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The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. We all need it, and we should figure out mechanisms to make it available to al

The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. We all need it, and we should figure out mechanisms to make it available to all. Practically that means paying to build and maintain housing stocks, changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing, charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people), abolish mandatory minimum parking, and upzone neighborhoods (eliminating the "single family home" neighborhoods as a zoning type.) I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case, that we should protect the rights of people to live where they've historically lived (eg, one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years), and we should offer extensive public housing (built as many geographically distributed small apartment buildings and 5 over 1s, not giant tenements or projects.)

mutatio 4y ago
"Nearly every case" is very wishy washy, I assume you have some specifics, what about trashing a property, who absorbs that cost? Living where one has historically lived is interesting, take London - you're implying it should be a birth right for natives - what about the immigrant flow into such cities, how would you reconcile the "right of natives" with human capital?
- turtledove 4y ago
  Not a birthright, I don't think it should move across generations, but I do think that it's needlessly cruel to force someone out of their home because wealthier people want to live there. As for tenants v landlords, I believe it should be difficult to evict tenants except in cases where the tenant is clearly a danger to others or to the home itself. If they are vandalizing the property, that should be an eviction. Likewise if they are cooking meth. But I think tenants should be protected if, eg, their income drops due to a layoff or unforseen medical expense.
  - jdhendrickson 4y ago
    Do you not see any obvious flaws in your desired changes?
    - turtledove 4y ago
      Depends. But what you label a flaw, I might label a feature. There is space for both of us to disagree about whether certain outcomes are desirable or not.
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    So the landlord what, eats all of the downside in that scenario? But I'm sure you'd also restrict their ability to raise rents on other tenants (if they have multiple units) to compensate, so why would the landlord even do this to begin with? It's potentially 100% downside and restricted upside.
    - turtledove 4y ago
      Yep. You got it in one. Private landlords are a part of the problem. They have every incentive to prevent new housing from being built. It should be challenging to be better at providing housing than the municipality government.
      - fundad 4y ago
        Exactly. Landlords aren’t entitled to a good business. If you diligently maintain the home you rent out AND pay income tax, it’s not a great business now. The profits are in neglect and appreciation.
        paisawalla 4y ago
        If you agree with this, you're saying they're not entitled to any business, plus are on the hook for all of their tenants. Why would anyone do this?
      - 4y ago
Ferrotin 4y ago
Why on earth would anybody build apartments or rent out property under your scheme?
- brtkdotse 4y ago
  The government would.
- anm89 4y ago
  - turtledove 4y ago
    It's absolutely realistic, and the fact that you're writing it off so quickly shows your ignorance. Social housing is successful in many parts of the world. Look at Singapore, for instance. Mandatory parking minimums are going away in cities across the US, and units are getting more housing as a result. Washington State is considering removing single family zoning. Cities like Paris have many smaller apartment complexes that are public housing. Everything I've suggested either exists or is being discussed seriously in some capacity. But, by all means keep your head in the sand rather than try to engage with actual housing policy.
    - paisawalla 4y ago
      It's really incredible that you're saying "superficially similar policies are being enacted in multiple, disparate geographies around the world, in vastly differing cultural and economic contexts, so you can't deny that all of them should coincide in one totally separate place I've chosen." I notice you didn't mention Berlin's rent control fiasco btw
    - shaky-carrousel 4y ago
      It's funny. There are ignorant people everywhere. But smug ignorance, that I only find it in Americans, for some reason. Maybe it's that "best country in the world" mentality leaking. That mentality doesn't make humble people.
me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
Cut down home ownership to max 3 homes per household. Otherwise rent from someone else. And yes it’s possible to be capitalist and agree with sensible regulations. I’d rather we focus on building amazing companies and utilizing labor effectively.
- jokethrowaway 4y ago
  Capitalism does imply the absence of regulations imposed by a bunch of goons with guns that claim to be "a legit government representing the people". Mixed economies are not capitalism. You can say you're a bit capitalist - that's an easy one, we have plenty of data to show that positive economic effect for everyone are linked to free markets - but still believe fairy tales about the government being moral and caring about something which is not being re-elected and stealing money from people.
  - me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
    Bro I can also pretend government can buzz off, but we need a military to protect our interests. We need some semblance of order so we don't descend into anarchy and chaos. People who exist at polar ends and bring up edge cases without contributing to fixing them to bring us closer to the middle actively make things worse, imo. These are not zero sum games, and people that think they are probably have no skin in the game. Even the people with lots of wealth and resources worry about losing them, and in order to maintain it you need to make concessions when necessary and be pragmatic.
- aperson_hello 4y ago
  I'd claim the big issue is Blackrock coming in and buying all the available housing and renting it out for the max amount possible. If you restrict individuals, but not corporations, you create a worse problem!
  - hackerfromthefu 4y ago
    Yes corporations/BlackRock must be limited to 3 or 10 or whatever. If they corner the market we will see a dystopia for sure.
acchow 4y ago
I guess you are unaware of all the money people pour into their homes - renovations, furniture, upkeep, maintenance. People spend all kinds of money on nice things, but nothing comes close to the home itself. There will always be a market for this.
- turtledove 4y ago
  My home is currently valued at 1.7m. I'm acutely aware of the cost of owning and maintaining a home. But "homes have costs" does not axiomatically lead to "housing must therefore be a market."
  - acchow 4y ago
    No, but people want nice homes and are willing to spend a ton for it.
paisawalla 4y ago
Ah yes, I also was deeply enamored with Coruscant the first time I saw it depicted. It never occurred to me to reverse engineer the planning policies which could give rise to such a nightmare however.
- turtledove 4y ago
  What? I'm out here saying "having homelessness is bad." And "reduce open parking lots so we can house people." I think you'll find if you increase housing supply and density you're likely to end up with more natural spaces, not less.
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    You're out here saying 640 sqft ought to be enough for anyone.
    - b112 4y ago
      So many of these ideas are some other vision in disguise. Cars are bad, you see, and therefore, let's pick some irrelevant problem (parking lots), and conflate it with housing issues. First, most places have zero housing issues. Mostly, certain tiny areas(with large populations) of California do, but the rest of North America has no shortage of land to build on. And unlike California, most of the world doesn't seem to have issues with zoning for new builds. In fact, in most of NA housing is quite affordable, with the exception of a current bubble, which exists due to COVID issues, a once in a century event. This has only been going on for a year or so, and is already starting to cool. Californians: a note. Your issues are not nation wide. Others: stop trying to solve other pet peeves, by conflating issues. I assure you, you just end up sounding uninformed.
      - turtledove 4y ago
        Surface parking lots take a huge volume of space that could be used to house tens or hundreds of families. It has nothing to do with "cars bad", and everything to do with "why are we letting all this precious resource go so poorly utilized?"
pj_mukh 4y ago
I really think most of the solution is in the first part of your plan. There’s no need to micromanage tenant-landlord relationships or setup governmental panels on who historically deserves to live where, if the government can just make sure there is an oversupply of decent housing at all affordability levels. The rest really takes care of itself at that point.
- turtledove 4y ago
  Hundred percent. I have a personal ethos that believes profit from rent is amoral, but we could probably address housing concerns without meeting my personal ethics standards, which I freely admit are more extreme than most.
  - cycrutchfield 4y ago
    “profit from rent is amoral”. Care to elaborate on this? Does this ethical standard also extend to other human needs as well? For instance should farmers not be able to profit from providing food?
    - b112 4y ago
      It's just backdoor socialism, and I say that as a Canuck!
      - serenitylater 4y ago
    - account42 4y ago
      If the farmer disappears, the food will no longer be produced. If the landlord disappears, the house will still be there.
      - cycrutchfield 4y ago
        Oh ok, I get where you’re going with this now. Some Marxist bullshit
anovikov 4y ago
Only way to achieve it is to return segregation
5ersi 4y ago
Nobody "decided" that housing is a market. If something can be bought and sold, then this is inherently a market. Yes, we can and should regulate markets, and we probably all agree that the purpose of the housing is for people to have a roof over their head, as opposed to use housing as an (speculative) investment market. This can easily be regulated via taxes (on ownership and transactions), but it comes with a caveat: if something is over-regulated to benefit the user, then there is less incentive for investor/landlord to build housing, which makes housing scarcer and drives prices up.
- turtledove 4y ago
  I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market? I buy sewer and garbage service likewise. There are some commodities we choose to operate as natural monopolies because competition and profit seeking leads to bad outcomes for society. My argument is fundamentally that housing is the same.
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    How will you be deciding who gets to have a view of the ocean, and who gets to sleep next to the overpass? First come first serve? Birthright?
    - nivenkos 4y ago
      Pricing? You can have the government / housing co-ops sell properties and just forbid private renting out in absentia.
      - paisawalla 4y ago
        The point is that 1 KWh is 1KWh, but your home on the top floor of Millennium Tower is not equivalent to my home across from the 680 overpass. Housing is not a commodity like electricity, it's not fungible.
    - turtledove 4y ago
nivenkos 4y ago
A more practical solution is housing coops like the BRF system in Sweden. Individual landlordism is mostly banned (there are some company rentals though) - you buy the place you live in, and there are restrictions on renting it out (no more than 2 years in a row, etc.). It's helped a lot here. I don't think that social housing is a good solution. It's a complete disaster here in Sweden, with 12+ year waiting times, and massive inequality between those who have those rent-fixed privileged first hand contracts and those stuck in the unregulated wild west of second hand renting. Often resulting in the working poor effectively subsidising wealthier, older people to keep their very cheap flats in the city centre, etc.
- turtledove 4y ago
  I love housing co-ops as well. If we ended up in a system like that, I'd be thrilled.
- thow-58d4e8b 4y ago
  > BRF system in Sweden To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus: Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple
  - unwind 4y ago
    The grandparent is a bit unclear in my opinion. In the BRF system, you literally do not "buy the place you live in", you instead buy the right to live there. The actual ownership of the property is with the BRF. The word is "bostadsrättsförening" [1] which roughly translates to "living rights association" or something (Wikipedia uses "housing cooperative" so I guess that's the best). The word "förening" is hard to translate, the closest seems to be "voluntary association" [1], it is a formal collection of people with some common purpose (like managing a house). There are legally various types with varying requirements, and so on. Edit: spelling, more linkage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_association
merrywhether 4y ago
Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in the type of building most likely), but attempting to protect their exact house just creates the equivalent of a public subsidy to exempt them from keeping pace with local land efficiency demands.
- turtledove 4y ago
  Yes! And thank you for approaching this with a thoughtful question. One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built. Alternatively, buy units from people who are leaving or who have passed away. We do need to knock down some houses to build more housing, but we can do it in a way that is minimally disruptive.
  - carom 4y ago
    >One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built. You are just increasing the cost of the building's rent with this stuff. You'll have a few birthright units and everything else will be luxury to cover costs. This is the same problem we currently have with affordable units, huge missing middle.
- UncleMeat 4y ago
  There is huge tension. We've forced ourselves into a situation where it is difficult to fix things because housing is such a huge portion of many people's wealth. Policies that improve things for the poor and lower middle class in meaningful ways will crush the upper middle class, who have a lot of local political influence because they've got enough money to have free time but there are still a lot of them. Somebody with a mortgage 4x their gross annual income is going to fight hard to prevent their house from tanking in price, even if that means promoting anti-social policies. It is a mess.
deleted 4y ago
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jjav 4y ago
> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. How do you or we decide it's not a market? If people are paying money for housing, it's a market. And it's not just money, but the largest lifetime expense by an order of magnitude and more. > I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case That's already the case, at least in many places (I know not all). If you take it too far the result is no landlords, thus no rentals. Perhaps that's ok if everyone wants to buy, but if there is anyone who wants to rent, it's useful to have rentals.
jillesvangurp 4y ago
The inevitable outcome of housing inflation and elimination of the middle class is slums: illegal housing. People will have to live somewhere. And when that becomes unaffordable they'll just improvise. This is not a technical problem but a policy problem. The solution is changing the policy. The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. This problem exists in most wealthy nations. There is no shortage of space. Just of access to that space. Mostly that's completely intentional and reinforced by generations of politicians acting on the will of the people they represent to ensure that can never change. You have NIMBYs and vested financial interests basically. Nobody wants their property devalued. So, social housing always is unpopular with the locals. Places like San Francisco where the homeless take dumps on Market Street are of course a bit extreme. But same principle. No shortage of space there. But it's all reserved and off limits. So, the homeless are camping out there. In the middle of a city full of some of the richest NIMBYs on this planet. That's not a temporary solution. That's a slum and it is growing. Complete with people just shitting all over the place. Slums are what happens when you let things escalate.
- southerntofu 4y ago
  > The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France). You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education. We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.
LatteLazy 4y ago
Housing isn't a market because there are 1001 restrictions on supply and subsidies for holding large amounts. I'm far from right wing, but let's not pretend the issue here is a market not working. It's that we rigged the whole system and then blame "the market" for the results...
shetill 4y ago
The reason the housing has turned into such a market is not because the evil overlords are deciding. It's due to overwhelming demand and the supply cannot keep up, so landlords have the freedom to choose any prices. The reason there is so much demand is because there are way more people on this planet now than there ever used to be. So if you want cheaper houses, solve the overpopulation problem first.
- turtledove 4y ago
  Landlords don't need to raise rent if their costs aren't rising.
  - dazc 4y ago
    Landlords who acquired property 20 years will use 'market rate' as a justification. I know of someone making a living from such a building consisting of 2 small apartments and a single office. He doesn't have a job, just idols away at home at all day getting anxious about climate change and identity politics.
    - shetill 4y ago
      landlords are definitely taking advantage of the situation, but that's a consequence of the bigger picture. In EU the constant influx of immigrants from 3rd world countries is creating demand and raising the prices while decreasing the salaries since they work for half the price and quality than locals but companies hire them regardless and they don't mind living 5 people in 2 bed flat. Moreover overseas oligarchs and cartels are buying out properties and raising the prices even more.
  - matheusmoreira 4y ago
    Landlords don't need to raise prices. They want to. We all want to have more dollars than everyone else and landlords are no exception.
    - turtledove 4y ago
glerk 4y ago
Housing shouldn't be a market? Then how would housing be allocated? The state builds and gives housing to everyone? Maybe you should take a trip to Eastern Europe one of these days to see the final result of what you're advocating. Pros: everyone is given an apartment to live in. Cons: your city's skyline looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/5X1sIeP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5X1sIeP.jpg "We collectively decide" just means you decide for me. You think you know better than everyone else and want to impose your values on others.
- maccard 4y ago
  Eastern European cities aren't the only examples. Nordic cities (e.g. Stockholm and Copenhagen) are great examples - they have different problems but people are housed. Cities like Berlin don't have a speculative housing market due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term. Finally, Vienna is the poster child for "how to do social housing".
  - glerk 4y ago
    All these cities still have a housing market albeit a more regulated one than your average American city. Housing is still developed and owned by private interest and responds to supply and demand. We could debate the policies of these specific cities (for example, the trade-offs of Berlin's rent control: https://archive.ph/l3i2w https://archive.ph/l3i2w) but that's beyond the point. The parent's position is "housing shouldn't be a market", and I am showing an example of what soviet-style state control over housing looks like in practice.
  - Kiro 4y ago
    What is Stockholm a great example of? There's still a housing market with absurd prices and all signs of a bubble. It's impossible to get an apartment in Stockholm unless you have a 20-year waiting time, buy an illegal third-hand contract or have the wealth to buy an apartment. The housing crisis in Sweden is extreme.
  - BlargMcLarg 4y ago
    Almost every major city in Europe has the exact same problems. Or arguably worse, depending on your socioeconomic status. Where this myth of "European cities are great" is coming from I don't know, and I would love to know. >Due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term This backfires spectacularly once you realize landlords continue to hold the reigns and put up huge demands to avoid "bad renters". As long as the rights don't cover the entirety, landlords will continue to pressure renters in different, more obscene ways. And in today's society, renting long term also isn't as great as people make it out to be, when your long term rent is a glorified broom closet and there's a great job opportunity a few cities over.
cloutchaser 4y ago
The problem in almost every country with out of control house prices is low interest rates since the dot com crash. That's where everything went wrong. At 0-1% interest you can get insane mortgages for 90-95% of the value of the property, pushing the price up to where people spend every last cent they can on mortgages, but at $xxxx per month you can easily afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgages. Raise interest rates (happening), go into recession, crash the market, stop people getting mortgages, house prices will drop insanely fast and hard. Of course no government wants to do this because it will panic the home owning class. Well - you have to chose at this point. Make it impossible for young people to buy a home, or piss off homeowners.
- nxm 4y ago
  If there is a recession, young people will not be in a position to buy homes
  - closedloop129 4y ago
    They will, as long as they have a job. All the forfeited houses from the people who cannot serve their mortgages will flood the market and drive down prices. Additionally, all the surplus construction infrastructure will be there, fighting for every project, which will make new houses cheap.
    - mellavora 4y ago
      > All the forfeited houses from the people who cannot serve their mortgages will flood the market and drive down prices. I used to think this. How does your model change if there is a large pool of private equity, ready to buy properties for cash, and turn them into rental units? Assuming this pool can easily handle the flood (which it looks like it can).
      - closedloop129 4y ago
        Rental units on their own don't matter from a market perspective. There is some sentimental value in owning your own house but apart from that, costs have to be equal or demand shifts until they are. Private equity can only make a profit if they corner the market and hold back units until prices massively increase. This is possible to some extend but at its core it is most likely illegal because it requires collusion or a monopoly. So if that's an option, then there is a bigger problem than just housing prices. But even in an entirely corrupt market, private equity cannot beat the market after Covid. Home office has become fully acceptable so huge fractions of the population are not bound to a specific city. People are free to choose where they live. There will be some municipalities that offer an abundance of housing so that prices will stay down. Then, once people move there, companies will be founded there or move there, too. Wages will be lower because costs are lower, which will be a huge problem for the companies that didn't move. So if the established municipalities allow the private equity companies to profit, they risk their own demise. However, this depends on the willingness of the people to move. It is also contradicted by silicon valley being able to maintain its large housing prices. My guess is that prices will rise for a while but some Asian city will crack the code and offer cheap housing despite being a cultural center which would make it the technological capital of the world.
fifticon 4y ago
In spirit I agree with some of your ideas, and I hate rent-seeking. However, where I live, I nearly ended in a situation where I was not allowed to sell an appartment I owned and had lived in for 20 years. I had moved to a different city to work and live with my girlfriend, and had rented out the apartment, because obviously it is expensive to both hold one apartment and pay for a second one in the new city. I had rented out the apartment, because initially it wasn't clear if we were staying in the new city or going back to the old city, once my girlfriend had finished her degree in that city. I had made a written agreement with the tenant they rented for 2 years. 1 and a half year later, we had decided we were going to buy a house in the new city and stay there. I wrote the tenant to inform them, I had decided to sell the apartment, come the 2 year date. "OK", replied the tenant, "it's just that, I've decided I don't want to leave this nice cheap apartment anyway, and prefer to stay.." So I start to read up on the law in my country regarding these things. It turned out, in my country it is nearly impossible to make a pre-determined time-limited rental. In fact, there are only 4 scenarios where it is possible. It turns out, our contract should have had the specific wording "I rent out this apartment for a period of 2 years, because after 2 years I am going to move back to it myself, on this date, because I have the following specified timelimited activity I'm doing at location X". Because my contract only stipulated the duration, but not specified the exact legal grounding for the limitation, it was not valid. TL;DR. I ended up having to 'bribe' the tenant with a huge sum of money, to get their written consent to leave the apartment by the originally agreed-upon date. I also ended up losing a significant amount of money on the sale, because the presence of the previous tenants hurt the price I could negotiate on the sale. In fact, I would have made 5x more money on the sale, than I made from received rent for renting out. (ie I received maybe 50000 some-currency in rent (without expenses subtracted, so in practice it may have been more like 10-20000). But the reduced salesprice was ~300000 lower, because I ran the sale while the tenants were still present (in hindsight, I should not have put it up for sale until the tenants were gone, but I paid a huge price to learn that lesson :-(. So if I had let the appartment stay empty for 2 years instead of renting it out, I would have made 300k instead of 20-50k. Apart from the fact, that those 50k ended up being what I had to pay in "bribe money" to get the tenants to leave. So I basically let two strangers live for free for 2 years in my apartment, in return for them making it very difficult for me to sell my own apartment. A final caveat is, that technically it's even illegal to leave the apartment empty in my country - if it's empty for a prolonged period of time, you have to register it for "public rental", at a reasonable rent price.. So, yes, I definitely want the rights of tenants in place and protected, but it is possible to protect them so much, you actually make the life of people who have bought a single property miserable. A postscript: I know many won't buy my arguments about "losing money" here, since the money I would potentially earn or lose here, are exactly the sort of 'board game monopoly money' we are arguing about whether anybody should have or be entitled to. IE the money I would make back on the sale of the apartment I have owned for 20 years, are exactly those 'the game is rigged' money, that appear out of thin air, for not exactly doing anything (apart from maintaining my apartment against wear and tear.)
bmmayer1 4y ago
Isn't the problem that housing isn't more of a market? In an actual market, margins are competed away and prices drop over time, there's elasticity in supply and demand, and people don't view their 15-year old cars or whatever as "investments", they trade them up for a newer model and pass down the older stuff to people who can't afford them as much. In housing, we artificially constrain supply with zoning laws and building codes, and we stimulate demand with subsidized mortgages and rent control laws. It's pretty much the opposite of what you want to do if you want there to be more affordable housing.
- harambae 4y ago
  This is how I view it as well. And there'd be a analogous method for getting medical costs lower in America by increasing competition (within reason, I understand why no one wants to go back to the days of snake oil remedies in an unregulated free for all). Also odd is how these HN threads on housing often devolve into redesigning a socialist utopia from scratch in America, as if such a radical revolution has any chance, when Californians can't even organize enough to get Prop 13 repealed. Removing red tape and zoning to get to a more efficient market is much more achievable.
gernb 4y ago
I can't imagine physical housing not being a market. Even in a post scarcity star trek world someone gets the penthouse, someone gets the house on the hill with a view, someone gets the beach front property, someone gets the house in a convenient location or close to public transportation. How would that ever not be decided by a market? Even without money it would end up as a market of "merit" or policial capital
vletal 4y ago
Are you American? I feel like you are assuming taking extreme measures to solve US problems. Have you considered how similar measures already affect markets in other countries? ad. "not a market" - When you do that are you going to also forgive my crazy large mortgage? ad. "protect tenants" - In Czechia we protect the tenants more than landlords. If you mean that this should scare people from renting that works quite well. People do not have much leverage here to kick out tenants who are problematic or skip payments.
throwaddzuzxd 4y ago
> charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people) Housed people need parking lots though. Tons of places are not, and never will be accessible with public transports. I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car, as much as I'd love not needing one: I need to visit friends or family outside the city, I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough, I sometimes buy big housing furniture, I even had to retrieve parcels outside of the city sometimes... Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike, or anything can happen that I need my car to save 1 hour. > abolish mandatory minimum parking Same as above, that's an awful idea.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  The majority of places where housing is a problem are places where it makes far more sense to go through the short term pains of minimizing car usage in favor of long term space optimization. Cars take an obscene amount of space when combining everything required to keep individual car ownership afloat. Almost all the problems you present can be solved by planning differently. You don't need bulk grocery shopping with a shop open nearby in walking distance, available at least once every 3 day. Big housing furniture is a rare occurrence and can be delivered, or you can rent a car capable of transporting it. Punctuality can be solved socially. The main problem is density, and cities certainly don't have a shortage of population density. Car ownership is a huge luxury with a giant price tag, and it's finally catching up to society.
- cesarb 4y ago
  > I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car Your experience doesn't match mine. I also live in a city with a good public transport network, but I've never had a car, or felt much need to have one, or even to learn how to drive. For your examples (except the parcel one, which hasn't happened to me and I have no idea how it would happen): > I need to visit friends or family outside the city The friends or family I have which live outside the city actually live in other nearby cities. To visit them, I'd take a bus to their city, and then a bus or taxi within that city. > I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough Every store large enough that I'd do "bulk grocery shopping" in it has a taxi stop next to it, sometimes even within the store's underground parking floor. So whenever I do bulk shopping on one of these stores, I simply take a taxi. > I sometimes buy big housing furniture Every store which sells big housing furniture has the option to send the furniture to your home using their own truck. You might have to wait for the next day (since they batch the deliveries - it's a big truck), but for big furniture, you usually aren't in a hurry. > Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike If I missed my bus, I wait less than 10 minutes for the next one. If I'm late, public transport is still faster than a car (or a taxi). And if there's a strike, it's true that having your own car might help, but when that happens (and it's not common enough to make it worth it to have a car just for that), the traffic slows to a crawl.
unmole 4y ago
Or, we could allow the housing market to respond to high demand by increasing supply instead of artificially restricting it via regulatory capture.
- afpx 4y ago
  At the limits of this, we will have people living in 5^2 meter boxes on the Pacific coast complaining that it's not affordable and that they should just build more supply. The problem isn't supply. We have (practically) unlimited supply. People just don't want to live in Pennsyltucky.
twirlock 4y ago
tsss 4y ago
And how is that different from a market? All we have to do is tax land appropriately and remove NIMBY regulation that prevents higher density building. Over time the land tax will displace inefficient single family homes, parking spaces, etc where needed. A good way to celebrate the upcoming 150 year anniversary of the release and continued ignorance of the book that pioneered this policy.
afpx 4y ago
If it isn't a market, then how to determine who lives where? Leaving it up to bureaucracy would bring corruption.
bell-cot 4y ago
At least in the U.S., you'll also need to replace the system of local governments being mostly funded by local property taxes. That results in local government (and the residents who elect it, and whose taxes fund it) being very strongly in favor of high-end residential development (ideal - a gated neighborhood of mansions, or a luxury skyscraper, with absentee owners), and very strongly against low-end residential development (worst case - a mobile home park). Vacant mansions will pay very heavy taxes, require minimal city services, and generally push up property values (good for all those already aboard the property ownership pyramid scheme). Mobile home parks will do quite the opposite.
stjohnswarts 4y ago
It's a market that needs to have preferential treatment for "first homes" and not for speculative hedge funds.
zamfi 4y ago
> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better Housing is already barely a market. An actual market would be much better. We artificially restrict the construction of new housing supply by policy and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. The same thing is happening in medicine: we artificially constrain the training of new MDs and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. Then people come out of the woodwork with "oh look markets aren't working!" -- but in fact the markets are working exactly as designed: those with control over the supply are acting to constrain the supply, in the process enriching themselves at the expense of all others. But instead of recognizing this fact, we look for other reasons. Sure, there are other reasons and interactions, too, but the primary drivers are supply constraints! Imagine if we explicitly forbade the construction of new grocery stores, forced farms not to use modern agricultural techniques, causing reduced yield, and then bought up a bunch of farmland just to take it out of commission. What would happen? Food prices would, obviously, skyrocket! That's exactly what we're doing with housing. Your proposed solutions probably won't hurt, but aside from making it easier to build housing, they're noise. In particular: > upzone neighborhoods This is the only one that matters -- and it needs to come with other changes too, including construction "by right", that is, without needing to go through a 3-year process of fighting with neighbors who will try whatever they can to prevent new construction because they've been convinced it will destroy their neighborhood and/or property values. > changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing We don't need to change tax incentives to get developers to build more housing, we just need to stop preventing them from building more housing. Developers are not sitting around waiting for incentives, they're actively being denied the ability to build. Let's fix that.
imapeopleperson 4y ago
> I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case, At least you understand this is radical. Developers/landlords are the ones providing and maintaining housing, not tenants. The government is incapable of doing this themselves which is why it’s left to the free markets. The only real issue is that the ‘free markets’ are anything but. Governments overly try to dictate policy which continues to hurt us (a well known feature is state run economies) Examples of this are zoning restrictions (NIMBY) and rent control. Broad, idealistic government policies are a disease; they will never be as efficient as entrepreneurs.
cplusplusfellow 4y ago
I’m sorry but respectfully, literally none of this will effect the outcomes you desire. You will assuredly constrain supply and decrease vendors to produce new supply.
coward123 4y ago
>The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market Then how would you recommend houses trade ownership? >so developers are incentivized to build more housing How do you prevent the development of shitboxes (it's a technical industry term)? Because that's what builders build when they need to hit a particular price point at scale. Houses that are quickly built out of low end materials and will decay over about twenty year period unless a homeowner invests considerably in upgrades. >one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years I'm in full support of the concept, but when you start to look at the causes of this, it gets complicated quickly and many of the causes aren't even directly related to housing. It's not just as simple as property tax moratoriums.

mutatio 4y ago

"Nearly every case" is very wishy washy, I assume you have some specifics, what about trashing a property, who absorbs that cost? Living where one has historically lived is interesting, take London - you're implying it should be a birth right for natives - what about the immigrant flow into such cities, how would you reconcile the "right of natives" with human capital?

turtledove 4y ago
Not a birthright, I don't think it should move across generations, but I do think that it's needlessly cruel to force someone out of their home because wealthier people want to live there. As for tenants v landlords, I believe it should be difficult to evict tenants except in cases where the tenant is clearly a danger to others or to the home itself. If they are vandalizing the property, that should be an eviction. Likewise if they are cooking meth. But I think tenants should be protected if, eg, their income drops due to a layoff or unforseen medical expense.
- jdhendrickson 4y ago
  Do you not see any obvious flaws in your desired changes?
  - turtledove 4y ago
    Depends. But what you label a flaw, I might label a feature. There is space for both of us to disagree about whether certain outcomes are desirable or not.
- paisawalla 4y ago
  So the landlord what, eats all of the downside in that scenario? But I'm sure you'd also restrict their ability to raise rents on other tenants (if they have multiple units) to compensate, so why would the landlord even do this to begin with? It's potentially 100% downside and restricted upside.
  - turtledove 4y ago
    Yep. You got it in one. Private landlords are a part of the problem. They have every incentive to prevent new housing from being built. It should be challenging to be better at providing housing than the municipality government.
    - fundad 4y ago
      Exactly. Landlords aren’t entitled to a good business. If you diligently maintain the home you rent out AND pay income tax, it’s not a great business now. The profits are in neglect and appreciation.
      - paisawalla 4y ago
        If you agree with this, you're saying they're not entitled to any business, plus are on the hook for all of their tenants. Why would anyone do this?
    - 4y ago

Ferrotin 4y ago

Why on earth would anybody build apartments or rent out property under your scheme?

brtkdotse 4y ago
The government would.
anm89 4y ago
- turtledove 4y ago
  It's absolutely realistic, and the fact that you're writing it off so quickly shows your ignorance. Social housing is successful in many parts of the world. Look at Singapore, for instance. Mandatory parking minimums are going away in cities across the US, and units are getting more housing as a result. Washington State is considering removing single family zoning. Cities like Paris have many smaller apartment complexes that are public housing. Everything I've suggested either exists or is being discussed seriously in some capacity. But, by all means keep your head in the sand rather than try to engage with actual housing policy.
  - paisawalla 4y ago
    It's really incredible that you're saying "superficially similar policies are being enacted in multiple, disparate geographies around the world, in vastly differing cultural and economic contexts, so you can't deny that all of them should coincide in one totally separate place I've chosen." I notice you didn't mention Berlin's rent control fiasco btw
  - shaky-carrousel 4y ago
    It's funny. There are ignorant people everywhere. But smug ignorance, that I only find it in Americans, for some reason. Maybe it's that "best country in the world" mentality leaking. That mentality doesn't make humble people.

me_me_mu_mu 4y ago

Cut down home ownership to max 3 homes per household. Otherwise rent from someone else. And yes it’s possible to be capitalist and agree with sensible regulations. I’d rather we focus on building amazing companies and utilizing labor effectively.

jokethrowaway 4y ago
Capitalism does imply the absence of regulations imposed by a bunch of goons with guns that claim to be "a legit government representing the people". Mixed economies are not capitalism. You can say you're a bit capitalist - that's an easy one, we have plenty of data to show that positive economic effect for everyone are linked to free markets - but still believe fairy tales about the government being moral and caring about something which is not being re-elected and stealing money from people.
- me_me_mu_mu 4y ago
  Bro I can also pretend government can buzz off, but we need a military to protect our interests. We need some semblance of order so we don't descend into anarchy and chaos. People who exist at polar ends and bring up edge cases without contributing to fixing them to bring us closer to the middle actively make things worse, imo. These are not zero sum games, and people that think they are probably have no skin in the game. Even the people with lots of wealth and resources worry about losing them, and in order to maintain it you need to make concessions when necessary and be pragmatic.
aperson_hello 4y ago
I'd claim the big issue is Blackrock coming in and buying all the available housing and renting it out for the max amount possible. If you restrict individuals, but not corporations, you create a worse problem!
- hackerfromthefu 4y ago
  Yes corporations/BlackRock must be limited to 3 or 10 or whatever. If they corner the market we will see a dystopia for sure.

acchow 4y ago

I guess you are unaware of all the money people pour into their homes - renovations, furniture, upkeep, maintenance. People spend all kinds of money on nice things, but nothing comes close to the home itself. There will always be a market for this.

turtledove 4y ago
My home is currently valued at 1.7m. I'm acutely aware of the cost of owning and maintaining a home. But "homes have costs" does not axiomatically lead to "housing must therefore be a market."
- acchow 4y ago
  No, but people want nice homes and are willing to spend a ton for it.

paisawalla 4y ago

Ah yes, I also was deeply enamored with Coruscant the first time I saw it depicted. It never occurred to me to reverse engineer the planning policies which could give rise to such a nightmare however.

turtledove 4y ago
What? I'm out here saying "having homelessness is bad." And "reduce open parking lots so we can house people." I think you'll find if you increase housing supply and density you're likely to end up with more natural spaces, not less.
- paisawalla 4y ago
  You're out here saying 640 sqft ought to be enough for anyone.
  - b112 4y ago
    So many of these ideas are some other vision in disguise. Cars are bad, you see, and therefore, let's pick some irrelevant problem (parking lots), and conflate it with housing issues. First, most places have zero housing issues. Mostly, certain tiny areas(with large populations) of California do, but the rest of North America has no shortage of land to build on. And unlike California, most of the world doesn't seem to have issues with zoning for new builds. In fact, in most of NA housing is quite affordable, with the exception of a current bubble, which exists due to COVID issues, a once in a century event. This has only been going on for a year or so, and is already starting to cool. Californians: a note. Your issues are not nation wide. Others: stop trying to solve other pet peeves, by conflating issues. I assure you, you just end up sounding uninformed.
    - turtledove 4y ago
      Surface parking lots take a huge volume of space that could be used to house tens or hundreds of families. It has nothing to do with "cars bad", and everything to do with "why are we letting all this precious resource go so poorly utilized?"

pj_mukh 4y ago

I really think most of the solution is in the first part of your plan. There’s no need to micromanage tenant-landlord relationships or setup governmental panels on who historically deserves to live where, if the government can just make sure there is an oversupply of decent housing at all affordability levels. The rest really takes care of itself at that point.

turtledove 4y ago
Hundred percent. I have a personal ethos that believes profit from rent is amoral, but we could probably address housing concerns without meeting my personal ethics standards, which I freely admit are more extreme than most.
- cycrutchfield 4y ago
  “profit from rent is amoral”. Care to elaborate on this? Does this ethical standard also extend to other human needs as well? For instance should farmers not be able to profit from providing food?
  - b112 4y ago
    It's just backdoor socialism, and I say that as a Canuck!
    - serenitylater 4y ago
  - account42 4y ago
    If the farmer disappears, the food will no longer be produced. If the landlord disappears, the house will still be there.
    - cycrutchfield 4y ago
      Oh ok, I get where you’re going with this now. Some Marxist bullshit

anovikov 4y ago

Only way to achieve it is to return segregation

5ersi 4y ago

Nobody "decided" that housing is a market. If something can be bought and sold, then this is inherently a market. Yes, we can and should regulate markets, and we probably all agree that the purpose of the housing is for people to have a roof over their head, as opposed to use housing as an (speculative) investment market. This can easily be regulated via taxes (on ownership and transactions), but it comes with a caveat: if something is over-regulated to benefit the user, then there is less incentive for investor/landlord to build housing, which makes housing scarcer and drives prices up.

turtledove 4y ago
I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market? I buy sewer and garbage service likewise. There are some commodities we choose to operate as natural monopolies because competition and profit seeking leads to bad outcomes for society. My argument is fundamentally that housing is the same.
- paisawalla 4y ago
  How will you be deciding who gets to have a view of the ocean, and who gets to sleep next to the overpass? First come first serve? Birthright?
  - nivenkos 4y ago
    Pricing? You can have the government / housing co-ops sell properties and just forbid private renting out in absentia.
    - paisawalla 4y ago
      The point is that 1 KWh is 1KWh, but your home on the top floor of Millennium Tower is not equivalent to my home across from the 680 overpass. Housing is not a commodity like electricity, it's not fungible.
  - turtledove 4y ago

nivenkos 4y ago

A more practical solution is housing coops like the BRF system in Sweden. Individual landlordism is mostly banned (there are some company rentals though) - you buy the place you live in, and there are restrictions on renting it out (no more than 2 years in a row, etc.). It's helped a lot here. I don't think that social housing is a good solution. It's a complete disaster here in Sweden, with 12+ year waiting times, and massive inequality between those who have those rent-fixed privileged first hand contracts and those stuck in the unregulated wild west of second hand renting. Often resulting in the working poor effectively subsidising wealthier, older people to keep their very cheap flats in the city centre, etc.

turtledove 4y ago
I love housing co-ops as well. If we ended up in a system like that, I'd be thrilled.
thow-58d4e8b 4y ago
> BRF system in Sweden To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus: Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple
- unwind 4y ago
  The grandparent is a bit unclear in my opinion. In the BRF system, you literally do not "buy the place you live in", you instead buy the right to live there. The actual ownership of the property is with the BRF. The word is "bostadsrättsförening" [1] which roughly translates to "living rights association" or something (Wikipedia uses "housing cooperative" so I guess that's the best). The word "förening" is hard to translate, the closest seems to be "voluntary association" [1], it is a formal collection of people with some common purpose (like managing a house). There are legally various types with varying requirements, and so on. Edit: spelling, more linkage. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_cooperative [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_association https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntary_association

merrywhether 4y ago

Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in the type of building most likely), but attempting to protect their exact house just creates the equivalent of a public subsidy to exempt them from keeping pace with local land efficiency demands.

turtledove 4y ago
Yes! And thank you for approaching this with a thoughtful question. One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built. Alternatively, buy units from people who are leaving or who have passed away. We do need to knock down some houses to build more housing, but we can do it in a way that is minimally disruptive.
- carom 4y ago
  >One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built. You are just increasing the cost of the building's rent with this stuff. You'll have a few birthright units and everything else will be luxury to cover costs. This is the same problem we currently have with affordable units, huge missing middle.
UncleMeat 4y ago
There is huge tension. We've forced ourselves into a situation where it is difficult to fix things because housing is such a huge portion of many people's wealth. Policies that improve things for the poor and lower middle class in meaningful ways will crush the upper middle class, who have a lot of local political influence because they've got enough money to have free time but there are still a lot of them. Somebody with a mortgage 4x their gross annual income is going to fight hard to prevent their house from tanking in price, even if that means promoting anti-social policies. It is a mess.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

jjav 4y ago

> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. How do you or we decide it's not a market? If people are paying money for housing, it's a market. And it's not just money, but the largest lifetime expense by an order of magnitude and more. > I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case That's already the case, at least in many places (I know not all). If you take it too far the result is no landlords, thus no rentals. Perhaps that's ok if everyone wants to buy, but if there is anyone who wants to rent, it's useful to have rentals.

jillesvangurp 4y ago

The inevitable outcome of housing inflation and elimination of the middle class is slums: illegal housing. People will have to live somewhere. And when that becomes unaffordable they'll just improvise. This is not a technical problem but a policy problem. The solution is changing the policy. The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. This problem exists in most wealthy nations. There is no shortage of space. Just of access to that space. Mostly that's completely intentional and reinforced by generations of politicians acting on the will of the people they represent to ensure that can never change. You have NIMBYs and vested financial interests basically. Nobody wants their property devalued. So, social housing always is unpopular with the locals. Places like San Francisco where the homeless take dumps on Market Street are of course a bit extreme. But same principle. No shortage of space there. But it's all reserved and off limits. So, the homeless are camping out there. In the middle of a city full of some of the richest NIMBYs on this planet. That's not a temporary solution. That's a slum and it is growing. Complete with people just shitting all over the place. Slums are what happens when you let things escalate.

southerntofu 4y ago
> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France). You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education. We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.

LatteLazy 4y ago

Housing isn't a market because there are 1001 restrictions on supply and subsidies for holding large amounts. I'm far from right wing, but let's not pretend the issue here is a market not working. It's that we rigged the whole system and then blame "the market" for the results...

shetill 4y ago

The reason the housing has turned into such a market is not because the evil overlords are deciding. It's due to overwhelming demand and the supply cannot keep up, so landlords have the freedom to choose any prices. The reason there is so much demand is because there are way more people on this planet now than there ever used to be. So if you want cheaper houses, solve the overpopulation problem first.

turtledove 4y ago
Landlords don't need to raise rent if their costs aren't rising.
- dazc 4y ago
  Landlords who acquired property 20 years will use 'market rate' as a justification. I know of someone making a living from such a building consisting of 2 small apartments and a single office. He doesn't have a job, just idols away at home at all day getting anxious about climate change and identity politics.
  - shetill 4y ago
    landlords are definitely taking advantage of the situation, but that's a consequence of the bigger picture. In EU the constant influx of immigrants from 3rd world countries is creating demand and raising the prices while decreasing the salaries since they work for half the price and quality than locals but companies hire them regardless and they don't mind living 5 people in 2 bed flat. Moreover overseas oligarchs and cartels are buying out properties and raising the prices even more.
- matheusmoreira 4y ago
  Landlords don't need to raise prices. They want to. We all want to have more dollars than everyone else and landlords are no exception.
  - turtledove 4y ago

glerk 4y ago

Housing shouldn't be a market? Then how would housing be allocated? The state builds and gives housing to everyone? Maybe you should take a trip to Eastern Europe one of these days to see the final result of what you're advocating. Pros: everyone is given an apartment to live in. Cons: your city's skyline looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/5X1sIeP.jpg https://i.imgur.com/5X1sIeP.jpg "We collectively decide" just means you decide for me. You think you know better than everyone else and want to impose your values on others.

maccard 4y ago
Eastern European cities aren't the only examples. Nordic cities (e.g. Stockholm and Copenhagen) are great examples - they have different problems but people are housed. Cities like Berlin don't have a speculative housing market due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term. Finally, Vienna is the poster child for "how to do social housing".
- glerk 4y ago
  All these cities still have a housing market albeit a more regulated one than your average American city. Housing is still developed and owned by private interest and responds to supply and demand. We could debate the policies of these specific cities (for example, the trade-offs of Berlin's rent control: https://archive.ph/l3i2w https://archive.ph/l3i2w) but that's beyond the point. The parent's position is "housing shouldn't be a market", and I am showing an example of what soviet-style state control over housing looks like in practice.
- Kiro 4y ago
  What is Stockholm a great example of? There's still a housing market with absurd prices and all signs of a bubble. It's impossible to get an apartment in Stockholm unless you have a 20-year waiting time, buy an illegal third-hand contract or have the wealth to buy an apartment. The housing crisis in Sweden is extreme.
- BlargMcLarg 4y ago
  Almost every major city in Europe has the exact same problems. Or arguably worse, depending on your socioeconomic status. Where this myth of "European cities are great" is coming from I don't know, and I would love to know. >Due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term This backfires spectacularly once you realize landlords continue to hold the reigns and put up huge demands to avoid "bad renters". As long as the rights don't cover the entirety, landlords will continue to pressure renters in different, more obscene ways. And in today's society, renting long term also isn't as great as people make it out to be, when your long term rent is a glorified broom closet and there's a great job opportunity a few cities over.

cloutchaser 4y ago

The problem in almost every country with out of control house prices is low interest rates since the dot com crash. That's where everything went wrong. At 0-1% interest you can get insane mortgages for 90-95% of the value of the property, pushing the price up to where people spend every last cent they can on mortgages, but at $xxxx per month you can easily afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgages. Raise interest rates (happening), go into recession, crash the market, stop people getting mortgages, house prices will drop insanely fast and hard. Of course no government wants to do this because it will panic the home owning class. Well - you have to chose at this point. Make it impossible for young people to buy a home, or piss off homeowners.

nxm 4y ago
If there is a recession, young people will not be in a position to buy homes
- closedloop129 4y ago
  They will, as long as they have a job. All the forfeited houses from the people who cannot serve their mortgages will flood the market and drive down prices. Additionally, all the surplus construction infrastructure will be there, fighting for every project, which will make new houses cheap.
  - mellavora 4y ago
    > All the forfeited houses from the people who cannot serve their mortgages will flood the market and drive down prices. I used to think this. How does your model change if there is a large pool of private equity, ready to buy properties for cash, and turn them into rental units? Assuming this pool can easily handle the flood (which it looks like it can).
    - closedloop129 4y ago
      Rental units on their own don't matter from a market perspective. There is some sentimental value in owning your own house but apart from that, costs have to be equal or demand shifts until they are. Private equity can only make a profit if they corner the market and hold back units until prices massively increase. This is possible to some extend but at its core it is most likely illegal because it requires collusion or a monopoly. So if that's an option, then there is a bigger problem than just housing prices. But even in an entirely corrupt market, private equity cannot beat the market after Covid. Home office has become fully acceptable so huge fractions of the population are not bound to a specific city. People are free to choose where they live. There will be some municipalities that offer an abundance of housing so that prices will stay down. Then, once people move there, companies will be founded there or move there, too. Wages will be lower because costs are lower, which will be a huge problem for the companies that didn't move. So if the established municipalities allow the private equity companies to profit, they risk their own demise. However, this depends on the willingness of the people to move. It is also contradicted by silicon valley being able to maintain its large housing prices. My guess is that prices will rise for a while but some Asian city will crack the code and offer cheap housing despite being a cultural center which would make it the technological capital of the world.

fifticon 4y ago

In spirit I agree with some of your ideas, and I hate rent-seeking. However, where I live, I nearly ended in a situation where I was not allowed to sell an appartment I owned and had lived in for 20 years. I had moved to a different city to work and live with my girlfriend, and had rented out the apartment, because obviously it is expensive to both hold one apartment and pay for a second one in the new city. I had rented out the apartment, because initially it wasn't clear if we were staying in the new city or going back to the old city, once my girlfriend had finished her degree in that city. I had made a written agreement with the tenant they rented for 2 years. 1 and a half year later, we had decided we were going to buy a house in the new city and stay there. I wrote the tenant to inform them, I had decided to sell the apartment, come the 2 year date. "OK", replied the tenant, "it's just that, I've decided I don't want to leave this nice cheap apartment anyway, and prefer to stay.." So I start to read up on the law in my country regarding these things. It turned out, in my country it is nearly impossible to make a pre-determined time-limited rental. In fact, there are only 4 scenarios where it is possible. It turns out, our contract should have had the specific wording "I rent out this apartment for a period of 2 years, because after 2 years I am going to move back to it myself, on this date, because I have the following specified timelimited activity I'm doing at location X". Because my contract only stipulated the duration, but not specified the exact legal grounding for the limitation, it was not valid. TL;DR. I ended up having to 'bribe' the tenant with a huge sum of money, to get their written consent to leave the apartment by the originally agreed-upon date. I also ended up losing a significant amount of money on the sale, because the presence of the previous tenants hurt the price I could negotiate on the sale. In fact, I would have made 5x more money on the sale, than I made from received rent for renting out. (ie I received maybe 50000 some-currency in rent (without expenses subtracted, so in practice it may have been more like 10-20000). But the reduced salesprice was ~300000 lower, because I ran the sale while the tenants were still present (in hindsight, I should not have put it up for sale until the tenants were gone, but I paid a huge price to learn that lesson :-(. So if I had let the appartment stay empty for 2 years instead of renting it out, I would have made 300k instead of 20-50k. Apart from the fact, that those 50k ended up being what I had to pay in "bribe money" to get the tenants to leave. So I basically let two strangers live for free for 2 years in my apartment, in return for them making it very difficult for me to sell my own apartment. A final caveat is, that technically it's even illegal to leave the apartment empty in my country - if it's empty for a prolonged period of time, you have to register it for "public rental", at a reasonable rent price.. So, yes, I definitely want the rights of tenants in place and protected, but it is possible to protect them so much, you actually make the life of people who have bought a single property miserable. A postscript: I know many won't buy my arguments about "losing money" here, since the money I would potentially earn or lose here, are exactly the sort of 'board game monopoly money' we are arguing about whether anybody should have or be entitled to. IE the money I would make back on the sale of the apartment I have owned for 20 years, are exactly those 'the game is rigged' money, that appear out of thin air, for not exactly doing anything (apart from maintaining my apartment against wear and tear.)

bmmayer1 4y ago

Isn't the problem that housing isn't more of a market? In an actual market, margins are competed away and prices drop over time, there's elasticity in supply and demand, and people don't view their 15-year old cars or whatever as "investments", they trade them up for a newer model and pass down the older stuff to people who can't afford them as much. In housing, we artificially constrain supply with zoning laws and building codes, and we stimulate demand with subsidized mortgages and rent control laws. It's pretty much the opposite of what you want to do if you want there to be more affordable housing.

harambae 4y ago
This is how I view it as well. And there'd be a analogous method for getting medical costs lower in America by increasing competition (within reason, I understand why no one wants to go back to the days of snake oil remedies in an unregulated free for all). Also odd is how these HN threads on housing often devolve into redesigning a socialist utopia from scratch in America, as if such a radical revolution has any chance, when Californians can't even organize enough to get Prop 13 repealed. Removing red tape and zoning to get to a more efficient market is much more achievable.

gernb 4y ago

I can't imagine physical housing not being a market. Even in a post scarcity star trek world someone gets the penthouse, someone gets the house on the hill with a view, someone gets the beach front property, someone gets the house in a convenient location or close to public transportation. How would that ever not be decided by a market? Even without money it would end up as a market of "merit" or policial capital

vletal 4y ago

Are you American? I feel like you are assuming taking extreme measures to solve US problems. Have you considered how similar measures already affect markets in other countries? ad. "not a market" - When you do that are you going to also forgive my crazy large mortgage? ad. "protect tenants" - In Czechia we protect the tenants more than landlords. If you mean that this should scare people from renting that works quite well. People do not have much leverage here to kick out tenants who are problematic or skip payments.

throwaddzuzxd 4y ago

> charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people) Housed people need parking lots though. Tons of places are not, and never will be accessible with public transports. I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car, as much as I'd love not needing one: I need to visit friends or family outside the city, I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough, I sometimes buy big housing furniture, I even had to retrieve parcels outside of the city sometimes... Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike, or anything can happen that I need my car to save 1 hour. > abolish mandatory minimum parking Same as above, that's an awful idea.

BlargMcLarg 4y ago
The majority of places where housing is a problem are places where it makes far more sense to go through the short term pains of minimizing car usage in favor of long term space optimization. Cars take an obscene amount of space when combining everything required to keep individual car ownership afloat. Almost all the problems you present can be solved by planning differently. You don't need bulk grocery shopping with a shop open nearby in walking distance, available at least once every 3 day. Big housing furniture is a rare occurrence and can be delivered, or you can rent a car capable of transporting it. Punctuality can be solved socially. The main problem is density, and cities certainly don't have a shortage of population density. Car ownership is a huge luxury with a giant price tag, and it's finally catching up to society.
cesarb 4y ago
> I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car Your experience doesn't match mine. I also live in a city with a good public transport network, but I've never had a car, or felt much need to have one, or even to learn how to drive. For your examples (except the parcel one, which hasn't happened to me and I have no idea how it would happen): > I need to visit friends or family outside the city The friends or family I have which live outside the city actually live in other nearby cities. To visit them, I'd take a bus to their city, and then a bus or taxi within that city. > I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough Every store large enough that I'd do "bulk grocery shopping" in it has a taxi stop next to it, sometimes even within the store's underground parking floor. So whenever I do bulk shopping on one of these stores, I simply take a taxi. > I sometimes buy big housing furniture Every store which sells big housing furniture has the option to send the furniture to your home using their own truck. You might have to wait for the next day (since they batch the deliveries - it's a big truck), but for big furniture, you usually aren't in a hurry. > Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike If I missed my bus, I wait less than 10 minutes for the next one. If I'm late, public transport is still faster than a car (or a taxi). And if there's a strike, it's true that having your own car might help, but when that happens (and it's not common enough to make it worth it to have a car just for that), the traffic slows to a crawl.

unmole 4y ago

Or, we could allow the housing market to respond to high demand by increasing supply instead of artificially restricting it via regulatory capture.

afpx 4y ago
At the limits of this, we will have people living in 5^2 meter boxes on the Pacific coast complaining that it's not affordable and that they should just build more supply. The problem isn't supply. We have (practically) unlimited supply. People just don't want to live in Pennsyltucky.

twirlock 4y ago

tsss 4y ago

And how is that different from a market? All we have to do is tax land appropriately and remove NIMBY regulation that prevents higher density building. Over time the land tax will displace inefficient single family homes, parking spaces, etc where needed. A good way to celebrate the upcoming 150 year anniversary of the release and continued ignorance of the book that pioneered this policy.

afpx 4y ago

If it isn't a market, then how to determine who lives where? Leaving it up to bureaucracy would bring corruption.

bell-cot 4y ago

At least in the U.S., you'll also need to replace the system of local governments being mostly funded by local property taxes. That results in local government (and the residents who elect it, and whose taxes fund it) being very strongly in favor of high-end residential development (ideal - a gated neighborhood of mansions, or a luxury skyscraper, with absentee owners), and very strongly against low-end residential development (worst case - a mobile home park). Vacant mansions will pay very heavy taxes, require minimal city services, and generally push up property values (good for all those already aboard the property ownership pyramid scheme). Mobile home parks will do quite the opposite.

stjohnswarts 4y ago

It's a market that needs to have preferential treatment for "first homes" and not for speculative hedge funds.

zamfi 4y ago

> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better Housing is already barely a market. An actual market would be much better. We artificially restrict the construction of new housing supply by policy and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. The same thing is happening in medicine: we artificially constrain the training of new MDs and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket. Then people come out of the woodwork with "oh look markets aren't working!" -- but in fact the markets are working exactly as designed: those with control over the supply are acting to constrain the supply, in the process enriching themselves at the expense of all others. But instead of recognizing this fact, we look for other reasons. Sure, there are other reasons and interactions, too, but the primary drivers are supply constraints! Imagine if we explicitly forbade the construction of new grocery stores, forced farms not to use modern agricultural techniques, causing reduced yield, and then bought up a bunch of farmland just to take it out of commission. What would happen? Food prices would, obviously, skyrocket! That's exactly what we're doing with housing. Your proposed solutions probably won't hurt, but aside from making it easier to build housing, they're noise. In particular: > upzone neighborhoods This is the only one that matters -- and it needs to come with other changes too, including construction "by right", that is, without needing to go through a 3-year process of fighting with neighbors who will try whatever they can to prevent new construction because they've been convinced it will destroy their neighborhood and/or property values. > changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing We don't need to change tax incentives to get developers to build more housing, we just need to stop preventing them from building more housing. Developers are not sitting around waiting for incentives, they're actively being denied the ability to build. Let's fix that.

imapeopleperson 4y ago

> I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case, At least you understand this is radical. Developers/landlords are the ones providing and maintaining housing, not tenants. The government is incapable of doing this themselves which is why it’s left to the free markets. The only real issue is that the ‘free markets’ are anything but. Governments overly try to dictate policy which continues to hurt us (a well known feature is state run economies) Examples of this are zoning restrictions (NIMBY) and rent control. Broad, idealistic government policies are a disease; they will never be as efficient as entrepreneurs.

cplusplusfellow 4y ago

I’m sorry but respectfully, literally none of this will effect the outcomes you desire. You will assuredly constrain supply and decrease vendors to produce new supply.

coward123 4y ago

>The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market Then how would you recommend houses trade ownership? >so developers are incentivized to build more housing How do you prevent the development of shitboxes (it's a technical industry term)? Because that's what builders build when they need to hit a particular price point at scale. Houses that are quickly built out of low end materials and will decay over about twenty year period unless a homeowner invests considerably in upgrades. >one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years I'm in full support of the concept, but when you start to look at the causes of this, it gets complicated quickly and many of the causes aren't even directly related to housing. It's not just as simple as property tax moratoriums.