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I believe this will eventually come to pass as the housing crisis impacts more and more families and eventually becomes an election issue. It's unlikely to happ

I believe this will eventually come to pass as the housing crisis impacts more and more families and eventually becomes an election issue. It's unlikely to happen in the first few attempts though It's a bit like healthcare - the national consensus has gradually but firmly shifted in the direction of a regulated marketplace. Took a while but eventually did happen.

esoterica 3y ago
Banning investors from owning homes will do NOTHING to alleviate the housing crisis. The problem is lack of supply, not the capital structure of the supply. We will never solve the housing crisis as long as people like you continue to deny basic economics and refuse to acknowledge the basic supply and demand problem that is causing rents and home prices to skyrocket.
- PlunderBunny 3y ago
  You can always argue that a problem that involves shortages will be alleviated by more supply (like saying that building more roads will solve traffic congestion), but if the increased supply is just captured by the same forces that capture it now, you haven’t solved anything.
  - konschubert 3y ago
    So these hedge funds buy the houses and let them sit empty forever? Or how do you imagine they “capture supply”?
    - toomuchtodo 3y ago
      They buy the asset and crank rent as high as they can. That’s capturing supply. When you buy a home, your payment is fixed for the life of the loan, and instead of being exposed to annual rent increases that can greatly exceed inflation, you as the homeowner are insulated from a private corporation’s extraction efforts due to that fixed payment (while your potential annual wage increases inflate away the debt). Google yieldstar to understand the collusion in doing this. If homes don’t end up in the hands of people, they end up in the hands of corporations who treat their renters like cattle. At current build rates, supply may never exceed the rate at which institutional investors can acquire these assets, hence the need for legislation and regulation. https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
      - konschubert 3y ago
        I don’t even know where to start. The buying and renting markets for houses are linked. These landlords need to rent their houses, so clearly they meeting a demand in the market. That demand would not go away and thus prices would not go down if the houses were owned privately. There would simply be more former renters, now trying to buy. You can keep blaming the messenger or you can just accept that the housing demand is real and work to increase housing supply. One of these things works.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        jjav 3y ago
        > You can keep blaming the messenger or you can just accept that the housing demand is real and work to increase housing supply. > One of these things works. If simply increasing housing supply is known to transform a city from having very expensive housing to having affordable housing, it should be possible to name a handful of previously-expensive cities which are now cheap. Could you name a few?
        konschubert 3y ago
        Tokyo, Vienna, … Most cities aren’t very good at adding enough supply. And sometimes that supply increases agglomeration effects and makes even more people want to move there. Which is a good thing, that’s what cities are for.
        jjav 3y ago
        Tokyo is such a unique special case that I don't think it should be an example for anywhere else. I did not know about Vienna, spent some time reading about it! Seems that it had very expensive rents and government programs to build a lot of public housing cut those rents making it fairly affordable. So it is a good case study of this approach working. Although it seems most of that housing was built a century ago. I have to wonder how practical it would be to replicate that today. > Most cities aren’t very good at adding enough supply. Maybe it's just not that easy? Also, culturally in the US it's just never going to happen that a city owns half or more of all housing as a public service, so I suspect wishing for that is not realistic. So in the US, building housing doesn't happen unless it is profitable for builders.
    - soupfordummies 3y ago
      A lot of times yes they do.
      - konschubert 3y ago
        What’s the vacancy rate in the affected cities?

esoterica 3y ago

Banning investors from owning homes will do NOTHING to alleviate the housing crisis. The problem is lack of supply, not the capital structure of the supply. We will never solve the housing crisis as long as people like you continue to deny basic economics and refuse to acknowledge the basic supply and demand problem that is causing rents and home prices to skyrocket.

PlunderBunny 3y ago
You can always argue that a problem that involves shortages will be alleviated by more supply (like saying that building more roads will solve traffic congestion), but if the increased supply is just captured by the same forces that capture it now, you haven’t solved anything.
- konschubert 3y ago
  So these hedge funds buy the houses and let them sit empty forever? Or how do you imagine they “capture supply”?
  - toomuchtodo 3y ago
    They buy the asset and crank rent as high as they can. That’s capturing supply. When you buy a home, your payment is fixed for the life of the loan, and instead of being exposed to annual rent increases that can greatly exceed inflation, you as the homeowner are insulated from a private corporation’s extraction efforts due to that fixed payment (while your potential annual wage increases inflate away the debt). Google yieldstar to understand the collusion in doing this. If homes don’t end up in the hands of people, they end up in the hands of corporations who treat their renters like cattle. At current build rates, supply may never exceed the rate at which institutional investors can acquire these assets, hence the need for legislation and regulation. https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
    - konschubert 3y ago
      I don’t even know where to start. The buying and renting markets for houses are linked. These landlords need to rent their houses, so clearly they meeting a demand in the market. That demand would not go away and thus prices would not go down if the houses were owned privately. There would simply be more former renters, now trying to buy. You can keep blaming the messenger or you can just accept that the housing demand is real and work to increase housing supply. One of these things works.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - jjav 3y ago
        > You can keep blaming the messenger or you can just accept that the housing demand is real and work to increase housing supply. > One of these things works. If simply increasing housing supply is known to transform a city from having very expensive housing to having affordable housing, it should be possible to name a handful of previously-expensive cities which are now cheap. Could you name a few?
        konschubert 3y ago
        Tokyo, Vienna, … Most cities aren’t very good at adding enough supply. And sometimes that supply increases agglomeration effects and makes even more people want to move there. Which is a good thing, that’s what cities are for.
        jjav 3y ago
        Tokyo is such a unique special case that I don't think it should be an example for anywhere else. I did not know about Vienna, spent some time reading about it! Seems that it had very expensive rents and government programs to build a lot of public housing cut those rents making it fairly affordable. So it is a good case study of this approach working. Although it seems most of that housing was built a century ago. I have to wonder how practical it would be to replicate that today. > Most cities aren’t very good at adding enough supply. Maybe it's just not that easy? Also, culturally in the US it's just never going to happen that a city owns half or more of all housing as a public service, so I suspect wishing for that is not realistic. So in the US, building housing doesn't happen unless it is profitable for builders.
  - soupfordummies 3y ago
    A lot of times yes they do.
    - konschubert 3y ago
      What’s the vacancy rate in the affected cities?