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This story is being repeated across countries and cities. It really is high time there is some serious regulation around home ownership, especially as an inves

• nelsonic 3y ago
  Agreed. What regulation would you propose?
  • raziel2p 3y ago
    A simple one would be progressive tax on house ownership. For each house/apartment/whatever you own, you pay N% more tax on it than the previous one.
    • andyferris 3y ago
      We have a simple version of this in many states of Australia. I wonder if it has helped? We are also having similar rent vs wage issues here.
    • giantg2 3y ago
      Until you use LLCs, corps, or trusts to get around that. Even if you didn't get around it that way, landlords will pass the tax onto the tenants.
    • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      But the higher taxes are then transoformed into higher rents, while at the same time, you still need more housing units in many areas.
      • raziel2p 3y ago
        I do think we still need to build more (correctly sized) housing, counteract urbanization, provide social housing, and I'm in favor of rent control in general. So don't get me wrong, I don't think progressive tax will solve the problem on its own. That being said: Higher taxes could lead to higher rents, but that stops working once the supply of people willing to pay said higher rent is exhausted. At some point landlords won't be able to rent out their place with a profit, at which point you have 2 options: Leave it empty (which should also be illegal, IMO) or sell it (to people who would otherwise have to rent). It could be that there is a potential never-ending supply of rich people wanting to pay rent to live in a place with ever-increasing rent and the gentrification that comes with it, but it seems unlikely to me. In the Netherlands there were recently a set of tax changes increasing taxes on house ownership, which caused companies to sell apartments en mass. Housing prices dipped for a little bit, rent (in the private market) went up, but more people own their own place now. This is the direction you want to go, I think.
        • wildrhythms 3y ago
          All that and no mention of rent control...
          • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
            If you have enough realestate, there's no need for rent control, because landlords will have to lower prices to get anyone to stay in their apartments, and empty apartments are still a huge cost to the owner. High costs of rent and (buying) houses is because there's not enough supply in the first place.
            • wildrhythms 3y ago
              That policy has been tried for 50 years and all we've seen (and the topic of this thread) is prices gone higher and higher, and properties become more and more consolidated under megacorporations.
              • ajsnigrutin 3y ago
      • ryandrake 3y ago
        You're assuming the market will bear the higher rents. If that is true, why aren't rents already at that higher level? Not all costs can simply be "passed on to customers" if they won't bear the increase.
  • pjc50 3y ago
    "One residential property per person"? Or the more reasonable one owned + max one let out? (Some holiday lets are entirely legit and necessary for some local economies, but the politics of that is very complicated and site-specific.)
    • giantg2 3y ago
      That won't fix anything. Many rentals are apartment buildings and are built/owned by large companies. You would effectively make the situation worse because individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing if they're only allowed one unit. Edit: why disagree?
      • pjc50 3y ago
        Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide. They also have different tax treatment. > individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing Who exactly has (a) enough money to build an apartment block and (b) not enough to put it in a corporate wrapper? (Admittedly the wrapper problem is a serious issue for any kind of rationing!)
        • giantg2 3y ago
          The problem with the large companies is they are more likely to price fix and leave units empty. But I do agree they tend to be easier to deal with.
          • rhaway84773 3y ago
            Some cities place an empty unit tax. I’m not sure why that’s more popular in the US. Not rented out a property for 3 months straight? Ok, pay 25% of the rent to the govt then. Property prices will quickly find their market value (and we will know if the problem is genuinely a shortage of space then).
        • herbstein 3y ago
  • EGreg 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
  • solatic 3y ago
    Single-payer. One government agency is permitted to purchase construction of additional units, and also manage the long-term rental (pricing set at auction) of those units in a rent-to-own model, where "own" means the right to live in that unit rent-free until you die, at which point control reverts to the government agency, combined with laws that forbid owning/renting multiple residences. Add in some allowances like giving neighbors right-of-first-rent so that rich people can combine units, some carveouts like keeping short-term hotels private, but basically, yeah, single-payer.
    • pjc50 3y ago
      This is sort of how social housing used to work in the UK ("council houses"), but with additional restrictions on private ownership that are politically very hard. > right to live in that unit rent-free until you die This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees.
      • solatic 3y ago
        > This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees. This is unfortunately a political requirement for passage. There are very, very few people 60+ who have lived in the same place for 20+ years who are willing to leave their houses, and most who do are dragged into nursing homes only because they are no longer physically capable of taking care of themselves. The rent-to-own period can and should be quite long, like 30-40 years, similar to a mortgage. But the quality of "nobody can take my property away from me" is quite strongly felt, and not one that you can really take away from people. Any radical housing reform must respect that.
    • fallingknife 3y ago
      Wow! That's worse than the CCP. I thought that all these other ideas on this thread to basically make everybody buy instead of rent were bad. But to force everybody to rent from the government is literally the worst housing arrangement idea I have ever heard.
• bsder 3y ago
  > It really is high time there is some serious regulation around home ownership, especially as an investment vehicle. Occupancy taxes would be a very good start--especially if applied aggressively to investment holders (resident owners aren't really the problem) who can't demonstrate that they live in a space. It's a lot harder calculation to hold a space unoccupied in the hope of getting better rent if you're staring down a nice big bill for a place being unfilled. It would also cut down on the whole AirBnB idiocy if you don't automatically classify that as occupied. Suddenly, you will have housing owners aggressively hunting for residents.
  • balderdash 3y ago
    I don’t get the impression that there are tons of residential housing units sitting empty in high demand areas (excluding seasonal vacation areas, trophy properties of the rich, and stuff caught in rebt control purgatory)
    • bsder 3y ago
      AirBnB "investment properties", for example, are still clogging up a lot of areas that have tourist flows. Some of the residential apartment units, for example, are playing pricing games with rental prices vs occupancy because they can blame it on "pricing software" right now. An occupancy tax would neutralize those.
      • balderdash 3y ago
        Ehh, take San Francisco there are like ~6,000 Airbnb listings (let’s assume they’re all dedicated spec properties) if you put those all on the market, that’d be like be like 1.5 months of inventory, you might make a dent that month, but you’re not moving the needle…
• EGreg 3y ago
  And across history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_and_Poverty Too bad most people forgot about this book. It was a bestseller and all the famous economists knew about it and praised it. Even Leo Tolstoy 3000 miles away.
• andyferris 3y ago
  If the issue is the supply of rental (i.e. investment) properties is too low, do we want to encourage or discourage investment homes?
  • TheLoafOfBread 3y ago
    progressive property tax which will increase with amount of owned properties.
    • balderdash 3y ago
      Outline the impact of that on supply and demand?
    • badcppdev 3y ago
      Quantity and value of properties. Which also means a wealth tax. To be clear I'm 100% in favour of this. The current economic trickle-up system is starting to cause serious problems. Large sections of populations everywhere are increasingly shut out of the capitalist system because they do not have ANY access to capital.
      • candiodari 3y ago
        But does it matter? The way housing problems were always fixed was very simple and without any kind of tax: with the government building social housing, allocated according to social principles (you pay the same, but the size of the apartment is determined by the number of kids you have). A LOT of non-luxury housing. This has nearly stopped. These buildings were famously bad. First, they tended to be unfair and violate building codes, they were government projects (ie. cost a lot more than a luxury housing development despite being much worse), and since houses got allocated by the government to vulnerable groups, they tended to have safety issues in the first few years they existed. But they fixed housing. A decade or so after they were built and things became somewhat stable around them. The problem with tax, and any kind of economic system is very simple. Capitalism and communism, and the more creative options like mercantilism or militarism, we can argue about them for a long time, but fundamentally they divide up existing properties. Nothing more. We can use these systems to choose WHO is homeless, but they cannot lower the number of homeless.
• nunez 3y ago
  How is this possible without governments controlling housing supply and distribution?
  • spaceman_2020 3y ago
    Taxation and regulation. Not very hard to limit who can buy property (forbidding large funds and overseas buyers, for instance), and how much taxes they pay on non-primary residences.
• tharmas 3y ago
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