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It would only be an economic crisis for land owners who seek rent. Really housing shouldn’t be something that people profit from.
Some people want to rent (e.g., young people, people with mobile jobs, or people who just aren’t ready to be tied down to one place).
And I don’t have a problem with a small-time property owner renting out a house at a fair rate. In theory it’s a win-win: the renter gets a place to stay, the landlord builds equity in their property.
The issue we have is two-fold:
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Companies buying up massive amounts of property (not just a house or two, but thousands) and turning entire neighborhoods into rent zones, driving out any competition and availability of housing to buy, thereby driving up prices.
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Price collusion amongst these companies, driving up rent far above fair rates, using these software services that share going rates across markets. That reduces consumer choice.
Barring a really interesting solution, like a Land Value Tax or something, my proposal to remediate this housing problem is rather straight-forward and simple:
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Prohibit these software companies from sharing rental rates info to customers. Landlords just need to figure it out in their own markets the old fashioned way.
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Prohibit corporations from buying housing with the intention to rent it. Force these corporations to sell their housing and get out of the landlord business.
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Allow individuals to hold property for renting out, but cap number of properties a person or household can own for the express intention of renting out to five at any given time. That allows a person to build up a nice little savings nest, and provide a rental property to someone who wants to rent, but doesn’t allow anyone to dominate a housing market. Look for those massive profits elsewhere - start a business that creates and provides value.
Anyway, one can dream, I guess.
You can have non profit driven rentals though…? Why does rent need to be profit driving?
Some people WANT to have short-term commitments to their housing location. That is currently accomplished through rent. That’s an important distinction you are missing while trying to preserve elements of familiarity with the way the world currently works.
Acknowledging people wanting to rent was literally their first sentence
And that is precisely what I am disputing. No one WANTS to rent specifically, it’s just that there aren’t a lot of other options for short-term commitments. You’re looking at hotels, couch surfing, van life, nomadism. All of which exist but are less common.
The rest of their statement was about trying to find ways making renting less bad when the real solution is to eliminate the need for rent or landlords at all. You can still have short-term housing options without landlords.
In fact, in a lot of countries it is customary for landlords to require long-term leases most of the time. In most of the Middle East rents are paid annually up-front. In India it’s common to see security deposits of 6 months rent or more. The only force keeping short-term housing options available to those who want them are… Those who want them. The market demand, and the responsiveness to that demand.
But one of the major shifts the world is seeing globally is the breakdown of the relationship between demand and supply, with more and more power going to the supply side. Landlords in particular are colluding indirectly through 3rd party consulting firms against renters. It’s almost comical now to talk about how many countries like Canada, the UK, and the US are having housing crisis while the new construction seems to be almost exclusively low-densith luxury homes. Renters simply do not have the power to influence supply today.
People don’t “want to rent”. They want shelter. It’s just that renting is the easiest way to get that.
People don’t “want to work.” They want money. It’s just that working is the easiest way for most people to get that.
Well, thanks Captain Obvious. Statements like that are technically true, but how helpful are they for contributing to a conversation?
People don’t “want to work.”
I don’t think that’s true, but I suppose then we’d have a debate over what “work” is.
Statements like that are technically true, but how helpful are they for contributing to a conversation?
Well, we were having a discussion about renting vs. owning which you seemed to understand were two different things.
greedy people have this weird argument that the rest of humanity shares their mental illness of worshiping money.
Wow finally someone else with a level-headed take. Careful though, that kind of thinking doesn’t do well here
Landlords are parasites. Period.
How do you mean “your proposal”?
Do you mean this post on Lemmy? Cause I’d vote for someone running for public office with that as their platform pertaining to the housing situation/crisis
Shit, I’d vote for that person, too.
Alas, I have zero interest in running for any public office.
Funny, that: with notable exceptions, of course, it’s generally the busy-body, loud-mouthed, ideologically-possessed control-freaks who seek any sort of political power. Sensible people tend to mind their own goddamned business, until the politicians and wingnuts force our hands to finally get involved.
It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
-Douglas Adams
You’d vote for a president running on a platform they would have zero authority to enact?
I didn’t specify president per se.
Politicians in most modern governments, of course, aren’t emperors who issue edicts and instantly enact sweeping change.
The imaginary politician in this scenario would run what that platform expressing the ideal. They then try to get those policies enacted against the opposition, which is both the inertia of the bureaucracy and opposing political winds.
You saying the imaginary person running for president with that platform couldn’t snap their fingers and put it in place doesn’t mean they wouldn’t steer the government in that direction, thats almost always the best we can do and I don’t think we should give up because the change we want isnt immediate
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I mean, 0 new apartments would be built
Existing apartments would be removed from the market too. $100 per month costs the owner more than keeping the apartment empty, because tenants are a risk.
If people thought that such a law was going to be permanent, or if there were fees for leaving apartments empty, then many (most?) apartments would be permanently destroyed - either converted to something else (condos, commercial space, etc) or just demolished so that the land could be used some other way.
You forgot the outcome that they could be sold. You know, so that a non landlord could own one.
I said they could be converted into condos, and that would happen to many of them if they were worth more as condos than as commercial space or undeveloped land (or apartments rented off-the-books at market price). Prices of condos would fall (at least until the market adjusted) but the supply of housing available would decrease, especially for the people who struggle to afford rent today.
I don’t follow your reasoning that goes from landlords selling housing to less housing being available. Also, which landlords are renting out at below mortgage prices?!
Less housing in the sense of (owner-occupied + rented). Not all former rented housing would become owner-occupied housing. People who struggle to pay rent are going to have a hard time getting a mortgage, and if they do then they’re betting a lot on an illiquid asset that they’re paying for with an unreliable revenue stream, especially since that asset might go down in value to below what they owe on it like what happened to a lot of people in 2008. One of the things a renter pays a landlord to do is to absorb a lot of the financial risk.
A couple of anecdotes about when I owned a house:
I would have been better off by renting for above mortgage price than I was by buying, since I had to move a lot sooner than I thought I would. There’s a lot of overhead to purchasing real estate that only makes sense if you plan on staying in one place for a long time. Fewer and fewer Americans are doing that.
I used to rent out the house at below-mortgage price but it was to good friends who were very trustworthy. (Even then, technically they shared the house with me although I would only come for one weekend a month, because then they would be easier to evict just in case.) Their rent covered interest and taxes, so I was paying off principal. I sold the house when they moved out rather than taking the risk of renting it to strangers. With that said, I don’t think this is common.
Not all former rented housing would become owner-occupied housing
Yeah, in your previous post you suggested it would be razed to the ground, which is a bit of a throwing your toys out of the play pen when asked to share. I’ll remind you that the original post was suggesting rent controls back to 1980s levels of rent. Housing prices would likely fall, bringing whole swathes of people who can’t get a mortgage now into the buyers market.
At the moment, most landlords basically get houses bought for them by their tenants. It’s iniquitous. If you’re paying the price for the house, you should get the house, not just someone with a better credit rating.
The reason most renters are renters and not owners is not because there aren’t any houses available to purchase.
This would just make countless people homeless as they lose the option to rent, because they can’t afford to buy/maintain an entire house.
It’s because the prices are so high! Countless people ARE homeless, and the skyrocketing price of housing is the immediate cause, with the vast profits landlords make the indirect cause. If you can make someone else (tenants) buy houses for you, there is no limit to the number of houses you can buy at no real cost to you, so being a landlord makes insane profits so the prices of houses climb as they’re such a money spinner.
What do you think the cost of a house is, just with the cost of the materials and labor to build it, with zero markup?
A fraction of the cost that they go to market with at the moment. The housing market is overheating and has been doing so for decades. The value is in the scarcity, and the profiteering, not the bricks and mortar.
Renters pay the mortgage and then some. It’s iniquitous. If you’re the one paying for the house, you should get the house, not someone who just has a better credit rating.
Until someone needs a home and they build it
Where are they living while they save up the several hundred thousand it costs to build one?
You’re right, the first time shelter was built in human history it was a Blackrock apartment complex.
How could i forget.
If you have to go back to before the concept of money was invented, you don’t really have a good point.
I didn’t.
Blackrock was the only corporate entity that had the building rights to the ferile cresent.
If it weren’t for them nobody would have ever had shelter.
God bless Blackrock
in which part of the world can people build tents that won’t immediately be torn down or vandalized? You make being part of society sound like hell.
Yes because we would decommodify housing and still commodify land.
Use your big boy brain instead of just the angry part
Why? Its not like apartments are built by private industry. Not any lasting ones at least.
What? Of course they are
None of the good ones that have lasted. Only disposable trash that needs to be nearly entirely rebuilt every 50 years.
This is the opposite in the US. Government housing, when it was even attempted, was concrete trash, left to rot for decades.
You’ve discovered the problem with organising an economic system around profit
Home values themselves would tank.
I imagine there would be far fewer people willing to pay thousands of dollars for a mortgage when rent is only $100 and maintenance is someone else’s problem. Hell, home maintenance and repairs alone are well more than that.
Then maybe we could adjust our zoning laws and take better advantage of the land available. Houses aren’t very effective use of land.
It would be a crisis for renters. Land owners by definition already have a place to stay, but the second you implement price controls you’re going to see the rental market go into convulsions. The correct solution is to Just Tax Land.
The correct solution is
to Just Tax Landsocialized housing.There you go
Yep, this is already a solved problem.
About 60% of the people in Vienna live in public housing and its one of the best places in the world to live.
Tons of people in this thread are running around coming up with Rube Goldberg schemes of incentive structures and legal frameworks when the problem is really not that complicated.
Well sure, people would stop renting in protest, and you’d have to tax unoccupied spaces at high rates to compensate.
It would crash the real estate market, which arguably needs to die since availability is artificially scarce due to wealthy hoarders.
tax unoccupied spaces at high rates to compensate.
Doing just this would help quite a lot today. A bunch of properties sit vacant because it’s cheaper to just pay the taxes and let the property appreciate than it is to bother with renting.
We had rent control apartments for most of the 20th century and the market was just fine.
There would literally be no rentals except maybe shitty murder sex room hotel rooms.
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It would be a crisis for anyone who wants to rent, because they won’t be able to anymore.
No one’s going to rent out an apartment if they’d have to do it at a huge loss. So as soon as this went into effect, all rentals would vanish and everyone who can’t afford to buy a house would be homeless.
pretty sure this would lead to some sort of economic crisis
And? We’ve already tried it the other way around, and we’ve really got nothing to lose at this point by trying OOP’s idea out.
Economic crisis? That would be terrible! It’s a good thing we never have any economic crises under the current system!
Surely not one that would cause the US to drop 10% of its stock market value in 4 months.
Honestly I was just thinking of the past 200 years of US history that has mostly just been a sequence of economic crises with occasional breaks.
THATS UNIRONICALLY BETTER THAN OUR CURRENT PRESIDENT
While I like the thought, still terribly bad in my opinion. Presidents should never have a say in any of that. That’s where we have fooled most of America. Legislation can make such a law and then the president can execute it by arresting those who do not follow the law that was made.
The president is a local cop and international diplomat. Locally they should do nothing that is not previously written by Congress and Passed the Senate and then signed (or not signed) by them or previous office holders.
International diplomat means they also cannot declare war and cannot make trade rules. They are a spokesperson.
If I were President I would follow the constitution and the amendments made thereafter. I would never want to be president, but if I ran I would focus my campaign on educating the populous on what the job is supposed to be, and who the members in their communities/cities/county/state are that they should be pushing for to do great things for them.
I would cheer for them to elect legislatives who will write thorough adaptable bills that can help their constituents and keep a platform along the lines of “Presidents don’t make laws, Vote for good people who will write good legislation for your community, and please don’t make me have to perform a job that hurts our people. America’s governing is decided by your representatives”
if i were president i would do a billion executive orders and try to resign from the UN security council because we clearly don’t deserve that veto power
Just do me the favor of starting with the first, or maybe just dissolving the security councils veto power, and keeping the UN together. I think many of us overlook what knowledge diplomats do learn of struggles in countries most citizens could never name, and some they can because our information is often localized. Maybe make a U.S. funded broadcasting nationally of their meetings with a council local and abroad mixed that give their briefings and present the views.
I don’t think you could ever get the Security Council to dissolve itself. The only reason the UN was able to get off the ground is the veto, the great powers wouldn’t have joined otherwise.
But our permanent seat. That veto. That’s ostensibly under our control. And it shouldn.t. We suck. We use it so much crap like. Gone. I want it gone. Give it up.
I fear you forget who the rest are and what they use it for. Are we terrible, yes. Would the world be better off if we didn’t have it… Maybe. The vacuum it would create without disolving it completely would be treacherous. It gives us no right to use it. But it doesn’t mean there won’t be bad actors other than us that do. We have examples currently ongoing
there’s like 10 non-permanent seats on the council, flipping one of the forever-seats to temporary isn’t gonna create a vaccuuummeee
A vacuum forms when you, say, disolve the whol dam thing
When China Russia Iran and India are motivated in the same path, which of those seats do you think can disincentivize them. I’m not saying the U.S. should have veto power, I agree… But logistically, when China does well by manipulating Russia into smattering their children over eastern Europe and depleting economic wealth as well as all of their offspring suffering for both Europe and Russia, what do you see as a viable way to make them feel checked in a way that stunts such.
I should say, no I don’t think China is behind all of this in some conspiracy or some shit. But the powers of large economies and populations will always be pushing at each other demanding more so long as Capitalism is the center of our world. The U.S., China, India, E.U. (hate to lump them) all have agreed that capitalism is the choice for them.
This is why we battle for what seems like nothingness so often. Power. The reason so many nations didnt shift to renewable resources earlier was because of pressures from “super powers”.
Solar power won’t run out before humanity does. Nuclear energy won’t run out before humanity does. Geothermal energy won’t run out before humanity does. Wind might, but that’s because we keep fighting over land to assert dominance.
We are hitting a revolution where energy dependence should never be an issue again. Transportation, heating, cooling, cooking whatever it may be. And global powers have fought it tooth and nail because when someone has a home with heat, cooling, food, transportation for cheap… They don’t have to answer to power unless it can break everyone else who has it around them as well. The rich right now compared to the middle class SHOULD be, the cost of their fancy coat, but both coats can insulate the same. Power fears happiness within “scarcity” and our scarcity should be enough to make people happy, so they create artificial scarcity and have to drive people to homelessness and other issues to make sure we are still scared.
Fear drives capitalism (edit: which by the way, should define it as terrorism last I checked).
Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to understand the difference between freedom fighters and terrorists. They are all coming from terrorism trying to gain freedoms manipulated by the fear intentionally driven into them)
I think you underestimated how much power “executing the law” gives you. And no matter what you believe, it can be immoral to not exercise this power sometimes.
Sure you can educate the populous and hope good people are elected, but you can’t guarantee things always go how you hoped. What if the Congress passes some truly reprehensible law? One you deeply disagree with? e.g. genocide, apartheid, weapons for the oppressor, tax break for the rich, what have you. Would you still hold on to your beliefs and execute the law faithfully? Should you?
My take?
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corporations aren’t allowed to own land or houses other than the office space and production facilities.
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people can only own the buildings they live in (with proof of living there at least X% of the year)
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The state takes over all houses and land that become unused by these laws
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The state rents out their property as ‘rent to own’, or as housing for the homeless
That’s basically China with extra steps. How are you going to deal with your companies siphoning money out of your economy by buying foreign real estate?
Corporations should be owned jointly in equal parts by the people who work there. Most live local and won’t want to do that.
Ah there’s that glorious protectionism that just shot the global economy in the foot! Constitutional law is gone and you’re day dreaming about reforming business law lmaooooo CLASSIC.
COMMUNIST REVOLUTION WEN?
This whole thread is about day dreaming about business law reform.
The whole world doesn’t stop to deal with each problem individually.
Of course, it’s basically a communist idea from even before the Russian revolution.
To answer your question: since corporations aren’t allowed to own more than the buildings they work with, they could not buy foreign real estate - except for facilities or offices they really use.
I don’t think I know all the answers, it was just a interesting idea I read a while ago.
As far as I know it was never implemented, so weather it would work out or not is just speculation.
Bububutttbut who gets the Waterfront property?!?!?
I saw a new development going up on the river and thought that. Next thought was how delightful it will be to watch the river consume it in my life time. Nature hates vanity.
I say that because some people can’t imagine a system other than the current one and they said that as a kind of a gotcha.
This doesn’t solve the problem, which is the lack of new supply. The real solution is to deregulate zoning
I think zoning laws are necessary, but they’re way too strict in some/a lot of places. Like, I don’t want a loud, polluting factory next to my home, but why are there places where all you can build are single-family homes?
The problem is if you have a housing crisis, and developable land, but the only housing projects you approve are $750k houses in giant suburb… There’s a huge difference between deregulation and planned incentivized development.
Communities have so much power as far as local approval for building developments and city design. You guy should be coming together and saying what you just said. How can we get more affordable housing without all the bad effects, what regulations do we need to protect your peace and health? What regulations are blocking a mixed use development in favor of a suburb no one can afford?
I disagree
Ok
One thing to is it comes down to incentivizing housing. someone needs to take the capital loss on creating a cheap house for a family in need. It’s the city and the tax payers. If you can’t figure out who is eligible for a cheap home, and who will pay for that person cheap home, and find a builder to build said cheap home, then it’s all just a waste of breath anyway.
Ah the ‘state’ So donald trump should take over all housing…
No wait, the nation of people who elected donald trump, who’s imaginary new government(which will be so much more awesome) that state should do it!
You need your revolution first friends, im waiting. It’s your time to shine and you’re still lurking in the dark quoting theory.
I don’t live in the USA, so my trust in my government is at least a little bit higher.
I agree that the government under trump is… not suitable for such a socialist concept. One can only hope that a better one will rise from the ashes.
That being said, in general, control by the state is better for the people, even though it’s less effective. Taking ‘greed’ out of the equation for the housing market would do wonders.
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If you can’t beat 'em, DEPORT 'EM TO HELL!
Always a winner’s first move! Disqualify, Deport, Dismiss. /s
That sounds like a violation of the separation of church and state!
funnily one could argue there is quite a bit of separation between Hell and the state depending on who you ask.
you could honestly make every apartment cost 100 dollars and no one would actually get affected
Those who own the land and go ape shit over their value don’t even take advantage of it and sell it off, more often they just die and have their kids inherit it, and the landlords who benefit from every type of inflation in real estate
of course this assumes every housing unit is owned and managed by the government, and these themselves are incredibly successful even if they only have 10% of the real estate market
The money that exits the economy through large landlords (not small landlords) is essentially wasted, I bet the economy would actually grow if we had proper gov. Housing that allowed people to actually spend their monthly wages on literally anything else
What if you made every apartment cost $100 AND promised to protect Americans from trans Mexican rapists stealin’ their jorbs?
you forgot /s
If people actually think that comment was serious, I can only feel sorry for them.
I mean, it’s not like there’s a lot of trans Mexican rapists to start with. Probably cheapest way to keep them from stealing jobs would be to hire the one or two you do manage to find!
Why couldn’t the US have guaranteed government housing available to any citizen that needs it? A $100 a month apartment to cure homelessness shouldn’t be a funny joke … it should be questioned with “why should it even cost money”?
Government housing tied to the cost of 1 weeks minimum wage. So simple, so elegant.
The government actually helping people without lining the pockets of the capital class? That’s commie talk
NOT IN MY AMERICA HIPPY!!! -Richard Nixon
Because then Trump gets elected, state housing gets neglected and people start dying.
They need the extra asbestos for fireproofing. It’s going to be hard work bringing back all the harmful chemicals of yesteryear.
Democrats never directly helping people (without lining the pockets of billionaires) is exactly why Trump was elected. FDR was the last President that actually fought for the working class and he was so popular he was elected 3 times.
I know it’s not trendy to say, but I’m gonna say it anyway: Bill Clinton is a bad person, but he was a good president.
For me personally I’d like a 50-60 square meter apartment for no more than 2x my annual income. And I’d like to be able to get a loan with a monthly down payment equal to whatever I’ve been paying in rent for the last couple of years.
I can pay 12500 NOK a month in rent, but for some reason the bank can’t trust me to pay the same amount if I were to buy an apartment? Fuck that.
That was a scam they put in place after 2008 when they were being punished for scamming us. (while scamming us for bailouts for the previous scam) It takes a lot of government regulation to keep the banks from stealing, good thing thats gone now!
Turn every company into a worker owned co-op and then it becomes 100x harder for companies to do shady immoral stuff
I mean thats fine as long as the Millions of chinese and vietnamese workers making Iphones get to keep their cut of the company. I just hate nationalistic protectionism. These are all global companys. I’d be down to share.
Banks used to trust people and that has led to GFC. So most governments now have legal frameworks to ensure that banks don’t trust you anymore. I don’t think you want another GFC.
Surely there can be a middle ground.
I hate that I’ve been paying close to 150k NOK a year in rent for the last ten years but for some reason I can’t be trusted with a loan unless I make a lot more and save up something like 300k.
Except for the fact that I have a place to live it feels like I’m throwing money out the window.
I don’t know what the situation is in your country, but here’s an example from the UK.
Imagine you bought a £500k house in London just after the pandemic. The mortgage rates were around 1.2-1.3%. You could afford monthly payments at the time, everything looked cool. Now a couple years later the war in Ukraine starts, economy tanks and interest rates go over 7%. Now your monthly payments become 3-4x higher and you’re fucked. You lose your house, become homeless and you still owe half a mil. The end.
Interesting to see the difference. In the US it’s most common for mortgages to be “fixed rate” and remain the same for the entire loan period. Downside is a higher base percentage, we got down to about 2.6-2.7% in the same time period. Upside is that your payment will never go up.
Yeah, that’s the difference. But in general British mortgages are much cheaper. That also leads to a situation, that people invest free money instead of over paying their mortgages. I’m still on 1.32% for example, while even my basic savings account pays me 4.5%.
The interest rates going up was because of Liz Truss and her loony huge unfunded tax cut for the most wealthy.
The war against Ukraine was the spark for the separate general inflation profiteering that started with the energy generating companies.
The situation in Norway is luckily a bit better than that, but I’ve heard from friends that their mortgages became a bit more expensive the last couple of years. Shit, is it really that bad in the UK? People’s payments tripled or even quadrupled? Sounds like capitalist dystopia.
From what I can gather the payments didn’t increase near that much in Norway, and we have solutions like exemption from down payments among other things for situations like the one we’re in now. I know some people with really expensive homes sold them and bought smaller cheaper ones to lighten the economic load, and a lot of people defaulted on expensive car loans. I think the situation hit people with expensive homes and cars the hardest because a lot of those people weren’t willing to adjust to the reality.
If I was allowed to get a loan I wouldn’t have gone over 1/3 of my income, just like with the rent I pay today. I’d manage, but they’re incredibly strict with who gets one.
It was that bad for a short while, but plenty of people had to re-mortgage during that short while and they got burned real hard. But due to borrowing limitations no one became homeless. That’s the point of them. I know it doesn’t feel fair, but I saw myself all that happening and I’m happy that banks don’t trust people anymore - it’s better that way for everyone involved.
Norway didn’t have Liz Truss crashing the economy and causing a run on the pound. It always comes down to trusting right wingers with the economy.
Seeing the way things have been going in different countries the last couple of years have given me a newfound gratitude for the country I live in. Even our most right wing party is left wing by any international standard.
Yup. When the UK had big revenues from oil, Margaret Thatcher spent it on tax cuts. Norway invested it for the future of the nation.
So everyone else should bail you out? That’s what it is
Not sure what you’re talking about…
What could go right? If apartments cost $100, everyone would own one and there would be no speculative market in them — no rental market at all probably.
If housing was truly abundant, we would still have landlords. The key difference is they would actually have to compete as a service provider instead of as mere land hoarders. “Landlord” would be an honest job for once.
Landlords like to say that many people prefer to rent because then they don’t have to worry about maintenance, doing home repairs, etc. But most people rent simply because they can’t afford to purchase a home themselves. Instead of helping people avoid maintenance, landlords in practice do everything possible to avoid spending a penny on any kind of maintenance. They’re able to be so stingy because people need somewhere to live. With most rentals, you’re simply paying for access to housing, the quality of the service is an afterthought. Very few people have the luxury of rejecting a potential apartment or rental home simply because the landlord has a reputation of poor responsiveness to maintenance requests.
With abundant housing, landlords would be more like hotels operators in vacation destinations. No one would stay at a resort hotel if the rooms were falling apart and full of mold. It’s a luxury purchase that people can go without, so they can afford to demand quality. With abundant housing, rental housing becomes a luxury good.
For example, let’s say anyone who wanted could buy a home with an affordable mortgage. Maybe the government subsidizes the mass production of housing units. Just flood the market with new homes and condos. Make it so there are 1.5 housing units for every 1 household. Or imagine some federal program to double the number of housing units in the US. And then offer low down payment and subsidized mortgages so basically anyone can get one.
In order to compete with that, landlords would have to offer a high quality of customer service. They would have to appeal to those who actually would prefer to rent. They would have to attract those who honestly just hate doing maintenance and don’t want to futz around with it. Those who wanted to not have to do home maintenance could rent, and they would seek out landlords who actually properly maintained their units. With dirt cheap housing available, any landlord that didn’t provide excellent customer service would quickly be driven out of business. Instead of being in the land speculation business, they would be in the customer service business. “Landlord” would actually be a real job for a change.
The problem isn’t landlords it’s land_barons_ rich fucks and corps treating housing as a business working the bottom line.
Not the first gen home buyer getting a 2 FAM or 3 FAM and renting out the spare unit. Not even when they get enough to buy a single and keep the multi as thier first step into making generational wealth.
Its the fuckers that buy up housing to rent at above market and do nothing they don’t legally have to maintain them.
Oh and they leave them empty for months on end instead of lowering rent to get the units all filled out.
Lots of new apartments are being built in my state but 90% is “luxury” crap that’s just going to keep raising rent.
15 years ago I rented an apartment, in the US, for $250 a month.
This policy is called rent control and it doesn’t work. New York has it and rent is still astronomical. All you would do is eliminate any incentive to build new housing, which is the actual source of the problem
“It doesn’t work” because profits. If you are in socialized housing there is no need for profit. It’s also kinda absurd to think that, were rent fixed, that there would not be a sea change in how housing and regulations surrounding housing works. It’s myopic to simply say “fixed rent costs = landlords stopping maintaining property” or some such. It would have to be comprehensive, not a sudden, poorly thought out decree like trump would do.
There’s always a need for profit, otherwise you end up with Chinese ghost cities with millions of empty and rotting homes. They will also become a huge environmental catastrophe there quite soon.
Imagine there’s no possessions… I wonder if you can…
Yeah, I don’t want to live in a stone age.
I’m not sure we could go back to the stone age, as a society. That would require collective amnesia. We can’t simply forget electricity and wavefunctions, QSARs.
Mind you, some people are still living a stone age mindset.
There are other options than a single choice to regress.
The majority of the population doesn’t even know ohm’s law, what wave functions are you even talking about? Remove a bunch of engineers and the whole world will be back in stone age in no time.
Another binary choice someone is inventing. Nobody said it all had to be socialized.
A world in which we all live in project housing is a dark one indeed
Christ dude don’t be so damn binary. Both your comments are. There is nobody saying everyone will or must live in socialized housing in this hypothetical.
Then why bring it up? We’re talking about a system of private housing with a profit incentive
Then this is my take:
- no taxes on first home
- some tax on second home
- taxes on any home past the second grow exponentially, doubling for each additional home
- order of the homes is always from less expensive to most expensive
- same is valid for companies
- for companies owned by other companies, all the houses owned are considered as belonging to the mother (root) company, so there’s no “creating matrioskas to that each own a single house”
Obviously offices and factories are not habitable space and therefore not counted in this system.
Housing shouldn’t be an investment asset, especially in a for profit system, or you’ll just make BlackRock again.
I think that’s what s/he was trying to resolve with the doubling of tax on each additional property. It would become cost prohibitive very quickly to have multiple properties.
You would have to close the endless amounts of tax deductions on real estate to make it matter. If they can write off the loss as a business cost than the portfolio will just eat the tax and pass it on to the renters.
Yes. No single change will solve the problem. It would have to be comprehensive.
And persistent. We cannot get complacent half way through this one.
It shouldn’t be an investment asset.
Homebuilding is still a business though. You still need someone to risk their money, assemble the materials and crew, complete the project and find a buyer for it.
If there’s no demand for a product no one will build it. There’s always going to be demand for a mythical product that can’t be built. Like cheap housing.
I just spent $2,000 on a handful of wood, shingles, and siding to patch my house up. like 1/10th of a single wide trailer. That’s just the materials i’ll be providing the labor which would normally cost $30-$60 hour.
So it shouldn’t be an investment asset, someone still has to invest in it being built, so that a homeowner may live there.
Is that sort of thing not exactly what our taxes should be paying for?
Ya in an ideal world. Currently the system runs by me fixing up a house and losing $50,000 of my hard earned money so a young family can get a cheap house. I’d preferred if the government compensated me for my contribution to the housing crisis?
Property taxes can also be used in this manner, you don’t need national legislation to use your city/town council. You have a lot of power at a local level to solve your local problems, its hard to get peopel organized for it. You tax undesirable housing to subsidize housing your desire. I know my problems here in Maine are different than those in California as far as real estate.
A national plan and blueprint would be nice, but i still think this is a problem with local governments that can’t be solved as each location has its own needs and problems.
There’s no market incentive for building small homes or efficent towns. Think about how much money we spent to get people to use EV’s same needs to happen for housing, you need incentives for buyers and producers to take the great leap.
They need to offer low interest rates for construction loans, for first time home buyers only. That would solve the housing crisis. Anything else would make inflation worse, or wouldn’t address the housing supply issues.
Problem: universities and other entities which require many buildings. How does this play into it? Do you count the entire campus as a single property?
We need non-profit public housing that is suitable for middle-class families.
Non-profit doesn’t mean “free” or that money is being lost, just that the goal is to provide housing at cost rather than profit-seeking. Subsidies and such would still be available for low-income households as needed.
No one who owns a home would vote for them. It’s not in their self interest, if they spent 300k on a house and this happened, they would lose ~300k. Not worth it at all. A much better idea would be to just have tax breaks for contractors making new homes, that would lower the value of everyone else’s homes, but by a lot less.
Eh, I’d go for it. This whole country thing isn’t about my personal gain, but making life better for everyone.
I get why they would lose money, but in my head it’s still like you still have a home still so why should they care.
Lots of people buy homes as an investment, its not only large corporations that do this, and if someone bought a home expecting that when they sell it they will get most of their money back, or even a profit on it, they would really be harmed by a government guaranteeing effectively free housing for all. If you want such a world to exist, it can’t be done instantly for sure
Profit or loss on real estate speculation should no more guide government policy than profit or loss on soy futures or baseball card investments. You want to use housing as an investment, you have to accept risk like any other investment.
Homeowners already are subsidized with mortgage interest and real estate tax deductions, something renters do not benefit from. Government housing policy should be crafted to support strong, stable, healthy communities.
Homes as an investment is what should be illegal. If you want to invest in real estate it should be commercial only.
Housing should not be an investment. They didn’t lose anything except speculated value which comes at the cost of locking others out from the ability to own their own home. In fact, those morons who care so much about “muh investment” are also costing themselves through higher property taxes and ridiculous house prices they’d have to face if they ever have to move.
There are quite a few people who say they wouldn’t be able to afford the house they have now if they had to finance it at today’s prices and interest rates. How can they realize the capital gains on such an “investment” if they don’t own more than one home? They still have to live somewhere.
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Removing speculation from the housing market doesn’t remove ownership.
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limited individual property ownership to say, 5 properties
fine, but taxes kick in on the second and get exponentially larger with each one
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you leave individuals who own up to, say, 3 houses alone and start massively taxing anything further. 4+ house voting bloc can suck a dick. corporations will be forced to rent at obscenely low rates to the point that they will be stupid not to sell. they have a minimum tenant percentage to make sure they’re not hoarding, and have mandatory government evaluation for any sale. fail to do any of this for 60 days and your properties now belong to the people.
Oh I’m sure those contractors would pass those breaks on and not just pocket the savings /s
This is effectively the same as the government paying some of the cost of making houses. Meaning that if they make more houses, they get ‘paid’ by the government, by paying less taxes. They pocket the savings because that is what the government gave to incentivize them making more homes.
How does that lower the cost of homes though?
Edit: to be clear, I mean the cost to the buyer, not the builder.
if you make more homes, then the value of each home individually would drop.
That’s not how it works in reality, unfortunately.
How so?
I think the poster is going by the mistaken assumption that there isn’t enough housing so they’re looking for incentives to increase supply. which is not the issue.
If you wanted bread to be cheaper, you would increase the supply of bread. If you want homes to be cheaper, increase the amount of homes. It might not be the issue at hand, but it definitely is a valid solution.
corporations are not hoarding bread so they can rent them at obscene rates.
Ideally, if one company charged too much for rent, the person living there could move to another place owned by a different company that would charge cheaper rent, in an effort to take business from the first company.
The issue arrives when monopolies control the majority of homes, but those monopolies can be broken much more easily if the cost of buying homes went down (from an increased supply of them) and the barrier to entry of new homeowners who want to rent went down. That would increase competition and would eliminate these monopolies.
You need to consider that people need somewhere to live. So, if your only house doubles in value, you generally can’t make use of this fact to get more goods and/or services, since every other house has likely also doubled in value. The only way you can get to these gains is if you’re willing to trade down in some way. For example, you could move to a rural area, where housing is cheaper, or you could move into a smaller home. If you’re unwilling to do any those things, your house becoming more valuable is not that useful. (Unless of course the increase in value is due to the land your house is on getting better in some way. This only concerns cases were your house gets more valuable due to increasing scarcity). In fact, since property taxes exists, you might end up getting priced out of your own house.
Tells this to the millions of voters that thought “tarif every country, specially or allies” would be a great economic plan.
Everyone now owns wherever they are living. Current owner residents get reimbursed via taxes for their current equity over a period of time. People and government win, corporations take losses on investments and probably come out ahead anyway.
Obviously an oversimplified idea, but I think we should be asking “How can we make this happen?” more often than dismissing outright.
Taxes don’t come out of thin air. What you’re proposing is effectively: spend $300k on a house, lose $300k, then lose another $300k from your taxes.
That’s why you shouldn’t over simplify dumb ideas.
What I’m proposing you wouldn’t lose the 300k because you still have your house and you’ll get the 300k back over time. And yes taxes don’t come out of thin air, but the whole system needs plenty of overhauling.
Do you have a house though? Or are you still on a mortgage and now you’re in negative equity, get booted out and still have to pay the debt while being homeless?
No no, if they force my loan to be 100$ they’re just going to increase interest 10,000 to get to that 300k lol
The President has that power now, because of the ╣¥th Amendment.
Ah yes, the MISSINGNO amendment. (Or at least that’s how your comment loaded for me)
ü»≡!
Like the stock market losing trillions? That kind of economic crisis?
The entirety of the U.S. could be housed for maybe $3 trillion dollars. Since Trump took office the market has taken an $11 trillion dollar loss. We could have housed everyone with free rent/mortgage and made them nice, put Americans to work boosting the economy (making those refurbished/new homes) and also taking away the expenditures on said rent/mortgage making it so more money will be spent elsewhere to boost the economy and balance out the not spending to landlords/corporations who own them. To think of that in another manner. In 2 months, the market lost 44% of the U.S.'s GDP.
More than twice the GDP of any other country in the world except China, was lost in 2 months.
You, and others like you, are the reason I love lemmy. I can make an off the cuff snipe at idiocy, and if I don’t feel like pulling in exact numbers someone will come in behind me with data like this.
Thank you, neighbor.
