| I forget the name, but there was one company that bought properties throughout the US after the 2008 market crash - we are talking about hundreds of thousands of properties here, massive scale. I remember (2014 or so) looking for apartments in some places in NYC - I went to multiple buildings before it struck me that they were all owned by the same company. I've been a renter all my life and the situation is not good for renters. I don't care if the super rich have mega mansions and million dollar cars. It is when they start monopolizing essential resources like water, housing etc that it becomes a serious issue. Another thing I noticed on HN - HN doesn't seem to like landlords being criticized, I guess many people here are well off and are landlords themselves. I do not understand why a person should be allowed to own multiple houses, just because they can afford it. There is a German town that bought apartment buildings from private companies to take charge of the out of control rent. Maybe it is time for such measures. After healthcare, housing (mortgage or rent) is how you keep a large percentage of the population chained to their jobs and control them easily. It is also the reason tiny house movement is taking off in other countries. In the US, legislation is a bottleneck for tiny houses. Who wants to be a slave to banks for 30+ years just to have a roof over one's head (assuming one can get a loan in the first place)? |
It’s not just tiny houses. On average, large developers in San Jose pay > 20% of the price of new home construction for government overhead (unnecessary work, permitting fees, rubber-stamp yielding consultants, etc).
On top of that, they often add a year or so delay to projects because they intentionally understaff the permitting offices, and created a system designed to block new construction.
We’re building a house, and it took over a year to go from architectural plans to permit. Twelve offices had to approve the plans.
All in, it will cost >2x the price of the house to complete construction. Of course, now we’re up to our eyeballs in debt and have pushed retirement out about 10 years. (Backing out by the time we realized we had been trapped would have been even worse, financially.)