15 ms·

Playing whack-a-mole with the most egregious examples of landlords extorting the need for people to have shelter to relocate as much money into their own pocket

Playing whack-a-mole with the most egregious examples of landlords extorting the need for people to have shelter to relocate as much money into their own pockets as humanly imaginable is fun to watch. But it’s not a solution. Anyone know any actual solutions? I feel landlords need to be removed as a class entirely. Residential property shouldn’t be able to be owned by anyone who does not reside in it (at least “some large X” percent of the year, perhaps).

derelicta 3y ago
Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  > Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name. As someone who was born in USSR I can venture a guess that OP won't also like its implementation.
  - derelicta 3y ago
    As someone whose (some) relatives were born in the old Yugoslavian Republic, they miss its implementation.
    - caskstrength 3y ago
      So why they are not voting to get it back? It is not like all kinds of Communist/Socialist parties are outlawed in either exUSSR or ex-Ugoslavian countries, it is just that some old people like to reminisce about it but nobody _actually_ wants it back.
      - derelicta 3y ago
        You can't vote yourself out of capitalism the same way you can't vote yourself out of slavery.
        caskstrength 3y ago
        Says who? Sure you can! After failed coup attempts Venezuela did exactly that in 1998[0]. But I guess they were no true Scotsman, right? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_e...
        derelicta 3y ago
        Sometimes miracles happen :)
      - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
        For a certain generation of Yugoslavs, it isn’t just the party that matters but the specific man who led it, Tito. Once he died, even though his party remained, things quickly went downhill for Yugoslavia.
  - rcpt 3y ago
    I thought he was talking about land value tax
    - HDThoreaun 3y ago
      Who doesn't like land value tax? "Won't like it's name" pretty much has to be communism/socialism imo
      - rcpt 3y ago
        Pretty much every land owner
  - midasuni 3y ago
    I fail to see the similarity between a land value tax and communism
- TotalCrackpot 3y ago
  Which alternative do you mean? Communism? Anarchism? Socialism? They all want to abolish rent-seeking and not only, but through very different strategies.
  - derelicta 3y ago
    Well the former is the end goal in both cases. It's just lefists can't answer the following question in a single unified voice: what goes away first? The State, or Capitalism?
    - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
      In USSR and other Marxist-Leninist experiments arguably both the state and capitalism prevailed. The relation of workers to their workplaces didn't actually change - still taking orders, this time not from the owner of the workplace but from the state beaurocrat. So workers actually didn't have control over means of production, just this time the political class and the owner class got combined into one class - the class of state beaurocracy.
      - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
        A lot of people referred to the USSR's economic system as "state capitalism"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    There's also Georgist Liberalism, which honestly isn't a big sterp away from where we are now. Basicaslly it just means tweaking the tax code.
konschubert 3y ago
The solution is called up-zoning and building fast transit to expand the supply of well-located housing. If you flood the zone with supply, the power of landlords will diminish. In the 90s, if you came to Berlin and wanted to rent and apartment, the landlord would hand you 3 keys with three addresses, and tell you to "have a look at them and choose one". The rent was minimal and the landlords had no power. Your proposed solution of making renting an apartment illegal will create A LOT of friction when people want to move. It will make it impossible for people with bad credit to live in the city. It will expose a lot of people to a lot of interested rate risk. Not everybody wants to be a real estate investor. It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space.
- mschuster91 3y ago
  > It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space. That is the problem. Berlin and Munich, the cities in Germany with the most insane housing markets, have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Even if you'd make policies to "up-zone", it will need decades until housing supply grows because you need to tear down and rebuild all the houses - and that doesn't even include the carbon emissions and resource-waste impact such programs carry. And the suburbs can't really be expanded either, the trains are already filled to the brim with commuters. We need to get rid of the demand, we need to force companies to not just go to Munich/Berlin/Hamburg/Stuttgart but also the other cities and areas of the country.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    Thank you for this comment. I think it reveals a lot about the mentality that is keeping rents high. > have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Let me introduce you to the original purpose of Berliner Kleingärten. Plus there are tons of vacant lots, parking lots etc in Berlin. I’ve lived in Schöneweide for many years and let me tell ya. Tegel alone could host half a million people and we haven’t even touched the Tempelhofer Feld. Berlin has no suburbs to speak of. I guess you have never been to any other city in the world if you think that the suburbs are full. Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels. Oh, and last: Before you “force companies to move to smaller cities” think about two things: - Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities? - Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?
avidiax 3y ago
Switzerland has an imperfect system with some good features. Landlords can't raise the rent without cause. The cause can be that the variable mortgage interest rate went up (and the tenant can reverse the increase if it goes down), or that the unit has been remodeled. The government can also apply a global increase or decrease to rents in a city, based on study of the market conditions. The tenant can object within X days of signing that the previous tenant's rent was less. That rent has to be made available for comparison. That makes it hard to raise rents by kicking people out. There are many additional parts that the Swiss get wrong, but the above is a good start.
- systemtest 3y ago
  To quote ch.ch: > Your landlord must give you a clear explanation for raising your rent. Justifiable reasons could be an increase in the reference interest rate, inflation, increased maintenance costs or an investment that increases the value of the property e.g. the installation of additional kitchen appliances. It is interesting that there is no hard cap mentioned. Inflation, interest rate and maintenance cost all skyrocketed last year, would a 5 percent rent increase be possible? Or could that be refuted? For comparison, The Netherlands has set a max rent increase of 4.1 percent for 2023. In 2022 this was 2.3 percent.
  - okr 3y ago
    In germany, to avoid rent caps, many landlords moved to so called index rent, which is bound to inflation/deflation and there is no cap and can not be refuted. Though, politics is everywhere, and they want to cap the index rents as well. Make sense, because why can everyone raise prices, while salaries do not automatically rise. There is no balance.
  - em500 3y ago
    Price controls are great for incumbents, but suck for new-comers or even incumbents who want to move. Disabling price as the allocation mechanism does nothing to address the supply/demand problems, and necessitates alternative allocation rules (waiting lists, insider connections, fit/need-based, lotteries) which all have their own problems. In the Netherlands the average waiting time for rent-controlled social houses in popular places like Amsterdam and Utrecht now exceed 10 years.
caskstrength 3y ago
> Anyone know any actual solutions? This is not some uncharted territory. Western societies just need to stop treating residential property as an investment. Japan would be a great example of such approach.
- konschubert 3y ago
  and the way to do that is to up-zone
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    Up-zoning doesn't guarantee you cheap residential. A lot of highly dense cities are still very expensive (NY, Paris, London, etc.) and will continue to be as long as buying and holding the property is one of the best long term investments one could make.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      These places would be even more expensive if they had not up zoned. All else being equal: More supply -> Lower price.
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  Japan only really started doing that as their population began to fall. It's a situation lots of Central Europe is starting to experience too. Before then, the land the Tokyo Imperial Palace occupised was worth more than (theoretically, at prevailing market rates) than all of California.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    I'm not sure I buy that simplistic argument. As a counter-example, residential property in most exUSSR experienced significant price increase during previous 30+ years while populations of those countries mostly decreased during that time (and often much more significantly than in Japan). Why? Because people were (and often still are) convinced that it is best investment for them long-term.
n4r9 3y ago
The thing is that property letting is a useful service to society. If you intend to live somewhere for more than 3 months but less than 3 years, it makes a lot of sense to rent somewhere. I guess you could still have live-in landlords, but that's quite awkward if the tenants are a family or group of friends.
- raziel2p 3y ago
  Rental flats can totally be a thing without private landlords in the picture - rental companies that are either government owned or follow strict government guidelines for example.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Salt Lake City has this, I believe. If you're in the COLDS (never noticed this acronym before!) then you might well be working for the church, banking with the church, and renting from the church.
  - n4r9 3y ago
    In my (UK-centric) experience it is largely the rental companies that make renting a nightmare. Back when I was a renter I would always look for private landlords when moving house as they were often more reasonable and responsive. Big rental companies would respond slowly, issue exorbitant fees, demand professional end-of-tenancy cleaning, and screw you on pre-existing damage if you don't point it out in time.
    - hooverd 3y ago
      Small landlords can be really good or really bad, big landlords are universally mediocre to bad.
- UncleMeat 3y ago
  People say this. Then I run into landlords who proudly talk about how their tenants are paying for all of their expenses and more or how they find ways to avoid paying for important amenities.
Shaanie 3y ago
Designated rental vs owned properties is one way to do it, although you're not exactly going to reduce the rental costs by doing that, probably the opposite, but you would decrease property prices. Heavily taxing empty properties would encourage landlords to reduce rent rather than let them sit empty. Otherwise the solution is to just build more. High property prices and rent is fundamentally an issue of supply vs demand, no?
nordsieck 3y ago
> Anyone know any actual solutions? The only real factor here is supply/demand. There are no good ways to control demand, so the only solution is to increase supply. Here are some ideas: * Get rid of anti-dorm laws. There are laws in a lot of places that limit dorm style living by limiting the number of unrelated adults who can live in the same residence. However, this is the most economically efficient living situation. * Change zoning. A lot of cities have most of their residential land zoned for single family only. Just change everything to multi-family. Remove requirements like having to conform to the character of the neighborhood, having to build parking spots per residence, having to have increased height based setbacks, needing to have a certain amount of land reserved for green space, etc. * Remove construction limits. A lot of places have a building plan where they only approve so much building over a period of time. Just say yes. Change to a "shall issue" model, where the government needs an affirmative reason to deny a permit and has to do it within a certain time period for certain well-recognized reasons. I'm not saying that all of these are good ideas. There are problems with all of them. And all of them will be unpopular. But they should all increase the supply of housing. Which is the same thing as decreasing property values. Which is why they're all un-popular.
- 8note 3y ago
  The goal being to reduce demand by reduced quality of living?
  - ryan_lane 3y ago
    The only thing in that list that reduces the quality of living is removing green space requirements. Having a multi-family building in your neighborhood doesn't affect your single-family home. Reducing parking requirements _may_ reduce quality of living, if public transportation isn't an option. Japan solves the parking problem by requiring you to have an off-street parking space to own a car. Removing street parking increases the amount of land available for use, makes the city more walkable (and bikeable) and reduces car ownership.
  - earthling8118 3y ago
    Many of these are increases in quality of living. There's really only a single thing on that list that is lowering
keerthiko 3y ago
there are a lot of people who need shelter who have not accumulated the wealth needed to purchase a dwelling in the economic framework of today. how will those people be housed? mass public housing (aka the government is an exception to this rule)? who is owning/maintaining/orchestrating that housing operation? and when people can buy, who are they buying from, once everyone has met this rule? it's a far more complicated problem than "landlord bad". Renting is a valuable option for expensive necessities that often times aren't as useful permanently owned (cars, ski gear, houses). the problem is that incentives are terribly non-aligned, given majority of people need to rely on renting. here are some of my ideas (as a long-time renter who owns a co-op unit since the pandemic) - make "projected housing capacity growth rate guarantee" for every residential-capable zone a policy — every <N> years, evaluate each zone for meeting that growth rate, and slate lowest density housing in that zone for demolition with large bounties for developers to claim the permits to build denser (usually taller) housing than the existing densest housing within the zone. The densest zones of the city can extend N by some factor each time. (that's a rudimentary version of the idea) - rent payments up to a certain amount per household member should be tax deductible commensurate to market rate in the region, so that home ownership doesn't immediately become tax optimal. - property taxes should be tied to market rate rent and market rate home values in that region so that home owners are not incentivized to prop up inflated rental prices when they aren't actively renting out, or to inflate home valuations when they aren't actively in the market to sell. - home ownership beyond primary residence should be taxed more significantly than it is. - tax developers constructing and/or operating luxury housing at different tiers (factoring sq. footage/room, amenities, starting lease prices)
- mmarq 3y ago
  Landlords are bad when the lack of tenants protections, such as in the UK, makes it so that often the only options available are living with rats and mould or being evicted for protesting. People that bought flats as an alternative to a private pension or small “professional landlords” are especially bad. Building more doesn’t necessarily fix this problem, because research costs are extremely high for tenants even if flats are very cheap. Germany has a housing shortage, but people don’t end up homeless or dying of mould, because the tenant would just withhold rent and crush the landlord in court. Said that, I agree with all your ideas, especially tying taxes to market rent (in Switzerland, if you own property, the average rent for your area is added to your income in your tax return), apart from the last. 1) Luxury housing is better than nothing, 2) demonising luxury housing (that in the UK means having a working lift and renovated windows and maybe air conditioning) is a way of blocking all new builds.
fxtentacle 3y ago
I'd go with Singapore as an example and suggest government-managed Skyscrapers. Lots of units and everything is standardized so you get the best possible bang for your buck. It also makes moving around pretty easy if both houses have the same landlord and similar units and similar prices. "In Singapore, nearly 80% of the population resides in housing that is developed and managed by the Housing and Development Board. Units are owned, however, by tenants. The government, following a land-lease system common in other city-states, owns the land and leases it out for 99 years to these unit owners." https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/17/singapore-housing-model/ https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/17/singapore-housin...
- unmole 3y ago
  What the 80% statistic doesn't convey is the fact that you have people delaying getting married and continuing to live with their parents because HDB supply can't keep up with demand. See also the insane valuations for resale flats.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Even government flats are expensive in singapore.
expertentipp 3y ago
At least you have landlords... in my country people hoard real estate and leave the houses and apartments vacant. They simply count on value increase, hoping the prices will level up with prices in rich EU countries. As a result every flip increases the value at least 10%, and the only apartments available for rental are 20-30 sqmt burrows optimized for rent extraction.
screye 3y ago
An onion hoarder can only exist as a job in an onion shortage.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Being a landlord is not hoarding. Taking a risk on a buying a property, and maintaining it, is not hoarding. There are bad landlords and good landlords, and yes, with the levels of supply and demand how they are, it's easier to be a bad landlord. But the answer isn't "get rid of landlords". It's "vote out the people causing this situation."
- futureamish 3y ago
  Except people don't require onions to live, whereas shelter... Also, if the onions stayed intact for 100 years, a group of onion lords taking advantage of widespread capital failures could simply hoard onions near-indefinitly, and there would be no "real" shortage, but the market would have a "shortage". This is exactly what is happening in world real estate.
ImPleadThe5th 3y ago
Making landlords compete with low-cost government subsidized housing. Vienna[0] is a fantastic model. Though I think implementing this in the US has a lot of stigma and challenges to overcome (ie, how can the government mass purchase apartments/land to create subsidized housing). Also, cooperative housing. A group of people buy a property with a Loan, and the cost of the loan + management is payed by all people in the apartment. Eventually, the loan is payed off and the cost of rent is lowered to cover only maintenance/mangement. This also has to come with restrictions about ownership and renting out the apartment. Because its ultimately a collective, its unfortunately totally possible there will be biases at play with these kinds of housing setups (ie, biases against allowing POC to move in, disagreements on how common space can be used). And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars. I found this youtube video[1] about the Vancouver housing situation interesting. Maybe a bit over-simiplified, but gives you an idea of some possible solutions. I know these aren't silver-bullet solutions. But I think it helps think of this in a different way then just a supply/demand problem. Its also a policy and profiteering problem. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/ https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-archit... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk
- shiroiuma 3y ago
  >And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars. Can't be done in North America. "Fast public transit" means subways (or trains on elevated tracks), and these are really expensive to build and maintain, so the economics don't work out unless you have a lot of ridership, and that only works if you have high enough density. So in Tokyo, it works great because the density is very high and ridership is enormous, so the city can afford hundreds of subway stations with trains running every 3-5 minutes. But in a typical American city, everything is SO spread out that it just won't work: it's too far for most people to walk to the station, having to drive to the station just adds more overhead plus having to deal with traffic with everyone else going to/from the station and looking for parking, etc. Of course, you could try a model where developers build huge, dense, mixed-use developments at the stations, but that's pretty hard to get done when all that land is already owned, and there's NIMBY zoning laws preventing such housing developments anyway: each such station would be a huge, expensive, long political fight. Honestly, I don't really see a solution; too many Americans think this kind of thing is anathema anyway, so the political will to make any of these ideas a reality is unlikely to materialize.
dwighttk 3y ago
Some percentage of rentals provide a service for people who are not going to live in a place long enough to be able to pay off enough on a home to make buying it worth it.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Land value tax?
- futureamish 3y ago
  [flagged]
RandomLensman 3y ago
So who is providing a place to live to people that don't own a house or flat? Is it supposed to be all sharing of living space?
csomar 3y ago
So the solution to the rental market problem is to completely kill the rental market? How come nobody seen that?
LudwigNagasena 3y ago
Move to a small city and WFH.

derelicta 3y ago

Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name.

caskstrength 3y ago
> Rent-seeking is a cancer, it has to be abolished. There is an alternative to all of that, but you won't like its name. As someone who was born in USSR I can venture a guess that OP won't also like its implementation.
- derelicta 3y ago
  As someone whose (some) relatives were born in the old Yugoslavian Republic, they miss its implementation.
  - caskstrength 3y ago
    So why they are not voting to get it back? It is not like all kinds of Communist/Socialist parties are outlawed in either exUSSR or ex-Ugoslavian countries, it is just that some old people like to reminisce about it but nobody _actually_ wants it back.
    - derelicta 3y ago
      You can't vote yourself out of capitalism the same way you can't vote yourself out of slavery.
      - caskstrength 3y ago
        Says who? Sure you can! After failed coup attempts Venezuela did exactly that in 1998[0]. But I guess they were no true Scotsman, right? [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_election https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Venezuelan_presidential_e...
        derelicta 3y ago
        Sometimes miracles happen :)
    - OfSanguineFire 3y ago
      For a certain generation of Yugoslavs, it isn’t just the party that matters but the specific man who led it, Tito. Once he died, even though his party remained, things quickly went downhill for Yugoslavia.
- rcpt 3y ago
  I thought he was talking about land value tax
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Who doesn't like land value tax? "Won't like it's name" pretty much has to be communism/socialism imo
    - rcpt 3y ago
      Pretty much every land owner
- midasuni 3y ago
  I fail to see the similarity between a land value tax and communism
TotalCrackpot 3y ago
Which alternative do you mean? Communism? Anarchism? Socialism? They all want to abolish rent-seeking and not only, but through very different strategies.
- derelicta 3y ago
  Well the former is the end goal in both cases. It's just lefists can't answer the following question in a single unified voice: what goes away first? The State, or Capitalism?
  - TotalCrackpot 3y ago
    In USSR and other Marxist-Leninist experiments arguably both the state and capitalism prevailed. The relation of workers to their workplaces didn't actually change - still taking orders, this time not from the owner of the workplace but from the state beaurocrat. So workers actually didn't have control over means of production, just this time the political class and the owner class got combined into one class - the class of state beaurocracy.
    - TheCoelacanth 3y ago
      A lot of people referred to the USSR's economic system as "state capitalism"[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_capitalism
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  There's also Georgist Liberalism, which honestly isn't a big sterp away from where we are now. Basicaslly it just means tweaking the tax code.

konschubert 3y ago

The solution is called up-zoning and building fast transit to expand the supply of well-located housing. If you flood the zone with supply, the power of landlords will diminish. In the 90s, if you came to Berlin and wanted to rent and apartment, the landlord would hand you 3 keys with three addresses, and tell you to "have a look at them and choose one". The rent was minimal and the landlords had no power. Your proposed solution of making renting an apartment illegal will create A LOT of friction when people want to move. It will make it impossible for people with bad credit to live in the city. It will expose a lot of people to a lot of interested rate risk. Not everybody wants to be a real estate investor. It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space.

mschuster91 3y ago
> It will also not solve the main suffering here, which is that a lot of people want to move into the city, but they cannot, because there isn't enough space. That is the problem. Berlin and Munich, the cities in Germany with the most insane housing markets, have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Even if you'd make policies to "up-zone", it will need decades until housing supply grows because you need to tear down and rebuild all the houses - and that doesn't even include the carbon emissions and resource-waste impact such programs carry. And the suburbs can't really be expanded either, the trains are already filled to the brim with commuters. We need to get rid of the demand, we need to force companies to not just go to Munich/Berlin/Hamburg/Stuttgart but also the other cities and areas of the country.
- konschubert 3y ago
  Thank you for this comment. I think it reveals a lot about the mentality that is keeping rents high. > have all space that could be used for housing in the borders already built, under construction or allocated for short-term begin of construction. Let me introduce you to the original purpose of Berliner Kleingärten. Plus there are tons of vacant lots, parking lots etc in Berlin. I’ve lived in Schöneweide for many years and let me tell ya. Tegel alone could host half a million people and we haven’t even touched the Tempelhofer Feld. Berlin has no suburbs to speak of. I guess you have never been to any other city in the world if you think that the suburbs are full. Guess what: you can run more trains, bigger trains, higher frequencies, and you can build new tracks and new tunnels. Oh, and last: Before you “force companies to move to smaller cities” think about two things: - Why do many companies prefer to move to big cities? - Why do many people prefer to live in big cities?

avidiax 3y ago

Switzerland has an imperfect system with some good features. Landlords can't raise the rent without cause. The cause can be that the variable mortgage interest rate went up (and the tenant can reverse the increase if it goes down), or that the unit has been remodeled. The government can also apply a global increase or decrease to rents in a city, based on study of the market conditions. The tenant can object within X days of signing that the previous tenant's rent was less. That rent has to be made available for comparison. That makes it hard to raise rents by kicking people out. There are many additional parts that the Swiss get wrong, but the above is a good start.

systemtest 3y ago
To quote ch.ch: > Your landlord must give you a clear explanation for raising your rent. Justifiable reasons could be an increase in the reference interest rate, inflation, increased maintenance costs or an investment that increases the value of the property e.g. the installation of additional kitchen appliances. It is interesting that there is no hard cap mentioned. Inflation, interest rate and maintenance cost all skyrocketed last year, would a 5 percent rent increase be possible? Or could that be refuted? For comparison, The Netherlands has set a max rent increase of 4.1 percent for 2023. In 2022 this was 2.3 percent.
- okr 3y ago
  In germany, to avoid rent caps, many landlords moved to so called index rent, which is bound to inflation/deflation and there is no cap and can not be refuted. Though, politics is everywhere, and they want to cap the index rents as well. Make sense, because why can everyone raise prices, while salaries do not automatically rise. There is no balance.
- em500 3y ago
  Price controls are great for incumbents, but suck for new-comers or even incumbents who want to move. Disabling price as the allocation mechanism does nothing to address the supply/demand problems, and necessitates alternative allocation rules (waiting lists, insider connections, fit/need-based, lotteries) which all have their own problems. In the Netherlands the average waiting time for rent-controlled social houses in popular places like Amsterdam and Utrecht now exceed 10 years.

caskstrength 3y ago

> Anyone know any actual solutions? This is not some uncharted territory. Western societies just need to stop treating residential property as an investment. Japan would be a great example of such approach.

konschubert 3y ago
and the way to do that is to up-zone
- caskstrength 3y ago
  Up-zoning doesn't guarantee you cheap residential. A lot of highly dense cities are still very expensive (NY, Paris, London, etc.) and will continue to be as long as buying and holding the property is one of the best long term investments one could make.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    These places would be even more expensive if they had not up zoned. All else being equal: More supply -> Lower price.
dukeyukey 3y ago
Japan only really started doing that as their population began to fall. It's a situation lots of Central Europe is starting to experience too. Before then, the land the Tokyo Imperial Palace occupised was worth more than (theoretically, at prevailing market rates) than all of California.
- caskstrength 3y ago
  I'm not sure I buy that simplistic argument. As a counter-example, residential property in most exUSSR experienced significant price increase during previous 30+ years while populations of those countries mostly decreased during that time (and often much more significantly than in Japan). Why? Because people were (and often still are) convinced that it is best investment for them long-term.

n4r9 3y ago

The thing is that property letting is a useful service to society. If you intend to live somewhere for more than 3 months but less than 3 years, it makes a lot of sense to rent somewhere. I guess you could still have live-in landlords, but that's quite awkward if the tenants are a family or group of friends.

raziel2p 3y ago
Rental flats can totally be a thing without private landlords in the picture - rental companies that are either government owned or follow strict government guidelines for example.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Salt Lake City has this, I believe. If you're in the COLDS (never noticed this acronym before!) then you might well be working for the church, banking with the church, and renting from the church.
- n4r9 3y ago
  In my (UK-centric) experience it is largely the rental companies that make renting a nightmare. Back when I was a renter I would always look for private landlords when moving house as they were often more reasonable and responsive. Big rental companies would respond slowly, issue exorbitant fees, demand professional end-of-tenancy cleaning, and screw you on pre-existing damage if you don't point it out in time.
  - hooverd 3y ago
    Small landlords can be really good or really bad, big landlords are universally mediocre to bad.
UncleMeat 3y ago
People say this. Then I run into landlords who proudly talk about how their tenants are paying for all of their expenses and more or how they find ways to avoid paying for important amenities.

Shaanie 3y ago

Designated rental vs owned properties is one way to do it, although you're not exactly going to reduce the rental costs by doing that, probably the opposite, but you would decrease property prices. Heavily taxing empty properties would encourage landlords to reduce rent rather than let them sit empty. Otherwise the solution is to just build more. High property prices and rent is fundamentally an issue of supply vs demand, no?

nordsieck 3y ago

> Anyone know any actual solutions? The only real factor here is supply/demand. There are no good ways to control demand, so the only solution is to increase supply. Here are some ideas: * Get rid of anti-dorm laws. There are laws in a lot of places that limit dorm style living by limiting the number of unrelated adults who can live in the same residence. However, this is the most economically efficient living situation. * Change zoning. A lot of cities have most of their residential land zoned for single family only. Just change everything to multi-family. Remove requirements like having to conform to the character of the neighborhood, having to build parking spots per residence, having to have increased height based setbacks, needing to have a certain amount of land reserved for green space, etc. * Remove construction limits. A lot of places have a building plan where they only approve so much building over a period of time. Just say yes. Change to a "shall issue" model, where the government needs an affirmative reason to deny a permit and has to do it within a certain time period for certain well-recognized reasons. I'm not saying that all of these are good ideas. There are problems with all of them. And all of them will be unpopular. But they should all increase the supply of housing. Which is the same thing as decreasing property values. Which is why they're all un-popular.

8note 3y ago
The goal being to reduce demand by reduced quality of living?
- ryan_lane 3y ago
  The only thing in that list that reduces the quality of living is removing green space requirements. Having a multi-family building in your neighborhood doesn't affect your single-family home. Reducing parking requirements _may_ reduce quality of living, if public transportation isn't an option. Japan solves the parking problem by requiring you to have an off-street parking space to own a car. Removing street parking increases the amount of land available for use, makes the city more walkable (and bikeable) and reduces car ownership.
- earthling8118 3y ago
  Many of these are increases in quality of living. There's really only a single thing on that list that is lowering

keerthiko 3y ago

there are a lot of people who need shelter who have not accumulated the wealth needed to purchase a dwelling in the economic framework of today. how will those people be housed? mass public housing (aka the government is an exception to this rule)? who is owning/maintaining/orchestrating that housing operation? and when people can buy, who are they buying from, once everyone has met this rule? it's a far more complicated problem than "landlord bad". Renting is a valuable option for expensive necessities that often times aren't as useful permanently owned (cars, ski gear, houses). the problem is that incentives are terribly non-aligned, given majority of people need to rely on renting. here are some of my ideas (as a long-time renter who owns a co-op unit since the pandemic) - make "projected housing capacity growth rate guarantee" for every residential-capable zone a policy — every <N> years, evaluate each zone for meeting that growth rate, and slate lowest density housing in that zone for demolition with large bounties for developers to claim the permits to build denser (usually taller) housing than the existing densest housing within the zone. The densest zones of the city can extend N by some factor each time. (that's a rudimentary version of the idea) - rent payments up to a certain amount per household member should be tax deductible commensurate to market rate in the region, so that home ownership doesn't immediately become tax optimal. - property taxes should be tied to market rate rent and market rate home values in that region so that home owners are not incentivized to prop up inflated rental prices when they aren't actively renting out, or to inflate home valuations when they aren't actively in the market to sell. - home ownership beyond primary residence should be taxed more significantly than it is. - tax developers constructing and/or operating luxury housing at different tiers (factoring sq. footage/room, amenities, starting lease prices)

mmarq 3y ago
Landlords are bad when the lack of tenants protections, such as in the UK, makes it so that often the only options available are living with rats and mould or being evicted for protesting. People that bought flats as an alternative to a private pension or small “professional landlords” are especially bad. Building more doesn’t necessarily fix this problem, because research costs are extremely high for tenants even if flats are very cheap. Germany has a housing shortage, but people don’t end up homeless or dying of mould, because the tenant would just withhold rent and crush the landlord in court. Said that, I agree with all your ideas, especially tying taxes to market rent (in Switzerland, if you own property, the average rent for your area is added to your income in your tax return), apart from the last. 1) Luxury housing is better than nothing, 2) demonising luxury housing (that in the UK means having a working lift and renovated windows and maybe air conditioning) is a way of blocking all new builds.

fxtentacle 3y ago

I'd go with Singapore as an example and suggest government-managed Skyscrapers. Lots of units and everything is standardized so you get the best possible bang for your buck. It also makes moving around pretty easy if both houses have the same landlord and similar units and similar prices. "In Singapore, nearly 80% of the population resides in housing that is developed and managed by the Housing and Development Board. Units are owned, however, by tenants. The government, following a land-lease system common in other city-states, owns the land and leases it out for 99 years to these unit owners." https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/17/singapore-housing-model/ https://catalyst.independent.org/2021/09/17/singapore-housin...

unmole 3y ago
What the 80% statistic doesn't convey is the fact that you have people delaying getting married and continuing to live with their parents because HDB supply can't keep up with demand. See also the insane valuations for resale flats.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
Even government flats are expensive in singapore.

expertentipp 3y ago

At least you have landlords... in my country people hoard real estate and leave the houses and apartments vacant. They simply count on value increase, hoping the prices will level up with prices in rich EU countries. As a result every flip increases the value at least 10%, and the only apartments available for rental are 20-30 sqmt burrows optimized for rent extraction.

screye 3y ago

An onion hoarder can only exist as a job in an onion shortage.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Being a landlord is not hoarding. Taking a risk on a buying a property, and maintaining it, is not hoarding. There are bad landlords and good landlords, and yes, with the levels of supply and demand how they are, it's easier to be a bad landlord. But the answer isn't "get rid of landlords". It's "vote out the people causing this situation."
futureamish 3y ago
Except people don't require onions to live, whereas shelter... Also, if the onions stayed intact for 100 years, a group of onion lords taking advantage of widespread capital failures could simply hoard onions near-indefinitly, and there would be no "real" shortage, but the market would have a "shortage". This is exactly what is happening in world real estate.

ImPleadThe5th 3y ago

Making landlords compete with low-cost government subsidized housing. Vienna[0] is a fantastic model. Though I think implementing this in the US has a lot of stigma and challenges to overcome (ie, how can the government mass purchase apartments/land to create subsidized housing). Also, cooperative housing. A group of people buy a property with a Loan, and the cost of the loan + management is payed by all people in the apartment. Eventually, the loan is payed off and the cost of rent is lowered to cover only maintenance/mangement. This also has to come with restrictions about ownership and renting out the apartment. Because its ultimately a collective, its unfortunately totally possible there will be biases at play with these kinds of housing setups (ie, biases against allowing POC to move in, disagreements on how common space can be used). And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars. I found this youtube video[1] about the Vancouver housing situation interesting. Maybe a bit over-simiplified, but gives you an idea of some possible solutions. I know these aren't silver-bullet solutions. But I think it helps think of this in a different way then just a supply/demand problem. Its also a policy and profiteering problem. [0] https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-architecture-austria-stigma/ https://www.politico.eu/article/vienna-social-housing-archit... [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKudSeqHSJk

shiroiuma 3y ago
>And lastly, fast public transit to expand the area its possible to live by people who can't afford cars. Can't be done in North America. "Fast public transit" means subways (or trains on elevated tracks), and these are really expensive to build and maintain, so the economics don't work out unless you have a lot of ridership, and that only works if you have high enough density. So in Tokyo, it works great because the density is very high and ridership is enormous, so the city can afford hundreds of subway stations with trains running every 3-5 minutes. But in a typical American city, everything is SO spread out that it just won't work: it's too far for most people to walk to the station, having to drive to the station just adds more overhead plus having to deal with traffic with everyone else going to/from the station and looking for parking, etc. Of course, you could try a model where developers build huge, dense, mixed-use developments at the stations, but that's pretty hard to get done when all that land is already owned, and there's NIMBY zoning laws preventing such housing developments anyway: each such station would be a huge, expensive, long political fight. Honestly, I don't really see a solution; too many Americans think this kind of thing is anathema anyway, so the political will to make any of these ideas a reality is unlikely to materialize.

dwighttk 3y ago

Some percentage of rentals provide a service for people who are not going to live in a place long enough to be able to pay off enough on a home to make buying it worth it.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago

Land value tax?

futureamish 3y ago
[flagged]

RandomLensman 3y ago

So who is providing a place to live to people that don't own a house or flat? Is it supposed to be all sharing of living space?

csomar 3y ago

So the solution to the rental market problem is to completely kill the rental market? How come nobody seen that?

LudwigNagasena 3y ago

Move to a small city and WFH.