5 ms·
Houses are for living, not for speculation
- juliusceasar 5mo agoSo is energy, food, water and space. And yet, all cost money.
- cassianoleal 5mo agoFalse dichotomy. The fact that something costs money doesn't mean it has to become a speculative asset.
- ramon156 5mo agothe argument here is that you cannot live without it. Everyone needs to have access to it
- cassianoleal 5mo agoWhat does that add in the context of the OP?
- lp4v4n 5mo agoWhat kind of speculation exists over energy, water and space? I'm really curious to know.
- lucky_cloud 5mo agoYou say that as if those things have always required money. People had all of those things for hundreds of thousands of years before money was invented.
- rogerrogerr 5mo ago“Money” is just a way to say “people’s time and resources.”
- cestith 5mo agoIn the US economy and much of the rest of the world, money is decreasingly tied to the time or resources of people. It is increasingly tied to the money, market capture, and regulatory capture of corporations that specialize in finance rather than producing goods.
- sidewndr46 5mo agoIsn't that the point of economics? If you're just going to tie money to something obvious, you don't need economics.
- cestith 5mo agoYes, you need economics even when most of the money is used to pay for something productive rather than extractive.
- sidewndr46 5mo agobut what's the difference between 'productive' and 'extractive'? Clearing huge swaths of land for agriculture is highly productive, in terms of making crops. Likewise irrigating huge swaths of arid land for agriculture is also highly productive. Are those 'extractive' or not?
- Paradigm2020 5mo ago
- Steve16384 5mo agoI'm not sure what your point is?
- toasty228 5mo agoThat's why they should be non profit and nationalised. Nobody mind paying taxes for the good stuff, everybody mind paying taxes for bottom tier private companies to mess with the bare necessities and charge a premium fo it
- bpt3 5mo agoWhen in modern history has that ever worked? Why would this time be any different?
- jrflo 5mo agoI think energy is actually a good example here of how it should work. At least in the US, it's pretty tightly regulated. Utilities are allowed to run a profitable business, but it's not a totally free market like housing is. We could certainly use some regulations to prevent private equity from buying up millions of single family homes as assets.
- bpt3 5mo agoIt's hard to think of a market that is less free than housing, including electric utilities with the advent of solar. Probably pharmaceuticals? I'm sure there are a couple others. Calling it "totally free" is naive. Because of how tightly coupled local taxation is to the real estate market, the political risk associated with angering local homeowners, and the regulatory capture performed by local government employees and supporters of the status quo, it's highly, highly regulated already in nearly every populated area of the US.
- xtracto 5mo agoI wholeheartedly agree with this. My opinion is that governments should tax 2nd, 3rd and further housing so as to prevent people from accumulating residential buildings. If you want to live of your rents, buy a commercial or industrial building, speculate with that. But residential construction should be protected to ensure each household is able to buy one with the average country salary.
- staticassertion 5mo agoI assume that increasing the taxes would just lead to higher rents, right?
- bananaflag 5mo agoWhich would favour people with fewer houses, which don't have to pay the increased taxes and so their rents could be lower. So the 2nd, 3rd house taxes could be relatively low but for the 10th they would be ginormous.
- Esophagus4 5mo agoThere are very few people with that many houses anyway. These people do not affect rents in any meaningful way. > Small investors who owned between one and five properties held 87% of the single-family homes owned by investors; those owning six to 10 properties owned another 4% https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/real-estate-investors-account-for-33-of-q2-2025-home-purchases-according-to-q2-2025-investor-pulse-report-from-batchdata-302567135.html https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/real-estate-investo...
- reactordev 5mo agoPossibly but it would also create more private equity reits that would build and operate these multi-family units. There isn’t a clean solution without making it illegal for companies to own single-family homes.
- cestith 5mo ago
- ubermonkey 5mo agoIt's not wrong. I would 100% support measures that inhibit corporations from owning residential property. Apartments are probably a special case, but I'm not entirely convinced the age of giant corporate complexes is a good one. I also don't necessarily mind if a PERSON owns a house and rents it out (e.g., to spend a year somewhere else, or because it's a lake house or something), but I get suspicious of they own a bunch of them and make it a business. Denying corporate status would discourage that.
- rvz 5mo agoThis is probably the reason why Gen Z is turning towards China and will eventually come out on top if a economic collapse in the west were to happen.
- ch4s3 5mo agoSo the Chinese government making retirement unaffordable, making it impossible to invest in equities, under funding pensions, and then attacking the last thing people can invest in for retirement savings is what won Gen Z?
- jackb4040 5mo agoYou're so conditioned against socialism that the only life plans you will consider are gambling your life's savings on a speculative asset, or working until you die. Not every country is constrained to these 2 options. Many of them would love for you to visit.
- ch4s3 5mo agoYou'll note that I specified that China has no real broad pension system that can fund people in retirement and instead leans on the cultural norm of children taking care of their parents in old age. The (socialist) one child policy made this mathematically infeasible as 2 working adults now need to care for a child and 4 parents. The solution that Chinese people cleverly devised was to invest often at the behest of local party officials in property development, which aided in rural Chinese moving to cities, another CCP socialist policy. Then XI does a giant rug pull and attacks peoples' property/retirement savings. Maybe look at the actual facts before trying to tun this into some dumb socialism vs not socialism argument.
- Markoff 5mo agothat would be funny considering China is closer to economic collapse than west considering their zero inflation or salary growth for years and raising youth unemployment, I visited after 9 years since I moved away, salaries and prices in restaurants are pretty much same as 9 years ago, so much for growth, they are going for Japanese way...
- arh5451 5mo agoGovernment causes speculation. Asks people not to speculate. Classic.
- h05sz487b 5mo agoYes, if Chinese people could buy their world ETF, like the rest of us, this wouldn't even be an issue.
- mothballed 5mo agoAllow anyone to build a shack and shit into a hole on any postage stamp size of land they could get, and it would be far more affordable.
- rogerrogerr 5mo agoYep, building codes are a double edged sword. Yes, they make life better for housed people and avoid streets looking like an India-esque mess of exposed wiring and open sewers. But they also establish a minimum bar to _be_ housed. If you can’t afford a (by global standards) very nice home, you will be on the streets.
- sidewndr46 5mo agoThis leads to my long running joke about Austin: in Austin everyone can afford their own house. Otherwise you don't live here.
- mherkender 5mo agoYou can find places like that all over the world. They're slums. Maybe regulations put too much burden on homeownership but slums create huge issues as well. Basic plumbing shouldn't be taken for granted.
- mothballed 5mo agoBuilt my house for 60k (post-COVID dollars). A couple turns of 3" pipe into a tank. Up into a toilet. Not much more than that. It dumps into a big concrete tank and then from that the effluent goes out a couple pipes with holes drilled along it and into the soil. Quite clean and very cheap. I think the 'plumbing' for sewage took me 2 days and $300 in pipe. The septic system was maybe $2000 in materials, you could easily replicate it with a shovel and a couple months of doing day labor on the weekends. I take it for granted because it is extremely cheap, extremely easy, quite sanitary, and basically a footnote on building the shack. This ain't the 60s anymore, any tom/dick/harry can plumb a whole house using extremely forgiving pvc and pex with minimal cost or thought, though they're usually stopped by asinine licensing rules and the dumbass notion you need building plans (I had none).
- gverrilla 5mo ago10 years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-39512599 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-39512599
- recursivedoubts 5mo agoYou have to understand that our money supply is based on debt. It shouldn't be: the money supply is a public good and should be managed for the public good via citizens dividend or whatever, but currently it is debt-based and managed for the private good of the banks. Housing debt has to expand or the economy tanks because the money supply shrinks. Since we are at the end of the current debt cycle, housing has gone vertical. It will collapse because eventually exponential curves can't fit reality. We may be seeing the start of that now. The core problem is how we create money and who benefits from it. That's what needs to be fixed.
- sam_lowry_ 5mo agoMoney is a promise of future work or in other words debt itself.
- recursivedoubts 5mo agoI don't disagree w/that definition (i think it's incomplete: store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account, etc) however when I use the term debt loosely here I mean the current privately issued, exponential, compounding interest mechanism. That's the fundamental problem. This was recognized for a long time in the west, we banned usury, but now if you use that word people either have no idea what you are talking about or get mad at you because they make good money off it.
- mothballed 5mo agoCommodity money isn't necessarily that though. Debt is useful between people that trust each other or intermediaries, but if you trust absolutely no one you can use useful commodities as money. These also happen to be the forms of money that tend to be more resistant to government collapse. They have intrinsic value that stand on its own and encapsulate already performed work rather than just the promise of it.
- Arnt 5mo agoMoney isn't managed by anyone. There's an excellent description here: https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-bulletin/2014/money-creation-in-the-modern-economy https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/-/media/boe/files/quarterly-... Scan for the sentence "at that moment, new money is created" and then read the whole thing anyway ;) It seems to me that if you want some sort of money creation management role in the economy, you need to restrict people's ability to lend and borrow from each other. So if you wanted to lend me money, or you wanted to borrow from me, we would have to apply for permission. Off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who's tried to restrict people's right to borrow from a willing lender. It doesn't seem like a good idea intuitively, but I do think it's something you must do if you want to have a money creation manager.
- throwaway132448 5mo agoUnaffordable housing turns entrepreneurship into a rare privilege. Whether you think that’s a good thing or not depends on whether you _actually_ believe in meritocracy or not. I’ve found most people don’t believe in it as much as they say they do.
- dahart 5mo agoWhich kind of meritocracy - the original definition that points out that “merit” is a function of wealth and social advantage, or today’s sanitized version that attributes merit to achievement while ignoring all the advantages that lead to ahievement? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy
- Markoff 5mo agoXXX are for living, not for YYY you can apply this for pretty much everything, who will decide what can be used for speculation? I want much rather free market than someone deciding what I can buy with my earned money yeah, and gold should be for making space stuff, electronics or jewelerry, and water should be for drinking/cooking, not for having fun in swimming pool, etc. edit: the problem in China is not expensive real estate, but no options to invest money, Chinese stock is shit, you would earn pretty much nothing over 10 year period, made that mistake once, even real estate prices are not really growing in China, my in laws bought apartment many years ago, now they would be lucky to sell it for zero profit, blame chinese economy with minimal real growth causing minimal inflation causing all these issues on the other hand it's nice to come to China after 9 years and find out meals in restaurant cost pretty much same as 9 years ago, unnelievable in Europe, sadly so are their salaries and I have still seen job ads offering like 2500-3500RMB same as 10 years ago, though you can rent small apartment for 1200-1600 RMB (talking both about Beijing suburbs) nice bonus in China is you can't even own the land with your house, just lease it for few decades
- markus_zhang 5mo agoSocial housing is the way to go. People who live in social housing are mandated to take free plumbing/electrician/whatever classes to serve the community. In this way people get some internal jobs and sense of community, while government reduces the costs of maintaining them.
- almost_usual 5mo agoChinese property sector crisis (2020–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis_(2020%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis...
- alkonaut 5mo agoWhere mortgage interest is a deductible expense (usually the case if savings interest is a taxable income) then one simple fix is to limit that to one home. Second homes or homes bought in speculation using borrowed money are at least less attractive then. Also for land tax and similar: raise them by a lot and use that money to pay for a tax-exemption for one home
- andyferris 5mo agoInteresting timing, with Australian budget night (removal of tax discounts for both capital and trusts, and for investment in existing housing stock).
- empath75 5mo agoPeople want to exempt housing from the laws of supply and demand. The reason real estate is expensive is that there is not enough housing available for everyone to own a house that wants a house. If we want inexpensive housing, we need a massive project in this country to build housing. There is no other way to fix it. There is no way to shuffle around ownership of existing housing stock that is going to magically make more houses available. There are not a bunch of houses sitting empty that people want to buy or move into.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoHouston added something like 500,000 people to its population and housing prizes went DOWN because they built more housing and their ratio of housing to people went up. Supply and demand.
- kelipso 5mo agoPretty sure there are plenty of houses sitting empty or as holiday rentals. Second homes, airbnbs, etc. Those could be simply banned or highly taxed and the shuffling of ownership would happen naturally.
- bpt3 5mo agoYou're "pretty sure"? All data would indicate otherwise, and why shouldn't short term rental or vacation properties exist?
- kelipso 5mo agoI know there is data that if you compare short term rentals to houses on sale, the rentals are a very large percentage, like more than 30%, in big cities. More than enough to significantly influence house prices (to be higher). Which is why short term rentals and vacation properties should be relegated to commercial properties only.
- empath75 5mo agoThat's an argument about land usage and not land ownership. There are plenty of short term rentals run by individuals, and if you banned corporate ownership of short term rentals and kept the other incentives the same, more individuals would just play in that space. The other problem is this, if you banned short term rentals _entirely_, which NYC basically did, you have not changed the fundamental supply vs demand structure. You still have X people who want units and Y units. Rents did not go down _at all_. House prices did not go down _at all_. The primary change was that hotel prices went up because of lack of competition.
- bpt3 5mo agoMaybe severe capital controls and other heavy-handed and objectively unwise but politically desirable (for a certain group) financial policies aren't the best plan for maintaining a stable economy? I wonder when Xi will come up with a witty one liner for that one.
- simonsarris 5mo agoSo that was 2016. Why doesn't it link to "Chinese property sector crisis (2020–present)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis_(2020%E2%80%93present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_sector_crisis... Never mind, I added a link to it, and the prior Chinese bubble (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_bubble_(2005%E2%80%932011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_property_bubble_(2005%...
- Brett_Riverboat 5mo agoSecond/vacation homes should be taxed at 200% per year with all revenue going toward low income housing.
- therealdrag0 5mo agoOr just build more housing instead of constraining supply.
- scoofy 5mo agoIf we wanted to do this, it would be trivial to introduce a 100% capital gains tax on the sale of real estate. Instead, we give people an exemption for their real estate capital gains, so they can buy a bigger house without paying taxes at all. Then these same folks pull up the latter by voting in restrictive zoning to protect their property values. There is one verifiably rigged game in finance, and it's residential real estate in affluent areas. It's the only industry where overt collusion and cartel-like behavior is completely legal. The result is generations of people who rationally load themselves up with way more debt than they probably should, because getting on the latter is the only way to stay above water within our lifetime.
- sn9 5mo agoA land value tax makes way more sense.
- scoofy 5mo agoI actually think an land value tax is our best option, it's just that a land value tax still allows for housing as investment. To make housing not an investment you need to eliminate returns from housing altogether. Yes, obviously I think that having a 100% capital gains tax on housing would be pretty absurd, and would not lead to the types of outcomes we actually want. We often do want developers betting housing, which incentivizes improvements and reselling the places. But my point here is that -- for those who truly want housing to not be for speculation -- you need to completely eliminate economic gains from buying housing. They way you do that is to tax the capital gains that come from the sale of housing to the point where they no longer exist. A land value tax is probably the best option for what we want to happen which isn't "eliminating speculation" but is instead to prevent land hoarding. We actually want people to speculate on properties, but in doing so, to develop them in to efficient uses if that future value.
- readthenotes1 5mo agoMy news feed article just before this one had the title "Trump Urges Congress To Pass Bill To Prevent Corporations from Scooping Up Single Family Homes"