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Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without eve

Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. There's multiple issues that need solving now. 1) Being able to purchase a house without ever setting foot in the country. NZ decided to stop foreigners buying houses. There were websites you can go in and people from China would buy houses without ever setting foot in NZ... The buying power of alot of people from China and India is huge. This drives up prices. Let's not forget, most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. You have have to have a spouse or buy via a 3rd party who owns it and you pay them fees to hold it for you. 2) Houses are no longer valued based on your income, they are based on what you can earn. This is difficult to solve. You need rentals to assist with foreign labour. But you want to remove rentals to prevent houses being investment properties. Maybe they should cap the number of houses a family can own, and a business cannot rent out a home. It's built for sale, not built for rental. 3) Housing shortages. Housing supply should be assisted by the government via BTO's. Built to Order. Rather than taking huge loans from banks, you can buy a house from the government at a fixed price, that you will pay back. If you don't pay the government takes it back, otherwise you cannot sell that house for the first 10 years of ownership. You cannot rent it out for the first 5 years of ownership. Somewhat similar to how Singapore runs their BTOs.

josho 4y ago
I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage. If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting. The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.
- christofosho 4y ago
  Is this meant to argue against a limit on the quantity of properties that one individual can own? If corporations were not permitted to own property, and other individuals were allowed only two properties (what real need would there be for more), the quantity of available property for purchase would skyrocket. The prices would plummet, and far more people would be capable of owning their home. I don't disagree that there is disincentive for developers to build mid-level properties. They want huge expensive homes or the ability to cram many people into one space. I think this is a problem, but is not the only reason for the lack of availability, as described by the grandparent and in my former paragraph.
- eldaisfish 4y ago
  this misses the point. The root of the housing shortage problem in Canada, Australia and New Zealand is zoning. Zoning plus NIMBYs make housing wasteful by allowing only single family houses in vast areas of prime land. This is a simple supply-demand problem, not anything complicated. The solution is equally simple - make zoning laws basic and limited in scope.
  - w3gv 4y ago
    NIMBYs and zoning preceded the housing shortage by decades. To attribute it solely to those two factors is oversimplifying the problem
- AussieWog93 4y ago
  >They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed. Is that true? I'd imagine building a big block of, say, 100 units to be far more capital efficient than building a few freestanding homes, if zoning laws allowed it.
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    The plethera of shoebox condos in Toronto attest to this fact. Then people wonder why birth rates are so low when the only options are having a baby while living in a 1 bdrm condo with a galley kitchen, or moving hours away from your job.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I honestly donno a lot about the US and it’s “projects”, but my understanding is large blocks of units in the US or the west tend to be built and left to rot. Other than Singapore are there any blocks of units that don’t get run down over time and left to rot? (Seriously question as I’m curious)
    - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
      Cooperative housing where the tenants are the owners.
    - llampx 4y ago
      Every city in Europe?
  - josho 4y ago
    Oh 100 units are still built. But they are sold as condos targeting upper middle class as those are more profitable for builders to sell. And these are not affordable for many. We need policy that requires mixed units. Some for the affluent, some for service workers, etc.
- IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
  Did the free market set the prevailing risk free interest rate in CAN ? Did the free market supply the homeowner and title insurance ? Did the free market determine the rules for zoning that plague most large metro areas and adjoining suburbs?
andreareina 4y ago
In Singapore HDB flats are still being used for investment and my generation (30s) and younger are still feeling the pinch. IMO there’s (at least) one part missing to the BTO sauce: you got a government subsidy, you don’t get to sell on the open market. I don’t know what the alternative is, whether it’s selling back to the government (adjusted for inflation and depreciation somehow) or what, but currently there’s a significant cash transfer from the government to people who won the BTO ballot lottery, just ten years later.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  Yeah it's not a bullet proof system but I think it still works relatively well. If I understand correctly if you own a HDB, you can buy a Condo? But if you have a Condo you cannot buy an HDB? And then in some scenarios you must pick which one you will keep. Since I'm not Singaporean I'm not well versed in the ins and outs of the system but I do think on the surface its much better than most other countries.
  - andreareina 4y ago
    I think that’s right. I’m in the same boat but it’s hard to talk to anyone my age and not get an earful about the housing situation haha. Definitely better than other places I’ve seen, agreed.
BenFranklin100 4y ago
The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.
- firecall 4y ago
  Those things are not the same though! Cars and Houses do not perform in the same way financially. Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value. There are, of course, outliers in both markets.
  - imtringued 4y ago
    Houses wear down just like cars. They behave exactly the same way.
  - dgoldstein0 4y ago
    > Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value. this is an observation that may be mostly supported by data right now, but also is not super meaningful. WHY do houses appreciate? why do cars depreciate? The answer is supply and demand: supply of housing is far more regulated than supply of cars - height limits and zoning are frequent reasons, but any sort of building approval process with unnecessary hurdles can increase supplier risk and cost. Most of these processes aren't set up with demand in mind. whereas if you are an automaker and want to churn out another 10000 cars, there's no laws stopping you (fuel efficiency / emissions requirements notwithstanding). The problem with houses is that since a large portion of the population thinks they are investments, anything that would increase supply would devalue their investment, so fixing the regulations around them is a political quagmire. I suppose cars, as machines, also have increasing maintenance costs over time. the same is true of houses, just over a much longer timescale... if houses depreciated instead of appreciated, we might see more torn down after 30-50 years rather than always repairing everything. Certainly the tradeoffs would start to look different.
    - dboreham 4y ago
phpisthebest 4y ago
1) I agree here but I have a feeling it would be unpopular policy on the democratic side of the asile if it tried to be done here in the US. 2) I am unclear why one would cap the number of houses or prevent rental. Or how that would solve the problem. Affordablity is only one reason people rent. There are alot of people that do not WANT to own. Hell I am a home owner and have often thought about selling and going back to rental. I might if I ever need to move cities again 3) Price fixing and having government take over the housing market is not a solution to what is largely a government created problem in the first place. Zoning, non-saftey based building standards (i.e min square footage, min lot size, bans on Multifamily, etc) and other government actions are the direct cause of the housing shortage. Change Zoning Laws and allow builders to only have to adhere to actual safety based building standards and housing shortage would be over. Government putting its hands on the scales of the market for over 50 years is the root cause of the problem, everything from FHA to Fannie/Freddie, to Zoning laws all created this problem.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  2) I think the vast majority of people want to own their own home, have somewhere to live when they retire, or something they can sell for some money and move to a smaller place. There will always be a need for rentals. Moving to another city/state/town/country, etc, will require rentals so people can live. What I'm against is people owning MANY homes for the sole purpose of renting them. If you had a balance of people owning 1-3 homes, or people who rent their home out while they live somewhere else maybe for work or they retired. It would be ok. When I was 20, just before I left NZ, I bumped someone I went to school with who had just bought his 7th house, he had quit his job because the rent income exceeded his day job and he was beginning to look for an 8th house. I'm not considering moving back to NZ as I have a family now, and looking at the prices I'm questioning if I can afford a house at all... Looking at the prices over the last 10 years, houses that wer 190k are now like 1.3 million... 3) Governments just building (or in this case not building) houses isn't the problem. Theres many government level issues to resolve. Absolutely fixing zoning laws, development laws, etc. 3 is a huge topic that could branch out into like 20 different things. I'm simply suggesting in terms of building aspect is taking some ideas from Singapore around the way BTOs are done and restrictions in place to prevent profiteering.
__MatrixMan__ 4y ago
Do you think the situation would improve if they were... bad investments? Because it seems to me that we can probably find all kinds of ways to reduce a house's market value without reducing its livability. Especially if its owners are on a different continent and not around to stop us. Once they cave and sell at a loss, we've got the local cost of housing going down and whatever the deficit is stays in the local economy.
QIYGT 4y ago
> Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. The only reason homes can be considered investments is that governments limit supply so much that prices are forced to increase.
- cycomanic 4y ago
  If it is just a matter of supply and demand, how come that increase in house prices have outpaced population growth by huge margins in many places? I mean look at places like, e.g. Germany which has a pretty stable population (it would be contracting if it wasn't for immigration), but house prices increased significantly over the last 10 years, pretty much throughout most of the country.
  - QIYGT 4y ago
    I don't know details about Germany, but you can't just look at national population trends. In the US for example, the problem is made worse by a trend of people moving from rural areas into cities. And re the "huge margins" the relationship between supply and demand isn't linear. If you have 10% more households than homes, bidding wars will drive prices up way more than 10%.
  - hcurtiss 4y ago
    Inflation-driven real asset appreciation.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Because the fed (and most other countries) have been printing money like no tomorrow for over a decade now.
  - BenFranklin100 4y ago
    There are several reasons; here’s a few, some US specific: 1. While the overall population may not have increased significantly in some countries, people have been migrating to cities from rural areas. This influx puts price pressure on urban housing. The US, for instance, likely has enough housing overall, it’s just spatially misallocated. A derelict, vacate home in Detroit doesn’t help someone in SF. 2. Many forms of denser housing are now illegal or have been torn down. Boarding houses are gone for instance. Boarders now compete for studios or one bedroom apts. 3. Smaller family sizes. It’s no longer common for a six person family to live in a three bedroom house. This used to be commonplace. Those six people are now two couples with a child each. 4. Related to point three, governments have made it illegal to reconfigure or replace larger homes with smaller homes more appropriate for smaller families or empty nesters. Think of the retired Boomer living in the 6 bedroom single family home, or the childless couple in a three bedroom condo with two of bedrooms being an office or guest room. Closely related, people often demand more space than they did 80 years ago. 5 This a big one: higher urban wages. After decades of wage stagnation, wages have been going up, especially in places like SF, NYC, and Boston. This is a GOOD thing. Not so good, is that these same places have kept their housing supply relatively static, forcing those with good jobs to compete amongst themselves for housing. The old joke: VC $$$ ——> Startup —-> Developer ——> Landlord, has a lot of truth to it.
drunkenmagician 4y ago
Having lived in both NZ and Singapore I can second these comments. Although the 'a business cannot rent out a home' bit would probably not work in practice. There's definitely an ongoing need for commercial landlords, although govt's could do more to ensure this model is sustainable and fair for both landlord and renter, usually it swings in favour of one or the other.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Commercial landlords aren't the problem, per se. Ownership concentrated in a few massive entities is. Outlawing owning >x% of a market's housing supply (for some low x) doesn't sound like the worst idea. What we'd want is there to be (a) enough rental housing stock, (b) enough rental owning companies of comparable size to create a healthy market on rental prices, & (c) a sane balance between the number of rental and owner-occupied homes. Part of the current imbalances are a consequence of low interest rates though, as investors could get a lot more leverage to acquire properties for rent.
  - philliphaydon 4y ago
    I concur. Finding a balance is very difficult, any way you tip the scale its difficult to stop it from continuing to tip causing new problems :( It's easy to point out problems, difficult to come up with solutions. One thing I believe is that mortgage payments, and accessible mortgages should always be lower than the rental price so those who want to own rather than rent, it makes it a easier/better option. (does that make sense?)
scarface74 4y ago
> It's built for sale, not built for rental. Why is there such an emphasis on ownership? Yes I’ve owned five properties - two to live in permanently, one to live in half the year (the other half we travel), and two investment properties. The tenants I had in my rental properties were in no position to buy a home or for that matter to rent a whole house. I rented by the room. I actively discourage young people from buying homes. They need the flexibility to move to where the jobs are. Besides, are you really going to discourage building multi unit housing for rents? How is that going to help housing affordability?
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  You kinda prove my point, you rent out a room, you can afford a high mortgage repayment and combined income from your rentals covers mortgage payments. Preventing anyone from ever owning a home. Mortgage payments should be less than rental payments. Also not EVERYONE will be able to afford homes. But when the middle class are priced out of owning a home, as is the issue, thats a problem. Edit: you also seem to ignore that house prices have sky rocketed while income hasn’t. So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home.
  - scarface74 4y ago
    So, I prevented someone from owning a home that could only barely afford $80-$135/week with all utilities included? Isn’t that the ultimate “let them eat cake”? The alternative would be for the eight people to be homeless? Are all of the people buying property and focusing on student housing also keeping people from buying houses? Were the college students with no income who were only going to be in town for four years and living off of student loans also going to buy houses? Should they have also been forced to buy homes or be homeless? > So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home I assure you those eight people (two houses) were happy to be able to afford to have a roof over their head. Do you suggest no one be allowed to be renters and everyone buy a home?
    - 4y ago
kypro 4y ago
Houses are only good investments if you can rent them for a price that will yield an attractive return. People will only rent a house for a price that they're willing to pay therefore this isn't a bubble as you imply (people are only buying because prices go up), so presumably it's a supply / demand issue. It's extremely easy to say "reee, why don't the government build more homes!!", but where exactly do you build more homes in central London? Oh no, sorry, you meant build more homes where there's free land? Sure, but people don't want to live there. The issue is actually far more to do with urbanisation than anything. For example here in the UK there are plenty of places that are extremely affordable to live, the issue is that they're in rural and generally undesirable areas so no one wants to live there. When people say house prices are too high, what they actually mean is that they can't afford a house in London or some other attractive city they want to live. It's not that an average wage wouldn't get you a decent house in say Middlesbrough where the average property price is ~£150k - it's that an average wage won't get you a decent house in a nice city location. A first time buyer could easily get a two bed house in Middlesbrough for around £100k. In my opinion the solution is counter intuitively to stop building more houses in cities. The more you build in cities the more jobs and more people relocate there. And that feeds on itself because then more people want to live there because that's where all the action is. If instead we invested in places like Middlesbrough and offered employees incentives to relocate we could distribute the demand for housing away from over populated cities. We could also couple this with investment in public transportation and incentivise remote working which would allow people to comfortably live further out of city centres. Though, I suspect this is understood fairly well by governments. I think they actually see urbanisation as a good thing because it's more efficient for business to have a pool of labour and consumers concentrated in a small geographic area. The only real cost is congestion and house prices, but that's a cost to humans, not businesses.
josephcsible 4y ago
> most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. This makes me wish we had a reciprocity rule. E.g., "A foreigner can only buy a house in America if Americans can buy houses in the foreigner's home country".
asdff 4y ago
A lot of this can be solved by simply updating zoning code to allow for more housing. Housing is only a lucrative investment because its been made artificially scarce through restrictive zoning.

josho 4y ago

I don’t necessarily see a problem with point 2. Renting a house often creates supply. The owner will create a basement suite or a nanny suite over the garage. If housing shortage was solved then that also kills the profit motive of renting out all but the most ideal houses for renting. The root cause in Canada is the neoliberal policy that started in the 90s that ended government building low income housing. They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed.

christofosho 4y ago
Is this meant to argue against a limit on the quantity of properties that one individual can own? If corporations were not permitted to own property, and other individuals were allowed only two properties (what real need would there be for more), the quantity of available property for purchase would skyrocket. The prices would plummet, and far more people would be capable of owning their home. I don't disagree that there is disincentive for developers to build mid-level properties. They want huge expensive homes or the ability to cram many people into one space. I think this is a problem, but is not the only reason for the lack of availability, as described by the grandparent and in my former paragraph.
eldaisfish 4y ago
this misses the point. The root of the housing shortage problem in Canada, Australia and New Zealand is zoning. Zoning plus NIMBYs make housing wasteful by allowing only single family houses in vast areas of prime land. This is a simple supply-demand problem, not anything complicated. The solution is equally simple - make zoning laws basic and limited in scope.
- w3gv 4y ago
  NIMBYs and zoning preceded the housing shortage by decades. To attribute it solely to those two factors is oversimplifying the problem
AussieWog93 4y ago
>They left the free market to do its thing. And this is the end result of decades of free enterprise. We’ve built lots of housing for upper middle class because that’s profitable for builders and largely left the poor/young to be screwed. Is that true? I'd imagine building a big block of, say, 100 units to be far more capital efficient than building a few freestanding homes, if zoning laws allowed it.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
  The plethera of shoebox condos in Toronto attest to this fact. Then people wonder why birth rates are so low when the only options are having a baby while living in a 1 bdrm condo with a galley kitchen, or moving hours away from your job.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I honestly donno a lot about the US and it’s “projects”, but my understanding is large blocks of units in the US or the west tend to be built and left to rot. Other than Singapore are there any blocks of units that don’t get run down over time and left to rot? (Seriously question as I’m curious)
  - MonkeyMalarky 4y ago
    Cooperative housing where the tenants are the owners.
  - llampx 4y ago
    Every city in Europe?
- josho 4y ago
  Oh 100 units are still built. But they are sold as condos targeting upper middle class as those are more profitable for builders to sell. And these are not affordable for many. We need policy that requires mixed units. Some for the affluent, some for service workers, etc.
IG_Semmelweiss 4y ago
Did the free market set the prevailing risk free interest rate in CAN ? Did the free market supply the homeowner and title insurance ? Did the free market determine the rules for zoning that plague most large metro areas and adjoining suburbs?

andreareina 4y ago

In Singapore HDB flats are still being used for investment and my generation (30s) and younger are still feeling the pinch. IMO there’s (at least) one part missing to the BTO sauce: you got a government subsidy, you don’t get to sell on the open market. I don’t know what the alternative is, whether it’s selling back to the government (adjusted for inflation and depreciation somehow) or what, but currently there’s a significant cash transfer from the government to people who won the BTO ballot lottery, just ten years later.

philliphaydon 4y ago
Yeah it's not a bullet proof system but I think it still works relatively well. If I understand correctly if you own a HDB, you can buy a Condo? But if you have a Condo you cannot buy an HDB? And then in some scenarios you must pick which one you will keep. Since I'm not Singaporean I'm not well versed in the ins and outs of the system but I do think on the surface its much better than most other countries.
- andreareina 4y ago
  I think that’s right. I’m in the same boat but it’s hard to talk to anyone my age and not get an earful about the housing situation haha. Definitely better than other places I’ve seen, agreed.

BenFranklin100 4y ago

The reasons we don’t have enough homes is because governments have made it illegal to build enough new homes to meet demand. You are essentially say that the presence of car collectors leads to car shortages.

firecall 4y ago
Those things are not the same though! Cars and Houses do not perform in the same way financially. Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value. There are, of course, outliers in both markets.
- imtringued 4y ago
  Houses wear down just like cars. They behave exactly the same way.
- dgoldstein0 4y ago
  > Houses tend to increase in value, Cars tend to decline in value. this is an observation that may be mostly supported by data right now, but also is not super meaningful. WHY do houses appreciate? why do cars depreciate? The answer is supply and demand: supply of housing is far more regulated than supply of cars - height limits and zoning are frequent reasons, but any sort of building approval process with unnecessary hurdles can increase supplier risk and cost. Most of these processes aren't set up with demand in mind. whereas if you are an automaker and want to churn out another 10000 cars, there's no laws stopping you (fuel efficiency / emissions requirements notwithstanding). The problem with houses is that since a large portion of the population thinks they are investments, anything that would increase supply would devalue their investment, so fixing the regulations around them is a political quagmire. I suppose cars, as machines, also have increasing maintenance costs over time. the same is true of houses, just over a much longer timescale... if houses depreciated instead of appreciated, we might see more torn down after 30-50 years rather than always repairing everything. Certainly the tradeoffs would start to look different.
  - dboreham 4y ago

phpisthebest 4y ago

1) I agree here but I have a feeling it would be unpopular policy on the democratic side of the asile if it tried to be done here in the US. 2) I am unclear why one would cap the number of houses or prevent rental. Or how that would solve the problem. Affordablity is only one reason people rent. There are alot of people that do not WANT to own. Hell I am a home owner and have often thought about selling and going back to rental. I might if I ever need to move cities again 3) Price fixing and having government take over the housing market is not a solution to what is largely a government created problem in the first place. Zoning, non-saftey based building standards (i.e min square footage, min lot size, bans on Multifamily, etc) and other government actions are the direct cause of the housing shortage. Change Zoning Laws and allow builders to only have to adhere to actual safety based building standards and housing shortage would be over. Government putting its hands on the scales of the market for over 50 years is the root cause of the problem, everything from FHA to Fannie/Freddie, to Zoning laws all created this problem.

philliphaydon 4y ago
2) I think the vast majority of people want to own their own home, have somewhere to live when they retire, or something they can sell for some money and move to a smaller place. There will always be a need for rentals. Moving to another city/state/town/country, etc, will require rentals so people can live. What I'm against is people owning MANY homes for the sole purpose of renting them. If you had a balance of people owning 1-3 homes, or people who rent their home out while they live somewhere else maybe for work or they retired. It would be ok. When I was 20, just before I left NZ, I bumped someone I went to school with who had just bought his 7th house, he had quit his job because the rent income exceeded his day job and he was beginning to look for an 8th house. I'm not considering moving back to NZ as I have a family now, and looking at the prices I'm questioning if I can afford a house at all... Looking at the prices over the last 10 years, houses that wer 190k are now like 1.3 million... 3) Governments just building (or in this case not building) houses isn't the problem. Theres many government level issues to resolve. Absolutely fixing zoning laws, development laws, etc. 3 is a huge topic that could branch out into like 20 different things. I'm simply suggesting in terms of building aspect is taking some ideas from Singapore around the way BTOs are done and restrictions in place to prevent profiteering.

__MatrixMan__ 4y ago

Do you think the situation would improve if they were... bad investments? Because it seems to me that we can probably find all kinds of ways to reduce a house's market value without reducing its livability. Especially if its owners are on a different continent and not around to stop us. Once they cave and sell at a loss, we've got the local cost of housing going down and whatever the deficit is stays in the local economy.

QIYGT 4y ago

> Because today houses are not for living in. They are investments. The only reason homes can be considered investments is that governments limit supply so much that prices are forced to increase.

cycomanic 4y ago
If it is just a matter of supply and demand, how come that increase in house prices have outpaced population growth by huge margins in many places? I mean look at places like, e.g. Germany which has a pretty stable population (it would be contracting if it wasn't for immigration), but house prices increased significantly over the last 10 years, pretty much throughout most of the country.
- QIYGT 4y ago
  I don't know details about Germany, but you can't just look at national population trends. In the US for example, the problem is made worse by a trend of people moving from rural areas into cities. And re the "huge margins" the relationship between supply and demand isn't linear. If you have 10% more households than homes, bidding wars will drive prices up way more than 10%.
- hcurtiss 4y ago
  Inflation-driven real asset appreciation.
- lazide 4y ago
  Because the fed (and most other countries) have been printing money like no tomorrow for over a decade now.
- BenFranklin100 4y ago
  There are several reasons; here’s a few, some US specific: 1. While the overall population may not have increased significantly in some countries, people have been migrating to cities from rural areas. This influx puts price pressure on urban housing. The US, for instance, likely has enough housing overall, it’s just spatially misallocated. A derelict, vacate home in Detroit doesn’t help someone in SF. 2. Many forms of denser housing are now illegal or have been torn down. Boarding houses are gone for instance. Boarders now compete for studios or one bedroom apts. 3. Smaller family sizes. It’s no longer common for a six person family to live in a three bedroom house. This used to be commonplace. Those six people are now two couples with a child each. 4. Related to point three, governments have made it illegal to reconfigure or replace larger homes with smaller homes more appropriate for smaller families or empty nesters. Think of the retired Boomer living in the 6 bedroom single family home, or the childless couple in a three bedroom condo with two of bedrooms being an office or guest room. Closely related, people often demand more space than they did 80 years ago. 5 This a big one: higher urban wages. After decades of wage stagnation, wages have been going up, especially in places like SF, NYC, and Boston. This is a GOOD thing. Not so good, is that these same places have kept their housing supply relatively static, forcing those with good jobs to compete amongst themselves for housing. The old joke: VC $$$ ——> Startup —-> Developer ——> Landlord, has a lot of truth to it.

drunkenmagician 4y ago

Having lived in both NZ and Singapore I can second these comments. Although the 'a business cannot rent out a home' bit would probably not work in practice. There's definitely an ongoing need for commercial landlords, although govt's could do more to ensure this model is sustainable and fair for both landlord and renter, usually it swings in favour of one or the other.

ethbr0 4y ago
Commercial landlords aren't the problem, per se. Ownership concentrated in a few massive entities is. Outlawing owning >x% of a market's housing supply (for some low x) doesn't sound like the worst idea. What we'd want is there to be (a) enough rental housing stock, (b) enough rental owning companies of comparable size to create a healthy market on rental prices, & (c) a sane balance between the number of rental and owner-occupied homes. Part of the current imbalances are a consequence of low interest rates though, as investors could get a lot more leverage to acquire properties for rent.
- philliphaydon 4y ago
  I concur. Finding a balance is very difficult, any way you tip the scale its difficult to stop it from continuing to tip causing new problems :( It's easy to point out problems, difficult to come up with solutions. One thing I believe is that mortgage payments, and accessible mortgages should always be lower than the rental price so those who want to own rather than rent, it makes it a easier/better option. (does that make sense?)

scarface74 4y ago

> It's built for sale, not built for rental. Why is there such an emphasis on ownership? Yes I’ve owned five properties - two to live in permanently, one to live in half the year (the other half we travel), and two investment properties. The tenants I had in my rental properties were in no position to buy a home or for that matter to rent a whole house. I rented by the room. I actively discourage young people from buying homes. They need the flexibility to move to where the jobs are. Besides, are you really going to discourage building multi unit housing for rents? How is that going to help housing affordability?

philliphaydon 4y ago
You kinda prove my point, you rent out a room, you can afford a high mortgage repayment and combined income from your rentals covers mortgage payments. Preventing anyone from ever owning a home. Mortgage payments should be less than rental payments. Also not EVERYONE will be able to afford homes. But when the middle class are priced out of owning a home, as is the issue, thats a problem. Edit: you also seem to ignore that house prices have sky rocketed while income hasn’t. So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home.
- scarface74 4y ago
  So, I prevented someone from owning a home that could only barely afford $80-$135/week with all utilities included? Isn’t that the ultimate “let them eat cake”? The alternative would be for the eight people to be homeless? Are all of the people buying property and focusing on student housing also keeping people from buying houses? Were the college students with no income who were only going to be in town for four years and living off of student loans also going to buy houses? Should they have also been forced to buy homes or be homeless? > So thank you for contributing to the housing issue that causes young people to not be able to afford a home I assure you those eight people (two houses) were happy to be able to afford to have a roof over their head. Do you suggest no one be allowed to be renters and everyone buy a home?
  - 4y ago

kypro 4y ago

Houses are only good investments if you can rent them for a price that will yield an attractive return. People will only rent a house for a price that they're willing to pay therefore this isn't a bubble as you imply (people are only buying because prices go up), so presumably it's a supply / demand issue. It's extremely easy to say "reee, why don't the government build more homes!!", but where exactly do you build more homes in central London? Oh no, sorry, you meant build more homes where there's free land? Sure, but people don't want to live there. The issue is actually far more to do with urbanisation than anything. For example here in the UK there are plenty of places that are extremely affordable to live, the issue is that they're in rural and generally undesirable areas so no one wants to live there. When people say house prices are too high, what they actually mean is that they can't afford a house in London or some other attractive city they want to live. It's not that an average wage wouldn't get you a decent house in say Middlesbrough where the average property price is ~£150k - it's that an average wage won't get you a decent house in a nice city location. A first time buyer could easily get a two bed house in Middlesbrough for around £100k. In my opinion the solution is counter intuitively to stop building more houses in cities. The more you build in cities the more jobs and more people relocate there. And that feeds on itself because then more people want to live there because that's where all the action is. If instead we invested in places like Middlesbrough and offered employees incentives to relocate we could distribute the demand for housing away from over populated cities. We could also couple this with investment in public transportation and incentivise remote working which would allow people to comfortably live further out of city centres. Though, I suspect this is understood fairly well by governments. I think they actually see urbanisation as a good thing because it's more efficient for business to have a pool of labour and consumers concentrated in a small geographic area. The only real cost is congestion and house prices, but that's a cost to humans, not businesses.

josephcsible 4y ago

> most countries in Asia you literally cannot buy property if you're a foreigner. This makes me wish we had a reciprocity rule. E.g., "A foreigner can only buy a house in America if Americans can buy houses in the foreigner's home country".

asdff 4y ago

A lot of this can be solved by simply updating zoning code to allow for more housing. Housing is only a lucrative investment because its been made artificially scarce through restrictive zoning.