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Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowne

Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Even in the cities where the renter population is bigger than the homeowners, such as in Seattle, half of the votes come from people of > 65 years old (all of whom are homeowners, likely more than one home). Young people simply won't vote at all. There is very little incentives for the young people to vote. Even if you cancel all the regulations right now and allow for unlimited constructions in the cities like Seattle, SF of NY, one will need about 10 years or longer to build enough apartments for the price to go back to affordable (which is 2-3 years salary of an average worker in the area). So the after-next generation will profit from the effort of the current renter generation. Nevertheless, I think young generation needs to engage in the politics with the uncompromised goal to crush the housing price, to prevent the economic collapse of the "rich" world and prevent entire Earth from sliding into the dictatorship. Such is life.

danielrpa 4y ago
If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation. I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.
- pochekailov 4y ago
  Haha I am still not a citizen, so can't vote myself. I was trying to encourage my friends, but they were often too busy. They would vote for Hillary (or even for Trump), but never for a local mayor. Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    I've got the political party for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo
- lambertsimnel 4y ago
  Some people find it difficult to vote, for reasons I suspect disproportionately affect renters. Where people must be registered with their home address in order to vote, renters are at more risk of being unregistered at election time, because they move home more frequently. People experiencing economic hardship (who are more likely to be renters) are less likely to make time for voting (especially if polling stations are congested or at inconvenient locations) or for prompt electoral registration.
  - pochekailov 4y ago
    We probably need some service (an app or a site) that gives clear instructions on how, where and when to register. Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.
    - choko 4y ago
      We have all that and more. There are even groups that seek people out to teach them to vote. When you file a change of address with the post office, they send you a packet with all kinds of moving resources including how to re-register. In addition, a really quick Google search gives you all you need to know to register and vote. I don't understand why some people pretend the process is difficult. If people still aren't voting it's due to lack of interest, not because it's confusing or difficult.
      - Retric 4y ago
        It is unreasonably difficult. There is no reason you should need to jump through any extra hoops beyond a change of address.
        choko 4y ago
        Why stop there? Perhaps government employees should go door to door and record my vote for me. Sending something in the mail is unreasonably difficult.
- francisofascii 4y ago
  Well, you can't vote where you don't live. The large problem is the lack of appropriate land taxes in high cost municipalities. And you can't vote to change that until you live there, and once you live there, you are much less incentivized to vote against your self interests.
  - nradov 4y ago
    Most of the laws regarding property taxes are set at the state level, not the municipal level. In California, a voter in Modesto can influence tax rates in San Francisco. Local votes only control minor things like special additional school district assessments.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      That is a California specific phenomenon due to various caps they put at state level on the rate at which property taxes can be increased
      - nradov 4y ago
        Even in other states which lack property tax caps, the basic framework within which tax rates are set is controlled at the state level. For example, some economists have proposed replacing property taxes with land value taxes but it would be impossible for a single city to do so without enabling state legislation.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Interesting. I assumed counties/cities are relatively free to set property tax rates according to their budget, and the city needing to compete with other cities is what keeps them relatively in line.
    - TuringNYC 4y ago
      That may be how things work in California, but it definitely does not work like that everywhere in the US. For example, here in NJ, property taxes are partly set by the state, but the schools portion is set my the county and township.
- lkbm 4y ago
  > If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation. What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently? Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote: Home-owner: * Bob moves in, lives there ten years. Renters: * John moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out. If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests. It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.
  - jjav 4y ago
    > so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.
    - lkbm 4y ago
      Collectively, the others live with it for the same amount of time. Their incentives are lower to improve things locally, but the impact on them is the same.
- banannaise 4y ago
  I voted, but somehow people keep saying my opinion doesn't matter because I, as a demographic, didn't vote.
infl8ed 4y ago
Although I don't disagree with you, I will just mention that housing affordability is also a problem in Australia where voting is mandatory
- strikelaserclaw 4y ago
  how do you think politicians make money? They usually own assets.
  - nradov 4y ago
    In the US some politicians make money by using their knowledge of upcoming legislation to trade stocks. https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-are-trading-large-with-a-wealth-of-hypocrisy/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-are-trad...
    - VonGuard 4y ago
      While I completely agree that Pelosi does this with insider knowledge, she and her husband also seem to be investing based on the hype they hear from people around them. Why else would the Pelosi's have taken such a bath on Roblox?! They had to have known shit is going bad over there, but they lost a LOT of money on that one... So yeah, they do insider trading, but they are sometimes also the dupes in these deals. Look at their history. They make money, yes, but they lose a lot to stupid investments too, ones they obviously made because some Steve-Jobs-wannabe got a meeting with them and fired their reality distortion ray.
    - missedthecue 4y ago
      What kind of insider knowledge did Pelosi have that would incline her to throw money into Roblox?
- deleted 4y ago
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- Aunche 4y ago
  I don't think mandating voting really helps that much. At best, you'll get people to vote for the candidate with the (D) or (R) next to their name. What we need is for people to be more informed. Fewer than 20% of people can name their state legislatures, let alone their stances. https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-state-government/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-sta...
kubb 4y ago
Do you think there exists a political option that will give more rights to the renters? Do you think there's a correlation between having more leisure time (living from rent) and having more ability to do politics? Do you think blaming the renters for not voting is the most constructive way of going forward, or does it reinforce the status quo?
- pochekailov 4y ago
  Q1: Yes, there is. Once a professional politician sees more activity from renters, they will include the renter's interests into their agenda Q2: Yes, obviously there is a positive correlation. This is exactly why renters need to fight: stakes are against them. Current status quo is in favor of homeowners; it will not be possible to change it while being passive. Renters and homeowners have conflict of interests, there is inevitable fight. Q3: I think blaming is the call for fight. If renters want better deal, they need to fight. Is it most constructive? I don't know, this is the best I can come up with. Does it reinforces the status quo? No, I think inactivity reinforces it.
  - nopenopenopeno 4y ago
    You have an incredibly naive impression of representative democracy and capitalist political economy. US politicians serve the rich, not only because they are the rich but also because they need the donations to even be able to run. This isn’t a mere hiccup but rather the entire point of the design.
    - deleted 4y ago
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    - pochekailov 4y ago
      Yes, in my experience, the naïve interpretation is right 80% of time and it is always best to start from a naïve explanation of a process. US politicians serve the rich only because they think that donations will help them win. Make the donations irrelevant - "rich" will loose the political power. How to make the donations irrelevant - go to vote, especially if you are poor and powerless. Convince your friends to vote. And not for a president, but for a local mayor, city council, judge etc.
refurb 4y ago
I think young generation needs to engage in the politics with the uncompromised goal to crush the housing price At least where I live, the “bank of mom and dad” either use their home equity to help their kids buy OR the kids are banking on getting the family home when they die. We’re in too deep now. We basically painted ourselves into a corner where the economic engine is so intertwined with rising home prices that nobody wants the gravy train to end. My best guess is tenancy laws change to be more and more in favor of tenants (SF, NYC) securing near permanent housing for current renters and massively disincentivizing an increase in supply of new rental units., completely screwing over those that come later. Basically kicking the can down the road another few decades.
- pochekailov 4y ago
  I'm an immigrant :). Banking on your family dying - this is like saying "I am a worthless loser". I want old generation to live eternally, and still afford housing.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    If the old generation cannot work for eternity, what would be your solution to a declining labor participation rate?
    - pochekailov 4y ago
      Rejuvenation and life-extending technologies to keep labor energetic forever. Industrial and maintenance automation for needing less labor. Relying on next generation to fund your retirement is ok if you live modestly; but not ok if you live luxuriously. Working person should not be doing worse than a non-working person; otherwise you have an extractive economy and social instability.
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  > We’re in too deep now. We're never going to be less "too deep". Kicking the can down the road condemns future generations to dealing with a worse problem.
throwaway6734 4y ago
Add to this the upcoming social security and Medicare crises, the constant rise in healthcare prices driven by elder care, and a shrinking population that needs to support more retirees. We're in a weird place in the US where young people are unwilling to flex any political power to stop elder people from financially taking advantage of them.
- pochekailov 4y ago
  Only one question: why are they unwilling? Is it that hard? They won't be killed or tortured, like in Belarus or Russia, then why not?
  - choko 4y ago
    Perhaps they don't believe political participation will help, or maybe OP is simply incorrect in their assertions.
  - throwaway6734 4y ago
    I think a lot of young people just are ignorant about the situation coupled with the rise of populists on the left and the right, there's always some abstract other to blame without a focus on concrete problems and possible solutions. Whenever I talk to my young friends about Social Security's trust running dry in a decade they just handwave it away with stuff like: the government will just print more money or blame jeff bezos
    - wyre 4y ago
      As a young person (28), I think it’s because we feel powerless in the face of what is to come. Young people have no power because we largely are in the renter and working classes; while the home and business owners fight against every mention of renter protections, increased housing, worker protections, etc. Not to mention we see the world we are growing up into is quickly becoming more and more inhabitable while living with the truth that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about climate change for 50 years. Who are the populists you’re talking about? I can only think of Bernie and Yang. Trump isn’t a populist. We aren’t ignorant either. We are a product of the social media machine and a decreasing faith in educational institutions. I think a lot of people are too scared of the future so they don’t think about it. Blaming an abstract for political problems has been a thing for long as politics as been around.
rco8786 4y ago
Definitely not that simple. To use your same argument though, it’s not just homeowners - it’s homeowners and aspiring homeowners. Which is nearly everyone.
- pochekailov 4y ago
  The longer I live the more I am finding the universe is working on extremely simple few principles; their relations create complexity. Aspiring homeowners will never become homeowners if the price is exclusionary. Take SF: with average salary of 75-79K, the apartment cost starts from 1.1M. Only 8% has salary > than 100K, that makes the remaining 92% the "aspiring" homeowners. They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life. The only think they (or rather, "we") can do - make sure that post-zoomer generation don't have to be "aspiring" for their entire lives.
  - api 4y ago
    The only rational move is for aspiring owners to leave SF, and not for another crazy expansive city. There is a gigantic country and world out there.
    - ryukafalz 4y ago
      I would say a non-exclusionary city would work just as well. Tokyo is the most expansive city I can think of and they've managed to keep prices down. Still, fighting to make US cities more livable is a laudable goal.
      - api 4y ago
        It's a laudable goal but I have serious doubts about its achievability in cities that are already overpriced. Every single incentive leans in the direction of keeping prices high since not only would lower prices cost homeowners money but would also possibly cut into tax revenues and could financial ruin people who purchased under these high price regimes. It's a bit of a ratchet. Once the prices go high, it's very hard to turn back. The only way out is probably to inflate the currency until a loaf of bread is $15 but housing is reasonable again, or for the state or federal government to offer some kind of huge tax write-off for depreciating home values. The latter is unlikely given the financial crunch faced by governments.
newsclues 4y ago
I’m not sure. At a certain point, if landlords strangle renters it can make hiring hard (workers can’t afford Cost of living if rents are too high), thus making the business environment uncompetitive. Will the business community have more power than landlords? I think so, eventually.
- bbarn 4y ago
  So far the business community's response has been "no one wants to work." because they can't afford to pay salaries. Ultimately, people vote with their feet, or government intervenes on behalf of those who would lose money.
  - newsclues 4y ago
    In Canada business and government says this stuff, to justify importing immigrants to work for low wages and often lower standards of living.
    - randomdata 4y ago
      Importing immigrants in Canada requires that the employer provide suitable housing for the imported workers, so that brings us back to the earlier comment.
      - newsclues 4y ago
        In a lot of documented cases a tim Hortons franchise owner owns rental housing and rents it at outrageous rates to temporary foreign workers.
- nradov 4y ago
  Peter Thiel agrees and has shifted his investments out of the Bay Area because high housing prices make it too expensive to hire workers there. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/19/17138290/peter-thiel-slumlords-comments-speech-rent-sf-silicon https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/19/17138290/peter-thiel-slumlor...
mamonster 4y ago
Biggest problem IMO is that "young generation" is already split among ideological lines(myself included), and kind of hard to imagine a concentrated "young vs old" movement that wouldn't at some point devolve into infighting.
anovikov 4y ago
I think you are more than exaggerating. Thinking of someone who's 65 now and owns several homes, these people are utter fools. How much would money put into houses 40 years ago when they bought, and put into stocks at the same time, would make? You don't even need to google up to know the answer. SP500 would make 96x with dividends reinvested and 37x without. Median home price is not even 10x, and the median home has increased in size 1.5x in the meantime, plus required upkeep. Fix to housing problem is nothing but financial education for people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Applejinx 4y ago
  Why should stocks be an asset class guaranteed to always expand at such a hyperbolic rate?
  - pharmakom 4y ago
    No guarantees, but stocks capture the value of technological innovation that housing (expect a few markets like SF) does not.
- bushbaba 4y ago
  You forget that 1) you only have 20% down for a home. 2) homes can be sold without tax implications. If housing had the same tax treatment as stocks it’d be a horrible investment.
- mrep 4y ago
  Actually, you do need to google up if you want to look at an actual data analysis. I mean, you aren't even counting the rental income in your comparison. If you look at the rate of return on everything from 1870-2015, equity markets and housing actually provide somewhat similar returns [0]. Equity markets are far more liquid though so I choose them personally. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584
deleted 4y ago
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29athrowaway 4y ago
Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable, have 4 kids, and now you will need 4x more units. Then their kids will have 4 kids, and you'll need 16x more units with respect to where you started. Few generations after you have a much deeper problem that the one you started with. Now you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion, where protests cannot be controlled anymore and now you need a totalitarian regime with a massive surveillance and censorship apparatus to keep things under control. The alternative is that everyone is stressed out and feels the pressure of a system that is over capacity. Have you heard of Earth day? In 2022, it was April 22. It means that by April 22 we already consumed our environmental budget for the full year. If we continue like this it's not going to be long until there's mandatory population control. NOTE: this was edited
- rowanG077 4y ago
  So your point is we need to keep people in such shitty situations they won't want to bring kids into this world?
  - 29athrowaway 4y ago
    My point is that the system is overcapacity, that's the reality you like it or not. If you want to watch Netflix and forget about what's happening outside, that's your choice. But we are completely destroying this planet in every way. There are lots of mouths to feed every day depending on systems that are not sustainable and may collapse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q If you go camping and have limited amount of food rations, water, etc, you will make sensible decisions about how to consume the supplies you have. This is very similar.
    - rowanG077 4y ago
      Keeping people in misery is not the solution. Population control is much less ethically challenging IMO.
      - 4y ago
marto1 4y ago
All this is true, but you missed a crucial piece, addressing your "need to engage" - political energy capacity coming from the young. I'll be more than glad to be proven wrong, but I don't think young people have driven any sort of political change in the west for at least the last 20 years. There are many cases where they get used as a lever, but actual movements like "occupy wallstreet" got squashed fairly fast.
- Loughla 4y ago
  100% accurate. While popular society takes small steps forward in regard to social and political changes, the actual politics has not changed from when I was a kid. There are more politicians willing to admit they support gay people, I guess. But that's about it. Deep down where it counts - fiscal policy - nothing changes.
  - namlem 4y ago
    Tens of millions of Americans gained access to healthcare due to policy changes. The IRA just further expanded access to healthcare.
rhacker 4y ago
Let's multiply Seattle housing count by 3. I'm sure you'll still be able to get from point a to point b in a day (if you survive the drive).
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  [laughs in Phoenix] In all seriousness, no. The way you multiply housing count is by making buildings taller and closer together, not by spreading them further out. This is how we used to build cities before cars and roads ruined them.
  - nemo44x 4y ago
    It's because most people don't want to live in small boxes stacked on top of each other. The market responded to what people wanted and it was larger single family homes with yards and living space. An automobile to get you to other places for shopping and entertainment. This is what most people people want. I agree though that a lot of suburbs are just wastelands and I would consider them to be depressing places to live. But people seem to love them for some reason. A lot of these places don't even have sidewalks but I guess it makes sense as there isn't really anywhere to walk to.
    - kenned3 4y ago
      This! I love how people seem to feel they can enforce their views of how a city should be build on others. The fact of the matter is very clear.. we have so many detach houses because that is what people WANT. For some odd reason there is a subset of the population who feel entitled to dictate how OTHERS should live. These people go on and on about "increasing density" while ignoring that some don't want to live like this.
      - kmeisthax 4y ago
        You are projecting. The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live. There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city. Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit. So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to. Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn. [0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick". [1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot. [2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password
wldcordeiro 4y ago
One thing that's missed in the renter vs homeowner thing is that the rules of election systems favors the homeowner too. Renters move more and will need to register to vote over again and the added inconvenience will stop plenty from even bothering.
- kixiQu 4y ago
  I will note that Washington state makes this very straightforward; universal mail-in voting with real easy registration has definitely led to me, a disorganized young person, voting when I wouldn't have otherwise.
- dionidium 4y ago
  A commonsense way to describe what you just said is that homeowners are more stable and stationary and therefore more invested in the long-term future of their communities than renters are, which is an argument that urbanists laugh at, but one that seems very clearly to be true. I think people basically know this, if they're allowed to be honest with themselves. Nobody who ever lived in a college dorm and then spent a "magical year" in NYC and then bought a house in a suburb thinks they were just as invested in those first two places as they are in the third.
  - cheriot 4y ago
    As long as people can't afford to buy they're "less invested" so no reason to address housing affordability... In the modern housing market that's a self fulfilling prophecy. How about that principle of one person, one vote.
    - dionidium 4y ago
      > How about that principle of one person, one vote. Reality, in my view, is absolutely chock-full of contradictions. I believe in the principle of one person, one vote; and I believe that what I said above happens also to be true. The dialectic doesn't care that we might wish things were simpler or more straightforward.
6510 4y ago
10-20 years seems fine. It doesn't have to happen overnight. To fast would create chaos and make it into new lame situations for people. Gradual rent control with a point system works just fine. Personally I would like to see renting [gradually] changed into lease/buy. That I've paid the value of the house 3 times now (and the construction cost 7 times) could mean I own at least some of the house? Doesn't seem unreasonable.
JasserInicide 4y ago
Break out what "homeowners" actually is. It's increasingly becoming these shell companies and entities like Blackrock. We need to ban that shit immediately. The deed of a house should have a fucking person's name on it, not a company's.
- namlem 4y ago
  Investment firms buying homes is a symptom, not a cause. The only reason they do that is because local government artificially inflate the value of homes through supply restrictions.
fleddr 4y ago
Lol, 2-3 years of salary: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... That would be half of the 70-year average. 5 is the norm, and it never got below 4. And you opt for half of the lowest point ever?
jjav 4y ago
> Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Homeowners and renters of course have the exact same politica power, one vote each. If renters are for whatever reason choosing to not exercise that power, what can one do? They are free to vote, please do. That said, I always vote and not once has there been anything on the ballot on whether to build more in my town, so it's not like it matters on that front.

danielrpa 4y ago

If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation. I started voting when I was 16 (my birth country allows that) and voted on every single election until I immigrated to the US - and then voted on every US election since becoming a citizen.

pochekailov 4y ago
Haha I am still not a citizen, so can't vote myself. I was trying to encourage my friends, but they were often too busy. They would vote for Hillary (or even for Trump), but never for a local mayor. Sometimes I am considering running myself for a local government after getting my citizenship, with the only goal: drop housing price at my city for at least 70%. Once achieved - retire from politics :).
- dfxm12 4y ago
  I've got the political party for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent_Is_Too_Damn_High_Party https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79KzZ0YqLvo
lambertsimnel 4y ago
Some people find it difficult to vote, for reasons I suspect disproportionately affect renters. Where people must be registered with their home address in order to vote, renters are at more risk of being unregistered at election time, because they move home more frequently. People experiencing economic hardship (who are more likely to be renters) are less likely to make time for voting (especially if polling stations are congested or at inconvenient locations) or for prompt electoral registration.
- pochekailov 4y ago
  We probably need some service (an app or a site) that gives clear instructions on how, where and when to register. Yes, it is harder for renters, but it is designed to be harder. This is to prevent renters from having political power and making homeowner's houses more expensive. One more reason to fight, from my point of view.
  - choko 4y ago
    We have all that and more. There are even groups that seek people out to teach them to vote. When you file a change of address with the post office, they send you a packet with all kinds of moving resources including how to re-register. In addition, a really quick Google search gives you all you need to know to register and vote. I don't understand why some people pretend the process is difficult. If people still aren't voting it's due to lack of interest, not because it's confusing or difficult.
    - Retric 4y ago
      It is unreasonably difficult. There is no reason you should need to jump through any extra hoops beyond a change of address.
      - choko 4y ago
        Why stop there? Perhaps government employees should go door to door and record my vote for me. Sending something in the mail is unreasonably difficult.
francisofascii 4y ago
Well, you can't vote where you don't live. The large problem is the lack of appropriate land taxes in high cost municipalities. And you can't vote to change that until you live there, and once you live there, you are much less incentivized to vote against your self interests.
- nradov 4y ago
  Most of the laws regarding property taxes are set at the state level, not the municipal level. In California, a voter in Modesto can influence tax rates in San Francisco. Local votes only control minor things like special additional school district assessments.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    That is a California specific phenomenon due to various caps they put at state level on the rate at which property taxes can be increased
    - nradov 4y ago
      Even in other states which lack property tax caps, the basic framework within which tax rates are set is controlled at the state level. For example, some economists have proposed replacing property taxes with land value taxes but it would be impossible for a single city to do so without enabling state legislation.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago
        Interesting. I assumed counties/cities are relatively free to set property tax rates according to their budget, and the city needing to compete with other cities is what keeps them relatively in line.
  - TuringNYC 4y ago
    That may be how things work in California, but it definitely does not work like that everywhere in the US. For example, here in NJ, property taxes are partly set by the state, but the schools portion is set my the county and township.
lkbm 4y ago
> If you are free and able to vote but won't do it, it's hard for me to feel too much pity for your situation. What if I vote, but people with interests aligned with mine tend not to? What if those people not voting are acting as rationally as the people who vote frequently? Consider these two groups, who get the same number of votes, live under the government for the same amount of time, but rationally have different incentives to vote: Home-owner: * Bob moves in, lives there ten years. Renters: * John moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Phil moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Mike moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Jess moves in, lives there two years, moves out. * Fred moves in, lives there two years, moves out. If we assume these people are self-interested, Bob will, on average, vote more than the renters, because Bob values future-Bob's well-being more than John values Fred's. It's only through the altruism of John, Phil, Mike, and Jess that Fred will get to benefit from a government that accounts for his interests. It's also true that each renter has an incentive to vote for things of short-term value and to discount long-term benefits, so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented. But "John isn't voting as much as Bob" isn't a case of John being less responsible than Bob. It's that they legitimately have different incentives.
- jjav 4y ago
  > so maybe it's okay that Bob ends up more represented In this example, I'd say it is very legitimate that the Bob has over time more influence how local things are run, since he's a long-time local that has to live with it. All the others are transients that come and go.
  - lkbm 4y ago
    Collectively, the others live with it for the same amount of time. Their incentives are lower to improve things locally, but the impact on them is the same.
banannaise 4y ago
I voted, but somehow people keep saying my opinion doesn't matter because I, as a demographic, didn't vote.

infl8ed 4y ago

Although I don't disagree with you, I will just mention that housing affordability is also a problem in Australia where voting is mandatory

strikelaserclaw 4y ago
how do you think politicians make money? They usually own assets.
- nradov 4y ago
  In the US some politicians make money by using their knowledge of upcoming legislation to trade stocks. https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-are-trading-large-with-a-wealth-of-hypocrisy/ https://nypost.com/2022/07/23/nancy-and-paul-pelosi-are-trad...
  - VonGuard 4y ago
    While I completely agree that Pelosi does this with insider knowledge, she and her husband also seem to be investing based on the hype they hear from people around them. Why else would the Pelosi's have taken such a bath on Roblox?! They had to have known shit is going bad over there, but they lost a LOT of money on that one... So yeah, they do insider trading, but they are sometimes also the dupes in these deals. Look at their history. They make money, yes, but they lose a lot to stupid investments too, ones they obviously made because some Steve-Jobs-wannabe got a meeting with them and fired their reality distortion ray.
  - missedthecue 4y ago
    What kind of insider knowledge did Pelosi have that would incline her to throw money into Roblox?
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Aunche 4y ago
I don't think mandating voting really helps that much. At best, you'll get people to vote for the candidate with the (D) or (R) next to their name. What we need is for people to be more informed. Fewer than 20% of people can name their state legislatures, let alone their stances. https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-state-government/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2018/12/14/americans-dont-understand-sta...

kubb 4y ago

Do you think there exists a political option that will give more rights to the renters? Do you think there's a correlation between having more leisure time (living from rent) and having more ability to do politics? Do you think blaming the renters for not voting is the most constructive way of going forward, or does it reinforce the status quo?

pochekailov 4y ago
Q1: Yes, there is. Once a professional politician sees more activity from renters, they will include the renter's interests into their agenda Q2: Yes, obviously there is a positive correlation. This is exactly why renters need to fight: stakes are against them. Current status quo is in favor of homeowners; it will not be possible to change it while being passive. Renters and homeowners have conflict of interests, there is inevitable fight. Q3: I think blaming is the call for fight. If renters want better deal, they need to fight. Is it most constructive? I don't know, this is the best I can come up with. Does it reinforces the status quo? No, I think inactivity reinforces it.
- nopenopenopeno 4y ago
  You have an incredibly naive impression of representative democracy and capitalist political economy. US politicians serve the rich, not only because they are the rich but also because they need the donations to even be able to run. This isn’t a mere hiccup but rather the entire point of the design.
  - deleted 4y ago
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  - pochekailov 4y ago
    Yes, in my experience, the naïve interpretation is right 80% of time and it is always best to start from a naïve explanation of a process. US politicians serve the rich only because they think that donations will help them win. Make the donations irrelevant - "rich" will loose the political power. How to make the donations irrelevant - go to vote, especially if you are poor and powerless. Convince your friends to vote. And not for a president, but for a local mayor, city council, judge etc.

refurb 4y ago

I think young generation needs to engage in the politics with the uncompromised goal to crush the housing price At least where I live, the “bank of mom and dad” either use their home equity to help their kids buy OR the kids are banking on getting the family home when they die. We’re in too deep now. We basically painted ourselves into a corner where the economic engine is so intertwined with rising home prices that nobody wants the gravy train to end. My best guess is tenancy laws change to be more and more in favor of tenants (SF, NYC) securing near permanent housing for current renters and massively disincentivizing an increase in supply of new rental units., completely screwing over those that come later. Basically kicking the can down the road another few decades.

pochekailov 4y ago
I'm an immigrant :). Banking on your family dying - this is like saying "I am a worthless loser". I want old generation to live eternally, and still afford housing.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  If the old generation cannot work for eternity, what would be your solution to a declining labor participation rate?
  - pochekailov 4y ago
    Rejuvenation and life-extending technologies to keep labor energetic forever. Industrial and maintenance automation for needing less labor. Relying on next generation to fund your retirement is ok if you live modestly; but not ok if you live luxuriously. Working person should not be doing worse than a non-working person; otherwise you have an extractive economy and social instability.
_aavaa_ 4y ago
> We’re in too deep now. We're never going to be less "too deep". Kicking the can down the road condemns future generations to dealing with a worse problem.

throwaway6734 4y ago

Add to this the upcoming social security and Medicare crises, the constant rise in healthcare prices driven by elder care, and a shrinking population that needs to support more retirees. We're in a weird place in the US where young people are unwilling to flex any political power to stop elder people from financially taking advantage of them.

pochekailov 4y ago
Only one question: why are they unwilling? Is it that hard? They won't be killed or tortured, like in Belarus or Russia, then why not?
- choko 4y ago
  Perhaps they don't believe political participation will help, or maybe OP is simply incorrect in their assertions.
- throwaway6734 4y ago
  I think a lot of young people just are ignorant about the situation coupled with the rise of populists on the left and the right, there's always some abstract other to blame without a focus on concrete problems and possible solutions. Whenever I talk to my young friends about Social Security's trust running dry in a decade they just handwave it away with stuff like: the government will just print more money or blame jeff bezos
  - wyre 4y ago
    As a young person (28), I think it’s because we feel powerless in the face of what is to come. Young people have no power because we largely are in the renter and working classes; while the home and business owners fight against every mention of renter protections, increased housing, worker protections, etc. Not to mention we see the world we are growing up into is quickly becoming more and more inhabitable while living with the truth that the fossil fuel industry has been lying about climate change for 50 years. Who are the populists you’re talking about? I can only think of Bernie and Yang. Trump isn’t a populist. We aren’t ignorant either. We are a product of the social media machine and a decreasing faith in educational institutions. I think a lot of people are too scared of the future so they don’t think about it. Blaming an abstract for political problems has been a thing for long as politics as been around.

rco8786 4y ago

Definitely not that simple. To use your same argument though, it’s not just homeowners - it’s homeowners and aspiring homeowners. Which is nearly everyone.

pochekailov 4y ago
The longer I live the more I am finding the universe is working on extremely simple few principles; their relations create complexity. Aspiring homeowners will never become homeowners if the price is exclusionary. Take SF: with average salary of 75-79K, the apartment cost starts from 1.1M. Only 8% has salary > than 100K, that makes the remaining 92% the "aspiring" homeowners. They will stay "aspiring" for the rest of their life. The only think they (or rather, "we") can do - make sure that post-zoomer generation don't have to be "aspiring" for their entire lives.
- api 4y ago
  The only rational move is for aspiring owners to leave SF, and not for another crazy expansive city. There is a gigantic country and world out there.
  - ryukafalz 4y ago
    I would say a non-exclusionary city would work just as well. Tokyo is the most expansive city I can think of and they've managed to keep prices down. Still, fighting to make US cities more livable is a laudable goal.
    - api 4y ago
      It's a laudable goal but I have serious doubts about its achievability in cities that are already overpriced. Every single incentive leans in the direction of keeping prices high since not only would lower prices cost homeowners money but would also possibly cut into tax revenues and could financial ruin people who purchased under these high price regimes. It's a bit of a ratchet. Once the prices go high, it's very hard to turn back. The only way out is probably to inflate the currency until a loaf of bread is $15 but housing is reasonable again, or for the state or federal government to offer some kind of huge tax write-off for depreciating home values. The latter is unlikely given the financial crunch faced by governments.

newsclues 4y ago

I’m not sure. At a certain point, if landlords strangle renters it can make hiring hard (workers can’t afford Cost of living if rents are too high), thus making the business environment uncompetitive. Will the business community have more power than landlords? I think so, eventually.

bbarn 4y ago
So far the business community's response has been "no one wants to work." because they can't afford to pay salaries. Ultimately, people vote with their feet, or government intervenes on behalf of those who would lose money.
- newsclues 4y ago
  In Canada business and government says this stuff, to justify importing immigrants to work for low wages and often lower standards of living.
  - randomdata 4y ago
    Importing immigrants in Canada requires that the employer provide suitable housing for the imported workers, so that brings us back to the earlier comment.
    - newsclues 4y ago
      In a lot of documented cases a tim Hortons franchise owner owns rental housing and rents it at outrageous rates to temporary foreign workers.
nradov 4y ago
Peter Thiel agrees and has shifted his investments out of the Bay Area because high housing prices make it too expensive to hire workers there. https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/19/17138290/peter-thiel-slumlords-comments-speech-rent-sf-silicon https://sf.curbed.com/2018/3/19/17138290/peter-thiel-slumlor...

mamonster 4y ago

Biggest problem IMO is that "young generation" is already split among ideological lines(myself included), and kind of hard to imagine a concentrated "young vs old" movement that wouldn't at some point devolve into infighting.

anovikov 4y ago

I think you are more than exaggerating. Thinking of someone who's 65 now and owns several homes, these people are utter fools. How much would money put into houses 40 years ago when they bought, and put into stocks at the same time, would make? You don't even need to google up to know the answer. SP500 would make 96x with dividends reinvested and 37x without. Median home price is not even 10x, and the median home has increased in size 1.5x in the meantime, plus required upkeep. Fix to housing problem is nothing but financial education for people.

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Applejinx 4y ago
Why should stocks be an asset class guaranteed to always expand at such a hyperbolic rate?
- pharmakom 4y ago
  No guarantees, but stocks capture the value of technological innovation that housing (expect a few markets like SF) does not.
bushbaba 4y ago
You forget that 1) you only have 20% down for a home. 2) homes can be sold without tax implications. If housing had the same tax treatment as stocks it’d be a horrible investment.
mrep 4y ago
Actually, you do need to google up if you want to look at an actual data analysis. I mean, you aren't even counting the rental income in your comparison. If you look at the rate of return on everything from 1870-2015, equity markets and housing actually provide somewhat similar returns [0]. Equity markets are far more liquid though so I choose them personally. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19817584

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29athrowaway 4y ago

Then each renter will become a homeowner, they will feel very comfortable, have 4 kids, and now you will need 4x more units. Then their kids will have 4 kids, and you'll need 16x more units with respect to where you started. Few generations after you have a much deeper problem that the one you started with. Now you live in a country with a population of over 1 billion, where protests cannot be controlled anymore and now you need a totalitarian regime with a massive surveillance and censorship apparatus to keep things under control. The alternative is that everyone is stressed out and feels the pressure of a system that is over capacity. Have you heard of Earth day? In 2022, it was April 22. It means that by April 22 we already consumed our environmental budget for the full year. If we continue like this it's not going to be long until there's mandatory population control. NOTE: this was edited

rowanG077 4y ago
So your point is we need to keep people in such shitty situations they won't want to bring kids into this world?
- 29athrowaway 4y ago
  My point is that the system is overcapacity, that's the reality you like it or not. If you want to watch Netflix and forget about what's happening outside, that's your choice. But we are completely destroying this planet in every way. There are lots of mouths to feed every day depending on systems that are not sustainable and may collapse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RjsThobgq7Q If you go camping and have limited amount of food rations, water, etc, you will make sensible decisions about how to consume the supplies you have. This is very similar.
  - rowanG077 4y ago
    Keeping people in misery is not the solution. Population control is much less ethically challenging IMO.
    - 4y ago

marto1 4y ago

All this is true, but you missed a crucial piece, addressing your "need to engage" - political energy capacity coming from the young. I'll be more than glad to be proven wrong, but I don't think young people have driven any sort of political change in the west for at least the last 20 years. There are many cases where they get used as a lever, but actual movements like "occupy wallstreet" got squashed fairly fast.

Loughla 4y ago
100% accurate. While popular society takes small steps forward in regard to social and political changes, the actual politics has not changed from when I was a kid. There are more politicians willing to admit they support gay people, I guess. But that's about it. Deep down where it counts - fiscal policy - nothing changes.
- namlem 4y ago
  Tens of millions of Americans gained access to healthcare due to policy changes. The IRA just further expanded access to healthcare.

rhacker 4y ago

Let's multiply Seattle housing count by 3. I'm sure you'll still be able to get from point a to point b in a day (if you survive the drive).

kmeisthax 4y ago
[laughs in Phoenix] In all seriousness, no. The way you multiply housing count is by making buildings taller and closer together, not by spreading them further out. This is how we used to build cities before cars and roads ruined them.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  It's because most people don't want to live in small boxes stacked on top of each other. The market responded to what people wanted and it was larger single family homes with yards and living space. An automobile to get you to other places for shopping and entertainment. This is what most people people want. I agree though that a lot of suburbs are just wastelands and I would consider them to be depressing places to live. But people seem to love them for some reason. A lot of these places don't even have sidewalks but I guess it makes sense as there isn't really anywhere to walk to.
  - kenned3 4y ago
    This! I love how people seem to feel they can enforce their views of how a city should be build on others. The fact of the matter is very clear.. we have so many detach houses because that is what people WANT. For some odd reason there is a subset of the population who feel entitled to dictate how OTHERS should live. These people go on and on about "increasing density" while ignoring that some don't want to live like this.
    - kmeisthax 4y ago
      You are projecting. The current state of affairs in the US is that, in most towns, detached single-family housing is the only thing you are legally allowed to build. When you buy land the local zoning board tells you what can be built on that land, and these zones are extremely fine-grained. Thus, the people who want detached houses are the ones who are dictating how others should live. There is a huge demand for denser urban arrangements, because people would like to live closer to where they work and don't want to drive cars. This is why smaller houses in urban centers go for more money than larger houses in suburbs. This is an arbitrage opportunity for anyone with the capital to buy houses at the periphery of those urban centers and demolish or renovate them to house more people. Except that's illegal, so instead the market is stuck pricing by convenience, and you get a society that demands it's working class spend two or more unpaid hours of their lives each day driving from the suburbs into the city. Historically, the transition to suburban home ownership as the default mode of living was also something dictated by elites rather than organically decided upon. To explain this we need to talk about cars, because suburbs and cars are basically a package deal. It is extremely inconvenient to live in the suburbs without owning a car, and cars do not work in cities where they have to compete for limited road space against pedestrians and public transit. So the car companies demanded that the laws and cities change to make their business work. We invented the """crime""" of jaywalking[0] just to make cities more convenient to access in a large vehicle. Car companies even bought up and destroyed public transit, turning efficient streetcar and rail systems into buses that had to compete for road space with individual riders, and often lost. This meant more people having to buy back their freedom[1] by moving to the suburbs and buying cars to get to the job they used to walk to. Had this decision not been made through top-down power and social engineering[2], the suburbanization of America would have been far more limited. We can see this in much of Europe and Asia, where attempts to level and rebuild cities in Henry Ford's divine image were resisted at every turn. [0] "jay" is old-timey derogatory slang for rural farmers, roughly equivalent to today's "hick". [1] I should point out that this freedom was an illusion because road capacity is far more limited for cars than it is for people. Suburbs will inevitably jam their streets and highways in ways that dense urban spaces cannot. [2] As in, engineering society to work a certain way, not defrauding someone out of their login password

wldcordeiro 4y ago

One thing that's missed in the renter vs homeowner thing is that the rules of election systems favors the homeowner too. Renters move more and will need to register to vote over again and the added inconvenience will stop plenty from even bothering.

kixiQu 4y ago
I will note that Washington state makes this very straightforward; universal mail-in voting with real easy registration has definitely led to me, a disorganized young person, voting when I wouldn't have otherwise.
dionidium 4y ago
A commonsense way to describe what you just said is that homeowners are more stable and stationary and therefore more invested in the long-term future of their communities than renters are, which is an argument that urbanists laugh at, but one that seems very clearly to be true. I think people basically know this, if they're allowed to be honest with themselves. Nobody who ever lived in a college dorm and then spent a "magical year" in NYC and then bought a house in a suburb thinks they were just as invested in those first two places as they are in the third.
- cheriot 4y ago
  As long as people can't afford to buy they're "less invested" so no reason to address housing affordability... In the modern housing market that's a self fulfilling prophecy. How about that principle of one person, one vote.
  - dionidium 4y ago
    > How about that principle of one person, one vote. Reality, in my view, is absolutely chock-full of contradictions. I believe in the principle of one person, one vote; and I believe that what I said above happens also to be true. The dialectic doesn't care that we might wish things were simpler or more straightforward.

6510 4y ago

10-20 years seems fine. It doesn't have to happen overnight. To fast would create chaos and make it into new lame situations for people. Gradual rent control with a point system works just fine. Personally I would like to see renting [gradually] changed into lease/buy. That I've paid the value of the house 3 times now (and the construction cost 7 times) could mean I own at least some of the house? Doesn't seem unreasonable.

JasserInicide 4y ago

Break out what "homeowners" actually is. It's increasingly becoming these shell companies and entities like Blackrock. We need to ban that shit immediately. The deed of a house should have a fucking person's name on it, not a company's.

namlem 4y ago
Investment firms buying homes is a symptom, not a cause. The only reason they do that is because local government artificially inflate the value of homes through supply restrictions.

fleddr 4y ago

Lol, 2-3 years of salary: https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-income-ratio/ https://www.longtermtrends.net/home-price-median-annual-inco... That would be half of the 70-year average. 5 is the norm, and it never got below 4. And you opt for half of the lowest point ever?

jjav 4y ago

> Nothing will change while the homeowners have more political power than the renters. Homeowners and renters of course have the exact same politica power, one vote each. If renters are for whatever reason choosing to not exercise that power, what can one do? They are free to vote, please do. That said, I always vote and not once has there been anything on the ballot on whether to build more in my town, so it's not like it matters on that front.