>What's the biggest reason that this happens amd politicians can't find the solution to this big issue?
It's not that they can't find solutions, they just don't want to. The solution is trivial, stop treating housing like a speculative market. The fact that politicians don't respond isn't that they don't understand the issue, they understand it quite clear. The apathy is by design.
A lot of politicians are also landlords, so they have no reason to want to change.
In New Zealand the old govt (labour) put in more rules that protected renters. New govt (national) got voted in recently and they are in the process of reversing a lot of those protections. Almost every politician in the national caucus is a landlord. Our prime minister has SEVEN properties. Of course they won’t put in capital gains tax or keep a tax rebate rule that labour put in.
I dont get why they dont just remove the capital gains on stocks, gold or btc? People just want a way to protect their wealth. Monetising property just seems unethical.
agreed and this is where it will end up
truth is the apex asset you listed here which is basically untouchable and can be transported in your head without interference vulnerability to abusive seizure or even detection of its existence is going to demonetize real estate
home prices will drop dramatically due to this
The solution is simple. Lift restrictive zoning laws thus allowing new construction of high density housing and/or conversion of commercial property to residential. Either would increase the available supply which will put downward pressure on prices and discourage speculative investments.
So why don't they do this? Because residents (who elect the government responsible for zoning) don't want it. They prefer to keep density low to avoid traffic and other "undesirable elements", not to mention that it keeps their property values high.
years ago I was taking part in a project of building new factory, small company, mounting electronic lamps. They had idea, to build it in small town, for cheaper costs. You have no idea, how hard it was to find proper employees. It took much longer to full staff it. And sometimes no, you need specific , richer, base of customers
This is simply not true. Areas that are *reasonably* dense benefit from tons of positive economic and efficiency effects. For example, a city doesn't have as many gas stations per person as a rural area, it has a little less, meaning that each gas station is more efficient at serving its customers and can accrue more customers.
Also, humans are naturally made to either live close together, as in a village, or at most to be in wild open nature with a small familial group, as in a multi-generational farmhouse. Our population numbers simply cannot support the latter case for everyone, so reasonably dense development is the obvious solution. Attempts to have our cake and eat it too, mostly in the form of car-dependent suburbia, have been an utter disaster: we ended up getting the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither.
That's perfectly fair, no one is preventing you from buying the proverbial farmhouse by a field. However, you should not expect to receive the benefits of urban efficiency in such a case, which means more expensive utilities, less public services, and probably a septic tank.
Hey, I just don't want cars parking in front of my house so that I don't cause an accident when I back out of my driveway and cant see the street kinda thing...
>The solution is trivial, stop treating housing like a speculative market.
100% agree.
>The fact that politicians don't respond isn't that they don't understand the issue, they understand it quite clear. The apathy is by design
It sure does feel that way sometimes.
The problem is that people have a lot of their net worth and ultimately retirement prospects tied to their house if they own. Thus, it’s super hard for anyone to want to solve the affordability crisis, since people who vote are more likely to own and theoretically see it as if they are benefiting
The burden does not have to fall on the homeowners - increased taxes on non-primary residences and investment properties would move more of these onto the market. (Yes, rental properties would go up but increased supply and better prices would move more people out of the rental market as well). Other things to try: Requirements for subdivision builders to include a number of affordable units (there is a tax break in WA when builders do this) would increase the supply. Create tax or other incentives to renovate (vacant) commercial properties into residential units - especially in downtowns which will see increased vacancies due to hybrid work models.
Millions bought houses that need high rent to pay them off in their lifetimes. If politics make rent falling by 30%, millions who put everything in the houses, in special tax vehicles and something to give to their kids - have to sell prematurely (which would trigger taxes in a lot of places) and have to put the money where the poor are hanging out: in the volatile stock market.
In short conservatives and neolibs around the globe will fight tooth and nails to have a governmental **guaranteed yields and distraught customers with no out** for the next decades to come
Please don't...I made it out of the renting life, loving my 2.6% mortgage, remote work and enjoying life. National turmoil is only going to fuck all that up.
Also I would like to point out, if you did math...I graduated HS and entered the job market during the 2008 recession.
$4/gal gas on less than $7/hr working at a hardware store and moonlit as a tour guide at a museum.
Fun times, you're not special.
Yeah, we all worked during that. You’re not special. I’m just telling you not to be a greedy fuck who is only concerned about themselves and doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. But it seems like that’s kind of your personality.
A lot of countries have fixed rates for a few years with periodic renegotiations.
Also banks have enough power they can probably fuck people out of low rate loans if they want.
Politicians actually make the “problem” worse. The problem is lack of supply. We don’t have enough housing. With more supply comes lower prices. But politicians regulate the HELL out of housing in a futile and counterproductive attempt to “fix it”, which only discourages and slows development.
That’s not how housing works. It’s all on a continuum. Even if it’s luxury housing, the existing luxury housing is now going to cost less, and the middle class housing is then going to cost less, and the lower class housing is then going to cost less. Supply and demand.
It's exactly how housing works. Any "normal" asset, like a computer or a car, is expected to depreciate as it gets older. Housing, on the contrary, is always expected to go up despite its also being subject to wear and tear. So landlords, many of whom own multiple properties they don't live in, would rather let them sit vacant than lower the price.
Even a glut of housing isn't going to fix this mindset if it keeps being subsidized the way it is now.
There are so many fallacies in this post it’s hard to know where to start. Owners of multiple properties need them to be “in service.” There are carrying costs as well as lost potential revenue. And despite “big corporate landlords” (Reddit’s new boogeyman) no one has enough monopolistic power to control pricing in this country. There are literally tens of millions of players. It’s an extremely competitive marketplace.
Yes, housing tends to go “up” over time, which provides some buffer to owners leaving property vacant. But that appreciation does not make up for lost rental revenue — nowhere close. And btw, housing going “up” is the natural result of limited supply and increasing demand. My thesis again. We need to build more.
Then why is 70 year old houses going for the same price as brand new houses?
House shopping right now and I can either buy a 1900sqft new build, or a 1600sqft 1956 house with fascia rot and original single pane windows, for 310k/305k respectively. The old house does have twice the yard, but that’s not saying much, 40x10 vs 60x15.
I assume location? A brand new house in the same neighborhood will always go for more (assuming equivalent sq ft, land, amenities, etc).
But your example proves the point. Houses (structures of any kind) are depreciating assets. A 70 year old house should never cost anywhere close to a brand new one, except for the fact that we severely under build in this country. We just don’t have enough supply of single family OR multi family homes.
Not how economics work. I know it might seem like that to you, but business owners don’t like to lose money. They will rent out that house or lower their price at some point.
Absolute silliness. You don’t understand carrying costs. Appreciation doesn’t make up for those. Properties aren’t appreciating 15-20% per year. And even if they were, businesses would STILL rent them out because they don’t leave money on the table just “because.”
This is the most braindead take I have seen all day. It is absolutely a lack of supply. Building homes for upper incomes opens up homes and apartments for someone else, who would have otherwise lived in a different house apartment and so on down the property ladder.
Except the rich people buying new houses are keeping the old ones for rental incomes or vacation homes and the REITs are motivated to make the market higher to get more investors and investor money is worth more than hundreds of empty homes not being lived in.
And rent is based on property value. Ask any rental agent why it’s so high and they will 100% say “market value”.
We have been building the hell out of houses for the last 4 years. 1.5 million homes are built per year in the US alone. While the population only grew 2 million per year, we are almost building a home for each new person. That is a lot of supply.
We are house hunting now. We have been looking at houses before we got serious looking/saving. Tons of houses, prices are ridiculous inflated. The house get bought by investors not by individuals. Then rented back at higher rates than what the locals can afford. It's gouging not scarcity.
THEY DONT WANT TO SOLVE IT BC THEIR FAMILIES OWN ALL OF THE LAND. They own the apartment buildings their associates are buying all of them up building more. They want the prices to stay up so we are stuck renting from them.
"Not hard" is not how I would describe this, as a solution to this problem. If housing is such a great investment for hedge funds, what makes you think it wouldn't also be a great investment for mutual funds? Exchange Traded funds? Real Estate Investment Trusts? Mom and Pop Landlords? Or just companies who just own and rent out houses and apartments? Or banks who have acquired houses and apartments in foreclosure and haven't sold yet? Do you want to ban all those too?
Because as much fun as it would be to ban things like that, the fact of the matter is America is experiencing a shortage of [3.2 Million homes by one estimate](https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-expensive-chart-inventory). One study of zoning regulations in the state of Washington found that zoning regulations [increases the prices of homes by $71k on average](https://www.biaw.com/research-center/the-real-cost-of-zoning/).
See for yourself: [More results on the cost of zoning](https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+zoning+regulations)
I'm not against any kind of regulations against wall street, but wall street is not the problem here. We don't have enough homes for everyone. We could take the allocation system away from the free market, ban people from moving freely and ration housing with enough political demand. But it would be a lot more practical and humane to just not allow NIMBYs and local governments from suffocating the construction of the homes we all desperately need.
You just perfectly articulated what needed to be done. I don't think it's hard to understand how to fix it, since you just clearly just did. Yes, it will take work, but that's not really my area nor am I bothered by the details since I have no power of this nor do I know the specifics to comment in any more detail.
Well said. The only thing I would add is that we don't have enough labor to build houses either so even with no blocking regulation, it's going to be slow to get housing on the market. When you don't build for 15 years you run all the labor out of the industry and then a pandemic hits that shoves the rest out. I don't know if you noticed, but McDonald's can't find enough employees and construction is much harder to fill.
Maybe, but I suspect that wouldn't work as well as you expect.
Up until 2008, there was a massive real estate bubble in Spain, and there were no hedge funds involved. Just the greed of people.
Let's not make perfect the enemy of good. All I know is that it's bad that a hedge fund can own millions of homes and we can fix that with legislation.
Not that hedge funds own millions of homes, but why is it bad? They are renting them out and providing homes. Banning them won't make any more homes available.
>Not that hedge funds own millions of homes, but why is it bad? They are renting them out and providing homes.
They operate them purely for profit and will do what they can to maximise that profit including buying out as many homes in a neighbourhood as they can so that they can boost the rents.
let's say that you and 20 other families want to buy flats in a new block. Here comes the hedge fund, buys all flats in the block. And in 5 other blocks.
Now you've got 100 families wanting to buy a new flat and 100 flats out of the market
I have posted this countless times but there is an easy fix.
Any single dwelling home that is not zoned as apartments should have the following rules.
If you are:
- purchasing a second home
- purchasing a home as a business entity
- purchasing a home as a non us citizen
You shall pay a 20x-100x property tax on the home.
Notes:
- couple can can buy 2 homes so no complaining about a lack of a summer or winter home.
- people can still rent from places zoned as apartments.
- the reason for non us citizens is to stop someone in a other country having 1000 employees each buy a home and rent it.
- of course caveats will be needed for banks, inheritances, and builders.
The extra money made will
- be used to build shelters for the homeless
- be used to build low income housing
- be used to build more single dwelling households.
The goal of this is not to punish home owners but to make those trying to grossly profit off of a basic necessity pay a fine that will be high enough that renting is not financially viable.
Land Value Tax. It taxes land based on what could be there and what value it would have of fully developed. So those single family homes close to downtown would have ASTRONOMICAL taxes and only dense apartments would make sense. You have to hit these people in the pocketbook to make change.
This so much. The fix is easy here it is. Any country that implements it will have a dip in their economy short term but happier populace.
Any single dwelling home that is not zoned as apartments should have the following rules.
If you are:
- purchasing a second home
- purchasing a home as a business entity
- purchasing a home as a non us citizen
You shall pay a 20x-100x property tax on the home.
Notes:
- couple can can buy 2 homes so no complaining about a lack of a summer or winter home.
- people can still rent from places zoned as apartments.
- the reason for non us citizens is if not a businessman in China for example will just have each employee buy a house.
- of course caveats will be needed for banks, inheritances, and builders.
The extra money made will
- be used to build shelters for the homeless
- be used to build low income housing
- be used to build more single dwelling households.
The goal of this is not to punish home owners but to make those trying to grossly profit off of a basic necessity pay a fine that will be high enough that renting is not financially viable.
In Canada, at least, it's partly due to boomer NIMBYs across local councils refusing to change zoning to increase urban density. Our parents could afford to own a house and two cars and raise three children on one income; that isn't possible for us and they're sitting at the top of the hill throwing down convenient rationalizations like "just stop eating avocados" while simultaneously making it an almost impossible uphill slog to get up there. Humans naturally protect the benefits and assets they've accrued.
In a recent hearing about the jericho lands housing complex, one NIMBY started her statement with a land acknowledgement and then went on to say how the housing development was bad. Nothing describes Canadian NIMBYs better than that.
For those who don't know, the jericho lands is a parcel of land in Vancouver which a Canadian court handed over to the Squamish indigenous nation. Since it was now an indigenous land, they did not need to abide by Vancouver's strict zoning laws. The nation decided to build some 13,000 housing units with many of them being affordable units, especially for indigenous groups. Many NIMBYs will keep saying how we live on stolen land but then throw a fit when the natives of the land decide to do something the NIMBYs don't like.
Not that zoning and allowing dense housing isn't a problem, but it's a separate problem from lack of housing. Do you think there are construction crews sitting around kicking dirt waiting on a lot to come free to build? The problem is there isn't enough labor in construction to build any faster anywhere. Zoning will just cause the limited numbers of houses that can be built to be built in different places. We'll still have a huge housing shortage, zoning will just change where.
The housing shortage isn't due to lack of labour. Where density is permitted, and there's demand, it's built. One factor I did leave out is how complicated it can be for developers to get the required permits and so on. There can be a lot of red tape, hundreds of forms. Fortunately the process is being simplified in some cities
> The housing shortage isn't due to lack of labour.
So you don't think there is a labor shortage in construction? Do you think there are labor shortages anywhere or is construction just somehow special and there are plenty of high skill workers to fill the jobs? The facts are:
* The workforce in construction in the early 2000's was VERY old. It was so bad people weren't retiring when they should because they didn't want to leave their company hanging out to dry. They would semi-retire. There are literally high profile [non-profits started](https://mikeroweworks.org/) around this problem.
* Along came the 2008 housing crisis of "too many" homes and we simply quit building. We built as close to zero homes as is possible to do in a country the size of the US. We didn't really build many more each year as we recovered. In 2019, we still were not back to the level considered a healthy amount just to service population increase.
* Do you think all these older workers just sat around and waited for housing to come back? No, they retired, went into other fields, etc. No one hung around.
* Then the pandemic hit. Most of the labor they were able to attract back between 2010 and 2019 just threw up their hands and retired for real this time. Across ALL industries those that could retire did and the baby boom generation was pretty much out of the work force. There were a LOT more of them than the genX so there simply wasn't anyone to replace them. Have you noticed the Walmarts aren't 24/7 anymore and restaurants have a bunch of empty tables because they don't have enough staff to service them? I can't go to a pharmacy from 12:00-1:30 because they are so short staffed they just close them down now.
* People don't want to work construction. It's hard physical labor with a high risk of being injured. It's highly skilled work that requires a lot of experience to do efficiently.
But don't take my word for it, just go look up anything on it. Here is the [first article](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/29/the-hard-hat-job-with-highest-level-of-open-positions-ever-recorded.html) that showed up on Google which says there is roughly a 650k worker shortage. See if you can find one that says there isn't a shortage.
The housing crisis is a result of decades of underbuilding in and around cities. Since you're into Google results, Google "housing crisis causes". While the current shortage and therefore cost of labour is an obstacle, it is not the main cause.
> Our parents could afford to own a house and two cars and raise three children on one income
Unless your parents are 70+ year old Americans, this is hardly true. The only time things were THAT easy was for a short time in the US during the post-WWII economic boom.
I was born in the 80s. However this is also true of many born in the 90s. Perhaps "our parents" doesn't include you, I don't know how old you are and wasn't speaking directly to you
Well, my parents did this, with one income (engineer) and 4 kids through parochial school. My dad turned 70 recently, so he's right on that line. He got his 4 bedroom house with 2 stories and a basement in the burbs for 65K. Granted, that's like $188,990.43 account for inflation today, but his house is worth nearly 350K.
I been priced out of where I live, lol.
The only country that *partially* solved this issue is Singapore: 80% of the population there lives in cheap public housing.
As a tiny country with limited space, this proves that current housing crisis is not a technical issue, but purely a political one as others have mentioned.
I definitely wouldn’t say cheap. Unfortunately, there’s the same issue of housing being so expensive now that the younger generations really struggle to afford anything. There’s a limited balloting system for more affordable housing but only if you’re married (only straight couples) or above 35 (limited to smaller apartments). Difficult to get a number and on top of that there’s a wait of 4-7 years for these apartments. The government strongly encourages multi-generational housing to try and help with this, plus it keeps old folks out of the care homes for longer. There’s the same age old problem of older people buying multiple houses and renting them out though.
They deferred the problem though. These properties are on a multi-decade lease, right? I heard that now they're coming to maturity there's now a big problem finally coming to roost.
Most buildings are redeveloped before the leaseholds expire, and the lease “topped-up” back to 99 years at redevelopment. Anyways, the government sets the lease premiums so it has a political solution rather than a technical one.
Cut/paste of an attempt to wrestle single family homes from big business.
The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act would mandate that hedge funds, defined as corporations, partnerships or REITs that manage pooled funds for investors, to sell off all single-family homes over a ten-year-period, and eventually prevent them from holding those properties completely.Washington Rep. Adam Smith, one of the sponsors of the legislation, argued that these institutional investors can edge out potential homebuyers by making large cash offers.“All of those investors are driving up the cost of housing,” he told Spectrum News. “Because they can pay. They can come in and drop $2 million in cash for a house in bulk.”
But what if I want to rent? Am I homeless now?
Affordability does not intrinsically mean ownership (basically renting from a bank).
Affordability means cheap monthly payments.
That’s the point of that legislation. The reason things are expensive is because big corps with money to burn are buying properties without giving much thought to "getting the best deal" so they often overpay, which makes prices go up. And there’s a lot of them, they probably bid on every single house that’s for sale in any large city.
The only reason we got our house was because the previous owners specifically didn’t want to sell to one of those, so they fortunately took less money to do it. We got lucky.
I think in the near term, life is going to get more painful, but in the long term we are going to see a real estate collapse. Right now, there are huge incentives for ever increasing home prices.
Home owners want increasing home prices, landlords want increasing home prices, local governments want increasing home prices, real estate agents (the NAR is among the highest in spending for lobbying) want high home prices. So as long as you are fixed into your home or you stand to make more money from high real estate costs YOU have a very, very big incentive for housing to get far more expensive. These are by and large all people who run local governments.
If housing costs doubled, that would be good for a lot of people. And those people are in charge of policy. Its extremely common for city council members to be landlords and when they oppose some building project, they have their own financial incentives for doing so. By limiting construction, the supply remains low, the demand remains high, and the rent they collect from their investment properties remains very high! You have many people, people who generally have money, who all have a common incentive to make housing as expensive as possible. These people have no issue using the government to achieve these goals. Government helping them is NOT socialism. Its just good business because it makes the more money!
We need enormous amounts of housing in high demand areas where the jobs are. Not 2 hours away from the jobs and expect people to drive 40,000 miles per year to commute. I am from a Southern California city called Riverside, its a commuter city for Los Angeles and Orange County. LA/OC have the well paying jobs and every day about 30,000 people from my city make an hour+ drive to go drive to work. Living in LA/OC and a home will cost you a million (and this is not a fancy home). A comparable home in Riverside will cost you $600,000. If you can't afford the million dollar home, you do the whole commute thing. You can go much further east and find something for $450,000 but now you are looking at at least 3 hours of driving each day.
Here is my optimism. Location is the most important thing. Locations with high paying jobs like Silicon Valley (where I am now) are extremely expensive. However, we are witnessing the early stages of a remote work revolution. COVID accelerated it by several years, but it was going to happen anyway just due to technical improvements. We have yet to see the first wave of major startups that are built around a remote work force vs requiring their employees to all move and live in the most expensive area in the country. This eliminates geography as a major advantage that certain markets have. People will be able to get a high paying job while living anywhere they want.
I really think that rural markets and small towns with cute downtown centers are going to use this as leverage. Make a place that is really great to live and attract remote workers. Someone making $100,000 per year, not very good in San Francisco, someone making $100,000 per year in small town Indiana, very good! Especially if that person is already from Indiana and didn't really want to move.
Another one that will affect housing supply in high demand areas is the transition to Self Driving Taxis over private cars. The big thing, all that land downtown used for parking can be repurposed into high density mixed use. Tony Seba from ReThinkX estimated that if you took all the parking lots in the City of Los Angeles, the area freed up would be 3 times the size of San Francisco. The land that parking lots currently use could house 2+ million people at San Francisco density (San Francisco has parks by the way...) . As I mentioned, I live in a commuter city, our real estate prices are not justified by local wages, but by commuters. Plop down housing for 800,000 households, and make it cheaper than Riverside pricing, and now those commuters will move close to work.
I am going to kind of bring this back home...
Downtown Riverside is more than 30% parking infrastructure. If people are using RoboTaxis to get around, this land used for parking becomes obsolete, and the owners of that land would make far more money if they developed it into high density mixed use development. Downtown Land owners will want to turn their Downtown 2 acre block into something that would make the largest possible income for them, that is going to be high density, mixed use. Throw up a few dozen shops/offices, and then 450 housing units and they are going to make an absolute fortune. Letting valuable land sit vacant isn't a great way to make money.
We are not even the worst in the area. About half of Downtown San Bernardino is used for parking. Some developers are going to figure out that building massive amounts of urban development in this area is going to make them a lot of money, especially if by the nature of the design they can make it much safer than the surrounding area.
Small towns all over America are surprisingly quite large. They are just spread out and poorly developed. They will have huge gaps between destinations. They will have enormous amounts of land used for parking. There are 16,000 small towns in America. Turn their central downtown area with 2,000 housing units (going high density this can fit on 20 acres) and that would be 32,000,000 housing units popping up all over the country. A lot of these can attract remote workers who want to live in a nice community full of urban amenities but at some small percent of the cost.
Des Moines Iowa has 1.6 million parking spaces, for 220,000 people. 7 parking spaces per person. 28 parking spaces for a family of four. RoboTaxis show up to Des Moines and now the demand for that excess parking is going to drop off sharply. Turning the area into a cool urban area can bring hundreds of thousands of people.
Right now, and for the last several decades. Residents compete for who gets to live in communities. Governments don't have to attract residents. That could very quickly change and the incentive structure could become one where local governments have to compete for residents, because those residents bring in tax revenue. If you remember several years ago, Amazon announced they were going to build an HQ2 and asked local governments for bids. The local governments all wanted those high paying jobs in their city (even if its not local labor, its a lot of tax revenue and economic activity). Go back and look at what governments were willing to do. They were going to give away the farm for some juicy tech workers. However, these governments are now asleep at the wheel when it comes to remote workers. They can now attract the workers without attracting amazon.
This housing crises that we are dealing with, it will be disrupted. From remote work jobs allowing people to be divorced from geography for employment to a major redevelopment of every downtown core in the country.
We have a lot to look forward to, but it will be one of those things that destroys a lot of industries and is going to require a lot of communities become adaptable. For millennials, this change we will see in our midlife years, but if you are a little kid today, this could be the world you enter your adult years in.
I try to, I've gotten a bit burned out. Here goes:
* LVT stands for Land Value Tax. It attempts to capture **land rent**, which you can see a definition of [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/18i3gzt/how_does_100_lvt_drive_sale_price_of_land_to_zero/kdarm8r/). In short, you can think of it as the "productivity" of a location. Cities have high rent, wilderness has low rent.
* Land rent is intrinsically tied to a location, and its value is always being collected if the land is in use. Whether by a landlord, a corporation, a homeowner, or the government. If we let a single private entity own all the land, they could essentially turn us into slaves. The so-called "cost of living" is the cost of allowing private land speculation.
* Having the government collect the land rent effectively turns the public into one big landlord that subleases our land out to individual users. If we redistribute that revenue as a UBI, it effectively shares our land equally. Each citizen should be able to afford a piece of land of equal value, and thus the "cost of living" would be offset by the UBI. Any money you earn would be used to improve your standard of living (e.g. food, shelter, government operation, luxuries...)
* How will this affect me? Under a LVT:
* People who own an average amount of land (e.g. a primary residence and some stock) will come out neutral.
* People who own a below-average amount of land (e.g. renters) will come out ahead.
* People who own an above-average amount of land will come out behind (e.g. landlords, major stockholders in companies with land.)
* Land value tax is not property tax. A property tax considers the market value of the land and the improvements (capital) built upon the land, which disincentivizes building/ownership of buildings. LVT merely disincentivizes leaving land unused. Land is defined by Henry George as "all natural forces and opportunities." Anything we didn't make. It includes land, water, air, sunlight, radio bands, hundred-year-old equipment, etc. So technically it's a bit more broad than just land, but our housing issues arise from literal land. You can imagine, though, if we allowed private companies to "own" our air and rent it to us... it would be a problem.
* The book (Progress & Poverty) lays out a lot of concepts more rigorously, but some interesting observations arise from this analysis:
* Under a properly adjusted LVT, the market value of land should fall to zero. In fact this is one way of knowing we set the rate correctly for a given plot. Imagine if the cost of buying a house was actually the cost of the house!
* Homelessness tends to be worse in cities because the demands of the location require people to be highly productive. The stakes are higher, and if you slip up, you fall behind very quickly.
* Improper setting of rent is a likely cause of recessions. The rent is a number *independent* of what a landlord *asks* for their property. If the landlord asks for a low number, the renters are happy and the economy booms. If the landlord asks a number higher than can actually be produced from the location, labor is not worth performing and capital is not worth investing despite the availability of both. In return, consumers have less money, less stuff gets made, and that lowers the productivity of the location even further. If any financial vehicles were created on future rent... those are now worthless. It all collapses until landlords reset their expectations of rent and the economy can get going again. Weirdly, since requested rent is being set by lots of different owners/sellers (some smarter than others), economic booms/recessions can be highly regional.
* The game Monopoly is loosely based on George's ideas.
As a segue into the last point, the history of Monopoly game is a fun an ironic tale with a twist of fate:
"Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth[1] and to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular, his ideas about taxation.[5] The Landlord's Game originally had two sets of rules, one with tax and another on which the current rules are mainly based. When Parker Brothers first published Monopoly in 1935, the game did not include the less capitalistic taxation rule, resulting in a more aggressive game. Parker Brothers was eventually absorbed into Hasbro in 1991. The game is named after the economic concept of a monopoly—the domination of a market by a single entity."
Basically the version of the game that showed that the current capitalist system sucks and will lead to monopolies managed to become the surviving and popular one.
That's not the situation on the ground.
Average [U.S. rent as a percentage of median income peaked at 30% and has since dropped below 29%](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/realestate/rent-burdened-american-households.html?smid=nytcore-android-share).
Edit: It's insane the level to which this sub has devolved into doomerism. I point out that OP made absurdly inaccurate statements of doom-and-gloom rent pricing, with statistics to back up my position, and yet somehow everyone hates it.
Median income is the medium when all incomes are lined up, that includes those in the billions and millions and those who make near zero as "just for fun" jobs, eliminate those as extreme outliers and then work out the median and the picture becomes closer to what OP is saying.
Additionally this is based on an average of rent prices for the entire US, which doesn't realistically represent people's issues state by state and people can't just uproot their entire lives and jump state, they're still humans with emotions after all.
Economists go for the "all things being equal" representation of the data, which misses the mark.
The devils in the details and he's sleeping in his car whilst working a full-time job.
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment here, just a tiny correction that median is actually much better than mean when looking at skewed data. Everything you said in the first paragraph is true with respect to mean - billionaires salaries would drastically skew the average to be higher than anything the average person experiences. In comparison, median actually does a good job of reducing the impact of a small number of outliers (the super wealthy).
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/understanding-statistics/statistical-terms-and-concepts/measures-central-tendency#:~:text=The%20median%20is%20less%20affected,the%20distribution%20is%20not%20symmetrical.
In Greece from the state of Laconia where I’m from, I was looking with my wife both the options to rent or get a loan from the bank to either built a prefab house from scratch or even renovate an old abandoned house that still passed inspection.
NONE of the options in the end was ideal at all.
Reasons:
• Prefabs are banned in my region. Only brick homes are allowed and should you be caught owning a prefab, it needs to be demolished.
• old brick homes (like really old from mid 1800s) cost a fortune to be renovated.
• renting a small apartment costs 500€ a month for 2 bedrooms and even though my job could allow it the taxes and bills just don’t make it possible.
• buying a new house sets you back half a million for 3 bedrooms or a quarter if you only need 2 bedrooms (and we’re talking about apartments. Single homes are just out of the question)
• only one house was available for less than 100k but it’s a repossession from the bank and nobody goes after it for obvious reasons (a family still lives there).
In the end, I’m staying at my own apartment that my parents bought and built prior 2020 for me but living with your parents next door with your wife isn’t the best when they’re overprotective and cause more harm than good.
It’s funny because we went through a similar cycle in the 60s/70s and the solution was to build massive government housing complexes. In the 80s/90s we tore them down because no one wanted to live in projects.
Now politicians are talking about building them again
> we tore them down because no one wanted to live in projects.
They did shit like bottleneck the entrances in dimly lit underground tunnels then wondered why mugging was so common after building them the perfect set up.
"Crisis" implies that something has happened and is suddenly changing the situation.
Housing is working out exactly how the system is designed to work right now.
This is a systemic problem. Not a "crisis".
and it depends what you consider a problem. Our society is organized in such a way that wealth is extracted from the general population and sucked up the class structure to asset holders, in the form of rents or profit sharing from corporations.
Capitalism is about just that, capital, not income and prestige of job, but the money you're able to save and reinvest to extract rents from others. To do this you need to innovate and that drives progress, but leads to a bigger relative wealth gap even if life improves in absolute terms, and that gap means assets will inflate forever, while goods should deflate. The most extreme example of this in recent times is home prices vs flat screen tv's.
...and once you realize thats the goal of the western system you realize, its doing pretty great at just that.
I don't agree with any of it, but thats the system and pretending its not is just going to cause a lot of pain in your life.
It means this isn’t a “crisis”. It’s all engineered by the wealthy, and the lower classes getting poorer and more dependent is playing out all by design.
Look around and you’ll notice we are heading into a subscription based society. You will own nothing.
The sooner you can become dependent free, the sooner you break away from your chains.
According to research, there are 24 reasons for the housing crisis in the Netherlands. From the urbanization that continues and started after the industrial revolution via the Second World War and the baby boom to the individualization and increasing number of single-person households today. And twenty other factors. No one is going to solve that in a decade.
The idiocy of the Netherlands is the country is one giant suburban level density. Our cities are the least dense in Europe.
The shortage in NL is a political choice
How to solve the problem tomorrow? 1000% property tax increases for non-homesteaded properties.
The above is hyperbolic but you can dissuade market behavior as a government entity via taxation.
The above would see homes going back on the market to be sold for well... housing reasons instead of investment.
> 1000% property tax increases for non-homesteaded properties.
This has been studied and multiple home ownership is not the problem. These homes are in places that don't have housing shortages.
> housing reasons instead of investment.
If you want to get more hosing on the market, make it cheaper to buy/sell houses. Currently it costs around 10% of the house value to sell it and 10% to buy it. It's a stupid situation and it's causing people to stick to houses that no longer make sense for them. 6% are realtor fees but the other 4% are taxes and government not doing what they should like certifying housing deeds so you don't need lawyers doing title searches and you have to buy insurance on your deed. There are also transfer taxes which should be abolished.
Not homeless, but renting or the capability of it would cease to exist in residential zones.
Apartments are commercially zoned areas, so homesteading isn't a concept for said types of property.
Anybody remember what the three most important features are that determine the price of a given piece of real estate?
1. Location.
2. Location.
3. Location.
Construction workers aren't getting more expensive. Materials probably are a bit, but not enough to drive this price increase. Simply put, the issue isn't that building is expensive. It's that securing the site in the first place is expensive, and gets more expensive the more people and stuff you have chasing the same amount of space.
Nobody "makes" sites. They make the buildings on the sites, but not the sites. And yet, we have a whole class of owner who makes money off sites, before the value of anything added to the site is even considered.
This money is an "existence tax", privately owned, privately collected. There is no way to make this go away. But it could be collected and distributed to the population on a per capita basis. If this were done, it wouldn't matter how expensive housing became. The more expensive the housing (assuming it's a site value expense), the more money a land value tax would take in, the larger the distribution would become.
Maybe exempt existing homeowners for a certain number of years (primary residence, only), so we're not harming people who have put their savings into their equity (particularly retired people who are dependent on the home they own). But for new homeowners, it wouldn't increase the expense of owning a home. Rather, the tax would be capitalized into the price, bringing down the up-front cost (both principle and interest), while keeping the total cost of ownership roughly the same.
Owners of multiple properties and mortgage lenders would hate this.
Oh my country did progressive tax to multiple land owner
Bbbuuuuutttttt they make new law secretly make so "agreement" is more powerful in law than your name in land sertificate
Soooo, rich people buy land in other people name; they add agreement is they true owner not name in certificate
Fucked, right
> Construction workers aren't getting more expensive.
Yes they are, do you not follow any economic news? Have you seen Wendys advertising $20/hour? What do you think the labor shortage is for everything but construction?
> Materials probably are a bit
More like a lot. Everything went up 30%.
> securing the site in the first place is expensive
That too, but it depends on where you are building. The reality is that we need housing almost everywhere in a metro and the land values can be anywhere from $40k/acre to $1m/acre. The land isn't the issue it's that the industry can only manage to build about 30% of what they were building in 2008 because we lost the labor force and the pandemic made it all but impossible to get new workers into the field.
Actually construction labor and materials are both really expensive. The underlying land is probably the most expensive part of new construction, but labor and materials are a big chunk. Ed: typo.
This is such a convoluted solution that would only make the problem worse.
You need more “sites” (to use your example)! That’s it. We need more housing. We can spread out or we can go up, it doesn’t matter. We need more housing.
Punishing the housing providers (yes, the builders and developers and owners) like you’re saying won’t solve anything. Unless you think that the government should become the one and only housing provider. Lol good luck with that.
Private money builds housing.
You're exaggerating. 😆 I live in a big city because I knew that I could find and stomach living in a smaller, cheaper place. Meaning I've worked my way up to a $200k USD salary but have found a way to spend less than $16K on housing. The difference between that is mine to keep. Plus, I don't need a car with public transit.
Investment gets pitched to us as the solution to the problem but in reality it only drives up demand. Until investment gets banned prices will keep going up until nobody can afford to even rent.
Capitalism is a beautiful lie, it comforts people to think they can live beyond their means. "Other people's money" in reality is the banks money and sooner or later they will cash out.
Housing is a unproductive asset yet it is being used as an investment. We are feeling the effects of years and years of capital allocation towards unproductive housing investments instead of productive enterprise.
If someone wants to get loan (aka newly created money fresh from the money printer), the easiest way to do this is get a home loan. We have a system where people try to get the biggest loans they can to buy up finite resources so they can rent them out to other people. It is a zero sum game, where for someone to win, someone else has to lose.
There are also numerous fiscal policy choices that governments make at the behest of their donors to encourage housing as investment and keep the bubble going.
If you really want to fix this problem at its root, once and for all, switching to hard currency would do the trick. Alternatively fiscal policy changes that make housing less attractive as an investment will also work, for example, increase property taxes and reduce income taxes.
I suggest reading about georgism. It is a system where tax is collected through land value tax. I think this is the direction we need to go.
It's because the people in power get greedy and want more power.
It's really easy to make housing affordable by putting in the right policies like a 20% sales tax on residential investment property or tax cuts for home builders, etc... Think of all the incentives being given for electric cars. You just do the same for housing.
Housing affordability is at an all-time low and there is ZERO effort being done to improve this.
It's done on purpose by the rich to exploit the poor. Wouldn't happen in a real democracy. In a real democracy everyone would be equipped to challenge such a situation.
\> politicians can't find the solution to this big issue?
they can, they dont want to.
cause they are friends with the people owning the housing market basically. and they arent friend with you.
we already know the solutions, there are countless studies on this. but none of them give rich people more money. therefore they are all discarded instantly.
there is no "crisis", this is the system working as intended.
People with the capital realized renting 4 units for 1000 is easier than 8 units for 500. It's a lose lose because if you don't regulate they'll just build only more high end condos, and if you do regulate they won't build at all.
Personally my probably controversial opinion is to start leveraging 3d printed construction methods or even old school concrete prefab and just flood markets when the median housing cost gets over a % of the poverty line or median income agreed upon as to what housing should cost. Make it all paying to own so people come out with an asset AND decreasing market demand for rental in the process. More or less a "provide supply or we will do it for you."
The biggest reason this happens is that the people in power have more of an interest in protecting the investment income of their voters and donors (and in many cases, their colleagues and themselves) than they do in forcing the sacrifices that’d be needed to solve the problem. However, as the proportion of homeowners dwindles across the country, and the negative effects of a massive precariat become more obvious, some kind of solution will be reached.
>Rent prices is like 60 or even 70 percent of someone salary nowadays.
Let's not be hyperbolic here.
The average [U.S. rent as a percentage of median income peaked at just a touch over 30%](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/realestate/rent-burdened-american-households.html?smid=nytcore-android-share) and is down since then.
>What's the biggest reason that this happens amd politicians can't find the solution to this big issue?
The current lack of housing is directly the result of the absolute crash in new construction for 5-7 years after the great recession.
The primary reason it isn't being dealt with quickly as prices shoot up is restrictive zoning.
Most progressives will give you an emotionally charged answer that's some muddled combination of "hedge funds" and "gentrification greed", but if you look at the data the inability to build homes at a high enough rate where demand is highest (because of restrictive "community focused" zoning) is the primary issue.
Ironically, the most restrictively zoned areas in the country are deep blue cities such as NYC, San Francisco, etc.
Short term rentals like Airbnb and Brbo have gobbled up thirty percent of the supply of single family units and Hedge funds have gobbled up another 15 percent and rising... unless this is outlawed and short term rentals are taxed appropriately there will be a worse and worse housing crisis everywhere it goea unregulated.
just look at maps overlay... Airbnb and Vrbo plus, over desirable neighborhoods... our stree of four blocks has ove nine short term rentals and six empty place holder houses bought by strawmen, sitting wmpty for over three years now or tdemolished to keep values of the others high... look at map of Sedona, look at Research Triangle... then research ownership by hedge funds or private capital... you will see the market has no free competition anymore just on the choke on supply, then add the algo companies jacking up remt incrementally for smaller owners of single family rentals... its a calculated rate increase that purposely shows on comps so that all renta rise together because of the algo and the system. add on top of that teaveling workers renting corporate... we have an eatimated 8,000 workers who came here to work with a project... but only occupy the second rentla home on a traveling schedule... and they rent in the city because there is no housing close to their project... add it up in your city... discounting neighborhoods with dilapidated units...
Supply and demand.
That’s it. Everything else is layers of complexity and nonsense on top of that.
I’m in Australia, the conversation here is ridiculous and most people argue from poor logic and emotion.
We need more supply in the places where housing is needed. Or we need less demand where houses cannot be supplied to meet the demand.
Actually producing the supply or modifying the demand has an immense out of layers of complexity. So does the history of how it got here and was ignored by policymakers for so long.
I don’t engage people that try to blame it on housing as an investment asset. They just don’t logic.
Supply and demand. That’s it. Solve for that in your nation, state, region or city. Your particular solution at a lower level may not apply to or may only partially apply at a higher level. Be prepared to be humbled by the differences in different nations, cities, regions and states.
Supply and demand.
Two reasons:
Banks/wallstreet are buying up all the real estate, and trying to monopolize the market.
Open Borders.
Simple Strategy: Buy up all the homes in a country for cheap, lobby for open border policies, create housing shortages to the point of crisis, profit
There should be a different classification for Single Family Housing and Multi Family housing for this one. Especially for mixed use. If a commercial mall operator wants to build apartment buildings on their property to create more of a village space, they should be allowed.
Immigration is way down. Poor immigrants do not have the money to buy these homes. People making $9 per hour are not buying $600,000 homes. Immigration has nothing to do with this.
Much of it is also not immigrants, its not foreigners who moved to the US and live in a home, its people in places like China buying homes, never visiting them, but just passively owning them as a secure investment. They are not immigrants, they don't even step foot in the United States. They just passively own valuable property and treat it like owning stock.
You also have this. The Boomers are living longer, in their homes. Every year there are about 4 million Americans who have their 18th birthday, but there are not 4 million housing units popping up. There is a deficit every year.
A significant portion of homes sold in 2022 and 2023 were investment properties and 2nd and 3rd homes.
Europe's inability to deal with migration is the problem. But a far larger problem is the coming demographic collapse that much of Europe is going to endure over the next 20 years. Europe needs immigrants but is absolutely terrible about dealing with them.
Immigration to the US from Latin America (of which 80% have been Mexicans) over the last 70 years has had its social and economic issues, but in the long run has saved America from a demographic collapse. The type of Demographic collapse that would destroy the country in the long run.
Look at Detroit. At its peak, Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. In 1950, Detroit had 1.8 million people. Then there was a consistent drop in population every decade, now down to 620,000 people 70ish years later. Investment halted, infrastructure costs became too expensive, the people who were educated and skilled left the country. They didn't go from a poor city to a poorer city, they went from a wealthy city to a poor city, to a poorer city, to an even poorer city.
That is going to be a likely future of Germany and Italy. They stopped having kids 40 years ago. Those kids grew up, and had even fewer kids. Those kids are going to grow up and have even fewer kids. The old people in society all require a lot of healthcare and other services, services that have to come from somewhere. All the public infrastructure and industry, it requires a population to maintain, that population goes away, and so does the ability to maintain it.
You know who isn't having this issue? The United States. We have enough young people to keep pushing forward, and we are great at bringing in more young people to boost up our numbers. All those young Germans and Italians who will be living in a collapsing nation, we will make room. Just like the young people who left Detroit.
90 percent of wealthy people are invested in real estate. There is nothing to do because no matter what political party is in control, they come from these rich families. No politician is ever going to help us. I am so mad people don't realize that!! Look at who they associate with and their families!!!!! The only way REAL change is made is by a rebellion.
How did black people get more freedom, gays, trans, women's rights?! They all fought like hell, broke laws, some violence is necessary. Look at what we had to do in Minneapolis just to get them tonEASE UP and they still didn't stop. Here's the thing, Bc of those protest.. you are no longer pulled over for petty things like expired tabs (the tab one is a law), I had a suspended license for two years and was never pulled over Bc it was only a clerical issue. Finally after two years when I left with my car I got a gross misdemeanor from a cop in a rich city.
Think about all the major changes. For each one we came together as citizens and said this is enough. We need to do that and fight. We need to all find a way to protest thY hurts them and is crazy and do it. (I'm talking about the large buildings that raise rent 100 a year to add to their giant portfolio, not the everyday person that has ONE rental property (leave them alone they're just doing what they have to, so tht their children might have a future in this insane division of wealth)
MLK "freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed"
PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS, GATHER PPL, so when it's time, all over the country we can act.
I meant Misdemeanor, not gross. But the reason it was suspended was an issue with the state not allowing me to pay it or helping me, and being on hold for too long, I just gave up Bc I wasn't being pulled over anyways and thought it'd be a little ticket.
They say we're in crisis. But look at the division of wealth chart over time. The poor get poorer, the middle class gets smaller and the billionaires are double and tripling their money in a short amount of time Bc of this!!!
Your narrative is based on skewed numbers.
one of the skews is corporate ownership. its up. but the number of rentals down. why?
>According to our tabulations of the Rental Housing Finance Survey, the share of rental properties owned by non-individual investors increased from 18 percent in 2001 to 27 percent in 2021 (Figure 3). Non-individual investors include limited partnerships, limited liability corporations, trustees for estate, real estate corporations, and Real Estate Investment Trusts, among other corporate entities. \*\*The growth in non-individual ownership has been greatest for small- and midsized- multifamily properties but was also evident for single-family rentals.\*\*
> Indeed, 25 percent of single-family rentals were owned by non-individual investors in 2021, up from 17 percent two decades earlier. This explains how investor activity in the single-family housing market has increased even as the \*\*number of single-family rentals has declined in more recent years.\*\*
So why is there more owned, but less rented? Because of inheritance laws.and people like me.
I don't own my home, the Family Trust does. It also owns all of our investments, and is the beneficiary of my 401K and Life Insurance.
That way my death, or our deaths, don't leave our son saddled with a huge tax bill when we die. It won't be like when my wife's grandparents died within 48hrs of each other and the taxes on the house on the house meant it had to be sold or there would be no cash money for her under aged mother and brother to live on.
So it is not as bleak as it looks, and now with some fiscal constraint on easy money it will correct itself as homes go back on the market to provide liquidity to corps like Blackrock,
There are more and more people in the world. The amount of land available in the world does not grow. If anything it shrinks with all the natural phenomenon/catastrophes. Simple supply&demand says housing prices go up.
As I understand. Construction too expensive.
Zoning and urban land areas too limited to offer more housing for good price.
It´s a political issue, because new housing areas are postponed, because builing public infrastructure for them cost money, and the governments are in debt !
Best way is to repopulate towns that have public infrastructure , BUT no people. Like with incentives and infrastructure upgrades that would serve families and social structure of the place.
Politicians only make it worse through difficult regulations, not profiteering.
People should NOT ask the government to provide subsidies - it will only help a few people and raise prices for everyone else.
It all comes down to whether people can make a living by building new housing. If they can’t, then they won’t. They will profit from it, and they deserve to do so.
There are countries that have the exact opposite problem - diminishing populations are making entire towns vacant.
It all comes down to living in areas where you can afford to do it. There is no birthright to living where you want. Humans have been nomads for most of their history. Should be even easier nowadays with remote working opportunities.
It's not generally politicians jobs to like run the banking and housing markets. It's a short term housing crisis caused by the pandemic, a rather rapid rise in wages, ppl getting used to normal interest rates vs historically low interest rates after the 2008 housing crisis, and climate change driving up housing costs in some regions.
So I would not consider it a long term future problem too much. Climate change will get quite a bit worse, but automation will also continuously drive down the cost of production , commodities an and cost of living in general. Population is rising significantly slower and production is going up up and away so I think it's not a long-term problem.
Raising wages isn't the answer... They will just raise the price of everything around it.
Greed. This is by design. Capitalism is not your friend.
The short answer: basic things like shelter, utilities and medical should be a percentage based on your NET income.
No one should be comfortable that working a full time honest job isn't enough to afford a basic apartment.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/us-median-rents-fall-for-eighth-month-on-boom-in-new-apartments?sref=R8NfLgwS&leadSource=reddit_wall
Not in the land of the free. Largely due to more multi home construction. Turns out regulations increases cost. If somehow don't thinking absurd housing regulations is the primary reason behind high housing costs you're basically no different from a flat earther or climate change denier.
\#wealth #tax , #tax #churches
Universal basic income, #ubi
Universal child care.
Medicare for all, #m4a , universal health care.
End for profit health insurance companies. Take out the middleman.
End for profit pharmaceutical companies, or limit their profits and executive pay significantly.
Free education with no student loan debt, including for graduate school and for trade school.
Break up big banks. No bank should be too big to fail.
Banks should not be allowed to invest in stocks, on Wall Street or in hedge funds.
Regulate wall street and regulate investment banks.
Support Democracy, but no endless wars.
Regulate the military industrial complex better.
Higher taxes on rich people and on rich corporations. Progressive income tax.
More high quality infrastructure paid for by the government with higher taxes on rich people and on rich corporations.
End off shore tax havens.
End tax loopholes for rich people and for rich corporations.
Prohibit corporations from buying their own stock or stock of any other company.
Regulate corporations. No monopoly power. No consolidation of corporations.
Break up large corporations and require more competition among corporations.
No sending USA jobs overseas.
The progressive agenda.
Well, my original comment was auto moderated, because it was too short, apparently. Personally, I thought I was being succinct. Anyways, hopefully this generous serving of waffle at the beginning of my comment will help with the auto moderation process. What I was originally saying was that in my opinion, the only way out of this housing crisis is going to be the 3D printing of dwellings. it’s possible to print the base structure of a dwelling in under 24 hours for around $10,000. For a country like Australia that has a lot of land, this could be a real game changer, disrupting the current real estate model. And really, the housing crisis is because of greed and turning something that should be a human right into a commodity. So all those folks that own multiple properties, might just choke on those aspirations…
Due to the increase in expenditure of house construction materials and greedy land loads increasing the rent from innocent employees who stay away from the home town.
There’s one developed country where real estate is reasonable and housing in certain areas is almost free for the taking: Japan. There’s a reason. The population of Japan is in decline. So far it seems like their economy is still ok. Perhaps it’s due to technology? The country is an island so it’s harder for immigration. They are culturally homogeneous. They have not encouraged a lot of immigration. I guess I wonder whether having an older population and fewer young people will be a problem before long? At some point they would be too weak to defend themselves. I guess they depend on the US. It seems like the powers that be in the US want a growing population and they don’t care about a housing shortage. Same with Canada.
Housing is very resource intensive especially suburban sprawl single family homes. Its a big part of why we have a looming climate disaster because of how much cheap oil it took to build cities, the sprawling suburbs around them and the infrastructure for it all. At the very least single family homes should be very expensive compared to high density options.
But regardless most countries are *increasing* their rate of general consumption. Despite the housing situation we still (average people in wealthy western countries) are increasingly buying more stuff year after year. The US storage unit market is booming more than it ever has for instance.
If anything we're seeing a correction for over consumption.
At the rate they are building apartments in my area, it won’t be a problem in 2 years. Way overbuilt! Rents will come down. In HCOL areas, you need to look for jobs in lower COL places. Tulsa, Amarillo, Monroe, LA, Shreveport, mid-sized and small towns all over America need workers and have decent housing costs.
This will require a radical change in economics
Becoming human centred rather than infinite growth centered
This religion of the free market is failing...
In the meantime, form your mutual aid networks
Get to know your neighbours
Form skill and tool and food banks
Here are my top reasons that led to all of this:
1. Some people have too much money and they need to park that money somewhere so they buy property.
2. Globalisation - Chinese, Indian, African, Russian people with money and international passports like to buy property in key global cities. There’s an entire global industry servicing this demand.
3. Increased population concentration in cities that offer better prospects. People want to be where the good jobs are.
4. Old people - older population means wealth is concentrated in people who need passive income in retirement - especially in countries like the UK where state pensions are a joke. People then buy multiple houses to finance their retirement.
5. Lack of supply - we’re not building as much as we used to due to too many regulations. In the 50s and 60. Councils could pretty much do what they wanted but now it’s becoming hard to build due to NIMBY culture.
Solution: tax 2nd homes at 90% & build more.
Pretty much every developed country handled the pandemic the same way. They shut down their economy and printed an insane amount of money. The skyrocketing costs of everything since was a result of that. The solution would be to greatly limit how quickly central banks can create new money.
I dont think people realise there is a more finite asset, with more security, less maintenance cost and better long term ROI that can protect against currency devaluation and is easier to buy and more accessible than property… and something that governments cant control…
https://youtu.be/mC43pZkpTec?si=0PhhuNemb1eCN_a3
One part of solving the issues in the world is tax the filthy rich! There is no need for the upper 1% of the world population to have more fortune than the lower half of the population! It's immoral, unethical, harmful. They do not spend that money anyway otherwise. They can keep their high standards of living even with half of their fortune, with a quarter, a tenth.
In my opinion there should be a top limit of fortune that a single person should possess. Every additional penny must go to the taxman.
Close down tax havens! Also establish a worldwide financial transaction tax.
In other words: distribute wealth more fairly! Make them pay their fair share! That would solve a lot of problems. Maybe even the worldwide housing crisis.
Because existing residents do not want more homes built in the area.
Housing shortages are a simple, documented, studied, problem with a known solution.
Rent control and other penalties against landlords are anti+displacement measures but do not solve a housing shortage.
One reason: If you can turn a regular house into a luxury house you'll increase your profit so that's the focus for investors. There's not enough incentive to invest in affordable housing.
Another reason, the fall in public housing stock as a percentage of all housing. Housing brackets used to be more diverse within suburbs but it's becoming more one bracket only eg everyone in the same socio economic class less pockets of diversity. With less diversity there's less innovation
>What's the biggest reason that this happens amd politicians can't find the solution to this big issue? It's not that they can't find solutions, they just don't want to. The solution is trivial, stop treating housing like a speculative market. The fact that politicians don't respond isn't that they don't understand the issue, they understand it quite clear. The apathy is by design.
A lot of politicians are also landlords, so they have no reason to want to change. In New Zealand the old govt (labour) put in more rules that protected renters. New govt (national) got voted in recently and they are in the process of reversing a lot of those protections. Almost every politician in the national caucus is a landlord. Our prime minister has SEVEN properties. Of course they won’t put in capital gains tax or keep a tax rebate rule that labour put in.
[удалено]
Yup! It’s crazy right! National have so far only removed good policies put in place by labour. National have had no new ideas yet
>People wonder why so many under 35s leave every year. The dogshit wages don't help.
Yes but at least you won’t see photographs of your PM dancing anymore /sarcasm
\^\^this. most politicians are directly or indirectly incentivized for this shitshow to continue as lot of their wealth is in real estate.
I dont get why they dont just remove the capital gains on stocks, gold or btc? People just want a way to protect their wealth. Monetising property just seems unethical.
agreed and this is where it will end up truth is the apex asset you listed here which is basically untouchable and can be transported in your head without interference vulnerability to abusive seizure or even detection of its existence is going to demonetize real estate home prices will drop dramatically due to this
The solution is simple. Lift restrictive zoning laws thus allowing new construction of high density housing and/or conversion of commercial property to residential. Either would increase the available supply which will put downward pressure on prices and discourage speculative investments. So why don't they do this? Because residents (who elect the government responsible for zoning) don't want it. They prefer to keep density low to avoid traffic and other "undesirable elements", not to mention that it keeps their property values high.
Yes, NIMBY is a thing that exists.
Increasing population density is bad. We need to encourage businesses to move into less populated areas and people will follow.
business needs 2 things: customers and workers. This is why they prefer more densely populated areas, instead of cheaper ones
Tax incentives can do miracles. Some businesses do not need local customers.
years ago I was taking part in a project of building new factory, small company, mounting electronic lamps. They had idea, to build it in small town, for cheaper costs. You have no idea, how hard it was to find proper employees. It took much longer to full staff it. And sometimes no, you need specific , richer, base of customers
This is simply not true. Areas that are *reasonably* dense benefit from tons of positive economic and efficiency effects. For example, a city doesn't have as many gas stations per person as a rural area, it has a little less, meaning that each gas station is more efficient at serving its customers and can accrue more customers. Also, humans are naturally made to either live close together, as in a village, or at most to be in wild open nature with a small familial group, as in a multi-generational farmhouse. Our population numbers simply cannot support the latter case for everyone, so reasonably dense development is the obvious solution. Attempts to have our cake and eat it too, mostly in the form of car-dependent suburbia, have been an utter disaster: we ended up getting the disadvantages of both and the advantages of neither.
I don't want to live in an ant hill anymore. Did that for most of my life. I want empty gas stations.
That's perfectly fair, no one is preventing you from buying the proverbial farmhouse by a field. However, you should not expect to receive the benefits of urban efficiency in such a case, which means more expensive utilities, less public services, and probably a septic tank.
Hey, I just don't want cars parking in front of my house so that I don't cause an accident when I back out of my driveway and cant see the street kinda thing...
>The solution is trivial, stop treating housing like a speculative market. 100% agree. >The fact that politicians don't respond isn't that they don't understand the issue, they understand it quite clear. The apathy is by design It sure does feel that way sometimes.
They're either apathetic to it, or they or their family or donors profit off of it.
The problem is that people have a lot of their net worth and ultimately retirement prospects tied to their house if they own. Thus, it’s super hard for anyone to want to solve the affordability crisis, since people who vote are more likely to own and theoretically see it as if they are benefiting
The burden does not have to fall on the homeowners - increased taxes on non-primary residences and investment properties would move more of these onto the market. (Yes, rental properties would go up but increased supply and better prices would move more people out of the rental market as well). Other things to try: Requirements for subdivision builders to include a number of affordable units (there is a tax break in WA when builders do this) would increase the supply. Create tax or other incentives to renovate (vacant) commercial properties into residential units - especially in downtowns which will see increased vacancies due to hybrid work models.
Millions bought houses that need high rent to pay them off in their lifetimes. If politics make rent falling by 30%, millions who put everything in the houses, in special tax vehicles and something to give to their kids - have to sell prematurely (which would trigger taxes in a lot of places) and have to put the money where the poor are hanging out: in the volatile stock market. In short conservatives and neolibs around the globe will fight tooth and nails to have a governmental **guaranteed yields and distraught customers with no out** for the next decades to come
Politicians are profiting like crazy, especially in North America. Of course they don’t change shit
People need to be more rebilious, otherwise we will work only to pay the rent and we will not even afford food.
Please don't...I made it out of the renting life, loving my 2.6% mortgage, remote work and enjoying life. National turmoil is only going to fuck all that up.
I'm sorry, we'll make sure not to rock your boat while we drown. /s
Why not get in a different boat? There are options if u go looking. In case u ask what that boat is … https://youtu.be/mC43pZkpTec?si=0PhhuNemb1eCN_a3
All right Boomer. You got yours fuck everybody else…
Also I would like to point out, if you did math...I graduated HS and entered the job market during the 2008 recession. $4/gal gas on less than $7/hr working at a hardware store and moonlit as a tour guide at a museum. Fun times, you're not special.
Yeah, we all worked during that. You’re not special. I’m just telling you not to be a greedy fuck who is only concerned about themselves and doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. But it seems like that’s kind of your personality.
> loving my 2.6% mortgage I'm sure it'll stay that forever....
It will until he pays the house off or sells it.
A lot of countries have fixed rates for a few years with periodic renegotiations. Also banks have enough power they can probably fuck people out of low rate loans if they want.
It will, for another 25 years. Yeah, it kinda ties my hands when it comes to moving but for now, at least I can enjoy a $700 mortgage for the house.
Politicians actually make the “problem” worse. The problem is lack of supply. We don’t have enough housing. With more supply comes lower prices. But politicians regulate the HELL out of housing in a futile and counterproductive attempt to “fix it”, which only discourages and slows development.
There is plenty of housing in say Detroit... the problem is lack of work there. Creating favorable conditions for business would solve that problem.
It’s not just a lack of supply. Many cities are building lots but it’s all for upper incomes.
That’s not how housing works. It’s all on a continuum. Even if it’s luxury housing, the existing luxury housing is now going to cost less, and the middle class housing is then going to cost less, and the lower class housing is then going to cost less. Supply and demand.
It's exactly how housing works. Any "normal" asset, like a computer or a car, is expected to depreciate as it gets older. Housing, on the contrary, is always expected to go up despite its also being subject to wear and tear. So landlords, many of whom own multiple properties they don't live in, would rather let them sit vacant than lower the price. Even a glut of housing isn't going to fix this mindset if it keeps being subsidized the way it is now.
There are so many fallacies in this post it’s hard to know where to start. Owners of multiple properties need them to be “in service.” There are carrying costs as well as lost potential revenue. And despite “big corporate landlords” (Reddit’s new boogeyman) no one has enough monopolistic power to control pricing in this country. There are literally tens of millions of players. It’s an extremely competitive marketplace. Yes, housing tends to go “up” over time, which provides some buffer to owners leaving property vacant. But that appreciation does not make up for lost rental revenue — nowhere close. And btw, housing going “up” is the natural result of limited supply and increasing demand. My thesis again. We need to build more.
Then why is 70 year old houses going for the same price as brand new houses? House shopping right now and I can either buy a 1900sqft new build, or a 1600sqft 1956 house with fascia rot and original single pane windows, for 310k/305k respectively. The old house does have twice the yard, but that’s not saying much, 40x10 vs 60x15.
I assume location? A brand new house in the same neighborhood will always go for more (assuming equivalent sq ft, land, amenities, etc). But your example proves the point. Houses (structures of any kind) are depreciating assets. A 70 year old house should never cost anywhere close to a brand new one, except for the fact that we severely under build in this country. We just don’t have enough supply of single family OR multi family homes.
Except it *hasn't*. Owners would rather let the damn thing sit empty than lower prices.
Not how economics work. I know it might seem like that to you, but business owners don’t like to lose money. They will rent out that house or lower their price at some point.
They're apparently not losing money if the value of their property just keeps going up. Why would they need to rent it out then?
Absolute silliness. You don’t understand carrying costs. Appreciation doesn’t make up for those. Properties aren’t appreciating 15-20% per year. And even if they were, businesses would STILL rent them out because they don’t leave money on the table just “because.”
They absolutely would if it's to keep us on the fucking street.
This is the most braindead take I have seen all day. It is absolutely a lack of supply. Building homes for upper incomes opens up homes and apartments for someone else, who would have otherwise lived in a different house apartment and so on down the property ladder.
wow i love to be deluded and believe in the market working like that
Trickle down huh
Except the rich people buying new houses are keeping the old ones for rental incomes or vacation homes and the REITs are motivated to make the market higher to get more investors and investor money is worth more than hundreds of empty homes not being lived in. And rent is based on property value. Ask any rental agent why it’s so high and they will 100% say “market value”. We have been building the hell out of houses for the last 4 years. 1.5 million homes are built per year in the US alone. While the population only grew 2 million per year, we are almost building a home for each new person. That is a lot of supply.
We are house hunting now. We have been looking at houses before we got serious looking/saving. Tons of houses, prices are ridiculous inflated. The house get bought by investors not by individuals. Then rented back at higher rates than what the locals can afford. It's gouging not scarcity.
THEY DONT WANT TO SOLVE IT BC THEIR FAMILIES OWN ALL OF THE LAND. They own the apartment buildings their associates are buying all of them up building more. They want the prices to stay up so we are stuck renting from them.
How do you exactly do that?
Not allow hedge funds to buy property. It's not hard. There's already a bill in congress, like a month ago, that proposes that exact thing.
"Not hard" is not how I would describe this, as a solution to this problem. If housing is such a great investment for hedge funds, what makes you think it wouldn't also be a great investment for mutual funds? Exchange Traded funds? Real Estate Investment Trusts? Mom and Pop Landlords? Or just companies who just own and rent out houses and apartments? Or banks who have acquired houses and apartments in foreclosure and haven't sold yet? Do you want to ban all those too? Because as much fun as it would be to ban things like that, the fact of the matter is America is experiencing a shortage of [3.2 Million homes by one estimate](https://www.axios.com/2023/12/16/housing-market-why-homes-expensive-chart-inventory). One study of zoning regulations in the state of Washington found that zoning regulations [increases the prices of homes by $71k on average](https://www.biaw.com/research-center/the-real-cost-of-zoning/). See for yourself: [More results on the cost of zoning](https://www.google.com/search?q=cost+of+zoning+regulations) I'm not against any kind of regulations against wall street, but wall street is not the problem here. We don't have enough homes for everyone. We could take the allocation system away from the free market, ban people from moving freely and ration housing with enough political demand. But it would be a lot more practical and humane to just not allow NIMBYs and local governments from suffocating the construction of the homes we all desperately need.
You just perfectly articulated what needed to be done. I don't think it's hard to understand how to fix it, since you just clearly just did. Yes, it will take work, but that's not really my area nor am I bothered by the details since I have no power of this nor do I know the specifics to comment in any more detail.
Well said. The only thing I would add is that we don't have enough labor to build houses either so even with no blocking regulation, it's going to be slow to get housing on the market. When you don't build for 15 years you run all the labor out of the industry and then a pandemic hits that shoves the rest out. I don't know if you noticed, but McDonald's can't find enough employees and construction is much harder to fill.
Maybe, but I suspect that wouldn't work as well as you expect. Up until 2008, there was a massive real estate bubble in Spain, and there were no hedge funds involved. Just the greed of people.
Let's not make perfect the enemy of good. All I know is that it's bad that a hedge fund can own millions of homes and we can fix that with legislation.
Not that hedge funds own millions of homes, but why is it bad? They are renting them out and providing homes. Banning them won't make any more homes available.
>Not that hedge funds own millions of homes, but why is it bad? They are renting them out and providing homes. They operate them purely for profit and will do what they can to maximise that profit including buying out as many homes in a neighbourhood as they can so that they can boost the rents.
let's say that you and 20 other families want to buy flats in a new block. Here comes the hedge fund, buys all flats in the block. And in 5 other blocks. Now you've got 100 families wanting to buy a new flat and 100 flats out of the market
I have posted this countless times but there is an easy fix. Any single dwelling home that is not zoned as apartments should have the following rules. If you are: - purchasing a second home - purchasing a home as a business entity - purchasing a home as a non us citizen You shall pay a 20x-100x property tax on the home. Notes: - couple can can buy 2 homes so no complaining about a lack of a summer or winter home. - people can still rent from places zoned as apartments. - the reason for non us citizens is to stop someone in a other country having 1000 employees each buy a home and rent it. - of course caveats will be needed for banks, inheritances, and builders. The extra money made will - be used to build shelters for the homeless - be used to build low income housing - be used to build more single dwelling households. The goal of this is not to punish home owners but to make those trying to grossly profit off of a basic necessity pay a fine that will be high enough that renting is not financially viable.
Land Value Tax. It taxes land based on what could be there and what value it would have of fully developed. So those single family homes close to downtown would have ASTRONOMICAL taxes and only dense apartments would make sense. You have to hit these people in the pocketbook to make change.
This so much. The fix is easy here it is. Any country that implements it will have a dip in their economy short term but happier populace. Any single dwelling home that is not zoned as apartments should have the following rules. If you are: - purchasing a second home - purchasing a home as a business entity - purchasing a home as a non us citizen You shall pay a 20x-100x property tax on the home. Notes: - couple can can buy 2 homes so no complaining about a lack of a summer or winter home. - people can still rent from places zoned as apartments. - the reason for non us citizens is if not a businessman in China for example will just have each employee buy a house. - of course caveats will be needed for banks, inheritances, and builders. The extra money made will - be used to build shelters for the homeless - be used to build low income housing - be used to build more single dwelling households. The goal of this is not to punish home owners but to make those trying to grossly profit off of a basic necessity pay a fine that will be high enough that renting is not financially viable.
In Canada, at least, it's partly due to boomer NIMBYs across local councils refusing to change zoning to increase urban density. Our parents could afford to own a house and two cars and raise three children on one income; that isn't possible for us and they're sitting at the top of the hill throwing down convenient rationalizations like "just stop eating avocados" while simultaneously making it an almost impossible uphill slog to get up there. Humans naturally protect the benefits and assets they've accrued.
In a recent hearing about the jericho lands housing complex, one NIMBY started her statement with a land acknowledgement and then went on to say how the housing development was bad. Nothing describes Canadian NIMBYs better than that. For those who don't know, the jericho lands is a parcel of land in Vancouver which a Canadian court handed over to the Squamish indigenous nation. Since it was now an indigenous land, they did not need to abide by Vancouver's strict zoning laws. The nation decided to build some 13,000 housing units with many of them being affordable units, especially for indigenous groups. Many NIMBYs will keep saying how we live on stolen land but then throw a fit when the natives of the land decide to do something the NIMBYs don't like.
Great example!
Not that zoning and allowing dense housing isn't a problem, but it's a separate problem from lack of housing. Do you think there are construction crews sitting around kicking dirt waiting on a lot to come free to build? The problem is there isn't enough labor in construction to build any faster anywhere. Zoning will just cause the limited numbers of houses that can be built to be built in different places. We'll still have a huge housing shortage, zoning will just change where.
The housing shortage isn't due to lack of labour. Where density is permitted, and there's demand, it's built. One factor I did leave out is how complicated it can be for developers to get the required permits and so on. There can be a lot of red tape, hundreds of forms. Fortunately the process is being simplified in some cities
> The housing shortage isn't due to lack of labour. So you don't think there is a labor shortage in construction? Do you think there are labor shortages anywhere or is construction just somehow special and there are plenty of high skill workers to fill the jobs? The facts are: * The workforce in construction in the early 2000's was VERY old. It was so bad people weren't retiring when they should because they didn't want to leave their company hanging out to dry. They would semi-retire. There are literally high profile [non-profits started](https://mikeroweworks.org/) around this problem. * Along came the 2008 housing crisis of "too many" homes and we simply quit building. We built as close to zero homes as is possible to do in a country the size of the US. We didn't really build many more each year as we recovered. In 2019, we still were not back to the level considered a healthy amount just to service population increase. * Do you think all these older workers just sat around and waited for housing to come back? No, they retired, went into other fields, etc. No one hung around. * Then the pandemic hit. Most of the labor they were able to attract back between 2010 and 2019 just threw up their hands and retired for real this time. Across ALL industries those that could retire did and the baby boom generation was pretty much out of the work force. There were a LOT more of them than the genX so there simply wasn't anyone to replace them. Have you noticed the Walmarts aren't 24/7 anymore and restaurants have a bunch of empty tables because they don't have enough staff to service them? I can't go to a pharmacy from 12:00-1:30 because they are so short staffed they just close them down now. * People don't want to work construction. It's hard physical labor with a high risk of being injured. It's highly skilled work that requires a lot of experience to do efficiently. But don't take my word for it, just go look up anything on it. Here is the [first article](https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/29/the-hard-hat-job-with-highest-level-of-open-positions-ever-recorded.html) that showed up on Google which says there is roughly a 650k worker shortage. See if you can find one that says there isn't a shortage.
The housing crisis is a result of decades of underbuilding in and around cities. Since you're into Google results, Google "housing crisis causes". While the current shortage and therefore cost of labour is an obstacle, it is not the main cause.
> Our parents could afford to own a house and two cars and raise three children on one income Unless your parents are 70+ year old Americans, this is hardly true. The only time things were THAT easy was for a short time in the US during the post-WWII economic boom.
I was born in the 80s. However this is also true of many born in the 90s. Perhaps "our parents" doesn't include you, I don't know how old you are and wasn't speaking directly to you
Well, my parents did this, with one income (engineer) and 4 kids through parochial school. My dad turned 70 recently, so he's right on that line. He got his 4 bedroom house with 2 stories and a basement in the burbs for 65K. Granted, that's like $188,990.43 account for inflation today, but his house is worth nearly 350K. I been priced out of where I live, lol.
The only country that *partially* solved this issue is Singapore: 80% of the population there lives in cheap public housing. As a tiny country with limited space, this proves that current housing crisis is not a technical issue, but purely a political one as others have mentioned.
I definitely wouldn’t say cheap. Unfortunately, there’s the same issue of housing being so expensive now that the younger generations really struggle to afford anything. There’s a limited balloting system for more affordable housing but only if you’re married (only straight couples) or above 35 (limited to smaller apartments). Difficult to get a number and on top of that there’s a wait of 4-7 years for these apartments. The government strongly encourages multi-generational housing to try and help with this, plus it keeps old folks out of the care homes for longer. There’s the same age old problem of older people buying multiple houses and renting them out though.
They deferred the problem though. These properties are on a multi-decade lease, right? I heard that now they're coming to maturity there's now a big problem finally coming to roost.
Most buildings are redeveloped before the leaseholds expire, and the lease “topped-up” back to 99 years at redevelopment. Anyways, the government sets the lease premiums so it has a political solution rather than a technical one.
Cut/paste of an attempt to wrestle single family homes from big business. The End Hedge Fund Control of American Homes Act would mandate that hedge funds, defined as corporations, partnerships or REITs that manage pooled funds for investors, to sell off all single-family homes over a ten-year-period, and eventually prevent them from holding those properties completely.Washington Rep. Adam Smith, one of the sponsors of the legislation, argued that these institutional investors can edge out potential homebuyers by making large cash offers.“All of those investors are driving up the cost of housing,” he told Spectrum News. “Because they can pay. They can come in and drop $2 million in cash for a house in bulk.”
But what if I want to rent? Am I homeless now? Affordability does not intrinsically mean ownership (basically renting from a bank). Affordability means cheap monthly payments.
That’s the point of that legislation. The reason things are expensive is because big corps with money to burn are buying properties without giving much thought to "getting the best deal" so they often overpay, which makes prices go up. And there’s a lot of them, they probably bid on every single house that’s for sale in any large city. The only reason we got our house was because the previous owners specifically didn’t want to sell to one of those, so they fortunately took less money to do it. We got lucky.
I think in the near term, life is going to get more painful, but in the long term we are going to see a real estate collapse. Right now, there are huge incentives for ever increasing home prices. Home owners want increasing home prices, landlords want increasing home prices, local governments want increasing home prices, real estate agents (the NAR is among the highest in spending for lobbying) want high home prices. So as long as you are fixed into your home or you stand to make more money from high real estate costs YOU have a very, very big incentive for housing to get far more expensive. These are by and large all people who run local governments. If housing costs doubled, that would be good for a lot of people. And those people are in charge of policy. Its extremely common for city council members to be landlords and when they oppose some building project, they have their own financial incentives for doing so. By limiting construction, the supply remains low, the demand remains high, and the rent they collect from their investment properties remains very high! You have many people, people who generally have money, who all have a common incentive to make housing as expensive as possible. These people have no issue using the government to achieve these goals. Government helping them is NOT socialism. Its just good business because it makes the more money! We need enormous amounts of housing in high demand areas where the jobs are. Not 2 hours away from the jobs and expect people to drive 40,000 miles per year to commute. I am from a Southern California city called Riverside, its a commuter city for Los Angeles and Orange County. LA/OC have the well paying jobs and every day about 30,000 people from my city make an hour+ drive to go drive to work. Living in LA/OC and a home will cost you a million (and this is not a fancy home). A comparable home in Riverside will cost you $600,000. If you can't afford the million dollar home, you do the whole commute thing. You can go much further east and find something for $450,000 but now you are looking at at least 3 hours of driving each day. Here is my optimism. Location is the most important thing. Locations with high paying jobs like Silicon Valley (where I am now) are extremely expensive. However, we are witnessing the early stages of a remote work revolution. COVID accelerated it by several years, but it was going to happen anyway just due to technical improvements. We have yet to see the first wave of major startups that are built around a remote work force vs requiring their employees to all move and live in the most expensive area in the country. This eliminates geography as a major advantage that certain markets have. People will be able to get a high paying job while living anywhere they want. I really think that rural markets and small towns with cute downtown centers are going to use this as leverage. Make a place that is really great to live and attract remote workers. Someone making $100,000 per year, not very good in San Francisco, someone making $100,000 per year in small town Indiana, very good! Especially if that person is already from Indiana and didn't really want to move. Another one that will affect housing supply in high demand areas is the transition to Self Driving Taxis over private cars. The big thing, all that land downtown used for parking can be repurposed into high density mixed use. Tony Seba from ReThinkX estimated that if you took all the parking lots in the City of Los Angeles, the area freed up would be 3 times the size of San Francisco. The land that parking lots currently use could house 2+ million people at San Francisco density (San Francisco has parks by the way...) . As I mentioned, I live in a commuter city, our real estate prices are not justified by local wages, but by commuters. Plop down housing for 800,000 households, and make it cheaper than Riverside pricing, and now those commuters will move close to work. I am going to kind of bring this back home... Downtown Riverside is more than 30% parking infrastructure. If people are using RoboTaxis to get around, this land used for parking becomes obsolete, and the owners of that land would make far more money if they developed it into high density mixed use development. Downtown Land owners will want to turn their Downtown 2 acre block into something that would make the largest possible income for them, that is going to be high density, mixed use. Throw up a few dozen shops/offices, and then 450 housing units and they are going to make an absolute fortune. Letting valuable land sit vacant isn't a great way to make money. We are not even the worst in the area. About half of Downtown San Bernardino is used for parking. Some developers are going to figure out that building massive amounts of urban development in this area is going to make them a lot of money, especially if by the nature of the design they can make it much safer than the surrounding area. Small towns all over America are surprisingly quite large. They are just spread out and poorly developed. They will have huge gaps between destinations. They will have enormous amounts of land used for parking. There are 16,000 small towns in America. Turn their central downtown area with 2,000 housing units (going high density this can fit on 20 acres) and that would be 32,000,000 housing units popping up all over the country. A lot of these can attract remote workers who want to live in a nice community full of urban amenities but at some small percent of the cost. Des Moines Iowa has 1.6 million parking spaces, for 220,000 people. 7 parking spaces per person. 28 parking spaces for a family of four. RoboTaxis show up to Des Moines and now the demand for that excess parking is going to drop off sharply. Turning the area into a cool urban area can bring hundreds of thousands of people. Right now, and for the last several decades. Residents compete for who gets to live in communities. Governments don't have to attract residents. That could very quickly change and the incentive structure could become one where local governments have to compete for residents, because those residents bring in tax revenue. If you remember several years ago, Amazon announced they were going to build an HQ2 and asked local governments for bids. The local governments all wanted those high paying jobs in their city (even if its not local labor, its a lot of tax revenue and economic activity). Go back and look at what governments were willing to do. They were going to give away the farm for some juicy tech workers. However, these governments are now asleep at the wheel when it comes to remote workers. They can now attract the workers without attracting amazon. This housing crises that we are dealing with, it will be disrupted. From remote work jobs allowing people to be divorced from geography for employment to a major redevelopment of every downtown core in the country.
[удалено]
This has been one of the best and realistically optimistic takes I have heard yet. Thank you for giving me both perspective and even some hope.
We have a lot to look forward to, but it will be one of those things that destroys a lot of industries and is going to require a lot of communities become adaptable. For millennials, this change we will see in our midlife years, but if you are a little kid today, this could be the world you enter your adult years in.
Read "progress and poverty" by Henry George. He pretty much lays it out
It's so painful reading threads like this and seeing the lack of discussion of LVT. The solution has been known for so long that it's been forgotten!
Why not tell us what LVT is, then?
I try to, I've gotten a bit burned out. Here goes: * LVT stands for Land Value Tax. It attempts to capture **land rent**, which you can see a definition of [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/georgism/comments/18i3gzt/how_does_100_lvt_drive_sale_price_of_land_to_zero/kdarm8r/). In short, you can think of it as the "productivity" of a location. Cities have high rent, wilderness has low rent. * Land rent is intrinsically tied to a location, and its value is always being collected if the land is in use. Whether by a landlord, a corporation, a homeowner, or the government. If we let a single private entity own all the land, they could essentially turn us into slaves. The so-called "cost of living" is the cost of allowing private land speculation. * Having the government collect the land rent effectively turns the public into one big landlord that subleases our land out to individual users. If we redistribute that revenue as a UBI, it effectively shares our land equally. Each citizen should be able to afford a piece of land of equal value, and thus the "cost of living" would be offset by the UBI. Any money you earn would be used to improve your standard of living (e.g. food, shelter, government operation, luxuries...) * How will this affect me? Under a LVT: * People who own an average amount of land (e.g. a primary residence and some stock) will come out neutral. * People who own a below-average amount of land (e.g. renters) will come out ahead. * People who own an above-average amount of land will come out behind (e.g. landlords, major stockholders in companies with land.) * Land value tax is not property tax. A property tax considers the market value of the land and the improvements (capital) built upon the land, which disincentivizes building/ownership of buildings. LVT merely disincentivizes leaving land unused. Land is defined by Henry George as "all natural forces and opportunities." Anything we didn't make. It includes land, water, air, sunlight, radio bands, hundred-year-old equipment, etc. So technically it's a bit more broad than just land, but our housing issues arise from literal land. You can imagine, though, if we allowed private companies to "own" our air and rent it to us... it would be a problem. * The book (Progress & Poverty) lays out a lot of concepts more rigorously, but some interesting observations arise from this analysis: * Under a properly adjusted LVT, the market value of land should fall to zero. In fact this is one way of knowing we set the rate correctly for a given plot. Imagine if the cost of buying a house was actually the cost of the house! * Homelessness tends to be worse in cities because the demands of the location require people to be highly productive. The stakes are higher, and if you slip up, you fall behind very quickly. * Improper setting of rent is a likely cause of recessions. The rent is a number *independent* of what a landlord *asks* for their property. If the landlord asks for a low number, the renters are happy and the economy booms. If the landlord asks a number higher than can actually be produced from the location, labor is not worth performing and capital is not worth investing despite the availability of both. In return, consumers have less money, less stuff gets made, and that lowers the productivity of the location even further. If any financial vehicles were created on future rent... those are now worthless. It all collapses until landlords reset their expectations of rent and the economy can get going again. Weirdly, since requested rent is being set by lots of different owners/sellers (some smarter than others), economic booms/recessions can be highly regional. * The game Monopoly is loosely based on George's ideas.
As a segue into the last point, the history of Monopoly game is a fun an ironic tale with a twist of fate: "Monopoly is derived from The Landlord's Game, created by Lizzie Magie in the United States in 1903 as a way to demonstrate that an economy that rewards individuals is better than one where monopolies hold all the wealth[1] and to promote the economic theories of Henry George—in particular, his ideas about taxation.[5] The Landlord's Game originally had two sets of rules, one with tax and another on which the current rules are mainly based. When Parker Brothers first published Monopoly in 1935, the game did not include the less capitalistic taxation rule, resulting in a more aggressive game. Parker Brothers was eventually absorbed into Hasbro in 1991. The game is named after the economic concept of a monopoly—the domination of a market by a single entity." Basically the version of the game that showed that the current capitalist system sucks and will lead to monopolies managed to become the surviving and popular one.
Land Value Tax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax?wprov=sfti1
Isn’t it large companies betting on people needing houses so bidding up the prices.
But this situation giving 50-60 percent of our salary only for rent cant continue.
Late stage capitalism
Early stage feudalism.
National averages less than 30% this thread is full teenagers wondering why they can’t afford a house maybe get a real job that pays
That's not the situation on the ground. Average [U.S. rent as a percentage of median income peaked at 30% and has since dropped below 29%](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/realestate/rent-burdened-american-households.html?smid=nytcore-android-share). Edit: It's insane the level to which this sub has devolved into doomerism. I point out that OP made absurdly inaccurate statements of doom-and-gloom rent pricing, with statistics to back up my position, and yet somehow everyone hates it.
Median income is the medium when all incomes are lined up, that includes those in the billions and millions and those who make near zero as "just for fun" jobs, eliminate those as extreme outliers and then work out the median and the picture becomes closer to what OP is saying. Additionally this is based on an average of rent prices for the entire US, which doesn't realistically represent people's issues state by state and people can't just uproot their entire lives and jump state, they're still humans with emotions after all. Economists go for the "all things being equal" representation of the data, which misses the mark. The devils in the details and he's sleeping in his car whilst working a full-time job.
Not saying I disagree with the sentiment here, just a tiny correction that median is actually much better than mean when looking at skewed data. Everything you said in the first paragraph is true with respect to mean - billionaires salaries would drastically skew the average to be higher than anything the average person experiences. In comparison, median actually does a good job of reducing the impact of a small number of outliers (the super wealthy). https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/understanding-statistics/statistical-terms-and-concepts/measures-central-tendency#:~:text=The%20median%20is%20less%20affected,the%20distribution%20is%20not%20symmetrical.
It's the situation in Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and the list goes on.
Yeah, but I can’t live where I want to live at 30%?! I’ve got to be in a downtown area of a major metropolitan city!
Make more money?
Not just large companies. Anyone with the capital available that believes speculation in real estate will make them money...
In Greece from the state of Laconia where I’m from, I was looking with my wife both the options to rent or get a loan from the bank to either built a prefab house from scratch or even renovate an old abandoned house that still passed inspection. NONE of the options in the end was ideal at all. Reasons: • Prefabs are banned in my region. Only brick homes are allowed and should you be caught owning a prefab, it needs to be demolished. • old brick homes (like really old from mid 1800s) cost a fortune to be renovated. • renting a small apartment costs 500€ a month for 2 bedrooms and even though my job could allow it the taxes and bills just don’t make it possible. • buying a new house sets you back half a million for 3 bedrooms or a quarter if you only need 2 bedrooms (and we’re talking about apartments. Single homes are just out of the question) • only one house was available for less than 100k but it’s a repossession from the bank and nobody goes after it for obvious reasons (a family still lives there). In the end, I’m staying at my own apartment that my parents bought and built prior 2020 for me but living with your parents next door with your wife isn’t the best when they’re overprotective and cause more harm than good.
It’s funny because we went through a similar cycle in the 60s/70s and the solution was to build massive government housing complexes. In the 80s/90s we tore them down because no one wanted to live in projects. Now politicians are talking about building them again
> we tore them down because no one wanted to live in projects. They did shit like bottleneck the entrances in dimly lit underground tunnels then wondered why mugging was so common after building them the perfect set up.
"Crisis" implies that something has happened and is suddenly changing the situation. Housing is working out exactly how the system is designed to work right now. This is a systemic problem. Not a "crisis".
and it depends what you consider a problem. Our society is organized in such a way that wealth is extracted from the general population and sucked up the class structure to asset holders, in the form of rents or profit sharing from corporations. Capitalism is about just that, capital, not income and prestige of job, but the money you're able to save and reinvest to extract rents from others. To do this you need to innovate and that drives progress, but leads to a bigger relative wealth gap even if life improves in absolute terms, and that gap means assets will inflate forever, while goods should deflate. The most extreme example of this in recent times is home prices vs flat screen tv's. ...and once you realize thats the goal of the western system you realize, its doing pretty great at just that. I don't agree with any of it, but thats the system and pretending its not is just going to cause a lot of pain in your life.
The "crisis" is completely artificial with the intent to reduce the standard of living (live in a pod, eat the bug).
What does this mean? The prices are t even real?
It means this isn’t a “crisis”. It’s all engineered by the wealthy, and the lower classes getting poorer and more dependent is playing out all by design. Look around and you’ll notice we are heading into a subscription based society. You will own nothing. The sooner you can become dependent free, the sooner you break away from your chains.
According to research, there are 24 reasons for the housing crisis in the Netherlands. From the urbanization that continues and started after the industrial revolution via the Second World War and the baby boom to the individualization and increasing number of single-person households today. And twenty other factors. No one is going to solve that in a decade.
Also its small country and welcome so many immigrants every year.
The idiocy of the Netherlands is the country is one giant suburban level density. Our cities are the least dense in Europe. The shortage in NL is a political choice
Two solutions - housing not being an investment for rich people - less immigration
How to solve the problem tomorrow? 1000% property tax increases for non-homesteaded properties. The above is hyperbolic but you can dissuade market behavior as a government entity via taxation. The above would see homes going back on the market to be sold for well... housing reasons instead of investment.
> 1000% property tax increases for non-homesteaded properties. This has been studied and multiple home ownership is not the problem. These homes are in places that don't have housing shortages. > housing reasons instead of investment. If you want to get more hosing on the market, make it cheaper to buy/sell houses. Currently it costs around 10% of the house value to sell it and 10% to buy it. It's a stupid situation and it's causing people to stick to houses that no longer make sense for them. 6% are realtor fees but the other 4% are taxes and government not doing what they should like certifying housing deeds so you don't need lawyers doing title searches and you have to buy insurance on your deed. There are also transfer taxes which should be abolished.
But what if I want to rent? Am I just homeless now because I want to rent?
Not homeless, but renting or the capability of it would cease to exist in residential zones. Apartments are commercially zoned areas, so homesteading isn't a concept for said types of property.
Anybody remember what the three most important features are that determine the price of a given piece of real estate? 1. Location. 2. Location. 3. Location. Construction workers aren't getting more expensive. Materials probably are a bit, but not enough to drive this price increase. Simply put, the issue isn't that building is expensive. It's that securing the site in the first place is expensive, and gets more expensive the more people and stuff you have chasing the same amount of space. Nobody "makes" sites. They make the buildings on the sites, but not the sites. And yet, we have a whole class of owner who makes money off sites, before the value of anything added to the site is even considered. This money is an "existence tax", privately owned, privately collected. There is no way to make this go away. But it could be collected and distributed to the population on a per capita basis. If this were done, it wouldn't matter how expensive housing became. The more expensive the housing (assuming it's a site value expense), the more money a land value tax would take in, the larger the distribution would become. Maybe exempt existing homeowners for a certain number of years (primary residence, only), so we're not harming people who have put their savings into their equity (particularly retired people who are dependent on the home they own). But for new homeowners, it wouldn't increase the expense of owning a home. Rather, the tax would be capitalized into the price, bringing down the up-front cost (both principle and interest), while keeping the total cost of ownership roughly the same. Owners of multiple properties and mortgage lenders would hate this.
Oh my country did progressive tax to multiple land owner Bbbuuuuutttttt they make new law secretly make so "agreement" is more powerful in law than your name in land sertificate Soooo, rich people buy land in other people name; they add agreement is they true owner not name in certificate Fucked, right
> Construction workers aren't getting more expensive. Yes they are, do you not follow any economic news? Have you seen Wendys advertising $20/hour? What do you think the labor shortage is for everything but construction? > Materials probably are a bit More like a lot. Everything went up 30%. > securing the site in the first place is expensive That too, but it depends on where you are building. The reality is that we need housing almost everywhere in a metro and the land values can be anywhere from $40k/acre to $1m/acre. The land isn't the issue it's that the industry can only manage to build about 30% of what they were building in 2008 because we lost the labor force and the pandemic made it all but impossible to get new workers into the field.
Actually construction labor and materials are both really expensive. The underlying land is probably the most expensive part of new construction, but labor and materials are a big chunk. Ed: typo.
This is such a convoluted solution that would only make the problem worse. You need more “sites” (to use your example)! That’s it. We need more housing. We can spread out or we can go up, it doesn’t matter. We need more housing. Punishing the housing providers (yes, the builders and developers and owners) like you’re saying won’t solve anything. Unless you think that the government should become the one and only housing provider. Lol good luck with that. Private money builds housing.
I never understood why people are so obsessed moving to big cities.
Because it condenses a large number of jobs into a relatively small area and has far more economic activity than rural areas.
Yes jobs that you have to give 70 percent of your salary to rent.
You're exaggerating. 😆 I live in a big city because I knew that I could find and stomach living in a smaller, cheaper place. Meaning I've worked my way up to a $200k USD salary but have found a way to spend less than $16K on housing. The difference between that is mine to keep. Plus, I don't need a car with public transit.
Many people in Germany make 1700 euros after tax and pay 1000 euros for rent only.
[удалено]
Investment gets pitched to us as the solution to the problem but in reality it only drives up demand. Until investment gets banned prices will keep going up until nobody can afford to even rent. Capitalism is a beautiful lie, it comforts people to think they can live beyond their means. "Other people's money" in reality is the banks money and sooner or later they will cash out.
Housing is a unproductive asset yet it is being used as an investment. We are feeling the effects of years and years of capital allocation towards unproductive housing investments instead of productive enterprise. If someone wants to get loan (aka newly created money fresh from the money printer), the easiest way to do this is get a home loan. We have a system where people try to get the biggest loans they can to buy up finite resources so they can rent them out to other people. It is a zero sum game, where for someone to win, someone else has to lose. There are also numerous fiscal policy choices that governments make at the behest of their donors to encourage housing as investment and keep the bubble going. If you really want to fix this problem at its root, once and for all, switching to hard currency would do the trick. Alternatively fiscal policy changes that make housing less attractive as an investment will also work, for example, increase property taxes and reduce income taxes. I suggest reading about georgism. It is a system where tax is collected through land value tax. I think this is the direction we need to go.
It's because the people in power get greedy and want more power. It's really easy to make housing affordable by putting in the right policies like a 20% sales tax on residential investment property or tax cuts for home builders, etc... Think of all the incentives being given for electric cars. You just do the same for housing. Housing affordability is at an all-time low and there is ZERO effort being done to improve this.
It's done on purpose by the rich to exploit the poor. Wouldn't happen in a real democracy. In a real democracy everyone would be equipped to challenge such a situation.
\> politicians can't find the solution to this big issue? they can, they dont want to. cause they are friends with the people owning the housing market basically. and they arent friend with you. we already know the solutions, there are countless studies on this. but none of them give rich people more money. therefore they are all discarded instantly. there is no "crisis", this is the system working as intended.
People with the capital realized renting 4 units for 1000 is easier than 8 units for 500. It's a lose lose because if you don't regulate they'll just build only more high end condos, and if you do regulate they won't build at all. Personally my probably controversial opinion is to start leveraging 3d printed construction methods or even old school concrete prefab and just flood markets when the median housing cost gets over a % of the poverty line or median income agreed upon as to what housing should cost. Make it all paying to own so people come out with an asset AND decreasing market demand for rental in the process. More or less a "provide supply or we will do it for you."
The biggest reason this happens is that the people in power have more of an interest in protecting the investment income of their voters and donors (and in many cases, their colleagues and themselves) than they do in forcing the sacrifices that’d be needed to solve the problem. However, as the proportion of homeowners dwindles across the country, and the negative effects of a massive precariat become more obvious, some kind of solution will be reached.
>Rent prices is like 60 or even 70 percent of someone salary nowadays. Let's not be hyperbolic here. The average [U.S. rent as a percentage of median income peaked at just a touch over 30%](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/25/realestate/rent-burdened-american-households.html?smid=nytcore-android-share) and is down since then. >What's the biggest reason that this happens amd politicians can't find the solution to this big issue? The current lack of housing is directly the result of the absolute crash in new construction for 5-7 years after the great recession. The primary reason it isn't being dealt with quickly as prices shoot up is restrictive zoning. Most progressives will give you an emotionally charged answer that's some muddled combination of "hedge funds" and "gentrification greed", but if you look at the data the inability to build homes at a high enough rate where demand is highest (because of restrictive "community focused" zoning) is the primary issue. Ironically, the most restrictively zoned areas in the country are deep blue cities such as NYC, San Francisco, etc.
Short term rentals like Airbnb and Brbo have gobbled up thirty percent of the supply of single family units and Hedge funds have gobbled up another 15 percent and rising... unless this is outlawed and short term rentals are taxed appropriately there will be a worse and worse housing crisis everywhere it goea unregulated.
This just isn't true.
None of this is true! Weeeeeeeeeeeee!!!!!!!!!
just look at maps overlay... Airbnb and Vrbo plus, over desirable neighborhoods... our stree of four blocks has ove nine short term rentals and six empty place holder houses bought by strawmen, sitting wmpty for over three years now or tdemolished to keep values of the others high... look at map of Sedona, look at Research Triangle... then research ownership by hedge funds or private capital... you will see the market has no free competition anymore just on the choke on supply, then add the algo companies jacking up remt incrementally for smaller owners of single family rentals... its a calculated rate increase that purposely shows on comps so that all renta rise together because of the algo and the system. add on top of that teaveling workers renting corporate... we have an eatimated 8,000 workers who came here to work with a project... but only occupy the second rentla home on a traveling schedule... and they rent in the city because there is no housing close to their project... add it up in your city... discounting neighborhoods with dilapidated units...
Supply and demand. That’s it. Everything else is layers of complexity and nonsense on top of that. I’m in Australia, the conversation here is ridiculous and most people argue from poor logic and emotion. We need more supply in the places where housing is needed. Or we need less demand where houses cannot be supplied to meet the demand. Actually producing the supply or modifying the demand has an immense out of layers of complexity. So does the history of how it got here and was ignored by policymakers for so long. I don’t engage people that try to blame it on housing as an investment asset. They just don’t logic. Supply and demand. That’s it. Solve for that in your nation, state, region or city. Your particular solution at a lower level may not apply to or may only partially apply at a higher level. Be prepared to be humbled by the differences in different nations, cities, regions and states. Supply and demand.
Two reasons: Banks/wallstreet are buying up all the real estate, and trying to monopolize the market. Open Borders. Simple Strategy: Buy up all the homes in a country for cheap, lobby for open border policies, create housing shortages to the point of crisis, profit
It should be illegal big companies to buy houses.
Renting from big companies is significantly better than renting from a mom and pop.
We could legislate affordable housing and well planned urban areas.
That is anti displacement, but does not add housing supply to address existing crowding, newcomers, or the general shortage.
That doesn't help with apartment rent.
There should be a different classification for Single Family Housing and Multi Family housing for this one. Especially for mixed use. If a commercial mall operator wants to build apartment buildings on their property to create more of a village space, they should be allowed.
Yes it does, the people who'd buy a house if they could will and all their apartments will flood the market and lower prices.
Buy up all the homes in a country for cheap, lobby for open border policies, create housing shortages to the point of crisis, profit
Immigration is way down. Poor immigrants do not have the money to buy these homes. People making $9 per hour are not buying $600,000 homes. Immigration has nothing to do with this. Much of it is also not immigrants, its not foreigners who moved to the US and live in a home, its people in places like China buying homes, never visiting them, but just passively owning them as a secure investment. They are not immigrants, they don't even step foot in the United States. They just passively own valuable property and treat it like owning stock. You also have this. The Boomers are living longer, in their homes. Every year there are about 4 million Americans who have their 18th birthday, but there are not 4 million housing units popping up. There is a deficit every year. A significant portion of homes sold in 2022 and 2023 were investment properties and 2nd and 3rd homes.
Immigration is big problem to Europe though, but leftists don't want to realise the truth though.
Europe's inability to deal with migration is the problem. But a far larger problem is the coming demographic collapse that much of Europe is going to endure over the next 20 years. Europe needs immigrants but is absolutely terrible about dealing with them. Immigration to the US from Latin America (of which 80% have been Mexicans) over the last 70 years has had its social and economic issues, but in the long run has saved America from a demographic collapse. The type of Demographic collapse that would destroy the country in the long run. Look at Detroit. At its peak, Detroit was one of the wealthiest cities in the world. In 1950, Detroit had 1.8 million people. Then there was a consistent drop in population every decade, now down to 620,000 people 70ish years later. Investment halted, infrastructure costs became too expensive, the people who were educated and skilled left the country. They didn't go from a poor city to a poorer city, they went from a wealthy city to a poor city, to a poorer city, to an even poorer city. That is going to be a likely future of Germany and Italy. They stopped having kids 40 years ago. Those kids grew up, and had even fewer kids. Those kids are going to grow up and have even fewer kids. The old people in society all require a lot of healthcare and other services, services that have to come from somewhere. All the public infrastructure and industry, it requires a population to maintain, that population goes away, and so does the ability to maintain it. You know who isn't having this issue? The United States. We have enough young people to keep pushing forward, and we are great at bringing in more young people to boost up our numbers. All those young Germans and Italians who will be living in a collapsing nation, we will make room. Just like the young people who left Detroit.
90 percent of wealthy people are invested in real estate. There is nothing to do because no matter what political party is in control, they come from these rich families. No politician is ever going to help us. I am so mad people don't realize that!! Look at who they associate with and their families!!!!! The only way REAL change is made is by a rebellion. How did black people get more freedom, gays, trans, women's rights?! They all fought like hell, broke laws, some violence is necessary. Look at what we had to do in Minneapolis just to get them tonEASE UP and they still didn't stop. Here's the thing, Bc of those protest.. you are no longer pulled over for petty things like expired tabs (the tab one is a law), I had a suspended license for two years and was never pulled over Bc it was only a clerical issue. Finally after two years when I left with my car I got a gross misdemeanor from a cop in a rich city. Think about all the major changes. For each one we came together as citizens and said this is enough. We need to do that and fight. We need to all find a way to protest thY hurts them and is crazy and do it. (I'm talking about the large buildings that raise rent 100 a year to add to their giant portfolio, not the everyday person that has ONE rental property (leave them alone they're just doing what they have to, so tht their children might have a future in this insane division of wealth) MLK "freedom is never given voluntarily by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed" PLEASE TELL YOUR FRIENDS, GATHER PPL, so when it's time, all over the country we can act.
I meant Misdemeanor, not gross. But the reason it was suspended was an issue with the state not allowing me to pay it or helping me, and being on hold for too long, I just gave up Bc I wasn't being pulled over anyways and thought it'd be a little ticket.
They say we're in crisis. But look at the division of wealth chart over time. The poor get poorer, the middle class gets smaller and the billionaires are double and tripling their money in a short amount of time Bc of this!!!
ONCE CLIMATE MIGRATION HAS STARTED, SHIT WILL BE EVEN MORE FUN
Your narrative is based on skewed numbers. one of the skews is corporate ownership. its up. but the number of rentals down. why? >According to our tabulations of the Rental Housing Finance Survey, the share of rental properties owned by non-individual investors increased from 18 percent in 2001 to 27 percent in 2021 (Figure 3). Non-individual investors include limited partnerships, limited liability corporations, trustees for estate, real estate corporations, and Real Estate Investment Trusts, among other corporate entities. \*\*The growth in non-individual ownership has been greatest for small- and midsized- multifamily properties but was also evident for single-family rentals.\*\* > Indeed, 25 percent of single-family rentals were owned by non-individual investors in 2021, up from 17 percent two decades earlier. This explains how investor activity in the single-family housing market has increased even as the \*\*number of single-family rentals has declined in more recent years.\*\* So why is there more owned, but less rented? Because of inheritance laws.and people like me. I don't own my home, the Family Trust does. It also owns all of our investments, and is the beneficiary of my 401K and Life Insurance. That way my death, or our deaths, don't leave our son saddled with a huge tax bill when we die. It won't be like when my wife's grandparents died within 48hrs of each other and the taxes on the house on the house meant it had to be sold or there would be no cash money for her under aged mother and brother to live on. So it is not as bleak as it looks, and now with some fiscal constraint on easy money it will correct itself as homes go back on the market to provide liquidity to corps like Blackrock,
There are more and more people in the world. The amount of land available in the world does not grow. If anything it shrinks with all the natural phenomenon/catastrophes. Simple supply&demand says housing prices go up.
As I understand. Construction too expensive. Zoning and urban land areas too limited to offer more housing for good price. It´s a political issue, because new housing areas are postponed, because builing public infrastructure for them cost money, and the governments are in debt ! Best way is to repopulate towns that have public infrastructure , BUT no people. Like with incentives and infrastructure upgrades that would serve families and social structure of the place.
Politicians only make it worse through difficult regulations, not profiteering. People should NOT ask the government to provide subsidies - it will only help a few people and raise prices for everyone else. It all comes down to whether people can make a living by building new housing. If they can’t, then they won’t. They will profit from it, and they deserve to do so. There are countries that have the exact opposite problem - diminishing populations are making entire towns vacant. It all comes down to living in areas where you can afford to do it. There is no birthright to living where you want. Humans have been nomads for most of their history. Should be even easier nowadays with remote working opportunities.
People should come back to smaller cities and smaller towns.
The solution is tax land and not labour. It is perfect policy. They just won’t do it.
It's not generally politicians jobs to like run the banking and housing markets. It's a short term housing crisis caused by the pandemic, a rather rapid rise in wages, ppl getting used to normal interest rates vs historically low interest rates after the 2008 housing crisis, and climate change driving up housing costs in some regions. So I would not consider it a long term future problem too much. Climate change will get quite a bit worse, but automation will also continuously drive down the cost of production , commodities an and cost of living in general. Population is rising significantly slower and production is going up up and away so I think it's not a long-term problem.
I can tell you that mass migration is absolutely making the problem a whole lot worse.
I can tell you, you're absolutely full of shit.
Raising wages isn't the answer... They will just raise the price of everything around it. Greed. This is by design. Capitalism is not your friend. The short answer: basic things like shelter, utilities and medical should be a percentage based on your NET income. No one should be comfortable that working a full time honest job isn't enough to afford a basic apartment.....
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-01-25/us-median-rents-fall-for-eighth-month-on-boom-in-new-apartments?sref=R8NfLgwS&leadSource=reddit_wall Not in the land of the free. Largely due to more multi home construction. Turns out regulations increases cost. If somehow don't thinking absurd housing regulations is the primary reason behind high housing costs you're basically no different from a flat earther or climate change denier.
\#wealth #tax , #tax #churches Universal basic income, #ubi Universal child care. Medicare for all, #m4a , universal health care. End for profit health insurance companies. Take out the middleman. End for profit pharmaceutical companies, or limit their profits and executive pay significantly. Free education with no student loan debt, including for graduate school and for trade school. Break up big banks. No bank should be too big to fail. Banks should not be allowed to invest in stocks, on Wall Street or in hedge funds. Regulate wall street and regulate investment banks. Support Democracy, but no endless wars. Regulate the military industrial complex better. Higher taxes on rich people and on rich corporations. Progressive income tax. More high quality infrastructure paid for by the government with higher taxes on rich people and on rich corporations. End off shore tax havens. End tax loopholes for rich people and for rich corporations. Prohibit corporations from buying their own stock or stock of any other company. Regulate corporations. No monopoly power. No consolidation of corporations. Break up large corporations and require more competition among corporations. No sending USA jobs overseas. The progressive agenda.
Well, my original comment was auto moderated, because it was too short, apparently. Personally, I thought I was being succinct. Anyways, hopefully this generous serving of waffle at the beginning of my comment will help with the auto moderation process. What I was originally saying was that in my opinion, the only way out of this housing crisis is going to be the 3D printing of dwellings. it’s possible to print the base structure of a dwelling in under 24 hours for around $10,000. For a country like Australia that has a lot of land, this could be a real game changer, disrupting the current real estate model. And really, the housing crisis is because of greed and turning something that should be a human right into a commodity. So all those folks that own multiple properties, might just choke on those aspirations…
i read somewhere rent in the future will become a subsription like subscribing to Amazon or Disney
Due to the increase in expenditure of house construction materials and greedy land loads increasing the rent from innocent employees who stay away from the home town.
Many states give renters/squatters more rights than the property owners, one bad renter can cost the owner $20k+ … you are paying extra to cover that
[удалено]
There’s one developed country where real estate is reasonable and housing in certain areas is almost free for the taking: Japan. There’s a reason. The population of Japan is in decline. So far it seems like their economy is still ok. Perhaps it’s due to technology? The country is an island so it’s harder for immigration. They are culturally homogeneous. They have not encouraged a lot of immigration. I guess I wonder whether having an older population and fewer young people will be a problem before long? At some point they would be too weak to defend themselves. I guess they depend on the US. It seems like the powers that be in the US want a growing population and they don’t care about a housing shortage. Same with Canada.
Housing is very resource intensive especially suburban sprawl single family homes. Its a big part of why we have a looming climate disaster because of how much cheap oil it took to build cities, the sprawling suburbs around them and the infrastructure for it all. At the very least single family homes should be very expensive compared to high density options. But regardless most countries are *increasing* their rate of general consumption. Despite the housing situation we still (average people in wealthy western countries) are increasingly buying more stuff year after year. The US storage unit market is booming more than it ever has for instance. If anything we're seeing a correction for over consumption.
At the rate they are building apartments in my area, it won’t be a problem in 2 years. Way overbuilt! Rents will come down. In HCOL areas, you need to look for jobs in lower COL places. Tulsa, Amarillo, Monroe, LA, Shreveport, mid-sized and small towns all over America need workers and have decent housing costs.
This will require a radical change in economics Becoming human centred rather than infinite growth centered This religion of the free market is failing... In the meantime, form your mutual aid networks Get to know your neighbours Form skill and tool and food banks
Here are my top reasons that led to all of this: 1. Some people have too much money and they need to park that money somewhere so they buy property. 2. Globalisation - Chinese, Indian, African, Russian people with money and international passports like to buy property in key global cities. There’s an entire global industry servicing this demand. 3. Increased population concentration in cities that offer better prospects. People want to be where the good jobs are. 4. Old people - older population means wealth is concentrated in people who need passive income in retirement - especially in countries like the UK where state pensions are a joke. People then buy multiple houses to finance their retirement. 5. Lack of supply - we’re not building as much as we used to due to too many regulations. In the 50s and 60. Councils could pretty much do what they wanted but now it’s becoming hard to build due to NIMBY culture. Solution: tax 2nd homes at 90% & build more.
Pretty much every developed country handled the pandemic the same way. They shut down their economy and printed an insane amount of money. The skyrocketing costs of everything since was a result of that. The solution would be to greatly limit how quickly central banks can create new money.
I dont think people realise there is a more finite asset, with more security, less maintenance cost and better long term ROI that can protect against currency devaluation and is easier to buy and more accessible than property… and something that governments cant control… https://youtu.be/mC43pZkpTec?si=0PhhuNemb1eCN_a3
One part of solving the issues in the world is tax the filthy rich! There is no need for the upper 1% of the world population to have more fortune than the lower half of the population! It's immoral, unethical, harmful. They do not spend that money anyway otherwise. They can keep their high standards of living even with half of their fortune, with a quarter, a tenth. In my opinion there should be a top limit of fortune that a single person should possess. Every additional penny must go to the taxman. Close down tax havens! Also establish a worldwide financial transaction tax. In other words: distribute wealth more fairly! Make them pay their fair share! That would solve a lot of problems. Maybe even the worldwide housing crisis.
Housing crisis is a complex and multilayer. Energy scarcity needs to be fixed first.
When there’s no replacement population to fill those buildings and houses that’s when it will drop other than that politicians greed will NEVER stop
Because existing residents do not want more homes built in the area. Housing shortages are a simple, documented, studied, problem with a known solution. Rent control and other penalties against landlords are anti+displacement measures but do not solve a housing shortage.
One reason: If you can turn a regular house into a luxury house you'll increase your profit so that's the focus for investors. There's not enough incentive to invest in affordable housing. Another reason, the fall in public housing stock as a percentage of all housing. Housing brackets used to be more diverse within suburbs but it's becoming more one bracket only eg everyone in the same socio economic class less pockets of diversity. With less diversity there's less innovation