Some people want to rent (e.g., young people, people with mobile jobs, or people who just aren’t ready to be tied down to one place).
And I don’t have a problem with a small-time property owner renting out a house at a fair rate. In theory it’s a win-win: the renter gets a place to stay, the landlord builds equity in their property.
The issue we have is two-fold:
Companies buying up massive amounts of property (not just a house or two, but thousands) and turning entire neighborhoods into rent zones, driving out any competition and availability of housing to buy, thereby driving up prices.
Price collusion amongst these companies, driving up rent far above fair rates, using these software services that share going rates across markets. That reduces consumer choice.
Barring a really interesting solution, like a Land Value Tax or something, my proposal to remediate this housing problem is rather straight-forward and simple:
Prohibit these software companies from sharing rental rates info to customers. Landlords just need to figure it out in their own markets the old fashioned way.
Prohibit corporations from buying housing with the intention to rent it. Force these corporations to sell their housing and get out of the landlord business.
Allow individuals to hold property for renting out, but cap number of properties a person or household can own for the express intention of renting out to five at any given time. That allows a person to build up a nice little savings nest, and provide a rental property to someone who wants to rent, but doesn’t allow anyone to dominate a housing market. Look for those massive profits elsewhere - start a business that creates and provides value.
Some people WANT to have short-term commitments to their housing location. That is currently accomplished through rent. That’s an important distinction you are missing while trying to preserve elements of familiarity with the way the world currently works.
And that is precisely what I am disputing. No one WANTS to rent specifically, it’s just that there aren’t a lot of other options for short-term commitments. You’re looking at hotels, couch surfing, van life, nomadism. All of which exist but are less common.
The rest of their statement was about trying to find ways making renting less bad when the real solution is to eliminate the need for rent or landlords at all. You can still have short-term housing options without landlords.
In fact, in a lot of countries it is customary for landlords to require long-term leases most of the time. In most of the Middle East rents are paid annually up-front. In India it’s common to see security deposits of 6 months rent or more. The only force keeping short-term housing options available to those who want them are… Those who want them. The market demand, and the responsiveness to that demand.
But one of the major shifts the world is seeing globally is the breakdown of the relationship between demand and supply, with more and more power going to the supply side. Landlords in particular are colluding indirectly through 3rd party consulting firms against renters. It’s almost comical now to talk about how many countries like Canada, the UK, and the US are having housing crisis while the new construction seems to be almost exclusively low-densith luxury homes. Renters simply do not have the power to influence supply today.
Do you mean this post on Lemmy? Cause I’d vote for someone running for public office with that as their platform pertaining to the housing situation/crisis
Alas, I have zero interest in running for any public office.
Funny, that: with notable exceptions, of course, it’s generally the busy-body, loud-mouthed, ideologically-possessed control-freaks who seek any sort of political power. Sensible people tend to mind their own goddamned business, until the politicians and wingnuts force our hands to finally get involved.
It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it… anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Politicians in most modern governments, of course, aren’t emperors who issue edicts and instantly enact sweeping change.
The imaginary politician in this scenario would run what that platform expressing the ideal. They then try to get those policies enacted against the opposition, which is both the inertia of the bureaucracy and opposing political winds.
You saying the imaginary person running for president with that platform couldn’t snap their fingers and put it in place doesn’t mean they wouldn’t steer the government in that direction, thats almost always the best we can do and I don’t think we should give up because the change we want isnt immediate
Existing apartments would be removed from the market too. $100 per month costs the owner more than keeping the apartment empty, because tenants are a risk.
If people thought that such a law was going to be permanent, or if there were fees for leaving apartments empty, then many (most?) apartments would be permanently destroyed - either converted to something else (condos, commercial space, etc) or just demolished so that the land could be used some other way.
I said they could be converted into condos, and that would happen to many of them if they were worth more as condos than as commercial space or undeveloped land (or apartments rented off-the-books at market price). Prices of condos would fall (at least until the market adjusted) but the supply of housing available would decrease, especially for the people who struggle to afford rent today.
I don’t follow your reasoning that goes from landlords selling housing to less housing being available. Also, which landlords are renting out at below mortgage prices?!
Less housing in the sense of (owner-occupied + rented). Not all former rented housing would become owner-occupied housing. People who struggle to pay rent are going to have a hard time getting a mortgage, and if they do then they’re betting a lot on an illiquid asset that they’re paying for with an unreliable revenue stream, especially since that asset might go down in value to below what they owe on it like what happened to a lot of people in 2008. One of the things a renter pays a landlord to do is to absorb a lot of the financial risk.
A couple of anecdotes about when I owned a house:
I would have been better off by renting for above mortgage price than I was by buying, since I had to move a lot sooner than I thought I would. There’s a lot of overhead to purchasing real estate that only makes sense if you plan on staying in one place for a long time. Fewer and fewer Americans are doing that.
I used to rent out the house at below-mortgage price but it was to good friends who were very trustworthy. (Even then, technically they shared the house with me although I would only come for one weekend a month, because then they would be easier to evict just in case.) Their rent covered interest and taxes, so I was paying off principal. I sold the house when they moved out rather than taking the risk of renting it to strangers. With that said, I don’t think this is common.
Not all former rented housing would become owner-occupied housing
Yeah, in your previous post you suggested it would be razed to the ground, which is a bit of a throwing your toys out of the play pen when asked to share. I’ll remind you that the original post was suggesting rent controls back to 1980s levels of rent. Housing prices would likely fall, bringing whole swathes of people who can’t get a mortgage now into the buyers market.
At the moment, most landlords basically get houses bought for them by their tenants. It’s iniquitous. If you’re paying the price for the house, you should get the house, not just someone with a better credit rating.
It’s because the prices are so high! Countless people ARE homeless, and the skyrocketing price of housing is the immediate cause, with the vast profits landlords make the indirect cause. If you can make someone else (tenants) buy houses for you, there is no limit to the number of houses you can buy at no real cost to you, so being a landlord makes insane profits so the prices of houses climb as they’re such a money spinner.
A fraction of the cost that they go to market with at the moment. The housing market is overheating and has been doing so for decades. The value is in the scarcity, and the profiteering, not the bricks and mortar.
Renters pay the mortgage and then some. It’s iniquitous. If you’re the one paying for the house, you should get the house, not someone who just has a better credit rating.
I imagine there would be far fewer people willing to pay thousands of dollars for a mortgage when rent is only $100 and maintenance is someone else’s problem. Hell, home maintenance and repairs alone are well more than that.
It would be a crisis for anyone who wants to rent, because they won’t be able to anymore.
No one’s going to rent out an apartment if they’d have to do it at a huge loss. So as soon as this went into effect, all rentals would vanish and everyone who can’t afford to buy a house would be homeless.
It would be a crisis for renters. Land owners by definition already have a place to stay, but the second you implement price controls you’re going to see the rental market go into convulsions. The correct solution is to Just Tax Land.
About 60% of the people in Vienna live in public housing and its one of the best places in the world to live.
Tons of people in this thread are running around coming up with Rube Goldberg schemes of incentive structures and legal frameworks when the problem is really not that complicated.
tax unoccupied spaces at high rates to compensate.
Doing just this would help quite a lot today. A bunch of properties sit vacant because it’s cheaper to just pay the taxes and let the property appreciate than it is to bother with renting.
It would only be an economic crisis for land owners who seek rent. Really housing shouldn’t be something that people profit from.
Some people want to rent (e.g., young people, people with mobile jobs, or people who just aren’t ready to be tied down to one place).
And I don’t have a problem with a small-time property owner renting out a house at a fair rate. In theory it’s a win-win: the renter gets a place to stay, the landlord builds equity in their property.
The issue we have is two-fold:
Companies buying up massive amounts of property (not just a house or two, but thousands) and turning entire neighborhoods into rent zones, driving out any competition and availability of housing to buy, thereby driving up prices.
Price collusion amongst these companies, driving up rent far above fair rates, using these software services that share going rates across markets. That reduces consumer choice.
Barring a really interesting solution, like a Land Value Tax or something, my proposal to remediate this housing problem is rather straight-forward and simple:
Prohibit these software companies from sharing rental rates info to customers. Landlords just need to figure it out in their own markets the old fashioned way.
Prohibit corporations from buying housing with the intention to rent it. Force these corporations to sell their housing and get out of the landlord business.
Allow individuals to hold property for renting out, but cap number of properties a person or household can own for the express intention of renting out to five at any given time. That allows a person to build up a nice little savings nest, and provide a rental property to someone who wants to rent, but doesn’t allow anyone to dominate a housing market. Look for those massive profits elsewhere - start a business that creates and provides value.
Anyway, one can dream, I guess.
People don’t “want to rent”. They want shelter. It’s just that renting is the easiest way to get that.
People don’t “want to work.” They want money. It’s just that working is the easiest way for most people to get that.
Well, thanks Captain Obvious. Statements like that are technically true, but how helpful are they for contributing to a conversation?
greedy people have this weird argument that the rest of humanity shares their mental illness of worshiping money.
I don’t think that’s true, but I suppose then we’d have a debate over what “work” is.
Well, we were having a discussion about renting vs. owning which you seemed to understand were two different things.
You can have non profit driven rentals though…? Why does rent need to be profit driving?
Landlords are parasites. Period.
Some people WANT to have short-term commitments to their housing location. That is currently accomplished through rent. That’s an important distinction you are missing while trying to preserve elements of familiarity with the way the world currently works.
Acknowledging people wanting to rent was literally their first sentence
And that is precisely what I am disputing. No one WANTS to rent specifically, it’s just that there aren’t a lot of other options for short-term commitments. You’re looking at hotels, couch surfing, van life, nomadism. All of which exist but are less common.
The rest of their statement was about trying to find ways making renting less bad when the real solution is to eliminate the need for rent or landlords at all. You can still have short-term housing options without landlords.
In fact, in a lot of countries it is customary for landlords to require long-term leases most of the time. In most of the Middle East rents are paid annually up-front. In India it’s common to see security deposits of 6 months rent or more. The only force keeping short-term housing options available to those who want them are… Those who want them. The market demand, and the responsiveness to that demand.
But one of the major shifts the world is seeing globally is the breakdown of the relationship between demand and supply, with more and more power going to the supply side. Landlords in particular are colluding indirectly through 3rd party consulting firms against renters. It’s almost comical now to talk about how many countries like Canada, the UK, and the US are having housing crisis while the new construction seems to be almost exclusively low-densith luxury homes. Renters simply do not have the power to influence supply today.
How do you mean “your proposal”?
Do you mean this post on Lemmy? Cause I’d vote for someone running for public office with that as their platform pertaining to the housing situation/crisis
Shit, I’d vote for that person, too.
Alas, I have zero interest in running for any public office.
Funny, that: with notable exceptions, of course, it’s generally the busy-body, loud-mouthed, ideologically-possessed control-freaks who seek any sort of political power. Sensible people tend to mind their own goddamned business, until the politicians and wingnuts force our hands to finally get involved.
-Douglas Adams
You’d vote for a president running on a platform they would have zero authority to enact?
I didn’t specify president per se.
Politicians in most modern governments, of course, aren’t emperors who issue edicts and instantly enact sweeping change.
The imaginary politician in this scenario would run what that platform expressing the ideal. They then try to get those policies enacted against the opposition, which is both the inertia of the bureaucracy and opposing political winds.
You saying the imaginary person running for president with that platform couldn’t snap their fingers and put it in place doesn’t mean they wouldn’t steer the government in that direction, thats almost always the best we can do and I don’t think we should give up because the change we want isnt immediate
Wow finally someone else with a level-headed take. Careful though, that kind of thinking doesn’t do well here
I mean, 0 new apartments would be built
You’ve discovered the problem with organising an economic system around profit
Existing apartments would be removed from the market too. $100 per month costs the owner more than keeping the apartment empty, because tenants are a risk.
If people thought that such a law was going to be permanent, or if there were fees for leaving apartments empty, then many (most?) apartments would be permanently destroyed - either converted to something else (condos, commercial space, etc) or just demolished so that the land could be used some other way.
You forgot the outcome that they could be sold. You know, so that a non landlord could own one.
I said they could be converted into condos, and that would happen to many of them if they were worth more as condos than as commercial space or undeveloped land (or apartments rented off-the-books at market price). Prices of condos would fall (at least until the market adjusted) but the supply of housing available would decrease, especially for the people who struggle to afford rent today.
I don’t follow your reasoning that goes from landlords selling housing to less housing being available. Also, which landlords are renting out at below mortgage prices?!
Less housing in the sense of (owner-occupied + rented). Not all former rented housing would become owner-occupied housing. People who struggle to pay rent are going to have a hard time getting a mortgage, and if they do then they’re betting a lot on an illiquid asset that they’re paying for with an unreliable revenue stream, especially since that asset might go down in value to below what they owe on it like what happened to a lot of people in 2008. One of the things a renter pays a landlord to do is to absorb a lot of the financial risk.
A couple of anecdotes about when I owned a house:
I would have been better off by renting for above mortgage price than I was by buying, since I had to move a lot sooner than I thought I would. There’s a lot of overhead to purchasing real estate that only makes sense if you plan on staying in one place for a long time. Fewer and fewer Americans are doing that.
I used to rent out the house at below-mortgage price but it was to good friends who were very trustworthy. (Even then, technically they shared the house with me although I would only come for one weekend a month, because then they would be easier to evict just in case.) Their rent covered interest and taxes, so I was paying off principal. I sold the house when they moved out rather than taking the risk of renting it to strangers. With that said, I don’t think this is common.
Yeah, in your previous post you suggested it would be razed to the ground, which is a bit of a throwing your toys out of the play pen when asked to share. I’ll remind you that the original post was suggesting rent controls back to 1980s levels of rent. Housing prices would likely fall, bringing whole swathes of people who can’t get a mortgage now into the buyers market.
At the moment, most landlords basically get houses bought for them by their tenants. It’s iniquitous. If you’re paying the price for the house, you should get the house, not just someone with a better credit rating.
The reason most renters are renters and not owners is not because there aren’t any houses available to purchase.
This would just make countless people homeless as they lose the option to rent, because they can’t afford to buy/maintain an entire house.
It’s because the prices are so high! Countless people ARE homeless, and the skyrocketing price of housing is the immediate cause, with the vast profits landlords make the indirect cause. If you can make someone else (tenants) buy houses for you, there is no limit to the number of houses you can buy at no real cost to you, so being a landlord makes insane profits so the prices of houses climb as they’re such a money spinner.
What do you think the cost of a house is, just with the cost of the materials and labor to build it, with zero markup?
A fraction of the cost that they go to market with at the moment. The housing market is overheating and has been doing so for decades. The value is in the scarcity, and the profiteering, not the bricks and mortar.
Renters pay the mortgage and then some. It’s iniquitous. If you’re the one paying for the house, you should get the house, not someone who just has a better credit rating.
Until someone needs a home and they build it
Where are they living while they save up the several hundred thousand it costs to build one?
You’re right, the first time shelter was built in human history it was a Blackrock apartment complex.
How could i forget.
If you have to go back to before the concept of money was invented, you don’t really have a good point.
I didn’t.
Blackrock was the only corporate entity that had the building rights to the ferile cresent.
If it weren’t for them nobody would have ever had shelter.
God bless Blackrock
in which part of the world can people build tents that won’t immediately be torn down or vandalized? You make being part of society sound like hell.
Yes because we would decommodify housing and still commodify land.
Use your big boy brain instead of just the angry part
Why? Its not like apartments are built by private industry. Not any lasting ones at least.
What? Of course they are
None of the good ones that have lasted. Only disposable trash that needs to be nearly entirely rebuilt every 50 years.
This is the opposite in the US. Government housing, when it was even attempted, was concrete trash, left to rot for decades.
Home values themselves would tank.
I imagine there would be far fewer people willing to pay thousands of dollars for a mortgage when rent is only $100 and maintenance is someone else’s problem. Hell, home maintenance and repairs alone are well more than that.
Then maybe we could adjust our zoning laws and take better advantage of the land available. Houses aren’t very effective use of land.
It would be a crisis for anyone who wants to rent, because they won’t be able to anymore.
No one’s going to rent out an apartment if they’d have to do it at a huge loss. So as soon as this went into effect, all rentals would vanish and everyone who can’t afford to buy a house would be homeless.
They could sell their properties amd just invest in stocks, a little tricker to manage, but its still profitable.
It would be a crisis for renters. Land owners by definition already have a place to stay, but the second you implement price controls you’re going to see the rental market go into convulsions. The correct solution is to Just Tax Land.
There you go
Yep, this is already a solved problem.
About 60% of the people in Vienna live in public housing and its one of the best places in the world to live.
Tons of people in this thread are running around coming up with Rube Goldberg schemes of incentive structures and legal frameworks when the problem is really not that complicated.
We had rent control apartments for most of the 20th century and the market was just fine.
Well sure, people would stop renting in protest, and you’d have to tax unoccupied spaces at high rates to compensate.
It would crash the real estate market, which arguably needs to die since availability is artificially scarce due to wealthy hoarders.
Doing just this would help quite a lot today. A bunch of properties sit vacant because it’s cheaper to just pay the taxes and let the property appreciate than it is to bother with renting.
There would literally be no rentals except maybe shitty murder sex room hotel rooms.