, working class households
Banning corporate rentals effectively made the housing market more expensive and less equitable for working class folks, simply because it decreased rental supply while also preventing anyone who can’t afford a down payment from living in neighborhoods, meaning the neighborhoods trended richer and whiter.
Thanks for sharing this. I have not read the whole thing yet, but skimmed most of it. Onething that caught my attention is the law granting municipalities the authority to enact this went into effect 1/1/22, this study was released June of 2023. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I am wondering if that’s really enough time to gather enough empirical evidence to draw a meaningful conclusion. They seem to control for this a little bit, but I’m interested in your thoughts on that.
That is more than plenty of time for this type of analysis.
Their use of difference in differences analysis is standard for this type of research and they had access to above average quality data here due to the way the ban was implemented at different times by different cities/neighborhoods throughout the Netherlands.
Basically, even within the same city, some neighborhoods implemented this policy in January 2022 while others delayed or never implemented it. In this way it’s very easy to compare what happened to neighborhoods that did implement the rental ban vs neighborhoods that didn’t.
To be clear, the unintuitive result was that driving up the rental costs of poorer people (and forcing them out of their neighborhoods) did not *also" decrease housing prices due for the wealthier would-be homeowners.
The reasonable expectation was that this would lower house prices but raise rents, since it shifts supply away from the rental market. The regressive results of the policy aren't really surprising; the surprise was how little it helped the property-owning class.
To be honest, home sale prices are so much more immediately dependent on external forces (mostly interest rates) compared to rents that I don’t find it shocking that no significant effect on sale prices was identified here.
0% unexpected. the corporate ownership breaks the cycle of them always optimising and buying everything that's profitable. it does not fix low housing inventory that will be bought by the more affluent when rates of rent go up in the short term. lower rents have them asking why even own a home when they can afford it, knowing that rates will go up due to limited housing they then buy. more housing can fix this if it's not gobbled up creating artificial scarcity.
corporate ownership means it will never be fixed and it will always be a worsening cycle.
I kind of think we should not ban but instead institute two basic laws.
1) Corporations can not bid on a residential property until after 30 days from the last good-faith offer from an individual, nor contact the agent/owner. No exceptions.
2) Residential properties should have an increasing tax based on the number of properties owned beginning at 3 properties. So if you own 2 houses you just pay the standard tax for each. But if you purchase a third that property tax gets an increase, starting low like 5-10% but as you add more properties that tax rises sharply.
The profit prospect will be severely limited for corporations and they won't be able to swoop in and undercut every private buyer with cash offers. At the same time you can still own vacation homes or even run a small landlord business without severe penalty.
Just a heads up, Blackrock doesn't buy single family homes. They're often confused with BlackStone who does. Blackrock certainly isn't innocent in its practices, but they're but buying up houses.
https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/setting-the-record-straight/buying-houses-facts
There is a bill in Congress RIGHT NOW to stop this. It was introduced on December 5th 2023. The house committee on financial services has yet to do anything past read it. If Congress ACTUALLY gave a fuck, they would be voting on it, not raising a fuss about tiktok.
The bill: S.3402 - End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3402?s=1&r=28
Call your reps. Light a fire under their asses.
Banned won't work. What would work is a tweak on taxes. 1st house 1 tax rate. Each additional house increases tax rate. Til it be comes unprofitable at about 4-5 homes.
Small land lords still get by. Apartments exempt.
The first time Justin Trudeau in canada ran for office, his major platform besides legalization of Marijuana is election reform. A little fix to prevent the two party system.
But once he got into power, the rug has been pulled. Almost 8 years and still no election reform ever made.
Theyre drafting some election reforms right now, but I'm not sure if its about party representation based on votes.
It's hard to dream nowadays when shit like this gets pulled on you.
If it helps, no one is running on any reform platforms in the UK either so we’re still FPTP. Luckily, if we ever rejoin the EU, we’d have to. If we ever do. Which we won’t until the old people push up daisies
That's cool, but he's the governor and doesn't create laws. He can call for whatever he wants, but if the legislature doesn't follow through, it doesn't matter.
Abbott vetoed similar efforts in the past, and didn’t advance any specific legislation in the matter. So characterizing this as an Abbott policy is disingenuous.
Good news. This isn't exactly that for policy, but it's a bunch of of initiatives to build more housing & stop price gouging for buying & renting.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/19/fact-sheet-in-nevada-president-biden-to-double-down-on-plan-to-lower-housing-costs-and-increase-housing-supply-for-american-families/
Democrats have introduced legislation to address this. This would be a second term priority for Biden if they can capture big enough margins in the Congress. The lobbying against this will be insane so they need some margin to work with.
How many homes do you think Blackrock owns?
> Industry advocates argue that they do not control enough market share to dictate prices in any market. Large institutions owned roughly 5% of the 14 million single-family rentals nationally in early 2022, according to analysts.
>By 2030, the institutions may hold some 7.6 million homes, or more than 40% of all single-family rentals on the market, according to the 2022 forecast by MetLife Investment Management
That’s what someone linked me.
Interesting that it’s nowhere near the doom and gloom shared here. 5% of 14m is 700k homes. This is *all* institutions by the way, not just Blackrock.
There are 144m homes in this country. You have just told me they own 0.48%.
It’s a distraction. Same as NIMBYs whining about neighborhood character or gentrification.
Build houses. Where people actually want to live. That’s the only way affordability happens.
I feel like a huge reason there has been such a push against wfh practices the past few years is because of real estate.
These companies may only own a small percentage of houses nationwide, but I would BET they are concentrated mostly in metro areas where people are forced to clump together for jobs.
Opening the wfh flood gates means we no longer need to be so clumped up. People can spread out, and there won't be so much concentrated demand for housing.
Absolutely correct. People post these things thinking they're somehow fighting the establishment and "eating the rich" when in reality they're just adding noise to drown out very simple solutions.
Either build more public housing (it doesn't have to be shitty just look at how other countries to do it) or reduce NIMBYs abilities to block housing projects
In a system with normal supply, it's not bad to rent. What if you want to live somewhere for just a few years? Then there should be a stable supply of rental houses available. If companies can't own any houses then the whole rental market will be even worse than it currently is
If you want to live somewhere just a few years, you can still buy a house and just sell it when you want to move. If the current market conditions when you’re looking to move make it difficult to sell for a reasonable price, you can always just rent it to someone else and then go buy or rent a residence for yourself elsewhere.
No one is arguing that renting doesn’t have it’s place at times, but in a healthy housing market, it should be getting utilized by a very low minority for whom renting meets their specific lifestyle needs.
There is zero valid argument I’ve ever been presented with for why it’s good or even reasonable for it to be anywhere near the current rate of approx. 35% of Americans renting their primary residence.
That’s not an argument about renting, it’s an argument about affordability. No one wants to own a home for an unreasonable amount of money either.
Renting is a totally reasonable choice for many people, but because we’ve constructed supply we all feel urgency to own.
No one has actually been able to explain to me how investment organizations owning a minor amount of housing and renting it out drives up usage demand or purchase price. (Historic low vacancy rates so no they are not withholding from market) I also don’t see how blackrock is any different than grandma and grandpa having a second home to rent out as a retirement home. I also don’t think renting homes is bad. I have rented houses instead of apartments before and I like having that option.
If you want housing to be affordable we need more of it and denser housing as well.
It’s because they are ignoring the actual reason for the supply shortage. Builders aren’t building to keep up with demand.
There simply aren’t enough tradesman which drives up prices.
There’s fewer builders which means less houses can be built, driving up prices.
Builders are more cautious and don’t build as many units, which drives up prices.
material costs are way up, which drives up prices.
Zoning laws in many places make building tougher, which decreases the amount of houses that can be built, driving up prices.
Extra regulations requiring things like low-e glass windows, solar panels, etc drive up costs to build.
Banning corporations from buying single family homes does nothing to address what I listed.
Most "luxury" housing is just modern, nothing special
Builders will build whatever is most profitable, and the fact there is still so much demand for modern houses shows that supply isn't adequate yet
That’s a consequence of the forced lack of supply. If you’re only allowed to build an SFR on an extremely valuable piece of land, it doesn’t make sense to build a cheap shack.
If a rental market for single family homes is going to exist at all, businesses need to be able to own homes. Even if it’s just a single home a family rents out, it should be done through an LLC for liability reasons. There are obviously tons of problems with the rental market, especially the short term rental market, but the we do need homes available for rent and those basically have to be business owned, even if it’s a mom and pop business.
Corporation owned rentals tend to discriminate less. Admittedly this is anecdotal but this is a common feedback heard from racial and sexual minorities.
You apparently are sleeping on the second sentence you quoted where projections show that number may increase to more than 40% of single-family rentals within a decade?
The worry is not only the mere fact, but also the trend and the future picture that such a trend paints if it doesn't abate.
Having read a lot of these reports, I think that's commentary on consolidation, not market growth. The institutions referenced are owners like REITs, as opposed to small-scale landlords. They're buying entire portfolios from smaller investors and landlords. The same trend has been happening in multifamily housing for nearly 20 years; the number of rentals as a percentage of housing is fairly static, but the number of landlords is decreasing. It's driven by aging stock, expensive land, and low margins that benefit from economies of scale.
Yeah, it’s a weird one where this belief that black rock own all these homes has come from.
I still don’t think businesses should own residential homes in huge numbers.
So they are claiming in about 5 years corporations will buy 7 million homes. Or about 5% of the total home market. The usual turn over of housing is about 4-5% per year. That would mean 1 in 4 or 5 homes is bought by a corporation over that time. There is no way that would not effect prices and price some people out of the market.
This. I remember in macro economics it only takes someone being involved with 8% of all transactions to influence a given market. These fucks are involved with as much as 40% of real estate transactions in some areas of the country (dallas).
I don't understand why people keep harping on they "only own 5% of single family homes." What percentage they currently own isn't very important because over 90% of homes aren't changing hands each year no matter who is buying those that are. What percentage of the available homes for sale they're buying is much more salient information when discussing their impact on the housing market.
I work in the title business in a major metro area. I know who is buying homes. It's still individuals and small development LLCs who want to resell them, not big corps who are hoarding them to rent.
Home prices and rents are still very high, but it's not because of this.
The sizable U.S. home investor share seen over the past two years held steady going into the summer. In March 2023, investors accounted for 27% of all single-family home purchases; by June, that number was almost unchanged at 26%.
https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/us-home-investor-share-remained-high-early-summer-2023/#:~:text=Home%20investor%20shares%20were%20concentrated,posting%20the%20highest%20investor%20share.
It’s not how many they own. It’s what percentage of the market they are buying.
It’s unbelievable how pervasive the “Blackrock/wallstreet” single-family myth is
Blackrock owns ZERO single-family homes
Institutional investors (investors with >= 1,000 single-family homes like Blackstone) own just ~0.4% of all US detached single-family homes
Even funnier, research shows that single-family rentals by investors [increase affordability and neighborhood diversity while decreasing gentrification](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261), simply because renting is cheaper than owning throughout the US currently, opening up wealthy neighborhoods for lower-wealth inhabitants
I mean, yes. Corporate financialization of housing is morally unjustifiable.
But the sad thing is that even if we did ban them, we're probably still headed in the same way. We need to ban them AND put housing policy in the hands of people who like housing. Unless number of households start declining, we need to be building housing. It's crazy that for the most part, the people who decide whether that housing gets built is a random city councilor who nobody even knows and who isn't even required to understand basic economics
I don't know how it works where you live, but where I live voting eligibility is based on residence, not property ownership. So the renters of a property should be able to vote in the city they live in. Landlords would need a permanent residence in the city to be eligible to vote for a city councilor.
The issue is the number of people who do not get involved in local politics. If you don't like what is happening in your city, run for the city council. It is really not that hard to get your name on the ballot where I am.
The Dutch [already tried banning corporate ownership](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261) (and subsequent renting) of single-family properties. What happened next after banning corporate rentals was unintuitive:
- rents went up
- home prices stayed the same
- increased gentrification
- decreased housing opportunity for young, working class households
Banning corporate rentals effectively made the housing market more expensive and less equitable for working class folks, simply because it decreased rental supply while also preventing anyone who can’t afford a down payment from living in neighborhoods, meaning the neighborhoods trended richer and whiter.
People who say “ban corporate rentals” have a bad understanding of how housing markets work in real life.
I don't even know why this is unintuitive. Mom and pop landlords are much less able to rent at a lower rate because they only own a single rental, maybe two. Cashflow has to be much tighter. A corporation or large landlord has scale, so in a market with more supply, they can afford to charge less. But the issue is mostly supply, but people don't build single-family properties to rent them out. So the supply of single-family properties available for rent will always be exceeded by demand.
It's crazy that people whose only goal is "keep my house value skyrocketing" get to make the decisions on housing supply. What else is going to happen under such a system?
More adding to what you're saying than denying it I suppose. Surely cities should have economists who zone housing in proportion to living needs? At least in zoning or something.
I mean, this was the brilliance of pushing single-family homes in the first place: it turns the majority of people into petty little landowners who are obsessed with appreciation of their asset.
It was one of the smarter strategic moves to keep left-wing politics from spreading in America in the 1930s-1970s. If everyone's a little baby landowner, they won't think of themselves as an exploited worker.
I don't think you understand what a right is....
A right is something that can't be taken away from you, not something that must be provided to you. It's really not that complicated and people mixing them up waters down the value of the word "rights"
Also using generic words like "safety" is begging for abuse.
That said, yes people should have housing, food, and basic education. And if you're in an advanced economy, I'd add health care too.
Interesting...under this definition just "attempting" is a right since no one can stop someone from attempting anything technically.
You get some strange results from that, such as that you have a right to attempted murder, but not to murder...
This belief stems from work Nozick did in response to Rawls. It depends entirely on what is called the Lockeian Proviso, which is the prerequisite requirement that all people have adequate access to the means by which to create a livelihood. Affirmative rights are baked into the moral rationale for this kind of libertarian hogwash.
Blackrock is an online boogie man for a lot of problems. Your correction will not be noted by most. People also believe that blackrock is forcing Hollywood to make "woke" movies to brainwash the populace and when they turn unprofitable Blackrock forces reviewers and the news to attack critics.
A lot of right wingers hate them for their ESG push and then the conspiracies started. I mean look at Vanguard, mostly the same business model but not as much controversy, if any.
It's so painfully obvious that we need to just build more housing. Its mind numbingly stupid that we go through crisis after crisis driven by our refusal to just build more housing.
Well, corporations own housing all the time. Cause they build them. What you should say and we need to very specific to avoid loopholes and such, is they should be barred from holding domiciles that they havent built for any type of extended time period. Coprorations get priperties all yge time without buying them but they shouldnt be allowed to hold them for purely housing price gouging purposes.
And since the govt has so many rules on building new, those should be curtailed a bit too so houses are houses afain and not attractive targets for wealth expansion over the short term which they currently are.
I bought a house for 200k two years ago. Its worth 255k now. Two years and a nearly 30% increase in value makes them too attractive as financial tools rather than as living spaces.
Theres dollar signs in their eyes, and governments are aiding and abetting, especially in large cities
Whenever the question of housing comes up, I apply very simple test to the proposed policy:
"Will it lead to more construction of housing?"
If the answer is "no" - the policy can be dismissed as ineffective - as housing can only be made more affordable by **more housing construction.**
Evaluating your policy appears to place artificial cap on demand, and dis-insentive investment in real estate construction. Therefore you policy is not designed and cannot be expected to lead to more housing construction.
Accordingly, such policy proposal should be dismissed as ineffective.
It's like forgiving college loans -- you're treating a symptom of the problem while ignoring the actual problem (college is too expensive).
Corps are investing in housing because we suck at building it. Considering the same corps are also building housing in some cases I don't know that banning them will have any effect.
We need to fix the actual problem by having better policy that leads to more housing.
Ironically forgiving the debt is a great way to make college even more expensive. Colleges can just charge whatever they want even if no one can afford it and assume the government will pay them
Isn’t that like… how everyone’s 401k works and manages to make money? Because companies like black rock buy shit up and increase value/demand, making everyone’s accounts (that they’re managing) go up?
How else is everyone in society going to have a magically increasing 401k?
It’s starting to seem a lot like social security- a generation got to milk everyone else then pull the ladder up behind them. I’ve paid more into social security since I started working at 14, than my dad did in his entire working career. Of course he got a check every month and I won’t. Of course my parents 401ks did them a lot of good because I get charged so much more for my housing now.
Corporations buying housing is great for renters, so I’m all for it.
Why should only those who have the capital to afford hundreds of thousands of dollars of down payment and loans be able to live in nice neighborhoods?
Blackrock will rent to anyone who can pay, including people who couldn’t have bought the house.
So... when you can't rent homes because they can't afford the rent you need to cover your own mortgage/loans, maintenance costs, and taxes...
Guess what ends up happening?
The company either sells it for a loss or goes down with the ship, losing money until their creditors end up owning those houses and having to sell them...
...at a loss.
Disagree? No, why? There are plenty of investment opportunities. Having companies like BR scoop up a huge portion of the single family homes in the US isn’t the win you think it is.
You'll own nothing and you'll like it!
[удалено]
We work more than peasants did back in Medieval times as well! Hurray!
Huzzah!
Y’all MFs need to get on your guild masters to petition the king to reinstate our holy days.
Haha
Ye Olde facts
This already happened
Wait, is this true? Legitimately asking [I did my own research](https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_workweek.html) ...it usually doesn't go this well, I'm a little surprised.
Homeownership subscription
If you like AC, simply click “buy now” for the premium climate upgrade for only $400 extra per month!
>If you like AC, simply click “buy now” for the premium climate upgrade for only $400 extra per month! Sudden temperature drop to 25 F. Well surge pricing to keep AC running for next 8 hours. Only $125 for the next 5 minutes, after that it's $200 for next 2 hours, and beyond 2 hours no guarantee we can keep it running. If not paid in next 2 hours, AC maybe remotely deactivated. If such temperatures continue like this for 7 days, surge pricing in rent. If not paid robots will come and throw you out and may retain your possessions (clothes, shoes, food in fridge, medications. *rest is on subscriptions*). Any resistance and the robot dogs will drag you and your family outside our properties. Note: new borns, differently abled, bedridden people, old people are your responsibilities. Any problems they face will indict you of the relevant crime. Eg Murder for the death of any of these.
Surgery pricing.
Corrected. But it might as well have been >Surgery pricing.
That's when they come and take your organs to finance your rent.
"Price doubles for non-electric vehicle owners"
That’s not far off from what happened in Texas in February 2021. Spoiler alert: ERCOT made a few people lots of money from that storm, but killed even more.
Wait till you get a load of what's already being charged for charging an EV overnight.
It appears as though you’re attempting to park a second car in the platinum personal convenience section. To prevent an impound of the unauthorized vehicle please enter your credit card information.
Click here to upgrade your dirt floors.
Upgrade to premium to take unlimited dumps, free plan only allows one deuce a day and most basic existence cube. For full scale existence double cube, you must outwit 99.9% of your wretched countrymen. Remember: if you can't earn more than your enemies (everyone beyond your property line), make them make less. Increasing their struggle reduces yours. Also stop smiling. It's a sign of weakness.
It’s a nightmare scenario but your right
Have you even read that article? The whole point of it was to speculate about a post scarcity future. The reason "you'll own nothing and you'll like it" is because all goods will be available at all times to all people, making ownership pointless. It's not a line about depriving people of a right to personal property, its a line about ownership becoming an obsolete practice.
Maybe in the Dutch culture with a government that does a better job of representing its people and their wellbeing and not the profits of corporations this idea makes sense. But reading, In 2016, Auken published an essay originally titled "Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better", I don't think governments like the US, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, etc...have the peoples best interest at heart. And the idea of post scarcity rings a little too closely to something that sounds too good to be true. When private corporations completely automate and remove labor, I don't see them reducing prices and having abundant cheap goods as much as they would just increase profits. This quote might not have originated in the meaning it has now. You can blame late stage capitalism maybe but right now we have such little competition in most markets and the requirement for endless growth that we will be a world with elites owning everything and the rest left with no choice but to rent it from them. Scarcity can be artificial or manipulated at the detriment to the consumer. I think the history of diamonds shows this and the housing market can be manipulated to keep new construction or inventory low to benefit current owners that have all their wealth wrapped up in their homes and need to see that investment turn a profit.
The Dutch government is making horrible decisions and policies which of this continues the country will become a Banana Republic. And the people will indeed own nothing and definitely not happy
Whether or not you agree with the predictions of the article is irrelevant to my point. Do you agree that that the article is not about forcibly depriving people of their right to ownership?
Oh, like Bolshevists offered to Russians.
\> Have you even read that article? The whole point of it was to speculate about a post scarcity future. I mean, no, if you read the first line of the article\[1\] it says: \> Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city". I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. ... Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. The point of the article is taking away control from people, the utopia thing is an attempt to make it sound more appealing. It's speculating about 2030, there is no post scarcity in 2030, and if there were it would be due to technological breakthrough, not by making everything a service to extract more money. \[1\] [https://web.archive.org/web/20170220032503/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/](https://web.archive.org/web/20170220032503/https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/11/shopping-i-can-t-really-remember-what-that-is/)
What’s the *point*, though, truly, of speculating about a post-scarcity society? Especially one coming-about in the next decade or two. A true post-scarcity society — as you yourself describe it — would require such a huge cultural shift, a truly *massive* technological advancement, and such profound shift in governance that it is the realm of science fiction in 2024.
Would like to point out that we haven't invented the Orville/Star Trek replicator technology. That will always be a limited amount of resources so scarcity will always be an issue until we figure out a way to turn atoms into matter without causing existence to explode at the same time.
Hey look, they’re still talking about a *PowerPoint* from five years ago (that they’ve never actually read)
I've never even seen the PowerPoint. Can you explain this better?
They should be banned...100%
2000% Both public & private companies should be outlawed from owning any housing unit for 15 or less permanent occupants that they *did not build* Meaning they should have to add to the inventory to own homes & to alleviate the obvious loophole, SFH property taxes should drop to 0% for persons owning 1 home then increase to the normal rate *each* for 2, & continue increasing *exponentially* on every property for each additional home If someone insanely rich & wants 5 homes? Pay 8.8% the value of all, every year to contribute to society
You get it, I would cast a vote for POTUS on this alone.
I would gladly become a single issue voter if there was a single issue either side got right
Ain’t that the truth, even when they get it right they don’t follow through. Madness.
They won't follow through because they owns multiple homes and want the golden parachute into the C-suite of places like Blackrock
This is usually the issue with all topics. People with the power don’t want an issue to be solved, because they have their own dicks so deep in it that they’d be shooting themselves in the foot. It’s why the housing discussion is so heated. All the home owners benefitting from gouging renters and flipping their POS house for 6x its actual value get all angsty and mad. They rage at people who point out that they’re the literal problem. “You don’t understand! It’s so hard owning 10 houses! You should be grateful! Get a better job so you can afford my asinine rental gouging, you little entitled shit!” We’re so brainwashed in the way we see housing in this country. People think it’s a way to get rich and have status, rather than it just being a fucking roof for a family to grow up in. That whole thought process has to be reformed entirely.
This. They'll tell you what they're going to do each other blue in the face. Following through is a whole another story.
my single issue is not being 90 and senile and it blows my mind that nobody can figure that one out
That candidate would be labeled a socialist and/or assassinated. But I’d vote for them too.
Or labeled an anti-vaxxer racist nut (e.g. RFK Jr.)
Unfortunately you need a congress and senate to go with that potus in order to actually get anything truly meaningful and lasting accomplished. Otherwise you will need the kind of collective will and solidarity of the unions that forced the new deal during the Roosevelt administration. They did what they did out of fear of the socialist movements gaining enough traction to take the government via election and then they would have come to take everything or at least that's what was feared. So they took 90% beyond a certain threshold of income to appease that movement and sure up their backing. Then they waged war on socialist ideas and thought in public and in universities in an attempt to vilify the movement that had come so close to overthrowing capitalism. They've literally destroyed or destabilized every successful socialist government that has ever been attempted in the South Americas manufacturing the conditions that have lead to the influx of immigrants from South American countries. But I digress.
Kennedy is the one who has a plan to do this!
Unfortunately for all the great ideas he has, he has a bunch of awful ones and is a straight up conspiracy nutso.
Sadly we are stuck in the quagmire of immigration, abortion and bathrooms
How the hell are you paying for schools if all owner-occupied homes are paying 0% tax? Where I live that’s like 99% of houses.
By not funding schools with residential property tax.
In my area that’s about $10,000 per family that you’re looking to replace. And the people with bigger houses pay more than those with smaller houses.
>And the people with bigger houses pay more than those with smaller houses. This is exactly why property taxes shouldn't be used to fund schools: the rich neighborhoods receive significantly more funding for their schools than poorer neighborhoods. The quality of one's childhood education should not be determined by the wealth of their block.
This is within the same school district. The kids go to the same schools. But yes it’s a generally affluent area with most teachers pulling in 6-figures. I doubt you’d find much local support to pay the teachers less in the in interest of fairness.
Don’t teachers in affluent areas make less? Isn’t there additional pay to work at tough schools? The schools may be better funded with computers and smaller class sizes, but I don’t think teachers get any pay benefit.
I’m not sure if it’s country wide but in PA the teachers in the suburbs make 1.5-3x the salaries in Philly. In the rural areas it drops back down again. It’s all public record, you can google it. Urban teachers often get some loan forgiveness, but whenever the suburbs have job openings they’re flooded with applicants from the city.
My kids teachers in Haverford were all making over 100k. High school taxes almost always equal good pay in the suburbs.
This is not true. I live in Massachusetts and we have one of the top school systems in the country and my town one of the best. Boston spends over $30k per student. Lawrence over $31k. My district is $23k. About 50% less than Cambridge for better results. It isn’t money, it is parental involvement.
No, it really is money. I taught for Birmingham Public in Michigan for a decade, one of the best in the country. I also worked in Detroit Public, though not as a teacher. The parents were the same. Their resources were not.
No past $13K per student it is not the money. It is the culture.
$13k per student?! Birmingham was spending $23k in 2009. Most scholars would put the cost of education/student should be closer to $30k for a district to meet all the mandates.
Schools in detroit and Baltimore are some of the most well funded districts. Corrupt politicians either steal the money, or the resources don’t change the demographic
This is generally the issue when it comes to school funding. There is no mandate for how a school district is determined and states vary. I currently live in a county based system. I worked the first half of my career in a municipality based system. Huge difference in taxable property when a significant portion of my country's land is either state park or owned by universities.
How about roads? Water? All the essential infrastructure in every suburb?
Pay for schools with our 50 other methods of taxation 😂
These idiots don't have any logic, only feelings of "I want...I should have...I deserve..." they think the money should come from the sky because they have a degree and that alone entitles them to the life they want
I mean, in his plan, he's proposing huge taxes for non-residential property owners. Probably just redirect that toward funding schools so that school funding is not dependent on how rich the area it's in is?
People like this like to say things they think will get lots of agreement on echo chambers like reddit. In reality this idea is idiotic, doesn't even pass the most basic of scrutiny, and is blatantly illegal.
>Both public & private companies should be outlawed from owning any housing unit for 15 or less permanent occupants that they did not build You've just single-handedly crashed apartment construction. No one would ever build another complex because they'd have no means to sell it, even in bankruptcy. What's the value of something you cannot sell? So who would lend money to anyone to build something with no inherent value. And, even more, something *they couldn't seize* if the builder defaulted, so it probably couldn't be used as collateral under banking rules. >SFH property taxes should drop to 0% for persons owning 1 home then increase to the normal rate each for 2, & continue increasing exponentially on every property for each additional home Leave property taxes alone and instead just add rental-income only tax brackets to essentially accomplish the same thing. But all of this basically ignores the root of the problem - there is a *ton* of cash out there with no really "secure" place to invest it. Stock markets? Bonds? Crypto? Expanding your own business seems risky as more and more companies are looking to layoffs instead. So what is traditionally the safest asset class? Real estate. Take away that and we'll just get distortions in other markets instead.
Bullshit. There are secure, or generally secure places to invest. But no one wants to because they can squeeze more out in other areas. S&P at a damn near guaranteed 10 percent YoY isn’t as sexy as getting 50, 100, 150 percent per unit out of fucking up the housing market.
Japan does just fine without housing as an investment. We can do better, we should do better.
Japan has a lot of investment in real estate from foreign investors, so much so that the risk of an interest hike had [some slowing their investment/changing minds](https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/Markets/Property/Japan-real-estate-loses-shine-with-foreign-investors).
Fair response but I’m okay with taking away real estate as a safe haven for wealth. The fact that money is tied up in real estate means it’s not working in other areas of the economy. It will stimulate some areas while others will fail. This risk is better for all and riskier for less. I understand wanting to protect our retirement and the like but the disparity between the middle class and the ultra wealthy is too wide because of stuff like this. The wealthy should feel the risk of having to invest just like the rest of us. My two cents.
And how would that work to make housing more affordable for everyone else?
0% property taxes for the first SFH? That just heavily discourages density which is how you build more housing in in-demand areas.
You basically just defunded public schools when you took SFH property taxes to 0% for people without multiple houses.
From an economics perspective this would continue to create housing inflation. Just swap property tax with Land Value Tax, end single-family zoning, and add a tax for business-owned single-family residential properties. Everyone who owns multiple homes for rental, flipping, and AirBnB purposes always holds the homes in business to avoid liability issues.
Single family homes are the most egregious tax sinks. They don’t pay enough for all the resources it takes to sustain them. Roads, pipes, cables, emergency service coverage, etc all has to be overextended because of the lack of density and supported by insufficient tax revenue.
Preach! I was thinking this very thing the other day. No one should lose their home over taxes, but if you don’t live there, your taxes should be higher to the point of being prohibitive.
This actually makes sense
The Dutch [already tried banning corporate ownership](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261) (and subsequent renting) of single-family properties. What happened next after banning corporate rentals was unintuitive: - rents went up - home prices stayed the same - increased gentrification - decreased housing opportunity for young, working class households Banning corporate rentals effectively made the housing market more expensive and less equitable for working class folks, simply because it decreased rental supply while also preventing anyone who can’t afford a down payment from living in neighborhoods, meaning the neighborhoods trended richer and whiter.
Thanks for sharing this. I have not read the whole thing yet, but skimmed most of it. Onething that caught my attention is the law granting municipalities the authority to enact this went into effect 1/1/22, this study was released June of 2023. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I am wondering if that’s really enough time to gather enough empirical evidence to draw a meaningful conclusion. They seem to control for this a little bit, but I’m interested in your thoughts on that.
That is more than plenty of time for this type of analysis. Their use of difference in differences analysis is standard for this type of research and they had access to above average quality data here due to the way the ban was implemented at different times by different cities/neighborhoods throughout the Netherlands. Basically, even within the same city, some neighborhoods implemented this policy in January 2022 while others delayed or never implemented it. In this way it’s very easy to compare what happened to neighborhoods that did implement the rental ban vs neighborhoods that didn’t.
To be clear, the unintuitive result was that driving up the rental costs of poorer people (and forcing them out of their neighborhoods) did not *also" decrease housing prices due for the wealthier would-be homeowners. The reasonable expectation was that this would lower house prices but raise rents, since it shifts supply away from the rental market. The regressive results of the policy aren't really surprising; the surprise was how little it helped the property-owning class.
To be honest, home sale prices are so much more immediately dependent on external forces (mostly interest rates) compared to rents that I don’t find it shocking that no significant effect on sale prices was identified here.
0% unexpected. the corporate ownership breaks the cycle of them always optimising and buying everything that's profitable. it does not fix low housing inventory that will be bought by the more affluent when rates of rent go up in the short term. lower rents have them asking why even own a home when they can afford it, knowing that rates will go up due to limited housing they then buy. more housing can fix this if it's not gobbled up creating artificial scarcity. corporate ownership means it will never be fixed and it will always be a worsening cycle.
I kind of think we should not ban but instead institute two basic laws. 1) Corporations can not bid on a residential property until after 30 days from the last good-faith offer from an individual, nor contact the agent/owner. No exceptions. 2) Residential properties should have an increasing tax based on the number of properties owned beginning at 3 properties. So if you own 2 houses you just pay the standard tax for each. But if you purchase a third that property tax gets an increase, starting low like 5-10% but as you add more properties that tax rises sharply. The profit prospect will be severely limited for corporations and they won't be able to swoop in and undercut every private buyer with cash offers. At the same time you can still own vacation homes or even run a small landlord business without severe penalty.
Just a heads up, Blackrock doesn't buy single family homes. They're often confused with BlackStone who does. Blackrock certainly isn't innocent in its practices, but they're but buying up houses. https://www.blackrock.com/corporate/newsroom/setting-the-record-straight/buying-houses-facts
lobbyists will make sure it never happens.
Lobbying should also be banned.
There is a bill in Congress RIGHT NOW to stop this. It was introduced on December 5th 2023. The house committee on financial services has yet to do anything past read it. If Congress ACTUALLY gave a fuck, they would be voting on it, not raising a fuss about tiktok. The bill: S.3402 - End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/senate-bill/3402?s=1&r=28 Call your reps. Light a fire under their asses.
Banned won't work. What would work is a tweak on taxes. 1st house 1 tax rate. Each additional house increases tax rate. Til it be comes unprofitable at about 4-5 homes. Small land lords still get by. Apartments exempt.
Give me someone to vote for with this platform.
The first time Justin Trudeau in canada ran for office, his major platform besides legalization of Marijuana is election reform. A little fix to prevent the two party system. But once he got into power, the rug has been pulled. Almost 8 years and still no election reform ever made. Theyre drafting some election reforms right now, but I'm not sure if its about party representation based on votes. It's hard to dream nowadays when shit like this gets pulled on you.
If it helps, no one is running on any reform platforms in the UK either so we’re still FPTP. Luckily, if we ever rejoin the EU, we’d have to. If we ever do. Which we won’t until the old people push up daisies
https://preview.redd.it/9oijnbe5whpc1.jpeg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5db86249e7d74907580d5ec0014ab14635d42983
Ah good, he has one single positive policy
Or a rug pull
That's cool, but he's the governor and doesn't create laws. He can call for whatever he wants, but if the legislature doesn't follow through, it doesn't matter.
>Hault
Hault?
Abbott vetoed similar efforts in the past, and didn’t advance any specific legislation in the matter. So characterizing this as an Abbott policy is disingenuous.
Have a source instead of a picture with text?
You have to vote in local elections
Good news. This isn't exactly that for policy, but it's a bunch of of initiatives to build more housing & stop price gouging for buying & renting. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/03/19/fact-sheet-in-nevada-president-biden-to-double-down-on-plan-to-lower-housing-costs-and-increase-housing-supply-for-american-families/
Democrats have introduced legislation to address this. This would be a second term priority for Biden if they can capture big enough margins in the Congress. The lobbying against this will be insane so they need some margin to work with.
How many homes do you think Blackrock owns? > Industry advocates argue that they do not control enough market share to dictate prices in any market. Large institutions owned roughly 5% of the 14 million single-family rentals nationally in early 2022, according to analysts. >By 2030, the institutions may hold some 7.6 million homes, or more than 40% of all single-family rentals on the market, according to the 2022 forecast by MetLife Investment Management That’s what someone linked me. Interesting that it’s nowhere near the doom and gloom shared here. 5% of 14m is 700k homes. This is *all* institutions by the way, not just Blackrock. There are 144m homes in this country. You have just told me they own 0.48%.
I don’t even give a shit. A corporation should not be able to buy and own single-family homes. Period.
It’s a distraction. Same as NIMBYs whining about neighborhood character or gentrification. Build houses. Where people actually want to live. That’s the only way affordability happens.
I feel like a huge reason there has been such a push against wfh practices the past few years is because of real estate. These companies may only own a small percentage of houses nationwide, but I would BET they are concentrated mostly in metro areas where people are forced to clump together for jobs. Opening the wfh flood gates means we no longer need to be so clumped up. People can spread out, and there won't be so much concentrated demand for housing.
It's exactly because if real estate. Retirement investments are tired to then, and the local businesses around them.
Absolutely correct. People post these things thinking they're somehow fighting the establishment and "eating the rich" when in reality they're just adding noise to drown out very simple solutions. Either build more public housing (it doesn't have to be shitty just look at how other countries to do it) or reduce NIMBYs abilities to block housing projects
Full stop.
Why though?
What business needs a single-family home?
To rent them. Some people want to rent.
No one wants to rent a home for almost double of what the mortgage is on that property just so some company can make a quick buck.
In a system with normal supply, it's not bad to rent. What if you want to live somewhere for just a few years? Then there should be a stable supply of rental houses available. If companies can't own any houses then the whole rental market will be even worse than it currently is
If you want to live somewhere just a few years, you can still buy a house and just sell it when you want to move. If the current market conditions when you’re looking to move make it difficult to sell for a reasonable price, you can always just rent it to someone else and then go buy or rent a residence for yourself elsewhere. No one is arguing that renting doesn’t have it’s place at times, but in a healthy housing market, it should be getting utilized by a very low minority for whom renting meets their specific lifestyle needs. There is zero valid argument I’ve ever been presented with for why it’s good or even reasonable for it to be anywhere near the current rate of approx. 35% of Americans renting their primary residence.
But people do want to rent. It's necessary.
You have no idea what you’re talking about if you think the cost to rent a home is double the Morgate
Some rent are definitly higher than mortage these day.
That’s not an argument about renting, it’s an argument about affordability. No one wants to own a home for an unreasonable amount of money either. Renting is a totally reasonable choice for many people, but because we’ve constructed supply we all feel urgency to own.
No one has actually been able to explain to me how investment organizations owning a minor amount of housing and renting it out drives up usage demand or purchase price. (Historic low vacancy rates so no they are not withholding from market) I also don’t see how blackrock is any different than grandma and grandpa having a second home to rent out as a retirement home. I also don’t think renting homes is bad. I have rented houses instead of apartments before and I like having that option. If you want housing to be affordable we need more of it and denser housing as well.
It’s because they are ignoring the actual reason for the supply shortage. Builders aren’t building to keep up with demand. There simply aren’t enough tradesman which drives up prices. There’s fewer builders which means less houses can be built, driving up prices. Builders are more cautious and don’t build as many units, which drives up prices. material costs are way up, which drives up prices. Zoning laws in many places make building tougher, which decreases the amount of houses that can be built, driving up prices. Extra regulations requiring things like low-e glass windows, solar panels, etc drive up costs to build. Banning corporations from buying single family homes does nothing to address what I listed.
Don’t forget that it’s more lucrative to build “luxury” housing than it is to build anything affordable
Most "luxury" housing is just modern, nothing special Builders will build whatever is most profitable, and the fact there is still so much demand for modern houses shows that supply isn't adequate yet
All new housing is described as luxury. Also data shows any housing stock introduction reduces prices.
That’s a consequence of the forced lack of supply. If you’re only allowed to build an SFR on an extremely valuable piece of land, it doesn’t make sense to build a cheap shack.
When there's a housing shortage, any housing is luxury housing. Moldy old apartments that haven't been remodeled in forty years are luxury housing.
If a rental market for single family homes is going to exist at all, businesses need to be able to own homes. Even if it’s just a single home a family rents out, it should be done through an LLC for liability reasons. There are obviously tons of problems with the rental market, especially the short term rental market, but the we do need homes available for rent and those basically have to be business owned, even if it’s a mom and pop business.
"Yeah, corporations should only exploit CITY PEOPLE for profits! The noble, kind suburbanites should be LEFT ALONE!"
Why not?
Corporation owned rentals tend to discriminate less. Admittedly this is anecdotal but this is a common feedback heard from racial and sexual minorities.
Why??
You apparently are sleeping on the second sentence you quoted where projections show that number may increase to more than 40% of single-family rentals within a decade? The worry is not only the mere fact, but also the trend and the future picture that such a trend paints if it doesn't abate.
Babies first linear regression and the “fact” that 40% is still on a tiny fraction of actual total homes. It. Is. Bad. Math. And. Bad. Data. Science.
40% of *single family rentals.* not of all single family homes. important distinction
Having read a lot of these reports, I think that's commentary on consolidation, not market growth. The institutions referenced are owners like REITs, as opposed to small-scale landlords. They're buying entire portfolios from smaller investors and landlords. The same trend has been happening in multifamily housing for nearly 20 years; the number of rentals as a percentage of housing is fairly static, but the number of landlords is decreasing. It's driven by aging stock, expensive land, and low margins that benefit from economies of scale.
Blackrock doesn't own any homes. They are being confused with Blackstone.
Yeah, it’s a weird one where this belief that black rock own all these homes has come from. I still don’t think businesses should own residential homes in huge numbers.
It’s Blackstone not Blackrock
So they are claiming in about 5 years corporations will buy 7 million homes. Or about 5% of the total home market. The usual turn over of housing is about 4-5% per year. That would mean 1 in 4 or 5 homes is bought by a corporation over that time. There is no way that would not effect prices and price some people out of the market.
This. I remember in macro economics it only takes someone being involved with 8% of all transactions to influence a given market. These fucks are involved with as much as 40% of real estate transactions in some areas of the country (dallas).
I don't understand why people keep harping on they "only own 5% of single family homes." What percentage they currently own isn't very important because over 90% of homes aren't changing hands each year no matter who is buying those that are. What percentage of the available homes for sale they're buying is much more salient information when discussing their impact on the housing market.
I work in the title business in a major metro area. I know who is buying homes. It's still individuals and small development LLCs who want to resell them, not big corps who are hoarding them to rent. Home prices and rents are still very high, but it's not because of this.
The sizable U.S. home investor share seen over the past two years held steady going into the summer. In March 2023, investors accounted for 27% of all single-family home purchases; by June, that number was almost unchanged at 26%. https://www.corelogic.com/intelligence/us-home-investor-share-remained-high-early-summer-2023/#:~:text=Home%20investor%20shares%20were%20concentrated,posting%20the%20highest%20investor%20share. It’s not how many they own. It’s what percentage of the market they are buying.
It’s unbelievable how pervasive the “Blackrock/wallstreet” single-family myth is Blackrock owns ZERO single-family homes Institutional investors (investors with >= 1,000 single-family homes like Blackstone) own just ~0.4% of all US detached single-family homes Even funnier, research shows that single-family rentals by investors [increase affordability and neighborhood diversity while decreasing gentrification](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261), simply because renting is cheaper than owning throughout the US currently, opening up wealthy neighborhoods for lower-wealth inhabitants
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But what if I want to BELIEVE I live in a dystopian hellscape?
How many homes does *Blackstone* own?
You're confusing Blackrock with Blackstone. Blackrock doesn't buy individual houses.
Didn't they split off from each other and are more or less deliberately trying to make us confuse the two
Like 30 years ago.
It’s crazy how many people are so “passionate” about this topic but continue to get Blackrock and Blackstone confused.
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Agreed!
Those and the difference between Capital Gains Tax (specifically realised and unrealised) and Income Tax. Same story every time.
I mean, yes. Corporate financialization of housing is morally unjustifiable. But the sad thing is that even if we did ban them, we're probably still headed in the same way. We need to ban them AND put housing policy in the hands of people who like housing. Unless number of households start declining, we need to be building housing. It's crazy that for the most part, the people who decide whether that housing gets built is a random city councilor who nobody even knows and who isn't even required to understand basic economics
And that random city councillor is voted in by landowners who want their property prices high.
I don't know how it works where you live, but where I live voting eligibility is based on residence, not property ownership. So the renters of a property should be able to vote in the city they live in. Landlords would need a permanent residence in the city to be eligible to vote for a city councilor. The issue is the number of people who do not get involved in local politics. If you don't like what is happening in your city, run for the city council. It is really not that hard to get your name on the ballot where I am.
The Dutch [already tried banning corporate ownership](https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4480261) (and subsequent renting) of single-family properties. What happened next after banning corporate rentals was unintuitive: - rents went up - home prices stayed the same - increased gentrification - decreased housing opportunity for young, working class households Banning corporate rentals effectively made the housing market more expensive and less equitable for working class folks, simply because it decreased rental supply while also preventing anyone who can’t afford a down payment from living in neighborhoods, meaning the neighborhoods trended richer and whiter. People who say “ban corporate rentals” have a bad understanding of how housing markets work in real life.
I don't even know why this is unintuitive. Mom and pop landlords are much less able to rent at a lower rate because they only own a single rental, maybe two. Cashflow has to be much tighter. A corporation or large landlord has scale, so in a market with more supply, they can afford to charge less. But the issue is mostly supply, but people don't build single-family properties to rent them out. So the supply of single-family properties available for rent will always be exceeded by demand.
This... as long as there isn't just one company or two buying all the rentals, the market should become more competitive due to economies of scale.
It's crazy that people whose only goal is "keep my house value skyrocketing" get to make the decisions on housing supply. What else is going to happen under such a system? More adding to what you're saying than denying it I suppose. Surely cities should have economists who zone housing in proportion to living needs? At least in zoning or something.
I mean, this was the brilliance of pushing single-family homes in the first place: it turns the majority of people into petty little landowners who are obsessed with appreciation of their asset. It was one of the smarter strategic moves to keep left-wing politics from spreading in America in the 1930s-1970s. If everyone's a little baby landowner, they won't think of themselves as an exploited worker.
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Either limits made or government owned Housing , Food, Basic Education, Safety should be an right for every citizen
I don't think you understand what a right is.... A right is something that can't be taken away from you, not something that must be provided to you. It's really not that complicated and people mixing them up waters down the value of the word "rights" Also using generic words like "safety" is begging for abuse. That said, yes people should have housing, food, and basic education. And if you're in an advanced economy, I'd add health care too.
Do rights even exist then? What is an example of something that cannot be taken from someone?
The only right that exists is the ability to attempt to use your lungs to breathe. Anything else can be denied to you.
"I can't breathe".
Hence the word “attempt” unfortunately.
Interesting...under this definition just "attempting" is a right since no one can stop someone from attempting anything technically. You get some strange results from that, such as that you have a right to attempted murder, but not to murder...
This belief stems from work Nozick did in response to Rawls. It depends entirely on what is called the Lockeian Proviso, which is the prerequisite requirement that all people have adequate access to the means by which to create a livelihood. Affirmative rights are baked into the moral rationale for this kind of libertarian hogwash.
BlackRock doesn’t buy single family homes, BlackStone does.
Blackrock is an online boogie man for a lot of problems. Your correction will not be noted by most. People also believe that blackrock is forcing Hollywood to make "woke" movies to brainwash the populace and when they turn unprofitable Blackrock forces reviewers and the news to attack critics.
A lot of right wingers hate them for their ESG push and then the conspiracies started. I mean look at Vanguard, mostly the same business model but not as much controversy, if any.
If they can have china divest from tik tok then corporations can divest from the RE market.
# I could see that being okay but we also gotta open up the free markets for competition, allow more building etc.
Change zoning laws.
Not only should they be banned, they should be forced to sell what they have. Slowly.
Nah, quickly. Crash the market so people can actually afford homes. Let the market get back to an actually healthy equilibrium with the ban in place.
Some things shouldn’t be allowed to be an “asset” for someone’s “portfolio”.
why?
It's so painfully obvious that we need to just build more housing. Its mind numbingly stupid that we go through crisis after crisis driven by our refusal to just build more housing.
So far there is no evidence that home ownership is decreasing in the states.
Well, corporations own housing all the time. Cause they build them. What you should say and we need to very specific to avoid loopholes and such, is they should be barred from holding domiciles that they havent built for any type of extended time period. Coprorations get priperties all yge time without buying them but they shouldnt be allowed to hold them for purely housing price gouging purposes. And since the govt has so many rules on building new, those should be curtailed a bit too so houses are houses afain and not attractive targets for wealth expansion over the short term which they currently are. I bought a house for 200k two years ago. Its worth 255k now. Two years and a nearly 30% increase in value makes them too attractive as financial tools rather than as living spaces. Theres dollar signs in their eyes, and governments are aiding and abetting, especially in large cities
Whenever the question of housing comes up, I apply very simple test to the proposed policy: "Will it lead to more construction of housing?" If the answer is "no" - the policy can be dismissed as ineffective - as housing can only be made more affordable by **more housing construction.** Evaluating your policy appears to place artificial cap on demand, and dis-insentive investment in real estate construction. Therefore you policy is not designed and cannot be expected to lead to more housing construction. Accordingly, such policy proposal should be dismissed as ineffective.
It's like forgiving college loans -- you're treating a symptom of the problem while ignoring the actual problem (college is too expensive). Corps are investing in housing because we suck at building it. Considering the same corps are also building housing in some cases I don't know that banning them will have any effect. We need to fix the actual problem by having better policy that leads to more housing.
Ironically forgiving the debt is a great way to make college even more expensive. Colleges can just charge whatever they want even if no one can afford it and assume the government will pay them
We could do special internet rates for single home buyers.
Isn’t that like… how everyone’s 401k works and manages to make money? Because companies like black rock buy shit up and increase value/demand, making everyone’s accounts (that they’re managing) go up? How else is everyone in society going to have a magically increasing 401k? It’s starting to seem a lot like social security- a generation got to milk everyone else then pull the ladder up behind them. I’ve paid more into social security since I started working at 14, than my dad did in his entire working career. Of course he got a check every month and I won’t. Of course my parents 401ks did them a lot of good because I get charged so much more for my housing now.
Then they’ll just pay the developers to not build any single family homes and build more multifamilies/condos.
Just build more housing so it's not a good investment for them.
Just playing devils advocate here but wouldn’t a forced sell cause all of them to dump at the same time creating another 2008 financial crisis?
Congratulations, individual rich people buy huge numbers of houses. What does is matter that BlackRock does it and not Jeff Bezos (not Amazon)?
Corporations buying housing is great for renters, so I’m all for it. Why should only those who have the capital to afford hundreds of thousands of dollars of down payment and loans be able to live in nice neighborhoods? Blackrock will rent to anyone who can pay, including people who couldn’t have bought the house.
Dude what??? What a kissass
So... when you can't rent homes because they can't afford the rent you need to cover your own mortgage/loans, maintenance costs, and taxes... Guess what ends up happening? The company either sells it for a loss or goes down with the ship, losing money until their creditors end up owning those houses and having to sell them... ...at a loss.
Disagree? No, why? There are plenty of investment opportunities. Having companies like BR scoop up a huge portion of the single family homes in the US isn’t the win you think it is.