4 ms·

> Housing can either be affordable for most people or it can be a safe, lucrative investment. For most of the period since WWII housing was both affordable and

> Housing can either be affordable for most people or it can be a safe, lucrative investment. For most of the period since WWII housing was both affordable and a good investment. We have no "landed gentry." Stop sharpening your guillotine and deal with reality. People who can afford housing are not guilty of anything -- we should celebrate success, rather than meet it with envy and veiled threats.

jackstraw14 4y ago
> We have no "landed gentry." It's just a bit less immediately tangible than it used to be. It's still there, and the market still ebbs and flows.
- twblalock 4y ago
  One of the things about "landed gentry", in the countries where they actually exist, is that they inherited their land. In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. To demean them by implying they don't deserve their success is insulting and wrong. That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense.
  - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
    > Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. Almost 30% of all houses sold last year on Texas was to LCC and institutional investors. You can keep the myth going of people without help buying their house and being succesful but the reality is most people report having help from friends or family for the deposit, that most mortgages are sold with criminal variable interest rates and that the corp mass buying of houses has been growing year after year since 2016. https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-homes-in-2021/ https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-h...
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages, and variable rates are not criminal. People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.
      - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
        > Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. > People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. They 100% play a significant role on the problem. > Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. Not in any way that fundamentally changes the status quo, certainly not to reverse it, and also housing has been in a downspiral of accesibility for 70 years, 3 local laws in Canada is not gonna fix it. > just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay Housing is a need, overpaying or homelessness is a real junction for a sizeble part of the population. Look at singapore, they are more capitalist than the US and has banned private landlords. Their results speak for themselves, cheaper mortgages, more space per person, shorter commutes, possibilities for larger families to find enough space. If you prefer to have a building "for billionaries" empty like New York does instead of close to 0% homelessness then thats your choice, but do not pretend it is to help hard working people be rewarded for their labour. Landlords are a remenant of aristocracy, a way for rich tophs to keep living large from their estate. Adam Smith called them parasites for a reason, they are a negative GDP engine.
        twblalock 4y ago
        > At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. Ok, you just don't understand how mortgages work in the US. Fixed-rate mortgages, which represent 91% of the mortgage market, can be had for terms of 15 or 30 years. This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. You can, right now, lock in a rate for the next 30 years in the US.
  - watwut 4y ago
    > In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. How would you even had stats like that and what is that supposed to mean? How would you distinguish money from "income"? > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      > How would you distinguish money from "income"? Mortgage underwriters are very good at doing that.
    - rascul 4y ago
      > Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined. It's not exactly a counter point, but there have been lots of new millionaires lately: > People got richer last year, with Americans making up nearly half of the new millionaires across the globe. According to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, as many as 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021; 2.5 million of those people were in the U.S. > "This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the United States since 2016," the report stated. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-million-new-millionaires-in-2021/435759 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-milli...
  - jackstraw14 4y ago
    > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense. hold up. take a moment to consider that "landed gentry" might change as a demographic and we're suddenly allies.
  - MandieD 4y ago
    "Compte du Whatevertheheck" and his English fellow fictional counterpart Lord Fitzwilliam, Earl of ------ (an Earl's wife is a Countess), weren't mere landed gentry - they were part of the hereditary aristocracy. An aristocrat could be rather poor if he or previous generations had mismanaged the family holdings. The Bennets and Darcys from Pride and Prejudice were the landed gentry, with the Bennets being in the middle of it, albeit very precariously for the Bennet women, as Mr. Bennet failed to father a son. Their interests very famously clashed with those of the up-and-coming merchant class, and of course, those of the tenant farmers and hired laborers. (Charles Bingley, son of a very prosperous merchant, was not yet part of the landed gentry, but would be as soon as he used his cash to buy an estate and started receiving that sweet sweet land rent from his new tenants.) We certainly have "landed gentry" in the US - have you ever noticed that auto dealerships tend to be handed down from father to son? It's a good deal of why Tesla can't sell direct in a lot of states. Also: family farms. Most agricultural workers worked land they didn't own, both now and in the previous two centuries.
siquick 4y ago
Australian resident here. Why should I be celebrating my landlord (who bought this house outright in 1995 for $86,000AUD) putting up our rent by $210 (24%) per week just because he can? My partner and I are both pretty decent earners but because of the amount of money we have to pay in rent (for a not even that great place) we will never be able to own a house in the city my partner was born in because we simply can’t save enough for a deposit in a period of time where the house prices wont rise out of reach. Greed-driven housing policy is ruining communities for a lot of people. All but a small handful of politicians in Australia own multiple investment properties. It is in their interest for the current system to continue as is.
- sien 4y ago
  Sydney or Melbourne?
- twblalock 4y ago
  You should be glad that the property rights that let your landlord do that are the same property rights that let you do what you want with your own money, including becoming a landlord yourself if you choose to do so. You should be glad that success is not punished, because if that was the case, nobody would try to succeed and your society would suffer tremendously as a result -- and when the economy suffers it always hurts the poor more than it hurts the rich. By renting you are getting a place to live, you are benefitting from the success of others who were able to afford housing, and you are buying time for yourself be successful. It's how healthy markets work.
  - siquick 4y ago
    Lucky me for having a roof over my families head in the 12th largest economy in the world. Our definitions of success are obviously very different.
    - twblalock 4y ago
      Do you realize how funny that is coming from twelfth place?
ben_w 4y ago
I'm a landlord now, and I've been of a similar opinion to @mullingitover both before and since, though perhaps with less colourful language. My rent has normally been just following the advice of my agent, in turn following market trends. But the most recent update from them was recommending a rent increase, which I rejected because of the news from the UK containing many references to a cost of living crisis. (The property is in the UK, if that wasn't clear). "Following the market" isn't a crime, but the market is not kind or generous. The phrase "without a fight" can be legal or physical; the former is a foregone conclusion, the latter would be undesirable.
coldtea 4y ago
>We have no "landed gentry." You'd be surprised. Large land ownership is a huge deal regarding money, status, and influence, without even going into readings of the situation like Georgism.
crote 4y ago
Yes, and that's why housing is unaffordable these days. An investment which increases its value at the rate of inflation or worse is a pretty poor investment. After all, you could probably make more money by simply buying government bonds. If the housing price increases more than the rate of inflation, it will eventually become unaffordable. After all, salary increases at the rate of inflation - if the housing price increased faster it'd take up an ever-increasing portion of your salary, meaning it'd become less affordable. Housing was affordable, but its price increased in such a way that it is now unaffordable. This made it a great investment for the people who already owned housing, but newer generations no longer have access to housing and can't invest in it.
- twblalock 4y ago
  > After all, salary increases at the rate of inflation That's quite an assumption there. Specifically, it assumes no increases in per-worker productivity. By your logic, housing never would have been affordable. But we know that it was! > This made it a great investment for the people who already owned housing, but newer generations no longer have access to housing and can't invest in it. Actually about 43% of new homebuyers are millennials, and that could not happen if new generations could not afford housing. https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-report-shows-share-of-millennial-home-buyers-continues-to-rise https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-report-shows-share-of-m...
- EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Newer generations will inherit all that real estate. Some will inherit more, some less, just as some will be born in Australia and some in Malaysia, well, life is unfair.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

jackstraw14 4y ago

> We have no "landed gentry." It's just a bit less immediately tangible than it used to be. It's still there, and the market still ebbs and flows.

twblalock 4y ago
One of the things about "landed gentry", in the countries where they actually exist, is that they inherited their land. In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. To demean them by implying they don't deserve their success is insulting and wrong. That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense.
- Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
  > Almost all of the people who are buying homes today can afford them by themselves, based on their income. They aren't "landed gentry", they are just successful people. Almost 30% of all houses sold last year on Texas was to LCC and institutional investors. You can keep the myth going of people without help buying their house and being succesful but the reality is most people report having help from friends or family for the deposit, that most mortgages are sold with criminal variable interest rates and that the corp mass buying of houses has been growing year after year since 2016. https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-homes-in-2021/ https://localprofile.com/2022/06/07/investors-bought-texas-h...
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages, and variable rates are not criminal. People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. It turns out that institutional and "foreign" investors, just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay -- the price of housing is what it is no matter who the buyer is.
    - Arkhaine_kupo 4y ago
      > Only ~9% of mortgages in the US are variable-rate mortgages At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. > People love to blame corporations and "foreign investors" for bidding up the price of housing. They 100% play a significant role on the problem. > Canada has banned that in various ways multiple times in the past few years and it has had no noticeable impact on the price of housing. Not in any way that fundamentally changes the status quo, certainly not to reverse it, and also housing has been in a downspiral of accesibility for 70 years, 3 local laws in Canada is not gonna fix it. > just like anyone else who has their heads screwed on straight, don't overpay Housing is a need, overpaying or homelessness is a real junction for a sizeble part of the population. Look at singapore, they are more capitalist than the US and has banned private landlords. Their results speak for themselves, cheaper mortgages, more space per person, shorter commutes, possibilities for larger families to find enough space. If you prefer to have a building "for billionaries" empty like New York does instead of close to 0% homelessness then thats your choice, but do not pretend it is to help hard working people be rewarded for their labour. Landlords are a remenant of aristocracy, a way for rich tophs to keep living large from their estate. Adam Smith called them parasites for a reason, they are a negative GDP engine.
      - twblalock 4y ago
        > At the start sure. But if you have a 2 year fixed rate and then it switches to variable, then you have a variable mortagege for 90% of your 20 year mortgage. Ok, you just don't understand how mortgages work in the US. Fixed-rate mortgages, which represent 91% of the mortgage market, can be had for terms of 15 or 30 years. This is not like Europe where you have to re-mortgage every two years. You can, right now, lock in a rate for the next 30 years in the US.
- watwut 4y ago
  > In America almost all of the homes sold today are purchased with money from income, rather than being inherited. How would you even had stats like that and what is that supposed to mean? How would you distinguish money from "income"? > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    > How would you distinguish money from "income"? Mortgage underwriters are very good at doing that.
  - rascul 4y ago
    > Afaik, America has currently low movement between social classes - rich people are the ones who had rich parents and poor people had poor parents. The issue with landed gentry was not that they inherited stuff, it was disproportional power these people had combined with fixed social classes where your fait was pre-determined. It's not exactly a counter point, but there have been lots of new millionaires lately: > People got richer last year, with Americans making up nearly half of the new millionaires across the globe. According to Credit Suisse's annual wealth report, as many as 5.2 million people became millionaires in 2021; 2.5 million of those people were in the U.S. > "This is the largest increase in millionaire numbers recorded for any country in any year this century and reinforces the rapid rise in millionaire numbers seen in the United States since 2016," the report stated. https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-million-new-millionaires-in-2021/435759 https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/us-gains-25-milli...
- jackstraw14 4y ago
  > That is very different than being angry that the Compte du Whatevertheheck inherited a chateau from his parents. And it requires a different response than fulminating about how the "landed gentry will have to be brought to heel" which is total nonsense. hold up. take a moment to consider that "landed gentry" might change as a demographic and we're suddenly allies.
- MandieD 4y ago
  "Compte du Whatevertheheck" and his English fellow fictional counterpart Lord Fitzwilliam, Earl of ------ (an Earl's wife is a Countess), weren't mere landed gentry - they were part of the hereditary aristocracy. An aristocrat could be rather poor if he or previous generations had mismanaged the family holdings. The Bennets and Darcys from Pride and Prejudice were the landed gentry, with the Bennets being in the middle of it, albeit very precariously for the Bennet women, as Mr. Bennet failed to father a son. Their interests very famously clashed with those of the up-and-coming merchant class, and of course, those of the tenant farmers and hired laborers. (Charles Bingley, son of a very prosperous merchant, was not yet part of the landed gentry, but would be as soon as he used his cash to buy an estate and started receiving that sweet sweet land rent from his new tenants.) We certainly have "landed gentry" in the US - have you ever noticed that auto dealerships tend to be handed down from father to son? It's a good deal of why Tesla can't sell direct in a lot of states. Also: family farms. Most agricultural workers worked land they didn't own, both now and in the previous two centuries.

siquick 4y ago

Australian resident here. Why should I be celebrating my landlord (who bought this house outright in 1995 for $86,000AUD) putting up our rent by $210 (24%) per week just because he can? My partner and I are both pretty decent earners but because of the amount of money we have to pay in rent (for a not even that great place) we will never be able to own a house in the city my partner was born in because we simply can’t save enough for a deposit in a period of time where the house prices wont rise out of reach. Greed-driven housing policy is ruining communities for a lot of people. All but a small handful of politicians in Australia own multiple investment properties. It is in their interest for the current system to continue as is.

sien 4y ago
Sydney or Melbourne?
twblalock 4y ago
You should be glad that the property rights that let your landlord do that are the same property rights that let you do what you want with your own money, including becoming a landlord yourself if you choose to do so. You should be glad that success is not punished, because if that was the case, nobody would try to succeed and your society would suffer tremendously as a result -- and when the economy suffers it always hurts the poor more than it hurts the rich. By renting you are getting a place to live, you are benefitting from the success of others who were able to afford housing, and you are buying time for yourself be successful. It's how healthy markets work.
- siquick 4y ago
  Lucky me for having a roof over my families head in the 12th largest economy in the world. Our definitions of success are obviously very different.
  - twblalock 4y ago
    Do you realize how funny that is coming from twelfth place?

ben_w 4y ago

I'm a landlord now, and I've been of a similar opinion to @mullingitover both before and since, though perhaps with less colourful language. My rent has normally been just following the advice of my agent, in turn following market trends. But the most recent update from them was recommending a rent increase, which I rejected because of the news from the UK containing many references to a cost of living crisis. (The property is in the UK, if that wasn't clear). "Following the market" isn't a crime, but the market is not kind or generous. The phrase "without a fight" can be legal or physical; the former is a foregone conclusion, the latter would be undesirable.

coldtea 4y ago

>We have no "landed gentry." You'd be surprised. Large land ownership is a huge deal regarding money, status, and influence, without even going into readings of the situation like Georgism.

crote 4y ago

Yes, and that's why housing is unaffordable these days. An investment which increases its value at the rate of inflation or worse is a pretty poor investment. After all, you could probably make more money by simply buying government bonds. If the housing price increases more than the rate of inflation, it will eventually become unaffordable. After all, salary increases at the rate of inflation - if the housing price increased faster it'd take up an ever-increasing portion of your salary, meaning it'd become less affordable. Housing was affordable, but its price increased in such a way that it is now unaffordable. This made it a great investment for the people who already owned housing, but newer generations no longer have access to housing and can't invest in it.

twblalock 4y ago
> After all, salary increases at the rate of inflation That's quite an assumption there. Specifically, it assumes no increases in per-worker productivity. By your logic, housing never would have been affordable. But we know that it was! > This made it a great investment for the people who already owned housing, but newer generations no longer have access to housing and can't invest in it. Actually about 43% of new homebuyers are millennials, and that could not happen if new generations could not afford housing. https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-report-shows-share-of-millennial-home-buyers-continues-to-rise https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/nar-report-shows-share-of-m...
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
Newer generations will inherit all that real estate. Some will inherit more, some less, just as some will be born in Australia and some in Malaysia, well, life is unfair.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]