4 ms·

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow const

Housing can not be a viable asset class, or it will continue to rise in prices. Step 1 is Land Value Taxes. Step 2 is remove/greatly reduce zoning, allow construction and streamline the process. If you allow density, building up, and incentivize it, then it will be built. Developers spend tens of thousands of dollars in permits and interest payments before they can put a shovel in the ground. Being a landlord isn't really an issue, morally, ethically, or with regards to people buying houses. The issue is when there are limited number of units, and people turn them into investments.

mchusma 2mo ago
The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing. But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation). Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.
- vablings 2mo ago
  The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.
  - jameshart 2mo ago
    Housing - more generally real estate property - can absolutely be a legitimate asset class, sustaining speculation and global investment; that is how we get capital invested in building out housing infrastructure. But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter. The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.
  - bombcar 2mo ago
    Housing should be an investment; you should be encouraged to invest in where you live and improve both your property and the area around you. It should not be a good investment - it should, over time, boil down to below inflation once you take maintenance and taxes into consideration.
    - em-bee 2mo ago
      housing should be an investment the same way that planting trees is an investment. it should not be a financial tool to make you money by selling it.
- jgeada 2mo ago
  And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.
  - ziofill 2mo ago
    The problem will keep persisting as long as the politicians who have the power to change the rules of the game have the opposite incentive to do so.
- WD-42 2mo ago
  Investment certainly feels like a problem. The amount of completely empty homes in my area (coastal ca) is disgusting. There are entire real estate brokers that specialize specifically in investment - these people aren’t even pretending that their clients will use the house, they may never even step foot in it. Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.
- ecshafer 2mo ago
  To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.
  - jimberlage 2mo ago
    I think the problem with getting this done in the US is the lack of public transit and the dysfunction in public schools. If you could avoid a $700 car payment and still get to school/job/grocery store on time, a lot of Americans would. But if you can't, and you are paying $700 anyways, why not at least use the fact that you're paying $700/month to travel anywhere and get a bigger parcel of land all to yourself? There's a big incentive to have single-family homes for rent as long as that math is true. And if you can live in a dense area and get around OK, but paying $700/month saves you from $800/month in private school payments, then the math might still make renting SFH better even if the transit is there.
    - cpburns2009 2mo ago
      No body is forced to have a $700 car payment. That's a luxury financing $30k+ on a brand new or nearly new car.
      - curious_curios 2mo ago
        Though with gas, maintenance, insurance on top of the car payment, that $700 is probably the floor of car ownership.
        cpburns2009 2mo ago
        Those will vary vastly depending on where you live. Gas and insurance are high where I live, and even though the environment is harsh on cars (winters with salt), maintenance has never been much.
      - jimberlage 2mo ago
        True (I certainly don't!) but I chose it because I had to do some research a while back and that was close to the average for Americans. [1]: https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-payment-by-state https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-paym... [2]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/ https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/
- FloatArtifact 2mo ago
  Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.
  - all2 2mo ago
    Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.
    - nisegami 2mo ago
      Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?
      - itake 2mo ago
        In the UK, a leaseholders get screwed if they forget to renew their lease before the 80 year mark. The cost to develop the land needs to justify the development. If I spent $500k to build a house on the land, I would like to be able to use that house for as long as the house exists (or I sell it to re-coop the investment). Many people are really bad at saving properly, but they will pay their mortgage. Landownership enables at least some old people to have a cushion in retirement.
        Giefo6ah 2mo ago
        You're mixing a house as personal property with the much broader claim of private property on land. It is possible to protect those two uses you mentioned, and other reasonable uses of land, without at the same time spending state resources in enforcing perpetual, absolute, hereditary, exclusive titles on plots of land.
      - FunHearing3443 2mo ago
        We may live in the same country or planet but that does not mean we inherently have any share of the land.
- jmyeet 2mo ago
  This is just wrong. Western economies have largely been hollowed out from productive output in favor of hoarding land and property because there is inelastic demand and increasing prices has become a political goal. It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago. Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
- mrguyorama 2mo ago
  And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions? We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable. So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy. So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then? I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.
anal_reactor 2mo ago
I've posted it already, but at least in my country (Netherlands) it seems like the problem isn't the lack of housing, but lack of marriages. If people ages 30-60 married each other at the rate they used to in 60's, then there would be no housing crisis. The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.
- jorgen123 2mo ago
  Is that true, though? When my parents got married in the 60's in the Netherlands, they had to move in with my grandparents because there was no housing available and eligibility was restricted. It took a few years and a 2nd child before they were eligible to rent an apartment. Perhaps that does not show up in the statistics?
- pixl97 2mo ago
  >we have historically low average number of people per house. I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen off a cliff which drastically drops the number of live at home adult children.
  - anal_reactor 2mo ago
    https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woont-alleen https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woo... It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people. https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-woningnood/berekening-woningbouwopgave https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-... Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So if two-thirds of those 1,2 million married each other and started living together, they would nicely plug the housing crisis by freeing 400k houses. Either way, we have a huge societal change that lots of people live alone, which did not use to be the case.
jmyeet 2mo ago
We shouldn't allow people to hoard housing and land. That’s the core problem here. It should be super expensive to own more than one property. I refer people to the Housing Theory of Everything [1]. I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing. Part of this (IMHO) is to have expansive social housing like Vienna to compete private land use "honest". Also, we should really not allow rich enclaves. There should be social housing in every ZIP code. [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
- em-bee 2mo ago
  There should be social housing in every ZIP code exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap. the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.
- pibaker 2mo ago
  I don't know why people say Houston is unregulated. Minimum parking requirement is a huge factor in any kind of housing development and Houston has one.
tokioyoyo 2mo ago
I’ve been part of housing-related online discussions for a decade now, and everything reads like a wish-list. - Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down. - Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down. - Another good chunk of people are waiting out to inherit homes from their parents. All these people, in one way or another, will protect asset prices (e.g. voting for certain people to ensure nothing gets built). The only ways I can see it being resolved is: - China-style benevolent dictatoresque commitment to surgical detachment of housing prices from the general economy (they’re trying, a lot of people are unhappy, but some progress is visible) - Population collapse, to reduce the demand. But looking at Japan, metro areas will keep skyrocketing, because people will flock to the main cities even more Any of the options will make a lot of people unhappy. A huge political no-go zone. All the talks about allowing construction and streamlining the process have been circulated for a decade+ at this point. But incentives for people aren’t there. “I got mine, don’t care about you” is the general attitude of majority of people.
- HaZeust 2mo ago
  I've always wondered if UBI can replace the category of "viable asset class" that homes are now, wherein UBI offers upward mobility now AND generational wealthy in the future - the same way owning a house does. Wouldn't that be a valid populist play, an actual policy rooted in pragmatic, and all-around a winning strategy?
  - tokioyoyo 2mo ago
    UBI is also another topic that has been discussed intensively for the past couple of decades. I don’t see it being implemented almost for the same reasons as cheap housing. On top of it, we experienced UBI-lite during pandemic, and saw the inflationary result. “But it wasn’t perfect UBI” argument won’t really fly either in the current political world. People are generally selfish and will want the best for themselves and their loved ones.
    - 2mo ago
profdevloper 2mo ago
Why is immigration always absent from these discussions on HN? the US has absorbed millions of people through immigration (both legal and illegal) which puts pressure on housing supply which drives up prices since supply is relatively inelastic. Enforcement of immigration policy would increase housing supply without needing to build more capacity in the short term and would lower prices.
- HDThoreaun 2mo ago
  We need immigration because there’s a construction worker shortage. No immigrants = even more expensive to build new homes
  - siriusastrebe 2mo ago
    Why can't we train our own citizens to become construction workers? If you claim that people "don't want to work" for those wages, then isn't immigration keeping our wages down? Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less?
    - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
      Immigration is keeping wages down for jobs natives dont want. I dont see the issue. > Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less? Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built.
      - marcusverus 2mo ago
        There's no such thing as "jobs natives don't want", only "wages natives don't want". > Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built. The foreign born population residing in the US fell from ~15% to ~5% from 1920-1970. It was one of the most prosperous and productive periods in human history.
anon291 2mo ago
People say things like this, and yet housing has -- for most of history -- been a viable asset class, including in the times that people idolize as the great boom times of America. The main issue is mismanaged regulation, as always. Real estate is probably one of the best examples of that. For example, in my city of Portland, OR, it's easier to keep an existing structure and not build new housing than to build new housing (because then you can do things by right). To build new housing, you have to hire a company called 'faster permits' (seriously, that's what it is called, look it up) which promises to 'expedite' the process of having things approved. If you, like me, are skeptical of engaging in investments in which you have to bribe your government to approve housing, then you won't put your money into building housing. Portland is probably not alone in these sketchy arrangements, which is why real estate developers often seem sleezy -- due to how the government manages itself, only the sleeziest people are willing to engage at all.
- luisln 2mo ago
  [dead]
pfisherman 2mo ago
I think land value tax is misguided. Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? Are they forced from their home to lower priced area? Regardless of how one might feel about the morality of that it is also worth asking whether this might create perverse incentives to become landlords?
- lemoncucumber 2mo ago
  > Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? That’s not specific to a land value tax, the same thing can happen with traditional property taxes when the property is re-assessed. California tried to “solve” exactly that scenario with Prop 13 limiting how much the assessed value of property can increase without a change in ownership and it’s been a disaster (and a contributing factor to the housing crisis, albeit far from the only one).

mchusma 2mo ago

The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing. But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation). Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.

vablings 2mo ago
The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.
- jameshart 2mo ago
  Housing - more generally real estate property - can absolutely be a legitimate asset class, sustaining speculation and global investment; that is how we get capital invested in building out housing infrastructure. But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter. The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.
- bombcar 2mo ago
  Housing should be an investment; you should be encouraged to invest in where you live and improve both your property and the area around you. It should not be a good investment - it should, over time, boil down to below inflation once you take maintenance and taxes into consideration.
  - em-bee 2mo ago
    housing should be an investment the same way that planting trees is an investment. it should not be a financial tool to make you money by selling it.
jgeada 2mo ago
And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.
- ziofill 2mo ago
  The problem will keep persisting as long as the politicians who have the power to change the rules of the game have the opposite incentive to do so.
WD-42 2mo ago
Investment certainly feels like a problem. The amount of completely empty homes in my area (coastal ca) is disgusting. There are entire real estate brokers that specialize specifically in investment - these people aren’t even pretending that their clients will use the house, they may never even step foot in it. Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.
ecshafer 2mo ago
To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.
- jimberlage 2mo ago
  I think the problem with getting this done in the US is the lack of public transit and the dysfunction in public schools. If you could avoid a $700 car payment and still get to school/job/grocery store on time, a lot of Americans would. But if you can't, and you are paying $700 anyways, why not at least use the fact that you're paying $700/month to travel anywhere and get a bigger parcel of land all to yourself? There's a big incentive to have single-family homes for rent as long as that math is true. And if you can live in a dense area and get around OK, but paying $700/month saves you from $800/month in private school payments, then the math might still make renting SFH better even if the transit is there.
  - cpburns2009 2mo ago
    No body is forced to have a $700 car payment. That's a luxury financing $30k+ on a brand new or nearly new car.
    - curious_curios 2mo ago
      Though with gas, maintenance, insurance on top of the car payment, that $700 is probably the floor of car ownership.
      - cpburns2009 2mo ago
        Those will vary vastly depending on where you live. Gas and insurance are high where I live, and even though the environment is harsh on cars (winters with salt), maintenance has never been much.
    - jimberlage 2mo ago
      True (I certainly don't!) but I chose it because I had to do some research a while back and that was close to the average for Americans. [1]: https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-payment-by-state https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-paym... [2]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/ https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/
FloatArtifact 2mo ago
Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.
- all2 2mo ago
  Property tax is theft. By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.
  - nisegami 2mo ago
    Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?
    - itake 2mo ago
      In the UK, a leaseholders get screwed if they forget to renew their lease before the 80 year mark. The cost to develop the land needs to justify the development. If I spent $500k to build a house on the land, I would like to be able to use that house for as long as the house exists (or I sell it to re-coop the investment). Many people are really bad at saving properly, but they will pay their mortgage. Landownership enables at least some old people to have a cushion in retirement.
      - Giefo6ah 2mo ago
        You're mixing a house as personal property with the much broader claim of private property on land. It is possible to protect those two uses you mentioned, and other reasonable uses of land, without at the same time spending state resources in enforcing perpetual, absolute, hereditary, exclusive titles on plots of land.
    - FunHearing3443 2mo ago
      We may live in the same country or planet but that does not mean we inherently have any share of the land.
jmyeet 2mo ago
This is just wrong. Western economies have largely been hollowed out from productive output in favor of hoarding land and property because there is inelastic demand and increasing prices has become a political goal. It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago. Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for_speculation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...
mrguyorama 2mo ago
And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions? We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable. So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy. So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then? I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.

anal_reactor 2mo ago

I've posted it already, but at least in my country (Netherlands) it seems like the problem isn't the lack of housing, but lack of marriages. If people ages 30-60 married each other at the rate they used to in 60's, then there would be no housing crisis. The statistic that doesn't compute for me is how is it possible that we're having a housing crisis while at the same time we have historically low average number of people per house.

jorgen123 2mo ago
Is that true, though? When my parents got married in the 60's in the Netherlands, they had to move in with my grandparents because there was no housing available and eligibility was restricted. It took a few years and a 2nd child before they were eligible to rent an apartment. Perhaps that does not show up in the statistics?
pixl97 2mo ago
>we have historically low average number of people per house. I'd like to see the actual statistics method used to calculate that. Saying it's marriages alone just doesn't past the smell test for me. Just because people aren't married doesn't mean they don't live together and the number of unmarried people living together is higher than ever. What makes far more sense is the number of children people have has fallen off a cliff which drastically drops the number of live at home adult children.
- anal_reactor 2mo ago
  https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woont-alleen https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/nieuws/2024/36/1-op-de-5-mensen-woo... It's basically this graph. In 60's almost nobody was living alone (less than 400k people). In 2024 about 3,3 million people live alone. When you look at the infographic, ages 30-60 add up to like 1,2 million people. https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-woningnood/berekening-woningbouwopgave https://www.volkshuisvestingnederland.nl/onderwerpen/aanpak-... Here we have an estimation that the country is missing like 400k houses. So if two-thirds of those 1,2 million married each other and started living together, they would nicely plug the housing crisis by freeing 400k houses. Either way, we have a huge societal change that lots of people live alone, which did not use to be the case.

jmyeet 2mo ago

We shouldn't allow people to hoard housing and land. That’s the core problem here. It should be super expensive to own more than one property. I refer people to the Housing Theory of Everything [1]. I disagree with the Ultra-YIMBYs who believe in removing all zoning and regulation. If you do that, you get Houston. Because that's what Houston is. What we need is to prioritize living over investment returns in housing. Part of this (IMHO) is to have expansive social housing like Vienna to compete private land use "honest". Also, we should really not allow rich enclaves. There should be social housing in every ZIP code. [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

em-bee 2mo ago
There should be social housing in every ZIP code exactly. it has been shown elsewhere that one problem that makes it difficult for people to escape poverty is that everyone around them is poor too. as long as you live there there is an invisible ceiling in how much you can improve your life as an individual/family. people who were able to move to a better neighborhood found it much easier to improve. mixed housing avoids that poor neighborhood trap. the same btw, is true for the integration of immigrants.
pibaker 2mo ago
I don't know why people say Houston is unregulated. Minimum parking requirement is a huge factor in any kind of housing development and Houston has one.

tokioyoyo 2mo ago

I’ve been part of housing-related online discussions for a decade now, and everything reads like a wish-list. - Majority of people own their homes. So it’s in their best interest for the housing prices at the very least not go down. - Less, but still, some amount of people are buying houses with sky high prices. After a huge purchase, they will also do their best to ensure prices don’t go down. - Another good chunk of people are waiting out to inherit homes from their parents. All these people, in one way or another, will protect asset prices (e.g. voting for certain people to ensure nothing gets built). The only ways I can see it being resolved is: - China-style benevolent dictatoresque commitment to surgical detachment of housing prices from the general economy (they’re trying, a lot of people are unhappy, but some progress is visible) - Population collapse, to reduce the demand. But looking at Japan, metro areas will keep skyrocketing, because people will flock to the main cities even more Any of the options will make a lot of people unhappy. A huge political no-go zone. All the talks about allowing construction and streamlining the process have been circulated for a decade+ at this point. But incentives for people aren’t there. “I got mine, don’t care about you” is the general attitude of majority of people.

HaZeust 2mo ago
I've always wondered if UBI can replace the category of "viable asset class" that homes are now, wherein UBI offers upward mobility now AND generational wealthy in the future - the same way owning a house does. Wouldn't that be a valid populist play, an actual policy rooted in pragmatic, and all-around a winning strategy?
- tokioyoyo 2mo ago
  UBI is also another topic that has been discussed intensively for the past couple of decades. I don’t see it being implemented almost for the same reasons as cheap housing. On top of it, we experienced UBI-lite during pandemic, and saw the inflationary result. “But it wasn’t perfect UBI” argument won’t really fly either in the current political world. People are generally selfish and will want the best for themselves and their loved ones.
  - 2mo ago

profdevloper 2mo ago

Why is immigration always absent from these discussions on HN? the US has absorbed millions of people through immigration (both legal and illegal) which puts pressure on housing supply which drives up prices since supply is relatively inelastic. Enforcement of immigration policy would increase housing supply without needing to build more capacity in the short term and would lower prices.

HDThoreaun 2mo ago
We need immigration because there’s a construction worker shortage. No immigrants = even more expensive to build new homes
- siriusastrebe 2mo ago
  Why can't we train our own citizens to become construction workers? If you claim that people "don't want to work" for those wages, then isn't immigration keeping our wages down? Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less?
  - HDThoreaun 2mo ago
    Immigration is keeping wages down for jobs natives dont want. I dont see the issue. > Wouldn't business owners pay more for labor if there wasn't a stead supply of under the table illegal immigrants doing it for less? Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built.
    - marcusverus 2mo ago
      There's no such thing as "jobs natives don't want", only "wages natives don't want". > Maybe, or maybe they just employ less people and less things get built. The foreign born population residing in the US fell from ~15% to ~5% from 1920-1970. It was one of the most prosperous and productive periods in human history.

anon291 2mo ago

People say things like this, and yet housing has -- for most of history -- been a viable asset class, including in the times that people idolize as the great boom times of America. The main issue is mismanaged regulation, as always. Real estate is probably one of the best examples of that. For example, in my city of Portland, OR, it's easier to keep an existing structure and not build new housing than to build new housing (because then you can do things by right). To build new housing, you have to hire a company called 'faster permits' (seriously, that's what it is called, look it up) which promises to 'expedite' the process of having things approved. If you, like me, are skeptical of engaging in investments in which you have to bribe your government to approve housing, then you won't put your money into building housing. Portland is probably not alone in these sketchy arrangements, which is why real estate developers often seem sleezy -- due to how the government manages itself, only the sleeziest people are willing to engage at all.

luisln 2mo ago
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pfisherman 2mo ago

I think land value tax is misguided. Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? Are they forced from their home to lower priced area? Regardless of how one might feel about the morality of that it is also worth asking whether this might create perverse incentives to become landlords?

lemoncucumber 2mo ago
> Issue is what happens to retirees on a fixed income when value of their property increases? That’s not specific to a land value tax, the same thing can happen with traditional property taxes when the property is re-assessed. California tried to “solve” exactly that scenario with Prop 13 limiting how much the assessed value of property can increase without a change in ownership and it’s been a disaster (and a contributing factor to the housing crisis, albeit far from the only one).