5 ms·

I think all countries should be eliminating real estate speculation ;-) Xi Jinping’s famous words are “housing is for living in and not for speculation.” When

I think all countries should be eliminating real estate speculation ;-) Xi Jinping’s famous words are “housing is for living in and not for speculation.” When will American join these other countries? Netherlands: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28422768 China: https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/7/28/in-its-latest-crackdown-china-intensifies-focus-on-real-estate https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2021/7/28/in-its-latest-cr...

sokoloff 5y ago
> Did they get ripped off by some owners that refused to sell and haggled upward? The first sentence of the article says they bought them from two corporate landlords.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  Missed that. Thank you good sir.
bserge 5y ago
People are against the idea because in their minds they won't be able to buy 2-3 homes and rent one or two out. No, this is about companies owning 150,000 apartments in a city that they simply charge ever-increasing rent for. It's lunacy.
- andrepd 5y ago
  Well to be fair buying 2-3 homes to rent is also undesirable rent-seeking, albeit on a smaller scale.
  - fragmede 5y ago
    It matters where the money goes afterwards. If it goes to a local landlord that spends it in that same neighborhood, improving it, vs going into an REIT that will make their investors, and their board, several states away happy. This is an important distinction that between trickle down theory and practice. Getting one person to $100mm vs making 10 people $10mm-airs vs 100 people to be single digit millionaires? Matters a lot in the long run, for a lot of reasons. We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system, so we have to realize that there are different shades of damage done by rent-seeking.
    - andrepd 5y ago
      Trickle-down doesn't work at any scale. If you want money to "trickle" down to a group of people, simply give cash to that group of people. This means lowering taxes on labour, for instance. > We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system Well we can certainly ameliorate it. Implementing a proper Georgist LVT would be a nice first step.
- danlugo92 5y ago
  I can either own 2 apartments worth $50k each, or have $100k stock in a company that owns $15k aparments. Can't outlaw one without outlawing the other one. If you ban one entity from owning more than n apartments, they'll just create apartments/n shell companies.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    Yes you can. You tie companies back to a specific person who has control over that company. And limit ownership of residential property by those people.
- anovikov 5y ago
  Extending that idea, we arrive from lunacy to a good thing: a city that is completely owned by one company. Where police is the company's private guards, the city council is its board of directors, and municipal taxes are just fees the company charges. And that is a good thing. I'd live in such a city if there was one. For example: no homeless. This is all a private territory, and if you don't pay your rent, a guard escorts you off the premises. Very little if any crime because crime prevention is all in one hands and these hands are protecting by and large, their own private property and their profits (because if the crime rate goes up, rent goes down and rent is how they make money). A wall keeping undesirables out. Guards/police that can check your papers anytime just simply as they can say in a hotel - "what's your room number"? So no "undocumented" aliens. There can't be any constitutional etc. bullshit that could prevent them from having an actual 24/7 guarded wall and checkpoints with papers check around their PRIVATE property. It can be a functional society where everyone who's there, belongs there.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    What would you do when the city decides to double prices overnight because it’s a private company focussed on profit maximisation and has a complete monopoly over absolutely everything
    - anovikov 5y ago
      What's the problem? Just move elsewhere. You don't own a place there - you can only rent - so you don't lose anything - it will be about as stupid/unworkable as one hotel in a city raking up room prices 2x just because they "try to maximise profit".
    - fragmede 5y ago
      Not to mention, what happens when you get laid off or fired? Ejected from your company town?
      - anovikov 5y ago
        Why? A company where one works, rents office space there. You rent an apartment. You can work for another company there, or move elsewhere.
- luckylion 5y ago
  Meh. I have friends who lived in a Vonovia apartment in a prefab in East Berlin. It's not for me, but the rent was pretty cheap (~10 Euros/sqm, heating + warm water included) and didn't get raised during the years they lived there. Berlin just came from a place of super low rent and is slowly catching up to other large German cities. Understandably, Berliners are in shock, but it's more "things are returning to normal" than "Berlin is so expensive, nobody can live there".
  - baybal2 5y ago
    It's a dreadful irony that communist plattenbau now cost more than homes further West.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    The simple fact is that the people who complain about their homes they rent from those companies are unable to find other accommodation for a comparable rent. Which in turn implies that it is not really the fault of those companies, otherwise somebody else would be able to provide better housing for the same price.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  You can not simply charge "ever-increasing rent". You can only charge what people are willing to pay. More people are pouring into the city every day who are prepared to pay more. Simple as that. Those companies owning 150K apartments are also shareholder companies, so "small people" and their pension plans will still be affected.
  - dpatterbee 5y ago
    People have to live somewhere, if someone's forced to choose between picking up an extra job to afford rent or living on the streets, they're gunna choose the first. I'd argue this is a bad thing and people deserve places to live.
    - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
      Yes, they have to live somewhere. Not necessarily in central Berlin, or central San Francisco. There are plenty of places with cheap housing in Germany. Also just because people need something, doesn't imply they have to be given those things for free. That's not usually how it works.
andrepd 5y ago
Houses can be homes to live in or can be an investment. They cannot be both. Since spending considerable labour and materials building concrete boxes for the ultimate purpose of speculation is silly, then it must be the former.
- coralreef 5y ago
  What is an investment defined as? Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment. Or live it in themselves as they ride the speculative wave.
  - TeMPOraL 5y ago
    Optimizing construction for investments leads to different houses, apartments and even neighborhoods than optimizing for living - the same way as optimizing your site for ad revenue leads to a completely different structure than optimizing it for actually being useful to your visitors/customers.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    > Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment. No, they are inserting themselves in the process as a middle-man providing absolutely no service or added value. All they have is capital, a monopoly on capital wrt. the person renting the house. This lets them add a drastic markup on the monthly price of housing for the person renting, as a direct first-order effect, PLUS, as an indirect effect this mechanism incentivises speculation and raises house prices even more.
    - coralreef 5y ago
      Renting out a house is a service. Being a landlord means legal responsibilities and liabilities. Houses need to be up to code, maintained, insured, and this is expensive. Grass needs to be cut, pipes need to be fixed, appliances need to be in working order. The person who wants to rent a house has obviously chosen not to, or cannot afford to, buy a house. They get the upside of having to take no financial risk, ie. fire, tornado, flooding, economic/housing market collapse, etc. The downside is they do not have ownership and make no market gains.
sva_ 5y ago
I don't know much about housing in Berlin, but I think the story is that in the time after the Berlin wall was torn down, late 80s, the city really needed money. As a result, they sold hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned apartments to these private companies in the 90s and 00s for almost nothing.[0][1] Now those apartments are worth a lot more, and people are mad because housing is not affordable to many. Hence you often hear demands for dispossession. The whole story is probably a lot more complicated though, idk. [0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-privatisierung-was-aus-den-landeseigenen-wohnungen-wurde/24025260-all.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-privatisierung-w... [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-in-berlin-als-das-tafelsilber-verkauft-wurde/13019974-2.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-in-... edit: if you read [1] for example, the private companies bought 65000 apartments for 400 million Euro. Now the city bought back 14750 apts for 2.46 billion Euro. Considering that these houses probably have barely been renovated if at all, the quality probably dropped significantly.
FredPret 5y ago
Well if Xi Jinping says so…
yunohn 5y ago
I wouldn’t use the Netherlands as an example, your link is only a “plan” they’re floating. The housing situation here is horrible - skyrocketing prices and massive corporate ownership. Real estate is massive money, and the politicians are in on it - so nothing is going to actually change. Plus, they take forever for new builds, so supply doesn’t meet demand at all.
- wsc981 5y ago
  One member of the Dutch royal family even owns about 500 apartments (IIRC) in Amsterdam.
imtringued 5y ago
There you have it (the solution): https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE

sokoloff 5y ago

> Did they get ripped off by some owners that refused to sell and haggled upward? The first sentence of the article says they bought them from two corporate landlords.

goldenkey 5y ago
Missed that. Thank you good sir.

bserge 5y ago

People are against the idea because in their minds they won't be able to buy 2-3 homes and rent one or two out. No, this is about companies owning 150,000 apartments in a city that they simply charge ever-increasing rent for. It's lunacy.

andrepd 5y ago
Well to be fair buying 2-3 homes to rent is also undesirable rent-seeking, albeit on a smaller scale.
- fragmede 5y ago
  It matters where the money goes afterwards. If it goes to a local landlord that spends it in that same neighborhood, improving it, vs going into an REIT that will make their investors, and their board, several states away happy. This is an important distinction that between trickle down theory and practice. Getting one person to $100mm vs making 10 people $10mm-airs vs 100 people to be single digit millionaires? Matters a lot in the long run, for a lot of reasons. We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system, so we have to realize that there are different shades of damage done by rent-seeking.
  - andrepd 5y ago
    Trickle-down doesn't work at any scale. If you want money to "trickle" down to a group of people, simply give cash to that group of people. This means lowering taxes on labour, for instance. > We can't abolish rent-seeking entirely without overthrowing the whole system Well we can certainly ameliorate it. Implementing a proper Georgist LVT would be a nice first step.
danlugo92 5y ago
I can either own 2 apartments worth $50k each, or have $100k stock in a company that owns $15k aparments. Can't outlaw one without outlawing the other one. If you ban one entity from owning more than n apartments, they'll just create apartments/n shell companies.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  Yes you can. You tie companies back to a specific person who has control over that company. And limit ownership of residential property by those people.
anovikov 5y ago
Extending that idea, we arrive from lunacy to a good thing: a city that is completely owned by one company. Where police is the company's private guards, the city council is its board of directors, and municipal taxes are just fees the company charges. And that is a good thing. I'd live in such a city if there was one. For example: no homeless. This is all a private territory, and if you don't pay your rent, a guard escorts you off the premises. Very little if any crime because crime prevention is all in one hands and these hands are protecting by and large, their own private property and their profits (because if the crime rate goes up, rent goes down and rent is how they make money). A wall keeping undesirables out. Guards/police that can check your papers anytime just simply as they can say in a hotel - "what's your room number"? So no "undocumented" aliens. There can't be any constitutional etc. bullshit that could prevent them from having an actual 24/7 guarded wall and checkpoints with papers check around their PRIVATE property. It can be a functional society where everyone who's there, belongs there.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  What would you do when the city decides to double prices overnight because it’s a private company focussed on profit maximisation and has a complete monopoly over absolutely everything
  - anovikov 5y ago
    What's the problem? Just move elsewhere. You don't own a place there - you can only rent - so you don't lose anything - it will be about as stupid/unworkable as one hotel in a city raking up room prices 2x just because they "try to maximise profit".
  - fragmede 5y ago
    Not to mention, what happens when you get laid off or fired? Ejected from your company town?
    - anovikov 5y ago
      Why? A company where one works, rents office space there. You rent an apartment. You can work for another company there, or move elsewhere.
luckylion 5y ago
Meh. I have friends who lived in a Vonovia apartment in a prefab in East Berlin. It's not for me, but the rent was pretty cheap (~10 Euros/sqm, heating + warm water included) and didn't get raised during the years they lived there. Berlin just came from a place of super low rent and is slowly catching up to other large German cities. Understandably, Berliners are in shock, but it's more "things are returning to normal" than "Berlin is so expensive, nobody can live there".
- baybal2 5y ago
  It's a dreadful irony that communist plattenbau now cost more than homes further West.
- notanzaiiswear 5y ago
  The simple fact is that the people who complain about their homes they rent from those companies are unable to find other accommodation for a comparable rent. Which in turn implies that it is not really the fault of those companies, otherwise somebody else would be able to provide better housing for the same price.
notanzaiiswear 5y ago
You can not simply charge "ever-increasing rent". You can only charge what people are willing to pay. More people are pouring into the city every day who are prepared to pay more. Simple as that. Those companies owning 150K apartments are also shareholder companies, so "small people" and their pension plans will still be affected.
- dpatterbee 5y ago
  People have to live somewhere, if someone's forced to choose between picking up an extra job to afford rent or living on the streets, they're gunna choose the first. I'd argue this is a bad thing and people deserve places to live.
  - notanzaiiswear 5y ago
    Yes, they have to live somewhere. Not necessarily in central Berlin, or central San Francisco. There are plenty of places with cheap housing in Germany. Also just because people need something, doesn't imply they have to be given those things for free. That's not usually how it works.

andrepd 5y ago

Houses can be homes to live in or can be an investment. They cannot be both. Since spending considerable labour and materials building concrete boxes for the ultimate purpose of speculation is silly, then it must be the former.

coralreef 5y ago
What is an investment defined as? Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment. Or live it in themselves as they ride the speculative wave.
- TeMPOraL 5y ago
  Optimizing construction for investments leads to different houses, apartments and even neighborhoods than optimizing for living - the same way as optimizing your site for ad revenue leads to a completely different structure than optimizing it for actually being useful to your visitors/customers.
- andrepd 5y ago
  > Because I'm pretty sure someone can buy a home, rent it out and make a monthly return on it, thus satisfying both a place to live and investment. No, they are inserting themselves in the process as a middle-man providing absolutely no service or added value. All they have is capital, a monopoly on capital wrt. the person renting the house. This lets them add a drastic markup on the monthly price of housing for the person renting, as a direct first-order effect, PLUS, as an indirect effect this mechanism incentivises speculation and raises house prices even more.
  - coralreef 5y ago
    Renting out a house is a service. Being a landlord means legal responsibilities and liabilities. Houses need to be up to code, maintained, insured, and this is expensive. Grass needs to be cut, pipes need to be fixed, appliances need to be in working order. The person who wants to rent a house has obviously chosen not to, or cannot afford to, buy a house. They get the upside of having to take no financial risk, ie. fire, tornado, flooding, economic/housing market collapse, etc. The downside is they do not have ownership and make no market gains.

sva_ 5y ago

I don't know much about housing in Berlin, but I think the story is that in the time after the Berlin wall was torn down, late 80s, the city really needed money. As a result, they sold hundreds of thousands of publicly-owned apartments to these private companies in the 90s and 00s for almost nothing.[0][1] Now those apartments are worth a lot more, and people are mad because housing is not affordable to many. Hence you often hear demands for dispossession. The whole story is probably a lot more complicated though, idk. [0] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-privatisierung-was-aus-den-landeseigenen-wohnungen-wurde/24025260-all.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/nach-der-privatisierung-w... [1] https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-in-berlin-als-das-tafelsilber-verkauft-wurde/13019974-2.html https://www.tagesspiegel.de/wirtschaft/immobilien/neubau-in-... edit: if you read [1] for example, the private companies bought 65000 apartments for 400 million Euro. Now the city bought back 14750 apts for 2.46 billion Euro. Considering that these houses probably have barely been renovated if at all, the quality probably dropped significantly.

FredPret 5y ago

Well if Xi Jinping says so…

yunohn 5y ago

I wouldn’t use the Netherlands as an example, your link is only a “plan” they’re floating. The housing situation here is horrible - skyrocketing prices and massive corporate ownership. Real estate is massive money, and the politicians are in on it - so nothing is going to actually change. Plus, they take forever for new builds, so supply doesn’t meet demand at all.

wsc981 5y ago
One member of the Dutch royal family even owns about 500 apartments (IIRC) in Amsterdam.

imtringued 5y ago

There you have it (the solution): https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE https://youtu.be/Li_MGFRNqOE