55 ms·

Priced out of home ownership

• vouaobrasil 2y ago
  Where possible, states should build more tiny house communities, or have land where putting up a tiny house is legal and pain-free. There should also be a law prohibiting a person from owning more than one of them, except for temporary periods of moving out of one and into another. (The same should hold for regular houses, too.) Effectively, land is a different sort of commodity than most others: it is truly finite, and people should not be able to make as much money off it as an investment as they currently do.
  • llamaimperative 2y ago
    A Land Value Tax is much simpler to enforce, more generally applicable across all housing product types, and a lot less artificially constraining of local decision making. Agreed land is totally unique and should be handled very differently from other forms of wealth.
    • vouaobrasil 2y ago
      Yes, that is true. Though I would argue that we still need some rules on land ownership to begin with that is independent of the prices set by a market.
  • yourusername 2y ago
    >Where possible, states should build more tiny house communities, or have land where putting up a tiny house is legal and pain-free. But let's just call them what they are: Trailer parks. I just don't see how trailer parks are going to solve the problem. You may have cheap land but if you put 500 trailers on a plot you're still going to need sewage hookup, power and water for 500 homes.
    • vouaobrasil 2y ago
      They don't have to look like traditional trailer parks -- at least not the kind that I've seen. But besides that, they will be cheaper. That's the point.
      • yourusername 2y ago
        How much of the cost of housing is construction vs land costs, utility hookups, developer profit and permits? Tiny houses are relatively energy inefficient (a lot of wall surface for the living space), inefficient in land usage and very expensive per square meter. And they are not suited for families with children. I wonder if these trade offs are worth it against building a reasonably sized prefab home.
        • vouaobrasil 2y ago
          One must also ask in addition to your pertinent questions, can the market bear putting the same price on a tiny house as it can with a large house? It's about perceived value. It's the same as anything "wedding". The price will go up just because the word "wedding" is there: wedding photography, wedding invitations, wedding catering. With tiny houses, you're going to get the opposite effect of the price being lower because if of the "tiny" aspect.
        • Aeolun 2y ago
          What the US needs is some expectation adjustment. If you make all your houses and lots 2x smaller suddenly you can fit four times as many people in the same space.
          • 0_____0 2y ago
            If you work this problem long enough you're going to converge on apartments/condos. It solves the problem you care about and all the caveats mentioned.
          • c22 2y ago
            Urbanization facilitates specialization which is the engine that drives inequality. So, make all your houses and lots 2x smaller and suddenly you can have more density and higher levels of inequality. Yay?
  • lucidguppy 2y ago
    How about developing the "missing middle" in urban development. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing Efficient and healthy land use for housing was solved in the 1900s - we don't need tiny homes.
    • schnitzelstoat 2y ago
      Yeah, American houses are massive compared to what we have in Europe and often have large amounts of space around the house too. In England, row housing is quite common and that seems a good compromise between density and comfort. I live in an apartment block in Spain and it's quite a lot worse than even row housing due to noise from neighbours, lack of parking etc. It's okay for young people, but it'll be hard to raise a family in, which is probably partly why we have such low birth rates here.
      • prawn 2y ago
        And Australian houses are, as I understand it, bigger again. There was a thread somewhere about where to put your washing machine: bathroom or kitchen. And every Australian was in there getting completely confused because the vast majority of houses in Australia have a dedicated laundry room usually with a trough, bench top, washing machine, dryer, etc.
      • throwaway1105q 2y ago
        I have lived in an apartment my entire life. I'm in a building with 15 floors and 5 flats on each right now. My direct neighbors have a newborn baby. I don't hear a thing, literally - I wouldn't know there are other people if I wasn't 20 meters above the ground. Don't compromise on build quality like the Spanish do, build it like the Germans, Poles, Czechs and Slovaks do - and you won't have any issues.
        • schnitzelstoat 2y ago
          Yeah, that's true. I guess I don't trust developers to build decent buildings, especially affordable ones. In England, the new-build homes are often of a far inferior build quality to the older ones built after the war.
  • cush 2y ago
    Row houses and flats are better. Zoning laws prohibit them in most neighborhoods though.
  • imperfect_light 2y ago
    We used to have housing of last resort, places like SROs that were unpleasant but cheap (and to be fair, they were often firetraps). But then we decided it was inhumane so we banned or greatly restricted them, and surprise, the people that would have been in an SRO now live in cars or tents, definitely not an improvement.
  • downrightmike 2y ago
    We used to just have boarding houses, apartment buildings for this sort of thing.
• andrewstuart 2y ago
  Society in UK, USA, AUS,Canada has been destroyed by housing as a financial instrument instead of……. housing. And politicians love every dollar of price increase. There’s the homeowners and the renters/serfs and nothing in between. Dead society, nothing to aim for or live for.
  • phyalow 2y ago
    New Zealand too. I totally agree. There is something utterly rotten with the seniorage abilities of commercial banks and the multigenerational distortions it has created by virtue of leveraged (mortgage) lending.
  • artemonster 2y ago
    tbh I am so angry about this I dont even know with whom to be angry with in the first place. we just "got" here and everyone is just waving hands, especially politicians, that promise to fix housing crisis since 2000 and nothing happens, it just gets worse. I think some heads need to fly, french revolution style and that needs to be this violent in order for elites to be afraid again, idk what else can help.
    • JonChesterfield 2y ago
      The leaders of violent revolutions aren't especially likely to govern with more skill or empathy than those they overthrew. The selection criteria of charismatic and violent isn't very well aligned with benevolent rule afterwards.
    • throw__away7391 2y ago
      Be angry at the currently retiring generation. This was consciously and deliberately engineered for their benefit. They even had the wisdom to carve out property tax exemptions for themselves. Perhaps they did not bother to consider what the long term consequences would be, but that is to be expected. The politicians merely did their bidding.
      • deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
• DataDaoDe 2y ago
  For those interested, Gary Stevenson has an interesting take on what is causing this, even though his view is focused on the UK market: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNUNR2NZvFM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNUNR2NZvFM
  • cedws 2y ago
    Something about Gary Stevenson doesn't feel right. Although what he says generally sounds good, all of his videos contain the exact same rhetoric about blaming problems on wealthy people. And yes, he says he's an inequality economist so it makes sense that he would say this, so why not show the numbers and data to back up his claims? He talks for 10-20 mins seemingly pulling his theories out of thin air. In that very video you linked he claims he saw house prices rising as a result of COVID while all the other economists were blind to it... uh no? He doesn't use the kind of vocabulary I would expect from somebody who has deep knowledge of the subject either. What is he getting out of making these videos other than playing the populist game? Has he actually been verified to ever have been "Citi's top trader"?
    • m4rc1e 2y ago
      His recent book went #1 on the Times best seller list so I guess his videos have been a brilliant form of marketing.
• bdcravens 2y ago
  I bought in 2022, and while it was new construction, it's a pretty mid-range house. No premium finishes, in a growing but small city northwest of Houston. If you told me 10 years ago how much I paid for it, I'd ask what the name of my butler is.
  • caeril 2y ago
    Indeed. My home "value" has roughly doubled in the last five years. Sounds nice, but land/home values in the area I'd like to move to has nearly tripled in the same timespan. I feel bad for renters priced out of the market, but many of us who have "enjoyed" the upside are actually deeply underwater relative to our preferences, to say nothing of the doubling of insurance premiums, and ~25% property tax hikes in the last five years.
    • aaomidi 2y ago
      Property tax shouldn’t be going up with this tbh. If everyone’s housing and land is becoming more expensive, then you need to tax smaller %s to get the same budget. To me this sounds like your city/state is just ballooning their budgets.
      • khuey 2y ago
        You don't need the same budget. You have to pay employees more to keep up with the rising cost of housing and land (or they all quit), so the budget has to go up too.
        • ryandrake 2y ago
          And... Look at California's prop 13 for what happens when property taxes can't rise with the market. People just keep their homes forever because they don't want to sell and buy a new place where the tax rate will ratchet up from the sale. We have multi-million dollar homes that are taxed as if they were $50,000 homes, starving the local area's schools and infrastructure of funding.
• rr808 2y ago
  I always assumed when the baby boomers retired there would be a flood of big family houses coming up for sale. I see it in my parents that they're pretty comfortable staying in the family house as long as possible, I'm happy with this. It is made a lot easier by the fact that prices keep going up so staying in a house that is oversized financially is rewarding. I'd like to think it'll all come to and end one day as the spiral reverses, but I've been wrong for so long now I'm losing faith.
  • omnibrain 2y ago
    > I've been wrong for so long now I'm losing faith There is a saying: „The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.“
    • tossandthrow 2y ago
      Yep, exactly. Variable rate mortgages have varying lengths, and we will see the entire unfold in roughly 3 years. Which is probably a mix of stagnant house prices and severe salary increases (for the ordinary person). We are in a wealth dispersion period now (I think) - The ordinary people will catch up with tech workers, and high-salary epople (as in: reducing the number of multiples in the salary)
  • throw383y8 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • fmajid 2y ago
      The old vote, and the young don’t. The Tories are the natural party of seniors in any case.
    • yakshaving_jgt 2y ago
      I think the “latest fad” you’re using as outrage bait here is from ~8 years ago.
      • 2y ago
• JonChesterfield 2y ago
  The UK made renting property a lot less lucrative a few years ago. Something about the tax position of letting mortgaged property. That meant landlords sold their houses - which I believe was broadly the point - and thus there are fewer places to rent and the cost of renting has increased to the new point of stability. I think this probably has decreased house prices to some extent, but people are really insanely reluctant to sell a house for less than they bought it for so lots will wait for years before accepting the change. It's probably good times to be buying an ex-rental to live in and getting better as mortgage rates fall.
  • dustincoates 2y ago
    A similar thing has happened in France, where the government has restricted the rental of less energy efficient dwellings[0]. This is generally a good thing for the environment, but it has already had an effect on rental prices as those apartments are now taken off the market. The exact impact is a little hard to work out, because, at least in Paris, it's also coincided with apartment owners wanting to hold on to empty apartments to rent them for the Olympics rather than to locals. 0: https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/timetable-for-new-energy-linked-restrictions-for-homes-in-france/199184#:~:text=From%20January%201%2C%202025%20rental,to%20250%20kWh%20per%20m%C2%B2 https://www.connexionfrance.com/practical/timetable-for-new-....
    • Rinzler89 2y ago
      >apartment owners wanting to hold on to empty apartments to rent them for the Olympics rather than to locals. Sounds like something that can be fixed with laws. Edit: would you mind explaining your downvotes with arguments please? thanks.
      • throwaway1105q 2y ago
        We're talking about France, fix the law too much and heads will roll, or at least cars burn.
        • 2y ago
• roenxi 2y ago
  I think it is a mistake to write an entire article without talking about supply and demand. Demographics are one of the lest surprising things in statistics, they can sometimes be predicted decades out from an effect arriving. Housing construction is similarly easy to observe. I'd personally bet that there is a gentle imbalance appearing between how much energy the average person can lay claim to vs. how much they need to build and service a house and this is a symptom of the energy squeeze. But it might not be and this article isn't doing much to prove or disprove what the actual problems are because we need more information to make useful observations.
  • xbar 2y ago
    Unfortunately, there is excess demand generated by non-human corporate entities. There is not a supply/demand problem among humans-who-need-a-place-to-live. But there is investor demand for an investment vehicle that has the tax and asset benefits that homes offer. The consequence is that the buying power in the market by humans-who-need-a-place-to-live is relatively weak when they compete against financial investment corporate entities.
    • roenxi 2y ago
      If we have 100 houses and 99 people, it is just unlikely that anyone will have a problem finding somewhere to live. These non-human corporate entities don't have a real incentive to leave the houses empty. There is always a win-win deal to be had renting the house out. It is certainly possible to have situations where someone chooses to leave a house empty. If it is happening at scale then that suggests either tax or rental law is doing an unacceptable level of damage. Otherwise, why leave the house empty? It is giving up free money.
      • NoGravitas 2y ago
        > These non-human corporate entities don't have a real incentive to leave the houses empty. They may have such an incentive. In an idealized market where everyone has perfect information, they wouldn't, but we don't live in such a market. In practice, it may be more profitable to leave a house empty to drive up rent on your other properties, and to save the maintenance costs that tenants would bring, especially if you can indirectly coordinate with other large property owners: https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
• fl0ki 2y ago
  I'm an expat now but I'm hearing it's even worse back in Australia. [Disclaimer: Some of this may be off because I'm hearing it second-hand, not actively investigating myself, so corrections are welcome] I hear people who are already in the top 1-2% in income are told their borrowing power is only A$1M (~U$660K) while houses at all worth raising a family in cost A$3-6M. Banks don't seem to want to lend to them because they could instead lend to yet another property investor that already has a portfolio full of equity and collateral. The houses will sell and the mortgages will close, the banks can afford to be picky. If you work in tech non-remotely, you're looking at the high end of that because you're competing with everyone else working tech, heavily weighted towards Sydney, and the rest of the country's housing supply is largely irrelevant. The cities certainly aren't designed for car commuting, so the supply of locations is further narrowed to places that are either so close they're walkable or have good public transport. To my US readers I cannot emphasize enough how much this limits people's options both ways. When you have a non-remote job it limits your housing options, and if you're lucky enough to lock in a house, now it's limited your employment options in return. This isn't great for housing or employment markets. I'd like to think remote work has helped some people, but the most career-focused people I know are sticking to in-person connections, competing with everyone else doing the same. Meanwhile cashed-up investors can buy up several houses and neither live in them nor rent them out. They're taking supply away from both the buying and renting markets, which is their legal right and a smart move on their part, but totally dysfunctional for the market as a whole. Anyone who does buy a house to rent it out is doing their small part to make buying less affordable but make renting more affordable, making it just that little bit less likely that the next person out there is a buyer of any kind. Of course there's been doomsaying about a housing bubble pop for decades, especially during the world-famous pandemic lockdowns. Nothing popped and the exponential runaway pricing continues. Surely it's getting untenable enough to pop somehow, if my successful friends can't buy houses then I don't know who's left in the market except the real estate investors themselves. I honestly don't see how I can un-expat now, and I'm just counting myself lucky to own property in the USA. If I want to keep this sweet deal, my options for moving are more limited than they've ever been, but it looks like a lot of people would gladly sacrifice flexibility to have anywhere near a tenable deal on housing.
  • BigJono 2y ago
• atemerev 2y ago
  Pff, in Switzerland, the mean age of the first-time home buyer is 48, and the mean age of a homeowner is 58. And those are the luckiest and the richest who could actually afford buying a house; many rent for life.
  • tonfa 2y ago
    Yeah, but renting in Switzerland is fairly advantageous compared to many countries (rent is locked, except interest rate adjustments).
  • deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  • elevatedastalt 2y ago
    I am not sure that a tiny country that's smaller than 40 US states is a useful model for what kinds of homeownership can work.
    • atemerev 2y ago
      This is not a useful model; in fact, things are quite bad here. I just wanted to say that US homeownership is absolutely exceptional, has no analogues anywhere else, and exists only by means of extensive government support. In most other countries, buying a house in your thirties is absolutely unimaginable.
      • elevatedastalt 2y ago
        What age is reasonable? Okay, maybe not 30s. How about 40s? The way we are headed most GenZs are not going to have enough to be able to afford a house in their 40s or even 50s.
• omgJustTest 2y ago
  2008 was low of the low for home values. In my view a few things have happened since: 1.hyperconsolidation in lenders 2. Real estate orgs have worked together to eliminate downward price pressures. 3. NIMBYs and generally “home ownership associations “ have created so many barriers to building & reaped the profits in their own home values. Some good news is that most populations are slowing or declining on the globe, and that ought to be a substantial risk to mass ownership, but that will take 20years to manifest.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    Now imagine all this, but 2008 was barely a blip and not a low for home values - that's Canada.
    • jarsin 2y ago
      Every time I hear someone predict the next housing crash I always ask them if they have looked at Canada and Australia. Seems to get more and more absurd but it keeps on trucking along.
      • marcosdumay 2y ago
        I keep wondering who the hell buys the housing on my city. The time for selling is on the 2 digit months, but the price of any small apartment is out of the reach of 95% of the people that live here if they save for their entire life. Anything that isn't small is out of reach of more than 99%.
    • WheatMillington 2y ago
      Same in New Zealand. The parallels between New Zealand and Canada in housing are truly tragic.
• DrNosferatu 2y ago
  To efficiently live in cities, many large public works have historically been completed, for example: - Cities across the world built thorough sewage systems, preventing the need for private citizens to empty their litter buckets out the window – a large river in Chicago was even reversed! - Cities across the world built mass transit networks, enabling citizens to move around efficiently without relying solely on private vehicles. - Cities across the world should build affordable housing networks, as Vienna did. This way, citizens don't have to fall victim to the exploitation of speculators and distortions of the supposedly fair market. Public affordable housing is a necessary infrastructure, just like sewers and transit, to create livable cities for all residents.
  • hiatus 2y ago
    > Public affordable housing is a necessary infrastructure, just like sewers and transit, to create livable cities for all residents. How do residents, by definition people who already reside there, benefit from public affordable housing?
    • DrNosferatu 2y ago
      If you’re renting, you would stop spending such a large part of your income in rent. If you’re a resident that already owns their home, and has absolutely no unfulfilled housing needs, you will benefit from a more prosperous society with less people struggling and more equality - and that’s a positive on its own right. (along with its positive knock-on effects) In fact, it’s the very goal this measure aims to achieve.
• fallingsquirrel 2y ago
  dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250
  • fragmede 2y ago
    dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40491157 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40491157 check the timestamps :p
• jeffbee 2y ago
  None of the measures mentioned in the article — lower interest rates, lower transaction fees, down payment subsidies — will lower costs. Every one of them will raise prices. You can only fix this with supply: build homes.
  • formerly_proven 2y ago
    The good ol' "subsidize demand" approach to reducing prices. And if prices continue to climb? Well, just subsidize demand harder and in more diverse ways. I assure you, eventually price will fall. You just haven't subsidized the demand side enough yet.
    • pdonis 2y ago
      The GP didn't say "subsidize demand". They said "increase supply". They're different things.
      • formerly_proven 2y ago
        It's a response to his summary of the article, not a contradiction. > the measures mentioned in the article — lower interest rates, lower transaction fees, down payment subsidies
        • pdonis 2y ago
          Ah, got it. Sorry for the mixup on my part.
  • technotony 2y ago
    That's not the main source of the problem, it's governments printing money that's causing this.
    • bsenftner 2y ago
      No, it's the value of the dollar in free fall and our purchased economists not talking about it. It's the value of the dollar as reflected by the rest of the planet's confidence in the US, which is dropping faster than Trump can fall asleep and fart.
• holoduke 2y ago
  Same here in the Netherlands. I currently rent a 130m3 house for 2500 euros. 500 energy. 2500 euros daycare (4 kids). I think I spend around 6000, 7000 euros after taxes on fixed costs. I wont complain. My life is good, but for most peope here impossible to pay those amounts. Result is that lots of my friends with "normal" jobs end up living in small apartments far outside the cities or even move to a completely different part of the country. Its very hard now to start a life now. Unless you make a shitton of money. Everything became so expensive these days. Its unsustainable imho.
  • prox 2y ago
    Why is this happening everywhere right now? On Reddit I see this in so many places (US, UK, Europe, not sure about Asia)
    • candiddevmike 2y ago
      Too few houses, too many landlords (commercial and "investment properties")
      • moralestapia 2y ago
        Nah, there's more than enough housing for everybody; quite obvious by the observable fact that people have a roof over their heads, lol. The value of currency went down significantly, i.e. actual inflation is massive. Salaries didn't go up as much, not even close, and here we are. >inb4 ...
    • moffkalast 2y ago
      I recall a thread from someone from South America in the Slovenia subreddit, where they said they wanted to move to Europe because it's impossible to afford a home where they currently live. The response was basically "yeah, welcome to the club pal". It's definitely a global issue, rising population mixed with late stage capitalism.
      • formerly_proven 2y ago
• blondie9x 2y ago
  The problem is pretty easy to fix. 50-70% of homes (Depends on Area) are owned by people over 58-70 (Baby Boomers). They don't have good senior apartment/living options. Make more senior housing and provide incentives for them to sell their homes. There are so few available affordable senior apartment options. It's really saddening. Most places have 5-10 year waiting lists, if the waiting list is open at all. Fixing senior living options will create inventory in the market and give seniors better choices with an active community.
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    Handouts to the homeowners does not feel like the right call here
    • cyberlurker 2y ago
      Senior living centers are often atrocious and still can set people back over $10,000 a month. I think a program could be designed without being a handout. One option could be if you’re going into a government run senior living center you need to pass that money down to whoever was going to inherit it/receive it through donation. And that has to be a taxable event to cover the cost of the subsidy on senior living. People would hate that option because no one likes taxes but the private market is not getting us where we need to be. If people don’t like the option, no subsidy for them and they are free to figure out their own senior care. That money goes surprisingly fast.
      • jncfhnb 2y ago
        And if the old people don’t have enough wealth to cover the subsidy via taxes that they would have paid anyway just later on their inheritances?
      • FireBeyond 2y ago
        > Senior living centers are often atrocious and still can set people back over $10,000 a month. For "fun", most states publish nursing home reports. In the county I work in EMS, there are probably only two that have only either minor or no infractions. Every single other one has major / patient/resident risk infractions. Often around minimum staffing levels. Perhaps pay your CNAs above minimum wage, your LPNs above $20/hr, and so...
• floodle 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • VoodooJuJu 2y ago
    Let me guess...you or your family own rentals?
    • unshavedyak 2y ago
      Honestly i see that sort of pro-rent logic quite a bit on HN. Not sure if they're all biased or what, but yeesh.
  • bongodongobob 2y ago
    This is bait, I'm flagging this.
    • Aldipower 2y ago
      This wasn't bait. Really depends on the country where you are living. In Germany it is totally fair to rent. Has is ups and downs.. To bad it's flagged now. :-(
      • bongodongobob 2y ago
        The article is about the US market, not Germany. To say "idk why you'd want to own a home in the US" is completely absurd.
  • unshavedyak 2y ago
    I dunno, spending years giving someone the same price as a mortgage (for me at least, back when i rented and decided to buy) and seeing almost nothing in return but convenience seems a pretty strong argument no? Yea, renting has some advantages. However in my view many people are simply too poor to spend that kind of money on the convenience of not managing a house. Is it more work and liability to own a home? Yes, definitely. However i was looking at throwing away $168,000 when i was renting over the next ten years (assuming no price fluctuations, which also doesn't happen lol). I couldn't afford to spend that kind of money on convenience. Plus there's America's (imo bad) idea that home ownership is an investment. Unfortunately, my home has doubled in price. So not only could i not afford to waste the money renting before, but now i've made significant money by simply not renting before. Where as i'd get the privilege to lose even more money by renting if i had stayed where i was before, since the rent has gone up - many times. Is there another angle i'm missing? I rented for years, and now have owned for ~8 years or something. Renting has upsides, yes - if you've got the money. I don't think most people do, especially these days. Is there an argument i missed?
• BenFranklin100 2y ago
  Younger people need to join the YIMBY movement in droves. Your economic future depends on removing the crushing restrictions on building new homes, especially homes in high wage cities. The older Boomer generation will never change its NIMBY views. Never.
  • RobotToaster 2y ago
    So developers can build more low density unaffordable housing that includes nearly no social housing?
    • BenFranklin100 2y ago
      New market rate housing gives wealthier people something to buy so they stop bidding up the price of older homes. This immediately relieves price pressure on the older housing stock. Leftist dreams of a government funded social housing utopia in the United States and the UK are just that: dreams. Reforming zoning on the other hand will strongly encourage developers to quickly add higher density housing in job rich urban areas.
    • tootie 2y ago
      House prices are supply and demand. More units, lower price. Imagine 1000 homebuyers for 950 houses. Capitalism says the houses go to the top bidders. Communists might use social credit or something. Technocrats might score on IQ. But there is no system that could possibly result in fewer than 50 people being homeless.
  • jncfhnb 2y ago
    They will die though
    • BenFranklin100 2y ago
      Boomers are choosing to age in place and the youngest Boomers are in their late 50s. Do you want to wait 20 years?
• oldpersonintx 2y ago
  [dead]
• Stranger43 2y ago
  In a lot of ways this is a problem creating itself. The reason Home Ownership is desirable is that the pricing of houses go up faster then both inflation and depreciation caused by wear decreases the utility value of a dwelling, and the reason that houses are expensive is that the state actors are invested enough in this cycle to make sure it never really breaks. In a real functional market there would be no real benefit to house ownership over long term leases. but were dealing with a market thats been deliberately broken by policies promoting home ownership for reasons that's fundamentally religious/dogmatic in nature.
  • lumb63 2y ago
    You talk about demand for home ownership as if it is entirely induced via economics rather than inherently valuable. I don’t understand why? There are reasons why home ownership is desirable neglecting economics entirely. Owning a home gives you more control over the space you live in, in terms of the ability to customize the space.
    • Stranger43 2y ago
      That's again a false argument, made a complete lie by the existence of Home Ownership associations and other contract covenants. Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership" There is yes some cases where owning is giving you a better deal then leasing in terms of rights and obligations but this is not an universal truth and not the reason house prices consistently rises faster then inflation and average disposable incomes that have nothing to do with the utility value of property as an dwelling. Ie if we were to go back to an scenario where home properties lost value as the loans were paid off and things got old and worn there would be no crisis, the issue is that the way that currency and banking intersect makes prices keep rising.
      • xboxnolifes 2y ago
        > Rights come from your contract with whoever hold power not "property ownership" Rights of property ownership is always a superset of the rights of renting property. It is not a false argument.
• speeder 2y ago
  I live in Portugal and here the situation is outright ridiculous. 1. There are a ridiculous amount of abandoned properties, when I walk the streets of major cities, sometimes more than half of the buildings even in expensive areas are boarded-up. 2. Meanwhile I am afraid of being homeless soon, I lost my job recently, and the unemployment benefit I can receive is literally half of my rent. Thing is, there is no "worse but cheaper" place to move to. I already live in a "0" apartment, with the "0" referring to the number of rooms. The apartment is literally just an empty square with kitchen sink and bathroom stuff. I don't even have my workstation anymore because literally there is no physical place for it inside the apartment. People are like: "Build more homes". Yet the amount of abandoned properties (by the way, this also include abandoned farmland! Government is upset that there are tons of that, and the result is land with zero management, with wildfires, poachers, drug traffickers...) is greater than the number of families needing.
  • Zealotux 2y ago
    I would expect that kind of situation to lead to a lot of squatting, how common is that in Portugal?
    • speeder 2y ago
      Instead of squatting people been sharing rent. In one infamous case a house that was shared between 20+ people burned down and killed 2 and sent 14 to hospital.
  • orwin 2y ago
    I'm sorry to recommend you that, but i have experience with homelessness. You have two temporary solutions: - join a group of squatters (hopefully you already know someone) until you get your bearings. The less ideological ones often squat old industrial properties, or long-abandoned houses (its rough in winter, but in Portugal you should be fine). You might meet some Urbex guys, they're nice and always fine with finding squatters. - Live in a "big enough" car. You absolutely need to rest on a completely flat surface. I knew someone who got the back seats down and put a wooden plank on it. If you're less than 1.80 and don't move on your sleep, you have a lot of choice (the diagonal is nice), else it might be a bit more expensive. A very short-term solution is squatting with a close friend, but you shouldn't abuse it too much, it strains relationships.
• nomilk 2y ago
  Given how abundant land is, does it imply that supply shortages are purely man-made? (e.g. policies not allowing large swaths of land to be built on). Otherwise it doesn't make sense that prices are high for a good (housing) whose primary input (land) is in great supply.
  • User23 2y ago
    The primary input isn’t land, it’s tolerable neighbors. That is of course what “good school district,” “location, location, location,” and similar euphemisms actually mean. If you have a high tolerance for crime and other antisocial behavior there is plenty of extremely affordable housing in major US cities with plenty of amenities like walkability and public transportation.
    • xboxnolifes 2y ago
      Good school district doesn't just mean tolerable neighbors, it also means wealthy neighbors (for more collected school taxes).
    • nradov 2y ago
      Or if you venture outside of major cities there is also plenty of affordable housing in unfashionable suburban. Many of those areas also have low crime and decent public schools. Not much public transportation, but plenty of free parking.
      • Auracle 2y ago
        Define affordable. My nearest town has a population of 500 or so and my home’s price has at least doubled in the last 10 years.
        • nradov 2y ago
          Absolute prices are irrelevant. Affordability is reflected in home ownership rates. In some states such as Alabama, Maine, Minnesota, Vermont, South Carolina, etc. the rates are above 70%. Regular people seem to be finding it affordable. https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by-state-and-city/#___Homeownership_by_State__ https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by...
• TriangleEdge 2y ago
  In my mind I redefine the housing crisis in Canada as a business clustering problem. I think the percentage of attractive businesses that are concentrated in a few areas is too high. This comes in conflict with the human desire to not live in a sardine can. I would leave my city, but where would I work? My options to have a dignified life feel limited to me, especially in tech. Tech bros like me are pretty constrained to cities, which I really don't like.
  • bongodongobob 2y ago
    That doesn't make any sense to me. Tech bros don't make physical goods. You and I can do everything remotely. There's no reason to live in a big city other than you chose to.
    • dukeyukey 2y ago
      We can do things remotely, but trying to do complex things with lots of expert input and less-than-perfect management is _way_ harder to do remotely than in-person. We evolved to work things out with other people, not via a low-res video and slightly out-of-sync audio.
• cush 2y ago
  We all want more housing but zoning laws and NIMBYs prevent us from building proper urban housing. Yet there’s nothing stopping someone from building a 6bd/4ba house in my neighborhood and renting the whole thing out for $1600/rm.
• EduardoBautista 2y ago
  Why doesn't the government build and sell housing at a small profit? Here in Dubai, the largest housing construction companies are or were government owned. It's one of the ways the government can have zero income tax despite oil being less than 1% of its economy. My only thought is that it's political, and some voters don't want their houses to lose value.
  • piva00 2y ago
    Because of neoliberal policies. Some governments around the world did incentivise and even footed the bill for building public housing before neoliberalism took hold; for example the Swedish Million Programme [0] built 1 million dwellings between 1965-1974 where the government took the risk on 66% of the building costs to be repaid by tenants over 30 years. This system of building houses was completely scrapped by neoliberals, letting the "market" take control of supply with the government taking a background stance of mostly zoning out where they'd incentivise building new dwellings. I can see in a not-so-distant future talks about this kind of program being reignited in politics, the neoliberal approach has absolutely failed us. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Million_Programme
    • EduardoBautista 2y ago
      > Some governments around the world did incentivise and even footed the bill for building public housing I am not referring to building public housing. I am saying the government should build housing as if it were a for-profit company. Take those profits, and re-invest into building even _more_ housing. Don't try to sell to those in need, sell to those who are speculating on real estate and increase supply at the same time.
      • b3ing 2y ago
        In the US no one trusts the government anymore and instead they want the private sector to do everything. But the private sector only cares about profit. It’s also a good way to ensure companies can milk the government of money and then the head of those companies can lobby the government to keep things how they are so they continue to get that government money.
• ChrisArchitect 2y ago
  [dupe] Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250
  • fallingsquirrel 2y ago
    dupe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40490860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40490860 ;)
• 587846 2y ago
  I never really bothered much before to check previous articles on the same topic by the same reporter. It's interesting that there was an article from this same reporter in November 2019 discussing US tech giants investing in housing (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50295130 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50295130). Then, there was another article about housing prices in April 2022 (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60921223 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-60921223) and 2023 (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64178954 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-64178954), and another in October 2023 (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67152845 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67152845), and then one in January 2024 (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68035274 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68035274). I just never really thought about looking at previous articles by the same reporter before. I look forward to an article when housing prices retreat rather than increase.
• divisonoflabor 2y ago
  [flagged]
• dhx 2y ago
  Some other less-cited reasons home ownership may increasingly be considered expensive: - Increasing density in older cities requires infrastructure upgrades that are much more complex and expensive to retrofit than it was to plan and build the first time when space was abundant. - Multi-story buildings are more expensive per floor space area than single-story buildings. As cities become denser, the added expense of multi-story buildings is realised. - Home standards have dramatically increased. We've forgotten how common it used to be for houses to leak during storms, or how hot or cold houses used to be without any insulation or HVAC systems. We've forgotten flash floods caused by inadequate stormwater systems. Where children used to grow up in bunk beds in tiny shared bedrooms, they now are expected to have their own adult-sized room. Where a small kitchen used to suffice, people now expect a huge show kitchen and butlers pantry that is double the size of old smaller kitchens. Or in a country such as China, millions of people have forgotten what living in a cave house was like for their grandparents. - Complexity of expected amenities and public services have dramatically increased, resulting in people wanting to live inside large cities rather than spread out across small towns. People want to live within an hour of travel to a MRI machine and healthcare specialists. Or instead of shopping at one food store or dining out in one of two restaurants in a small town, people want to be within a few minutes of 20 choices of cuisine in a large city. - Materials are more expensive because it has been realised that clear-felling old growth forest is not sustainable, nor is digging up the easiest to extract resources, and we're just starting to realise how expensive sustainable resource extraction actually is. As a result of increased quality of housing and infrastructure, materials are enormously more complex and varied. - Safety standards for construction labour are significantly improved, even if just by worker and public expectation. It's no longer acceptable for labourers to be working in dusty environments or working at heights without scaffolding and harnesses having been planned and setup first. - Increasingly affluent populations are aging and naturally reducing in size. In such a demographic shift, workers can prefer safer and easier jobs that don't risk life-long back and joint injuries and all the other types of health risks common to the construction industry.
  • the_snooze 2y ago
    >Increasing density in older cities requires infrastructure upgrades that are much more complex and expensive to retrofit than it was to plan and build the first time when space was abundant. >Multi-story buildings are more expensive per floor space area than single-story buildings. As cities become denser, the added expense of multi-story buildings is realised. A lot of that is parking. Parking minimum laws basically hollow out intermediate-density development. In order to meet parking requirements, the only legal and economically viable types of buildings are low-density with cheap surface parking, or high-density with expensive underground parking.
• xnx 2y ago
  Dupe: 6 hours ago. 71 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40489250 (I thought there was some dupe protection for exact urls in such a close time period?)
  • DamnInteresting 2y ago
    It appears that this link is to the domain bbc.co.uk, the other is to bbc.com.
• esel2k 2y ago
  I am not an economist but if we would treat house ownership something that is beneficial for the whole society (less traffic from commuters, less homeless etc) and remove the speculations/foreign investments around housing? Why not apply the following: - every house not used for primary living place is highly taxed (removing all speculative ownership) - charge foreign investors heavily (australia will do this soon) - tax reduction for renting places for lower than median per square meter price - incentivising affordable homes Just trying to understand why this wouldn’t work?
  • colpabar 2y ago
    This is extremely unlikely to happen because the people who own multiple houses have more political power than those who don’t, and they don’t want to give them up. And even if it did, there would be ways to pay experts to get around it, just like the tax system.
  • khuey 2y ago
    None of that addresses the fundamental problem which is that there's just not enough housing. Greater Dallas builds more housing than the entire state of California.[1] Until that changes California's housing costs cannot be fixed. [1] https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/1794495929266983191 https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/1794495929266983191
    • teaearlgraycold 2y ago
      Renters in CA should be ready to tell owners resistant to new development to go fuck themselves. Oh, you put all of your eggs in one basket (real estate)? Seems like a bad decision.
  • hombre_fatal 2y ago
    Are speculators the problem is it the fact that housing prices are always expected to go up due to such limited supply? Instead of targeting a symptom, like speculative investment, why not target the root problem of prices always going up so that people can afford housing?
• FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
  > In recent months, the White House has tried to address concerns about affordability head on, offering proposals such as rules to limit closing costs and a $10,000 tax credit for first time homebuyers. "Here's a nickel, sonny."
• lwansbrough 2y ago
  In my opinion, there can only be one solution to this that will come sooner or later. A great correction following simplified zoning & building legislation. Federal governments across the west need to take control of building and zoning. Planning can remain a city/state/provincial affair, but it must be done under standardized and simplified building and zoning legislation. We are wasting unfathomable economic potential on rising housing costs, rent seeking, and artificially limiting economic development in urban centres. It is probably exceptionally challenging to manage the economic fallout from such a correction, but I believe it has to happen. I would also support draconian measures which would forcibly and retroactively destroy accrued home value to ensure we haven't extracted wealth from the younger generations. I realize this is unprecedented and probably unconstitutional, but that's my emotional response to the problem. It is plain as day: Boomers extracted the wealth out of the country and now they're extracting the wealth out of their kids. It has to be stopped.
  • bryanlarsen 2y ago
    Federal would require constitutional change, so it'll never happen. But it's the right idea -- move it up the chain so that it's not a hyper-local issue. IOW, at the state level rather than city/county. This has seen some success in California: https://cayimby.org/legislation/ https://cayimby.org/legislation/
    • lwansbrough 2y ago
      The Canadian government is currently facing this problem. Provinces have constitutional authority over building and zoning. One way they're trying to get around it (though in my opinion, no party is taking this seriously and all efforts thus far have fallen laughably short of where they need to), is by incentivizing the adoption of federal policy by conditioning federal housing grants on the adoption of new federally guided policy. This is the way for the west, if we're being serious. Once we've taken a few breaths and accepted that we don't want to be authoritative, we can see that incentivizing provinces is the right move. In my opinion, the federal government should be designing simplified building and zoning guidelines and offering unprecedented grants (on the order of tens of billions) to provinces in a first come first serve manner. Have provinces compete on urgency to receive the most funds, tapering off the offer the longer provinces hold out.
• RickJWagner 2y ago
  The US government printed a bazillion dollars during covid, continues to spend wildly, and engages in practices like transfer of college debt from debtors to tax payers. It's a complete mystery why inflation has run amuck.
  • 2four2 2y ago
    I think you mean business loans like PPP, not student loans.
    • missedthecue 2y ago
      Didn't PPP go to wages? Unless it was literal outright felony fraud. My employer received a PPP loan and it had to go to non-management employee pay.
  • bachmeier 2y ago
    > It's a complete mystery why inflation has run amuck. The CPI inflation rate is 3.4%, and it's been under 4% for a year. House price inflation is at almost 6%, and it's been above 4% for more than 10 years. The lowest house price inflation rate during Trump's presidency was 4.4%. Excluding the financial crisis, you have to go back to the mid-90s to find house price inflation under 3%. Pandemic-era fiscal policy and college loan debt cancellation is not helpful as an explanation for the explosion of house prices.
• DGAP 2y ago
  Stop subsidizing demand at the national level. Stop restricting supply at the local level.
  • postalrat 2y ago
    Land is cheap but building a house is expensive. If you want more supply then you are going to need to make building more economical.
    • mym1990 2y ago
      Land is definitely not cheap in places people actually want to live, and land is the thing that is appreciating over time, not the structure.
      • tsss 2y ago
        The building does appreciate sometimes, at least here in Germany because the increasing absurdity of bureaucracy and regulations make the same class of house more and more expensive to build. At the same time, "lower classes" of houses become outright illegal to erect, leaving only the luxury segment for new buildings. Old buildings have grandfather privilege and thus become more expensive than an equivalent new build would be, simply because you aren't allowed to build new.
        • mym1990 2y ago
          Right, I'd figured there are exceptions to my assessment, and my view is only from the US. Many homes in the US are are seemingly being built with lower quality/faster timelines, and I personally would not want to see what they look like in 30 years... There is also the consideration that "lifestyle" appreciation can also happen. If an area gets really built up, more things are happening in the neighborhood that make it a more appealing place to live in, the allure of that lifestyle will push people to buy homes that are probably not worth much in another location.
    • photonthug 2y ago
• fullshark 2y ago
  This won't end until the boomers cash out their home equity. It's political suicide to do anything threatening that.
• fairity 2y ago
  I don’t get articles like this. It’s arguably a better financial decision to NOT buy a home, and park your downpayment in a broad based index fund. I get that there are arguments for or against, but there doesn’t seem to be a clear financial advantage to home ownership. So, what’s the big fuss about? Just pay rent and carry on? Surely, there are better things to focus on?
  • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
    Every person should be able to have a right to say "This is me. This is where I live. I belong here." It's all fun and games until you've lived in one place for 15 years and your landlord decides to sell the place out from under your feet because a developer wants to build a high rise.
    • IAmGraydon 2y ago
      >Every person should be able to have a right to say "This is me. This is where I live. I belong here." Why do you think every person should have an “right” to own property? It’s a nice utopian idea, but that’s not how a capitalist economy works.
      • MisterBastahrd 2y ago
        Why do you think we need capitalist economies? It's almost as if you've just decided that the other thing must necessarily exist.
    • jandrewrogers 2y ago
      Same thing happens to homeowners with eminent domain. No one has unlimited entitlement to where they live.
    • pompino 2y ago
      Convince enough people that this should be a right, and its automatically a right. Rights are just made-up constructs that only exist in our head.
  • 2y ago
• fortran77 2y ago
  I can't imagine there won't be a major crash soon and then Biden will shift from shoveling more printed money to new "homebuyers" (his $10K tax credit and his proposed $400/month grant for the first 4 years) to printing more money to bail out the industry he propped up. The only solution, of course, is to build more houses! Build until prices fall! (And don't bail out people who are now underwater because prices fell.)
• ayakang31415 2y ago
  I am sure people are priced out of "desirable" places. I don't think this can be fixed by oversupplying homes in specific areas. You need to incentivize people to move into low dense areas.
  • ch4s3 2y ago
    Why would we want a public policy that spreads people out? There are great economies of scale in dense urban areas, not to mention climate and other environmental factors.
  • Carrok 2y ago
    The reason no one else lives there are the same reasons I don’t want to live there. Not everyone will be happy living in the middle of nowhere. I’d wager most wouldn’t.
    • pompino 2y ago
      Sure, but that is what public policy is about. Incentivizing citizens through a democratic process that alleviates resource constraints so we can plan for the future.
  • madmask 2y ago
    Exactly, move out of the city where conditions are better. With remote work or a couple of commutes a week should be feasible for many.
  • francisofascii 2y ago
    I think people already are going to less desirable places. People priced out of higher income first tier cities are coming into 2nd tier cities, which then makes the 2nd tier places unaffordable for the current population.
• patall 2y ago
  Are mortage rates that high everywhere in the US? 7%, or 6.625% sound ridiculous to me in norther europe. I pay 4.54% now with roling 3 month-fixed rates, but its going down now, and I could get it for 3.55% if I fixed it for 5 years. 30 years fixed is pretty much impossible here in Sweden. But you get ~30% of your interest back as tax deduction, so effectively I am borrowing at ~3% (in SEK). Which, again, is cheaper than 4.5% in the US in 2019!!!, a time when my parents could borrow 20 years fixed at ~2.2% (in the euro zone).
  • sneed_chucker 2y ago
    The majority of mortgages in the US are fixed rate with a 30 year term. Mortgages originating now will have a rate in the 7% ballpark. In 2021 you could get mortgages with a 2.5% fixed rate. However, it's common for people to refinance down to a lower rate when they come available, so lots of American homeowners have rates in the 2-3% range.
    • patall 2y ago
      Makes sense, thank you! Actually that would go in line with my suspicion that 'the market' predicts/trends towards a 2 USD = 1 EUR rate within one or two decades.
      • dalyons 2y ago
        How are fixed mortgages related to exchange rate forecasts?
        • patall 2y ago
          Maybe I am wrong, but at least in some contexts one can get a mortgage in a foreign currency. In which case it would be beneficial to use the more inflating one if they were the same rate, wouldn't it?
• tmnvix 2y ago
  People intuitively jump to the conclusion that the problem is caused by a lack of building. While more building would help, a lack of it isn't the main cause of this problem. Ask yourself, do Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the US, Britain, Ireland, etc, all have the same inability to build or is there maybe some other common cause? In my view this is symptomatic of a more fundamental issue - global asset price inflation driven by a broken financial system (i.e. a system being artificially pumped up with cheap credit). Housing is just where the rubber hits the road and regular lives are directly effected. Just look at the tight correlation between the increase in the money supply and property prices. For those who insist that the number of properties is inadequate, take a look at the numbers for each of the countries I mentioned in the first chart here: https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HM1-1-Housing-stock-and-construction.pdf https://www.oecd.org/els/family/HM1-1-Housing-stock-and-cons... (Total number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants, 2022 and 2011). This is a problem of underutilisation in my view. Too many properties are being used as investments and not as a primary residence. Cheap credit causes an increase in demand. This is not demand for homes but additional 'artificial' demand for properties as investments. Think short term rentals, second homes, land banked properties, etc. By definition, only investment properties can be underutilised - owner occupied homes are occupied! So in an environment that encourages property investment you will see more underutilisation. What will cause prices to fall is higher interest rates. This is what has been happening in NZ.
  • jachee 2y ago
    > This is a problem of underutilisation in my view. Too many properties are being used as investments and not as a primary residence. I've believed for a long time that heavily taxing income from second+ properties, similar to capital gains, would help reduce rent-seeker hoarding, to help free up and reduce the cost of properties for primary-residence owners.
    • tmnvix 2y ago
      Yes, any government that was serious about addressing this issue would take measures to decrease the incentives for property investment. Instead in most of the countries I mentioned property investment enjoys benefits that other forms of investment don't (tax, leverage, etc). Personally, I think LVT would be the best approach.
• throwaway22032 2y ago
  In the UK we basically just seem to have some variant of regulatory capture. The man on the street wants less immigration and more housebuilding so that they can start a family. The political class seem to want to just import a ton of low skilled foreigners because they'll take lower living standards. It's ass backwards. The solutions are obvious.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  “But shelling out $2,500 (£1,960) a month in rent doesn't leave much left over” I’ve noticed roommates are not a thing for many people anymore, particularly among younger folk. Is this a post-Covid thing?
  • FridgeSeal 2y ago
    That’s not my experience at all: me, my friends, everyone I know that lives in a city lives with housemates. I don’t know anyone lucky or well-off-enough who can possibly afford a place to themselves that isn’t a minuscule studio.
    • JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      That was my experience as well. But who is paying $2,500 for a room? These stories always seem to feature folks who are trying to live alone while saving for a home in a Tier 1 city.
  • NoPicklez 2y ago
    I have lived with housemates since I started Uni in 2013, 11 years now. Now for the last 3 or so years I have been earning a decent salary in a 7 year long career and saving a significant deposit, but my capacity has diminished significantly. A house I lived in to rent in 2019 sold for $550k in 2019, that house is now worth $780k.
• imperfect_light 2y ago
  First of all, agreed that housing prices are insane, even two-income households struggle to buy in my city. But taking a more long-term view, in the US the owner-occupied housing rate about 65%, which has not changed a ton in the last 50-60 years (high was 69% in 2005 and low was 63% in 1965). Granted the market has changed a lot, we have much bigger houses, and more two-income families to pay for those more expensive houses. https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2024/04/30/home-ownership-rate-q1-2024#:~:text=The%20Census%20Bureau%20released%20its,lowest%20rate%20in%20two%20years https://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/2024/04/3....
  • tmnvix 2y ago
    Worth keeping in mind that the typical measure of the home ownership rate is really a measure of the proportion of people living in a home with the owner. So a 25 year old living with parents counts towards and not against this. Likewise anyone else sharing the house (boarders, etc). I suspect that the number of people in this situation has increased in the past couple of decades due to housing affordability.
    • imperfect_light 2y ago
      The denominator in this graph is houses, not people, so adult children living/not living at home would have no impact.
      • 8note 2y ago
        The numerator is some multiplication of people and houses and people per houses though, with the houses and people counted differently on each multiplier though, so it still matters
  • briHass 2y ago
    Not only has the owner-occupied rate stayed near constant, but that rate itself is an average of all income levels. If one just looks at the rate of homeownership among those making more than the median income (family/individual) ~$74K for a family (~55K individual), that number jumps up to 79%. Given that this number doesn't take preferences into account, I think it's pretty reasonable that almost everyone (>80%) making at least the average (median) salary owns their home.
• glitchc 2y ago
  They're always the same reasons: - Properties in world-class cities are in demand globally - NIMBYism means it's hard to build new housing or increase density - Resource costs and wages are high in world-class cities The first one is a demand-side driver, the last two are supply-side drivers. There aren't any palatable solutions to reduce the impact of these drivers, at least not ones that do not negatively impact other sectors of the economy.
  • rcpt 2y ago
    The reason is always tax policy. Real estate gets ridiculous advantages that other assets don't.
• NoLinkToMe 2y ago
  Honestly I'd love for some good data, rather than cherry-pick journalism. It's crazy how many news articles will simply parrot a narrative without actually investigating it. The discussion on housing should start with one fact: the supply of housing has been growing faster than the size of the population, decade after decade, for a very long time. This is why the number of people per home, has been dropping decade after decade. That is a measure of luxury. We can afford homes with fewer people. People can afford to be single and live alone. We can afford not to take in a roommate. Couples can afford to each have their own home. That's not an indication of a housing crisis or being priced out. Then there is home size, it has been increasing also, decade after decade. We can afford to live in bigger homes. Again, a measure of luxury. Anecdotes about 'my (grand)parents lived in XYZ home that's way bigger than mine' are just that, anecdotes. The data shows we live in bigger homes with fewer people, in fact we have double the housing that we had a few decades ago. In other words, the average person's lifestyle with respect to housing has greatly, greatly improved compared to previous generations. What is often also not mentioned is that affordability is not a function of prices only, but of prices x the cost of money (i.e. interest rates). In the 1980s interest rates were as high as 18%, now it's 1/3rd of that at around 6%. That's the true cost of housing. Taking $1000 and paying off $1000 in debt has no impact on your equity, you're as rich as you were before the transaction. Paying interest however is money you'll never see again. That cost was 3x as high a few decades ago. Prices haven't tripled when adjusted for inflation and salaries, not even close. That's why affordability of housing isn't the disaster that many people think it is. Here is an old source (2016), which you may think is outdated. But it shows a multi-decade trend that cuts across the same price increases we've seen in recent years: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-square-feet-larger-than-in-1973-and-living-space-per-person-has-nearly-doubled/ https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/new-us-homes-today-are-1000-s... For another source that runs to 2020: https://humanprogress.org/u-s-housing-became-much-more-affordable-over-the-last-40-years/?ref=trend&related=2147 https://humanprogress.org/u-s-housing-became-much-more-affor... I'm not even going into how the function of housing has changed. With today's connectivity (netflix, spotify, internet, food delivery, teams/slack, amazon etc), it has become more than ever: an workplace/office, a cinema, a library, a music studio, a game hall, a restaurant, a shopping mall. Its value has increased. No, I'm not saying finding housing is super easy for anyone and everyone. I recognise many find challenges. But what is simply not true, is that it is any more difficult than the past. In fact it has never been easier. What appears true however is that our lifestyle expectations keep increasing faster than our lifestyles are improving.
• robertlagrant 2y ago
  The problem is lack of supply vs demand. In 2022,England and Wales: - built 254000 homes[0] - had 745,000 people immigrate (net)[1] - had 600000 people turn 21[2] - had 577160 people die[3] If you gain a load of people, far more than you increased dwellings for, prices will go up and dwelling size will go down. It's not particularly complicated. [0] https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/357082-0 https://www.savills.co.uk/research_articles/229130/357082-0 [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67612106 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-67612106 [2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/birthsummarytables https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde... [3] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregistrationsummarytables/2022 https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
  • rcpt 2y ago
    UK also has the Council Tax which is arguably a stupider tax policy than California's Prop 13
    • walthamstow 2y ago
      And stamp duty, which is even worse
  • tmnvix 2y ago
    > The problem is lack of supply vs demand. My point elsewhere in this thread is a that demand is not entirely a function of demand for homes (what I would call 'natural' demand). Finance and tax incentives play a large part too - encouraging demand for investment properties that are often not used as homes (what I would call 'artificial' demand). This is not to say that addressing supply through more building is not helpful, just that there are other things to consider that may not require as much effort and can have broader economic benefits (e.g. changes to the tax system to encourage productive rather than unproductive investment, credit guidance, etc).
    • robertlagrant 2y ago
• adverbly 2y ago
  Starting to sound like a broken record but land value tax + up zoning was the fix for this 100 years ago, and it still is today...
  • akvadrako 2y ago
    Because it'll lead to building more and higher utilization. The problem with most comments in this post is they don't say how they'll get people to build. It requires incentives. Has anywhere tried LVT?
• tap-snap-or-nap 2y ago
  Sydney has the capacity to build a highrise crown casino at the city centre then why can't they hire the same builders to continue building residential 3BDR-4BDR homes in the suburbs which will also allow locals to have children. I believe the pricing of various things involved is insane and not where it should be to allow this to materialise. The rents, insurance, wage bills and capital cost seems to be the major bottlenecks.
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
  [dead]
• ubj 2y ago
  > The growing outcry has raised pressure on the US central bank to cut interest rates to bring relief, a move Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell has said is likely at some point. I don't think the solution is as simple as just "cutting rates". Low rates lead to incredibly fierce bidding wars that can drive up the price by tens of thousands of dollars. An acquaintance of mine and his wife bid $50,000 over the asking price on a house in the Boston area a few years ago. They were outbid by an additional $60,000 (total of $110,000 over the asking price). Another acquaintance narrowly defeated 30+ other bidders (!) to get his house. My wife and I bought a house last year during a time when rates were _highest_. Ironically, I believe this was actually a fairly great time to buy. Competition from other buyers was low, and sellers were more willing to negotiate because they didn't know if they would be able to sell anytime soon. And yes, we now have a higher interest rate, but that can be refinanced down the road. It's a complex situation. I do hope for lower interest rates, but I don't think that alone is going to solve the issue.
  • tmnvix 2y ago
    Low rates got us into this mess. It is not a solution.
  • Cheer2171 2y ago
    Sounds like the asking price was too low.
• vladms 2y ago
  I find it a bit strange that the article (and also a lot of the discussion here) does not discuss the size of these houses (in square meters per person), or alternatively the distribution of the sizes/areas. I grew up in a 20 square meter per person apartment (with multiple person living there, for a total size of 60 square meters) - and it was definitely not pleasant. But I feel that nowadays people also expect a lot - for example in The Netherlands the reported average of 65 square meter per person https://longreads.cbs.nl/trends19-eng/economy/figures/construction-and-housing/ https://longreads.cbs.nl/trends19-eng/economy/figures/constr.... Not discussing what it should be ideal, but if (some) people now want 2x or 3x what they wanted 40 years ago for example (without actually needing it due to a larger family), it's no wonder that there are issues (with prices/availability etc.).
  • feoren 2y ago
    The people buying up their 5th investment property are taking up a lot more that 65 square meters. This feels like the usual "you should all just get used to living in poverty so that the few can exploit you more." If everyone got used to 20 square meters, pretty soon the rich would buy the rest and then we'd hear "your standards are too high; you should be happy with 10!"
  • downrightmike 2y ago
    (2019) Baby Boomers Built Big, But Now Nobody is Buying https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/baby-boomers-built-big-now-201515536.html https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/baby-boomers-built-big-now-2... I think part of the problem is there aren't 3rd places nearby in the suburbs, because that is the point, so people want more room to have to accommodate their needs.
  • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 2y ago
    I grew up in a 20 square meter room, with multiple persons living in that same room, and multiple families living in the other rooms of the apartment ... I built private quarters for myself on top of a wardrobe, where my parents couldn't easily reach.
• mkl95 2y ago
  If you leave in some mid EU country, chances are a lot of your current government's policies are based on "sticking it to the man". The man used to be an upper-ish class dude (p96+), but due to how horribly slow and uneducated governments are at making data-driven decisions, the man is now a working or middle class dude. As a result, you will see property prices skyrocket in your area while the government takes 50%+ of your 5% pay raise, leaving you only some pocket change richer than before. But the property owners in your area will be richer every year because their great grandad hunted a bunch of whales or some shit, and so called progressive policy makers are clueless about wealth distribution.
• MainlyMortal 2y ago
  U.K. view here... and I'd guess this applies the the majority of the world too. I was born in, grew up in and currently live in a location that the HN community never even thinks about. Most people in here have no idea of how the regular 99% live and then base their whole world view on expensive capital cities and hold the strangest views of housing. I bought my current house in the 2010s, my mortgage is still half the price of renting and I could manage to pay for everything by myself even if I were on a minimum wage. The problem isn't anything to do with housing it's to do with your own warped view on the world. I don't say this to be contrarian or to necessarily make a point. I want you to look up the minimum wage of your country and think about how literally everyone else happily lives without thinking twice about these things. You all live a massively privileged life yet these things concern you more than they should.
  • feoren 2y ago
    Hot take: already own a house and live somewhere with a livable minimum wage. You are the one who sounds like you are completely unaware of your own privilege. You just said that where you live, if you were on minimum wage, you could "manage to" pay for half the price of renting. Think hard about what you just said here. You are saying that someone on minimum wage can't nearly afford to rent. But their problem is their own warped view of the world. The warped view that someone working full time should not be forced into homelessness? How warped!
    • Izkata 2y ago
      I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning. You jumped straight there yourself, only arguing about cost of renting and not even touching ownership. For example in Chicago in the US, at least in the early 2010s, it was also flipped like in GP's area: My monthly mortgage payment was around a third of the rent I had been paying, for a far far better place.
      • dukeyukey 2y ago
        > I think the warped view is that renting is always cheaper than owning. I'm not sure that view really exists. Like, on a day-to-day basis early in your mortgage, _maybe_, but that's about it.
• rzwitserloot 2y ago
  What if the common trend of 'house prices rising totally out of whack' amongst various locales (Canada, USA, Europe, Australia, China) is not.. actually, a common trend? No single explanation suffices; it's just coincidence. Low interest rates raise house prices. This has to be a 'duh' thing, really, but, governments don't really appear to 'get it', or, play dumb for political reasons. If, after adjusting for inflation and the like, the exact same house costs €500,000 in 1980 but costs €1,000,000 in 2024, BUT, interest rates in 1980 are double what they are in 2024, your mortgage cost to buy that house is __pretty much identical__. It's oversimplified to say that this means 'real house price has not changed'. It still takes more money to actually buy that house. But, of the money you pay every month for your house, more of it is a weird, not very liquid investment portfolio, and less of it a weird form of rent. It's got all sorts of problems: Not everybody qualifies for a mortgage in the first place, for starters. But _in the end the amount of money you have to burn just to live in a house is identical in this hypothetical scenario_. One lesson you could learn from it is that everybody is whining and houses are just as affordable as they've always been, but that's not my point, and isn't really true. The point is more: With low interest rates, house prices skyrocket. This explains _some_ high house prices, but certainly not all. For example, China's is an utterly different explanation. Due to the way their government is set up, the usual benefits of a free market, namely that the population 'intelligence of the masses' their way to efficient allocation of resources isn't a thing china 'does', in essence. Government decides what happens. And so far, they've decided to build more houses than there will ever be chinese people to live in them. Ever. This is a bit of a problem today and will be far more of a problem tomorrow. But that's it. That's the simple, sufficient, and therefore only required explanation. It has NOTHING to do with how hard to it is to build in China (it is not), nor with population growth (it doesn't, or rather, a sheer and severe drop in house prices looming, that'll be explained by China's population glut). It's just that: They built way too many, and their market system cannot respond in kind to stop that runaway process. In europe, yes, in large part runaway NIMBYism and being at the forefront of ecological change, putting limits on how much nitrogen/co2 can be 'used up', and building does take quite a bit of that - has put the breaks on building. Especially combined with extremely low unemployment which hurts the building sector. "Too few houses being built" is a factor. But not the only one. And I think, not even the largest one. Yet another explanation is lack of efficiency: Fewer people partner up, so, more people live alone. They tend to use space inefficiently: They all want their own kitchen, their own shower, their own living room, their own bed room, their own hallway, and so on. A really cheap and ludicrously efficient solution to _that_ is dorm-style living together. Instead of having a small crappy single-tenant kitchen, why not have a giant luxurious very well stocked kitchen you share with 9 other solo tenants? Yes, there are all sorts of downsides to this (which lout has made a mess of the kitchen?!? - and nobody wants to deal with a cleaning schedule), but in the end it is vastly more efficient, and better for social cohesion. Society in e.g. europe and the US has not, yet, adapted to it. I hope it will. It'll solve the unaffordability of housing crisis all on its own if society wants to invest in it.
• amelius 2y ago
  Yes, and I think there is some truth to the statement that the older generations are stealing from the younger generations, whatever the underlying financial/technical explanation may be. The game is rigged. But that should be no surprise. People who enter a game of Monopoly after a few rounds have been played know that they will be swimming against a strong current. Our financial systems are unfair and broken.
  • pizzafeelsright 2y ago
    I can't say I see it the same way. We're born in a year we didn't choose to parents we didn't pick with talent we didn't earn with intelligence we don't deserve with environmental influences we can't control. The game is Texas Hold em. Play your cards. Bluff if you must. Press if you can. Go all in when you can leverage. I recently got to know a gentleman quite like myself. His parents and upbringing are quite the same. His father took risks. Mine did not. He's got a million dollar business that he took over. With respect, I don't think he would be any better than me without his father's risk and resources. I was briefly jealous. Then I realized I was exactly in his father's position. I'm taking risks and building something for my kids. He's one generation ahead of me. You can get upset about the game or play it. I took a risk a week ago. Turned $500 into $11,000 with a little effort. My skills let me analyze stuff quickly. I discovered a pump and dump bot network. It turns out I correctly matched the entry and exit signals to the bots chatter. If i can validate this next week, I will pay off my house in a few weeks.
    • amelius 2y ago
      > You can get upset about the game or play it. You've got to think outside the box. Do we want a society that rewards gambling behavior, or do we want to reward honest hard working? Apparently we cannot have both, because we are now observing that increasingly money (and bricks) makes more money than honest work. You can keep playing the game until there are only survivors and losers but ultimately we need people who do real work. Unless of course you want to turn those hardworking people into the slaves of the surviving gamblers.
      • 2y ago
• ljsprague 2y ago
  Tax 2nd properties 100%.
• SuaveSteve 2y ago
  Not voting in psychopaths would go a long way.
• magicloop 2y ago
  Those problems of unaffordability of homes is a symptomatic effect of an earlier problem. During COVID-19, facing possible catastrophe in the Economy, Trump presidency pumped money into the US economy. The Biden presidency continued this (despite no indicator of recession). There is a 7% gap between Federal income and expenditure, and this drives up the interest rates, making home ownership less affordable. "Across the aisle" there is no appetite to raise taxes or cut spending so the problem will only get worse. Since the dollar is a global reserve currency, any printing of money is diluted across the global demand for dollars. So the reckoning will come quite late (in contrast with Greece who had to be bailed out following a similar trajectory). But the reckoning will come. Unless spectacular success in productivity arises from AI (which cannot be discounted - the US is a leader here), there will be a crunch where savage cuts and bail outs are needed. Note US GDP looks great until you realise that it is in dollars whose nominal purchasing power is diminishing. There is no better was of seeing this than in the price of housing.
• jmyeet 2y ago
  Our economy is designed to extract wealth from the young to the old and the rich. Home ownership has become a primary method of creating generational wealth and that was a huge policy mistake. Even China has made this mistake. Almost all Western countries have too. So let me explain somethign that is often misconstrued about leftist sentiment, be in socialism or whatever: leftists generally make the distinction between personal property and private property. Private property is what we have now. We have wealthy landlords buying up houses to drive up prices. We have single homeowners who think their home value is going up so that's good for them so they vote for these policies. A leftist position is that you're entitled to own your personal residence but there's next to no landlording. Housing is a basic human need. The only way to provide it in a sustainable way is with social housing. For example, the majority of housing in Vienna is social housing. The UK came really close last century to ending landlording [1] (ie councils simply bought houses from landlords who wanted out). But if you think about it: there's no way your $200k turns into a $600k house without that money coming from somewhere. You're taking it from the next generation. Capitalism loves this because a) a bunch of capital owners become even wealthier and b) debt-laden workers and workers who will take any jobs they can get (ie it suppresses wages). In the 1990s, the average house price in London was ~70k pounds. Now it's over 700k. Pretty much everything bad about modern society can be traced back to private property, be it intellectual property, housing or whatever. People need to realize that if your house triples in value, you haven't really gained anything. If you sell it, what now? You still have to live somewhere. That means higher rents or buying an equivalently priced home. Or downsizing or moving overseas. This is why housing is unlike other assets. we, as a society, have decided to prioritize generational wealth from landlording by literally killing people by denying them housing. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-landlords-surprisingly-simple-solution-to-uk-housing-crisis https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2024/mar/19/end-of-...
  • dukeyukey 2y ago
    Worth keeping in mind that the UK has quite a lot of social housing, more than most of it's European neighbours and Anglosphere offshoots, yet still struggles more than most with housing. Social housing is not a silver bullet.
• xbar 2y ago
  A byproduct of large financial entities investing against each other in the market comprised of places where people need to live. Maybe that was not in the public's interest.
• DogOfTheGaps 2y ago
  As many have noted, the problem is largely Byzantine zoning regulations, NIMBYism, and a "vetocracy" system that makes it extremely hard to build housing in so major metropolitan areas. For example, NYC likely needs at least half a million new homes to keep up with demand.
• gghffguhvc 2y ago
  My local grocery store has a “senior discount” of 10% off for anyone over 65. I find that sort of positive discrimination to be a gut punch to young families.
  • downrightmike 2y ago
    adopt a granny to go shopping for you
  • seoulmetro 2y ago
    Seniors over 65 have discounts on most things around the world. They also have no earning potential. Young families also get discounts if they are poor, and have a much higher earning potential.
• housingqueen 2y ago
  The number of people that think owning property/a house is not only a “right” but “required” is *absurd*. It’s an idea pushed upon the “next” generation to prop up the value of their assets. :eyeroll: On top of the weird collective delusion, most ignore the huge financial/time burden that is owning a home. It is not cheap, and anyone that tells you otherwise is *literally lying*. There’s the never-ending maintenance that costs thousands per year in both money and time, small problems can cost thousands of dollars to fix, variable property taxes, variable insurance rates, having an asset worth being sued over, shitty neighbors that you can’t easily move away from, bad school districts, etc etc etc. Is home ownership right for _some_ people? Sure. Is it right for the majority of people? Probably not. Should corporations be allowed to own housing? Hell no.
• curation 2y ago
  Wealth inequality of the Global South has reached the West. Folks will have to live in smaller spaces with more people.
• 3vidence 2y ago
  Canada in particular has a very strange housing affordability issue... artificial growth! Our population is currently increasing by over 1 million people each year and it is 98% immigration. I think an odd effect of very very high immigration is that everyone who arrives is presumably of working age and needs to be housed outside of a family unit. This puts immense pressure on a housing supply that is already decades behind where it should be and as a result prices are exploding. Canada as a country has a population of about ~40 million people. The main country we are getting our immigration from is India with a population of nearly 2 billion. There is no possible world in which Canada can construct enough housing for the nearly infinite supply of people that it seems to be importing A recent study showed it currently takes on average 10 years to go from acquiring a piece of land to building an apartment. This is clearly problematic but there is a physical limitation on how fast housing can be constructed.
• dcchambers 2y ago
  My wife and I bought our first house in 2018 and it feels like we jumped on the train a minute before departure, right before it took off like a rocket. Most of our friends are still running along the platform, desperately trying to grab on but the train just keeps accelerating. Our first home price increased by 50% in 4 years when we sold and moved into a bigger home in 2022, and we hardly did anything to it. Just the way the market is. The only reason we were able to afford the new house is because of the rapid gains on our first house and the fact that we had a ~2% interest rate for two years that allowed us to quickly build up a savings nest egg, with a mortgage payment that was far below what our friends paid in rent. I just feel bad for all my fellow millennials that couldn't catch the train before the market went fucking insane in 2020. Because it really does feel like catching up is impossible if you aren't already in the game.
• phendrenad2 2y ago
  What's scary is people don't understand how something being unaffordable is not much different from it being prohibited. And prohibition always leads to the rise of organized crime. Living in the Bay Area, I can't help but wonder if the homeless encampments are already under organized crime rule.
• RugnirViking 2y ago
  In my opinion the problem is the ability of people to write some percentage of owned homes as tax losses as depracation to a ridiculous degree. Its often possible to buy a home, write off its entire value as a loss due to depracation, and then sell it for more then you bought it for, without ever once renting or using it. This is also true for some other asset classes, like ships
• alkonaut 2y ago
  Why are 30yr fixed rate mortgages 7% and up so massively from just a few years ago? Shouldn't the interest on the mortgage be about the expectation of average interbank rates for the coming years, plus some margin? Sure interest rates shot up recently, but did banks go from believing we'd have 3% long term average to 7%? My mortgage (not UK) are just fixed in various parts on various semi-short terms (3 months, 1year, 3 years etc). The shortest ones are basically the current interbank rate plus 1%. The 3 year one is the banks expectation of interest over 3 years, plus a small margin and so on. For 10 year or longer the current rates are 4%. Why are interest rates so much higher for mortgages in the UK, despite often demanding longer fixed terms? Is the risk massively higher? (My loan uses the home as collateral but also future income, meaning if the home becomes worthless I'm still on the line for repaying the lone for as long as it takes, I can't just leave the keys and let the bank eat the risk).
  • ta1243 2y ago
    There are no* 30 year fixed rate mortgages in the UK. The typical one is 5 years. I renewed last September for 5 years at 4.49% with about 80% LTV. The problem buying a house for me was always getting the deposit together while paying rent. Most people in the UK seem to rely on gifts from parents. * very few -- there are some very specialised brokers
    • alkonaut 2y ago
      Ok. Weird that there is such a lot of talk about the 30yr mortgages if no one has them. I'd also be completely unable to afford the deposit for the home I own now (£500k loans at 80% LTV or so). The key was of course buying a small flat, selling that, buying a larger flat with the profit from the first as deposit on the next, selling that. The "income" in terms of property value increase from these month over month for 20 years was almost constantly higher than what I made working each month. If I didn't have the past trades behind me, I'd be renting to my grave. There is zero chance I'd even begin saving for a £100k deposit. It would be 100% of my fun/vacation money for ten years at least.
      • 2y ago
• akskos 2y ago
  Even if you can afford to buy a home it isn't necessarily economical accounting in the opportunity cost of capital. This ofc varies across different times and situations regarding interest rates, regulation on mortgages in your jurisdiction, house prices and rent prices.
• pif 2y ago
  A utopic solution would be to learn, at last, how to have a thriving economy without increasing megalopolis. Housing prices are unaffordable in big cities, while abandoned properties are rotting in the countryside everywhere. It's time we start spreading the economy rather than concentrating the people.
  • gloryjulio 2y ago
    Not let the city to hijack the companies to force rto is a good start. I estimate that lots of the companirs didn't really care that much about rto but the cities are forcing their hands because of their commercial buildings and real estates depends on them
  • nightski 2y ago
    This comment will not go over well on HN but I am in full agreement. I am actually extremely disappointed as I thought tech would enable a more dispersed society. Instead we received the opposite.
    • NoGravitas 2y ago
      Infotech will let you work anywhere, but you still need fixed infrastructure that is only possible to efficiently provide in a centralized way. Even suburbs are a net economic drain given their infrastructure costs, never mind dispersed rural living.
      • nightski 2y ago
        There's nothing efficient about big cities. Hours of commuting by millions of people every day. Tons of excess and waste. You become disconnected from the source of your food which has to be shipped in. Technology is a lot more than InfoTech. It includes core engineering and infrastructure.
        • Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
          > There's nothing efficient about big cities. Hours of commuting by millions of people every day. You have it backwards. Density makes mass transit feasible. You want to talk about commute times, spreading everyone out is going to magnify that. Cities are efficient. At least, they can be. Busses and trains/subways work a hell of a lot better in urban cores than suburbs, and are effectively worthless from an efficient standpoint for moving individual people in a rural environment.
• apwell23 2y ago
  all housing posts on HN can be summarized with this without reading any of the comments all housing posts have the following discussions 1. housing shouldn't be an investment 2. 'local democracy' always turns into nimby 3. something about gentrification 4. something about govt incentives/disincentives: don't give tax breaks for homeowners, tax second home ownership ect . 5. something about airbnb 6. some comparisons with europe/denmark pls let me know if i need to add anything to list https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40286434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40286434
  • kerkeslager 2y ago
    The fact that your response to real solutions is to list them dismissively underscores why we need to continue to say these things.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • lotsoweiners 2y ago
      I think you’re missing his point that yelling the same ideas into the void (internet) ad nauseam doesn’t really help solve anything or implement these solutions. Each one of the items the poster listed are very difficult to implement and just fixing one thing isn’t going to move the needle noticeably.
      • kerkeslager 2y ago
        What's your theory of how change happens in a democracy? Assuming we aren't giving up on democracy, my theory of how change happens in a democracy is that it starts with changing people's minds.
  • suroot 2y ago
    [dead]
• ChumpGPT 2y ago
  Low Interest rates, High Immigration, Wage stagnation and not enough building. Demand outweighs supply and higher interest rates make it difficult for buyers and builders. Immigration puts strain on the both Housing and Rentals making it unaffordable for existing pop. In places like Toronto, huge influx of people where the city doubled in size in a few short years not only putting strain on housing and rentals but everything (hospitals, roads, schools, you name it). In places like Texas the huge influx of out state people drove up prices where housing in DFW basically doubled in price since 2019. Very much like what Toronto went through. Migration from high tax states to low tax states has now made low tax states high tax states and Texas is becoming very unaffordable quickly. Don't know what the end game is. In Ontario, Canada what use to cost 200k 10 years ago now is 1 million. What use to cost 1 million is 5 plus million and there is no end to the madness. You have foreigners from Arab countries, China, India paying cash for 2-3 million dollar homes.
• thebigspacefuck 2y ago
  Time to raise minimum wage to $50/hour?
• rybosworld 2y ago
  The housing market has gone through several booms and busts in the U.S. I'll restrict to U.S. viewpoint since it's the only country I am educated on this topic. In every single case, the root cause was unchecked financial speculation. The most major busts by year: 1837 - caused by land speculation, driven by the gold rush 1873 - caused by land speculation, driven by railroad companies and their investors 1929 - caused by a stock market bubble 2008 - caused by widespread mortgage fraud and speculation on the housing market
• bojangleslover 2y ago
  Factors boosting demand -Cheap credit with ever-decreasing lending standards (not like 2006 though, not yet) -Population growth (whether immigration or births — does not make a difference, though babies can't buy houses) -"Pent up" demand, people who wanted to move during COVID but did not because of COVID (somehow), who now do want to move Factors restricting supply -Building -Zoning -Most of all: nobody wants to leave their 3% rate, and there is about 11T of outstanding mortgage debt, most of which at the 2020-2022 low rates Factors inflating prices -(Mostly) obsolete realtors charging 6% in a world with Zillow -Orgy of money-printing
• tuatoru 2y ago
  946 comments! Here is mine. The Boomers, the generation born 1945 - 1965, benefited from affordable housing, and when it grew up, set about making housing an investment. 'Affordable ' and 'investment' are mutually exclusive. That is why supply is not keeping up with demand, and why there are so many unoccupied houses.
• CrispyKerosene 2y ago
  The hard truth is that all of these potential solutions are just band-aids. Until housing is no longer treated as a viable investment vehicle, we are fucked.
• iancmceachern 2y ago
  The problem is that we've made our housing into a financial product, not housing. We optimize for things like appreciation, maximizing square footage, etc. Not optimizing for the people who live in them, our communities. Same with startups, anymore many of them are setup as attractive financial products, not attractive businesses.
• foobarkey 2y ago
  As long as people are willing to pay “anything” for their home - prices will always be near the max that they are able to afford. To be honest I don’t think capitalism is able to fix this problem, the only solution I see if government takes over and subsidizes housing enough from taxes to make it more affordable for salaried employees (needs to come with strings attached so the free market does not turn a quick buck reselling)
• darkclouds 2y ago
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• darkclouds 2y ago
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• cchi_co 2y ago
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