4 ms·

TL;DR: it's because home equity is used as a savings account, and it's the primary or sometimes only means whereby most members of the middle class can accumula

• eru 10y ago
  The big insight I see is that it's not only expected values, but unhedged variance that make people NIMBYs.
  • afarrell 10y ago
    Hmmmmmm... As someone with family in Boston and who plans to return there, I really want a some way to invest 20% of my IRA contributions in the Boston housing market until I can actually afford to buy a house there and move back. I wonder if I can help someone else hedge against the market going down.
    • eru 10y ago
      Slightly related, they have housing cooperative in Germany, especially the East. You can own a share, and get much reduced rent in return, in any of the cooperatives apartments and houses in the city. Depending on how well they do, they might also pay a dividend, but mostly the owners of the cooperative are also the renters, so generally they rather keep the rent down than make a profit. I know old people who `paid' for their shares by working on building sites for these very houses in the 50s and 60s. See http://www.wohnungsbaugenossenschaften.de/genossenschaften/how-cooperatives-work http://www.wohnungsbaugenossenschaften.de/genossenschaften/h... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative#Germany
      • ido 10y ago
        As someone looking to get into one, it's quite difficult and can take years for them to offer you a decent place (which will have crazy competition).
        • eru 10y ago
          Yeah, they are not exactly market based--ie they don't just increase prices and acquire more units.
• shados 10y ago
  Realistically, in areas where housing cost and shit is a big problem, prices will always go up even if you build a skyscraper in my backyard. My personal issue and why we've fought against some developments in the past, is because city noise/animal/traffic/blah blah rules are just not being enforced. At all. So if I ever want to be able to sleep (not sleep in. Just sleep at all...like at 4 in the morning or whatever), I had to buy a place that was totally overpriced, and in a totally sub-optimal location, just so I'd have tolerable neighbors. Then someone decided to build a rental-only land-locked high rise where the only possible access point is through my development's parking lot. And said high rise, even though it is in my backyard, is technically in a different city, so when there's neighbor issues, it gets really complicated. If it was in my Canadian hometown, it honestly wouldn't matter: some asshole decides to throw a party at 3 in the morning or play hockey in my yard, I call the cops on them, 10 minutes later problem is over. Here? They'll just laugh at me and tell me to grow a thicker skin. So the only thing I -can- do is prevent it from happening in the first place. If it was like in other countries I lived? Knock yourself out, build away!
• curun1r 10y ago
  > It's in the best interests of those who own homes to lock people out of homeownership. This is only true in the absence of periodic appraisals to recalculate property taxes. In states where that is the norm, homeowners are incentivized to allow other homeowners to prevent their properties from appreciating, so long as they're not planning to sell in the immediate future. This has its own drawbacks (mostly longtime, fixed-income homeowners who are forced out due to onerous property taxes), but it's a much healthier dynamic than what states like California, where property taxes are capped, have.
  • eru 10y ago
    Land taxes are even better for this. No need to penalize people for (housing) owning capital on top of the land.
    • jrs235 10y ago
      It appears that you are getting down voted. I can only assume its because people don't like taxes, of any type, in general or that they don't understand what you mean by land taxes. Perhaps if you elaborated on land taxes then people would understand that "property" taxes should be determined by the value of the land being occupied and not include the value of what it is being used for (the tax amount shouldn't be more if its a 10 story high rise vs. a parking lot). Land is a fixed asset. If someone owned an entire block in San Francisco that was just surface parking they should pay the same amount of [land] tax as the owner of the lot across the street that has a multi-million dollar high rise housing complex. The nuances of various land tax plans can be interesting. One being that EVERYONE (human) that lives in a city/state/country gets an allowance based on the amount of land in that city/state/country divided by the number of people living in that city/state/country (and even perhaps multiplied by days living/residing divided by 365).
      • eru 10y ago
        Yes, you could use the proceeds of a land tax to eg pay for a universal basic income. You can also use some proceeds to pay for infrastructure development (of any kind). If done well, then the additional infrastructure will raise land values enough to pay for itself in higher taxes. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem