5 ms·

Can you point me to any discussion of it being 10 to 20 years? I'd like to read more about that because it feels like that could provide insight into politics/

Can you point me to any discussion of it being 10 to 20 years? I'd like to read more about that because it feels like that could provide insight into politics/policy more broadly. For example, if someone came up with a solution for the housing crisis but it would take more than 10 to 20 years, would people view that as effectively no solution at all?

Jensson 2y ago
> if someone came up with a solution for the housing crisis but it would take more than 10 to 20 years, would people view that as effectively no solution at all? If it made things worse short term, absolutely! Rent control is the opposite, it makes things worse long term but better short term, and people love to vote for that, so we already know the answer.
- simoncion 2y ago
  > Rent control is the opposite, it makes things worse long term but better short term... In general, rent control regulation is SUPER, SUPER BAD and absolutely will turn everything to shit. However, local conditions and the particulars of what is being called rent control matter A LOT. The only rent control laws I'm intimately familiar with are those in San Francisco. I'm also somewhat familiar with the history that caused such regulations to be enacted in major cities in the state. About the regs in SF: * The rent control regulation in SF is more-correctly called "rent stabilization". Once all original tenants (termed "master tenants" in the regs) on the lease move out, the covered unit can be rented at any price. Until all master tenants move out, the base rent for the unit may only be increased by 60% of the Urban CPI in the Bay Area. Many other costs may be passed through at 100%. * SF's Rent Stabilization only applies to residential buildings built BEFORE 1979. [0] Construction NEWER THAN 1979 IS NOT COVERED by Rent Stabilization, unless the owner of the building chooses to be covered by it. [1] Commercial non-residential buildings are NOT COVERED by SF's Rent Stabilization. * It is super duper not permitted for a particular human to be a "master tenant" in more than one apartment. If you do this, are discovered, and someone complains to the Rent Board, you will quickly find yourself paying whatever the landlord cares to charge for all of those apartments. About the history of Rent Control in California: Two words: "Proposition Thirteen". Wind back to the mid-to-late 1970s in California. Rents are spiraling upwards, out of control, and have been for years. Folks are getting extremely worried about being able to pay the rent. Proposition 13 is proposed as a solution... landlords SWEAR that they can't do anything BUT increase the rents because property valuations are SOARING. If only Californians could vote to limit annual property tax increases to no more than 2% per year (unless that property changes hands... except for a "few" exceptions), then landlords would finally be able to keep rents in control. Mix those promises in with a few commercials and full-page ads about "How will granny keep her house if she can't pay the tax man??" and Prop 13 passes. Well, some time passes and rents keep spiraling out of control. Turns out the landlords were full of shit. So, to match landlords' new, shiny "Property Tax Control", major cities enacted various Rent Control and Rent stabilization ordinances. Two things I super want to point out here: Prop 13 applies to ALL property in the state, residential, non-residential, commercial, and non-commercial built at ANY time. SF's Rent Stabilization regs ONLY apply to residential property that's being rented to tenants, and ONLY buildings built before 1979. SF's rent control regs are absolutely NOT why SF has been failing and continues to utterly fail to build even a tiny fraction of the housing required to meet local demand. [0] Nor does it apply to buildings being used as single-family homes, nor to many-to-most condominiums. [1] It's my understanding that this has happened exactly once. Trinity Place is a very large apartment complex. In order to build it, a much smaller motel-style pre-1979 apartment building with like ten or twenty apartments needed to be demolished. The owner of the land and the building reached an agreement with the city to forever subject ten or twenty units in his new building to the Rent Stabilization regs so as to provide the residents of the motel-style building (and any and all future tenants of those units) with 1:1 replacements for the Rent Stabilized apartments. All other apartments in the big-ass complex are "market rate" apartments.
  - refurb 2y ago
    > Well, some time passes and rents keep spiraling out of control. Turns out the landlords were full of shit. So, to match landlords' new, shiny "Property Tax Control", major cities enacted various Rent Control and Rent stabilization ordinances. Prop 13 wasn't driven by landlords, it was driven by higher housing prices forcing out retirees. The two aren't really connected. Prop 13, enacted in 1978, actually set property value at 1976 levels, so property taxes didn't just stop going up a lot, they went down. And the timing doesn't really work out. Prop 13 was passed in 1978 and rent control was enacted in SF in 1979. If anything, Prop 13 helped drive rent control as landlord's no longer could claim that property tax increases would bankrupt them.
    - simoncion 2y ago
      > ...it was driven by higher housing prices forcing out retirees. That's part of it, yes. As I mentioned: > Mix those promises in with a few commercials and full-page ads about "How will granny keep her house if she can't pay the tax man??" and Prop 13 passes. > And the timing doesn't really work out. Prop 13 was passed in 1978 and rent control was enacted in SF in 1979. What? A ~year is very reasonable amount of time to discover whether landlords' promises of reining in rents because of the property-tax-payment-control they just got gifted were genuine. That's not something you're going to find out in a month or a quarter.
      - refurb 2y ago
        Read the news papers from that time. They were in parallel. The legislature doesn’t move that fast.
TheAlchemist 2y ago
How would you view it if you were 30 years old, unable to buy a house, and if it was affecting you directly ? Would you rationnaly evaluate the situation and say 'yeah, that's fine, it will be better for my kids' or rather feel a very justified anger that bad politics effectively cost you ... the ability to buy a place to live during your, checking notes, only life you have on this earth ?
- zht 2y ago
  Why am I entitled to buy a house I isn’t understand
  - harimau777 2y ago
    A big part of the social contract behind society is something like "the working class agrees to respect the private property rights of the capital class, in exchange society ensures that they are able to maintain a decent standard of living". Many people consider owning a home part of "a decent standard of living" both due to the economic stability it provides and due to the autonomy it provides. Another way to look at it is that a home is the primary large piece of property that most people own. Therefore, owning a home gives people a stake in a capitalist society. What both of these are getting at is that if common people are unable to buy a house then they are less likely to feel obligated to support the rules that society is built upon.
- fragmede 2y ago
  I wonder how Japan's 46% Buddhist population, which believes in reincarnation, checks religious texts, meaning they get another life on Earth, factors in here.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  This seems to be a seperate issue than ROI. If you need can afford a house but it take 30 years for a return, then most people are still happy. Inversely, If it is a 10 year ROI, but you cant afford it, they are unhappy. If you look at the US housing market of the last decade or two, the issue is closer to the 2nd case than the first. Base price is out of reach for most, but those that get have a excellent returns. I was extremely jealous when I couldn't by a first house but my friend who could pay 1 million did so, only to sell it 2 years later for 2 million. He did it again and now his current house is in the 6-8 million range, and I'm just getting in the market.
roenxi 2y ago
Not really discussion, but if you look at long-run low-risk investments like bonds, people invest in things that pay back in <50 years. As the risk profile increases and you get to high-risk investments like stock that tend to pay back in <25 years. A company like Google is 25 years old, expecting it to even exist in another 25 years involves a certain level of optimism - companies have lifespans just like everything else. But ultimately any preference is implied, it isn't the sort of thing people can be surveyed on (revealed economic preferences and all that). > For example, if someone came up with a solution for the housing crisis but it would take more than 10 to 20 years, would people view that as effectively no solution at all? That does sound like it'd be a politically hard sell. People generally expect governments to implement their solutions inside a decade. Not an entirely rational expectation, but nonetheless. To flip the burden of proof, 30 year ROIs imply that people are routinely sitting down and having serious conversations where they expect to make their money back over 30 years assuming literally nothing goes wrong. Any bankruptcies and they are in the negatives. Any stock price drops and they are probably in the negatives. If you believe that is the norm where people are comfortable, I hope to see you in the conversation next time people on HN attack stock market investors for being too focused on the next quarter!

Jensson 2y ago

> if someone came up with a solution for the housing crisis but it would take more than 10 to 20 years, would people view that as effectively no solution at all? If it made things worse short term, absolutely! Rent control is the opposite, it makes things worse long term but better short term, and people love to vote for that, so we already know the answer.

simoncion 2y ago
> Rent control is the opposite, it makes things worse long term but better short term... In general, rent control regulation is SUPER, SUPER BAD and absolutely will turn everything to shit. However, local conditions and the particulars of what is being called rent control matter A LOT. The only rent control laws I'm intimately familiar with are those in San Francisco. I'm also somewhat familiar with the history that caused such regulations to be enacted in major cities in the state. About the regs in SF: * The rent control regulation in SF is more-correctly called "rent stabilization". Once all original tenants (termed "master tenants" in the regs) on the lease move out, the covered unit can be rented at any price. Until all master tenants move out, the base rent for the unit may only be increased by 60% of the Urban CPI in the Bay Area. Many other costs may be passed through at 100%. * SF's Rent Stabilization only applies to residential buildings built BEFORE 1979. [0] Construction NEWER THAN 1979 IS NOT COVERED by Rent Stabilization, unless the owner of the building chooses to be covered by it. [1] Commercial non-residential buildings are NOT COVERED by SF's Rent Stabilization. * It is super duper not permitted for a particular human to be a "master tenant" in more than one apartment. If you do this, are discovered, and someone complains to the Rent Board, you will quickly find yourself paying whatever the landlord cares to charge for all of those apartments. About the history of Rent Control in California: Two words: "Proposition Thirteen". Wind back to the mid-to-late 1970s in California. Rents are spiraling upwards, out of control, and have been for years. Folks are getting extremely worried about being able to pay the rent. Proposition 13 is proposed as a solution... landlords SWEAR that they can't do anything BUT increase the rents because property valuations are SOARING. If only Californians could vote to limit annual property tax increases to no more than 2% per year (unless that property changes hands... except for a "few" exceptions), then landlords would finally be able to keep rents in control. Mix those promises in with a few commercials and full-page ads about "How will granny keep her house if she can't pay the tax man??" and Prop 13 passes. Well, some time passes and rents keep spiraling out of control. Turns out the landlords were full of shit. So, to match landlords' new, shiny "Property Tax Control", major cities enacted various Rent Control and Rent stabilization ordinances. Two things I super want to point out here: Prop 13 applies to ALL property in the state, residential, non-residential, commercial, and non-commercial built at ANY time. SF's Rent Stabilization regs ONLY apply to residential property that's being rented to tenants, and ONLY buildings built before 1979. SF's rent control regs are absolutely NOT why SF has been failing and continues to utterly fail to build even a tiny fraction of the housing required to meet local demand. [0] Nor does it apply to buildings being used as single-family homes, nor to many-to-most condominiums. [1] It's my understanding that this has happened exactly once. Trinity Place is a very large apartment complex. In order to build it, a much smaller motel-style pre-1979 apartment building with like ten or twenty apartments needed to be demolished. The owner of the land and the building reached an agreement with the city to forever subject ten or twenty units in his new building to the Rent Stabilization regs so as to provide the residents of the motel-style building (and any and all future tenants of those units) with 1:1 replacements for the Rent Stabilized apartments. All other apartments in the big-ass complex are "market rate" apartments.
- refurb 2y ago
  > Well, some time passes and rents keep spiraling out of control. Turns out the landlords were full of shit. So, to match landlords' new, shiny "Property Tax Control", major cities enacted various Rent Control and Rent stabilization ordinances. Prop 13 wasn't driven by landlords, it was driven by higher housing prices forcing out retirees. The two aren't really connected. Prop 13, enacted in 1978, actually set property value at 1976 levels, so property taxes didn't just stop going up a lot, they went down. And the timing doesn't really work out. Prop 13 was passed in 1978 and rent control was enacted in SF in 1979. If anything, Prop 13 helped drive rent control as landlord's no longer could claim that property tax increases would bankrupt them.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    > ...it was driven by higher housing prices forcing out retirees. That's part of it, yes. As I mentioned: > Mix those promises in with a few commercials and full-page ads about "How will granny keep her house if she can't pay the tax man??" and Prop 13 passes. > And the timing doesn't really work out. Prop 13 was passed in 1978 and rent control was enacted in SF in 1979. What? A ~year is very reasonable amount of time to discover whether landlords' promises of reining in rents because of the property-tax-payment-control they just got gifted were genuine. That's not something you're going to find out in a month or a quarter.
    - refurb 2y ago
      Read the news papers from that time. They were in parallel. The legislature doesn’t move that fast.

TheAlchemist 2y ago

How would you view it if you were 30 years old, unable to buy a house, and if it was affecting you directly ? Would you rationnaly evaluate the situation and say 'yeah, that's fine, it will be better for my kids' or rather feel a very justified anger that bad politics effectively cost you ... the ability to buy a place to live during your, checking notes, only life you have on this earth ?

zht 2y ago
Why am I entitled to buy a house I isn’t understand
- harimau777 2y ago
  A big part of the social contract behind society is something like "the working class agrees to respect the private property rights of the capital class, in exchange society ensures that they are able to maintain a decent standard of living". Many people consider owning a home part of "a decent standard of living" both due to the economic stability it provides and due to the autonomy it provides. Another way to look at it is that a home is the primary large piece of property that most people own. Therefore, owning a home gives people a stake in a capitalist society. What both of these are getting at is that if common people are unable to buy a house then they are less likely to feel obligated to support the rules that society is built upon.
fragmede 2y ago
I wonder how Japan's 46% Buddhist population, which believes in reincarnation, checks religious texts, meaning they get another life on Earth, factors in here.
s1artibartfast 2y ago
This seems to be a seperate issue than ROI. If you need can afford a house but it take 30 years for a return, then most people are still happy. Inversely, If it is a 10 year ROI, but you cant afford it, they are unhappy. If you look at the US housing market of the last decade or two, the issue is closer to the 2nd case than the first. Base price is out of reach for most, but those that get have a excellent returns. I was extremely jealous when I couldn't by a first house but my friend who could pay 1 million did so, only to sell it 2 years later for 2 million. He did it again and now his current house is in the 6-8 million range, and I'm just getting in the market.

roenxi 2y ago

Not really discussion, but if you look at long-run low-risk investments like bonds, people invest in things that pay back in <50 years. As the risk profile increases and you get to high-risk investments like stock that tend to pay back in <25 years. A company like Google is 25 years old, expecting it to even exist in another 25 years involves a certain level of optimism - companies have lifespans just like everything else. But ultimately any preference is implied, it isn't the sort of thing people can be surveyed on (revealed economic preferences and all that). > For example, if someone came up with a solution for the housing crisis but it would take more than 10 to 20 years, would people view that as effectively no solution at all? That does sound like it'd be a politically hard sell. People generally expect governments to implement their solutions inside a decade. Not an entirely rational expectation, but nonetheless. To flip the burden of proof, 30 year ROIs imply that people are routinely sitting down and having serious conversations where they expect to make their money back over 30 years assuming literally nothing goes wrong. Any bankruptcies and they are in the negatives. Any stock price drops and they are probably in the negatives. If you believe that is the norm where people are comfortable, I hope to see you in the conversation next time people on HN attack stock market investors for being too focused on the next quarter!