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Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion. One way to alleviate this problem is to have a harsher tax
by anonporridge 5y ago
Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion.
One way to alleviate this problem is to have a harsher tax on vacant properties to punish using housing as a store of value and creating artificial scarcity in the market, e.g. like how the DeBeers corporation made diamonds artificially scarce and scammed the world for the past century selling a shiny rock.
- davidw 5y ago> Land lords still exist in a competitive market and can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion. Well...kind of. It's pretty bad in a lot of places. There aren't enough homes in the places people want to live.
- anonporridge 5y agoThere's a delicate balance of property owners using their power to prevent new construction and densification in an attempt to keep their property values high by preventing competition and going too far where you destroy your local economy because the people who actually do the work can't afford to live there.
- jimbob45 5y agoWhat good is it to build rental properties that will only be used for AirBNB? You’ve ruined even more of the environment just to enrich a landlord. It has nothing to do with supply - there are more houses now than can be occupied in the US. It has everything to do with misusing the supply we have.
- davidw 5y agoVacant housing in Cyanide Springs, Oklahoma is useless to people who want to be near jobs in Palo Alto. It has everything to do with the supply of housing and how it's been severely constrained over the years.
- jimbob45 5y agoAnd what about when you’ve exhausted every square inch of land to shove more housing on? Then the city isn’t worth anything to anyone and you move on to the next city to ruin. At some point, enough is enough and you have to accept that there’s no room for more housing without ruining the city. You could focus on reclaiming AirBNBs and vacant housing and you might be able to make a dent in the problem. Just announce that your city is full and tell everyone to move on. Ruining the city will make landlords money and everyone unhappy.
- lmm 5y ago> And what about when you’ve exhausted every square inch of land to shove more housing on? Then the city isn’t worth anything to anyone and you move on to the next city to ruin. So Manhattan isn't worth anything to anyone? Funny, I thought it was one of the most valuable and productive places in the country and there were still swarms of people wanting to live there.
- davidw 5y agoThe city I lived in, in Italy has like twice as many people as the place I live in the US, in a slightly smaller footprint. This is accomplished by some clever technology the Italians use: they are able to stack dwelling units on top of one another. In many ways, it was a more pleasant place to live, since I could walk or bike to so many places.
- jollybean 5y ago"can't arbitrarily raise rents without collusion." ??? There's no need for 'collusion' - term is 'inflation' - which will 100% happen when we start printing money at that scale. It's unavoidable, almost by definition. Housing costs are already skyrocketing and this is moving into rents already, at least largely in part because of of massive Fed Stimulus. In the short run it might be better to just give some cheques to people, but not over any period of time.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago"term is 'inflation' - which will 100% happen when we start printing money at that scale." So you get 0% inflation when we give money to the rich and bail out the banks, but as soon and you give a hobo $50 the entire economy crumbles and inflation spikes, right? Very conveneint ideology
- usefulcat 5y agoIf you give a lot of money to the rich, I would expect to see inflation in the stock market. Coincidentally, the stock market has far, far outpaced inflation for probably at least 20 years now.
- jollybean 5y agoI didn't remotely imply any of that. You fabricated a bunch of ideas which have nothing to do with what I said. 'Very convenient fabrication'. --> If you put a lot more dollars into the real economy by direct distribution, then rents will go up via systematic collusion. Most of that money handed out will be captured by landlords. That has nothing to do with with what may or may not happen if you concentrate money in the financial sector via whatever means.
- j_walter 5y agoNot to mention the rents going up to make up the lost money for all those who didn't pay rent the last 2 years.
- rthomas6 5y agoThe thought-out version of this is called Georgism. It proposes a (close to) 100% tax on the unimproved value of land. Economists agree the tax can't be passed on to renters, for reasons I can't articulate. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progress-and-poverty https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
- dnautics 5y agoHow do you define and evaluate unimproved value?
- deelowe 5y agoYou can’t and that’s why such a program is popular with politicians. The bigger issue is with vacant properties being used as cash stores.
- hpkuarg 5y ago> You can't Sure you can. Unimproved value of the land is simply the value of the lot as a whole minus the value of building that sits atop (well, improvements aren't always buildings, but that's a simple example). You can approximate it by comparing it against the transaction prices of nearby lots that aren't improved, or by taking the construction cost out of the purchase price of the lot. > is popular with politicians Land value tax in general isn't that popular around the world, and Henry George's version of it, where all tax is replaced with just a land value tax, even less so. As far as I'm aware, there is literally no jurisdiction in the world whose sole tax revenue is from LVT. Economists and idealists like land value tax; politicians, who derive a lot of power from the wealthy landowning class (who in turn would be the most hurt by LVT), not so much. > The bigger issue is with vacant properties being used as cash stores. Land value tax would be an excellent way to curb real estate speculation.
- dnautics 5y agoSo a unit that abuts the el should have the same per acre value as a unit a block and a half away?
- dv_dt 5y agoThey don't need to collude, they just need a public price signal - which advertised rent prices signal. As a landlord, it's something like a prisoners dilemma, only there is a much lower disincentive for breaking away to raise your price.
- keyboardCowBoy 5y agoLandlords in collusion? What kind of landlords, like mom and pop? My small apartment complex raised my rent 25%. Is this collusion?