[arciini]

Housing as a for-profit business kinda makes sense, but I think the main takeaway of the article is this:

> The thing is, "the algorithm" should have very little to do with that sick feeling. The coldness of the interface and robotic voice certainly make for a stark contrast with the thing you are doing, but they aren't the cause. The moment you start thinking about someone's longtime home as something that can "align with strategy," and about pricing someone out of their longtime home as "an adjustment that would be more beneficial," you have morally lost. It doesn't really matter how you go about making that adjustment.

The tool and the training for the tool definitely matters, but the truth is, making business decisions about housing will necessarily hurt people in ways that are disproportionate to the amount of additional income a landlord gets.

This sucks for everyone, but especially for less mobile or financially-secure tenants. I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore.

[nordsieck]

> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore.

Fundamentally, the solution is to allow much, much more building.

So far voters are not a fan. Perhaps that will change with the increasing rise of corporate ownership.

[fwlr]

“So far voters are not a fan.”

While I’m always uncomfortable with violent rhetoric, the very public antipathy around “rent-seeking parasites” does give me hope that in the future, fewer voters will see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed landlords”.

[rootusrootus]

I don't think it's that many people aspire to be a landlord. It's just that homeowners have put a large amount of their net worth into real estate and declaring open season on new building directly hurts them.

We can easily see this as millenials have gotten into owning homes themselves. People are quite good at tending to their own self interest.

[noirbot]

For sure. I have no aspiration to be a landlord, but I bought a place last year with a mortgage payment a bit higher than what I was paying to rent an equivalent place before. This made good financial sense.

Now, let's suppose somehow we build all over my neighborhood over the next three years and rent craters. Instead of paying, say, 1200 on my mortgage to own a place instead of 1000 in rent, I could now be paying 600 in rent vs. 1200 on a mortgage. I'm now in a bind where I'm losing money every month over renting the place next door and there's a good chance my property even when I pay it off is worth less than I've paid.

I'm certainly not against building, but if somehow every YIMBY dream came through for them near me, I've definitely just made a really terrible financial decision that's going to dramatically change the trajectory of my life. Moving to another city for a job is now borderline impossible if I'm tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars underwater on my mortgage, and couldn't rent the property for anything close to what I'm paying.

Like many fixes to societal ills, it's easy to look at the end result and see how it's better for most people, but it's likely to hurt a lot of people who made totally reasonable choices.

[nordsieck]

> Like many fixes to societal ills, it's easy to look at the end result and see how it's better for most people, but it's likely to hurt a lot of people who made totally reasonable choices.

The US Government sets policy all the time that hurts people who own stocks and bonds. And mostly people are fine with that. I don't see why home owners ought to be afforded a special level of protection for their investment.

[noirbot]

The fundamental difference is that I can't sleep and shower in my bond portfolio. I didn't buy my house as an investment, I bought it because I have to live somewhere and it made financial sense vs. renting. I'd be perfectly happy selling it for roughly the same amount in 5, 10, or 30 years.

I also was explicitly saying that I want there to be policies in place that will "hurt my investment" because I think it's a good thing in general, but it's important to not just assume that building more is only going to hurt rich rent seeking landlords that are easy to rally people against.

There's a lot of financial and cultural incentives towards home purchasing in the US, so to quickly move to instead make renting the preferred option in policy is going to hurt a lot of people and cause issues that may not be easy to predict. It doesn't mean it's not worth doing, but it's important to look at it holistically and not just see it as only punishing bad rich cartel owners who deserve to be hurt.

[hackernewds]

Note even right now the Fed has trillions backing the real estate markets from collapsing. The govt creating winners and losers in a free market despite any fundamentals, was never supposed to be the design but here we are.

[teachrdan]

> The US Government sets policy all the time that hurts people who own stocks and bonds.

Could you give me any recent examples of this happening? It seems the exception, not something that happens "all the time."

[dublinben]

It's illogical for the value of your land to decrease if your neighborhood has been substantially upzoned.

Instead of being able to fit a single house worth an imputed rent of $1000 on your lot, you'd instead be able to fit a duplex, renting for $600 + $600 = $1200. If supply has increased so much to lower equivalent rents a whopping 40%, then you're probably looking at a situation more like now being able to build a quadplex or small six-unit apartment building on your lot. At $600 x 4 = $2400 or $600 x 6 = $3600 you've actually seen the value of your land double or triple in this scenario.

In this hypothetical scenario you'll now have so much extra money, that you could easily move to more expensive, quieter neighborhood that hasn't been upzoned yet. If you're lucky, you'll be able to repeat the process there as well.

[noirbot]

Or you purchased a condo or townhouse where there's no way to sell the land under it or redevelop it without getting a large number of other people to all decide to move/leave at the same time.

If you're one of the first people in an upzoning neighborhood, you're the one who loses value as the rest of the area upzones.

The price to buy 1/100 of the condo/duplex/quad supply in a zipcode is almost definitely higher than in a few years when there's 1000 available. Sure, there's ways it could appreciate enough to offset it if it also becomes a nicer and more desirable neighborhood at a counteracting rate, but that's not for-sure.

This situation specifically screws the people who are doing what you'd want and not over-purchasing a single family home as an investment and instead buying a smaller part of some complex.

[nordsieck]

> I don't think it's that many people aspire to be a landlord.

I think it was a reference to this famous quote:

> John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. -- Ronald Wright, A Short History of Progress

[rootusrootus]

I got the temporarily embarrassed reference but figured the comment was otherwise serious.

[crooked-v]

For more, the more infuriating rhetoric is the supposedly-YIMBY types who act like property developers are evil scum for constructing and selling buildings at anything other than a loss.

[j_walter]

> So far voters are not a fan.

Correction...voters are a fan of more housing being built (affordable housing even), just not in their neighborhoods where it will negatively impact their property values and status quo.

[medvezhenok]

In other words, it's a classical prisoner's dilemma.

The only way out is forcing voters to accept housing being built in their neighborhood.

[firstplacelast]

There are tons of things America could do for the rental and home-ownership market, but we won’t because people will scream that it’s unfair and it will hurt the upper class and existing home owners.

The government could force and pay for construction of massive numbers of condos/townhouses in/around large cities (say 20-40million). Sell them to first time home-owners for extremely cheap (say 200k) with all types of restrictions on it being owner occupied and only allowing the owner to recoup a certain % of appreciation after X numbers of years if sold (say 3% each year lived in).

I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system, but there are very tenable solutions with the ability to change laws/policies and a massive pocket-book.

The US used to give away large parcels of land to people just to move out west. So it’s not like there’s not precedence for helping citizens with real estate.

Nothing significant will be done in our lifetimes though, oh well.

[rootusrootus]

> I’m sure that’s problematic and a team of people smarter than me could come up with a much better system

Agree, and disagree. Distortions of the market rarely go as planned, so trying a massive intervention is likely to have a whole bunch of negative side effects. And I don't believe smarter people are more likely to be successful with their own attempts.

Keep it simple. Build more. Drop the zoning restrictions, reimagine the purpose of urban growth boundaries. Supply and demand actually does work.

[unethical_ban]

Build more relatively dense housing.

And to those who may balk: Dense housing doesn't need to be cheap. If you think to yourself "Gosh these walls are thin", that should not be a given in a long-term investment like a multistory complex. High quality, somewhat private housing is possible!

While "any housing" is better than an extreme like homelessness, I align with those who think ever expanding suburbs is a big waste of concrete, infrastructure buildout and promotes the use of needless daily private transport.

I lament (rental) apartments being built all over my city's downtown, but I support increasing the density of living in urban areas.

[HDThoreaun]

Japan style zoning and LVT completely solves the problem. Maybe throw in a vacancy tax in some areas to keep the progressives happy and environmental standards deregulation for conservatives.

[shuckles]

The HDB system's outcomes aren't great if not paired with abundant supply. Singapore market rents are growing fast, HDBs have all sorts of unsavory (to Americans) queueing and prioritization rules, and there are plenty of rent seeking HDB owners who sublet their flats at high prices.

[pydry]

The whole point of the HDB system was to streamline and standardize the creation of decent quality housing. It worked spectacularly at creating abundant supply. Compared to the 1950s the supply has taken off like a rocket.

The "problem" was that population growth kept up with supply - initially through an extremely high birth rate and then, when that collapsed, through extremely high immigration rates.

Given the high population growth and low availability of land the growth in housing stock has been pretty amazing. Both the quality and the quantity certainly blows the US and Europe out of the water.

[shuckles]

I don’t think Singapore has run out of (re-)developable land. It has lots of low rise homes that have very low land value tax assessments. In any case, I agree their current situation is better than ours, but my point that the HDB model cannot solve housing costs without abundant supply stands.

[causalmodels]

IMO the ethnic quotas would be the most unsavory aspects to an American audience.

[notahacker]

Suspect "virtually everyone lives in government housing projects" would be an even harder sell...

[shuckles]

HDBs are high quality and safe. I don’t think most Americans would object to owning their own apartment if the builder and operator happened to be a government agency.

[notahacker]

I suspect plenty of Americans would object just to the "apartment" bit! A successful housing solution for Singapore's situation but one that's a million miles from the suburban American Dream.

The safety of HDBs, apart from reflecting Singapore's low crime rate in general, also reflects Singapore not having the idea that high rise government housing projects are somewhere only the poor and desperate would want to live and their condition a reflection of Singapore not having the belief that government budgets are things to be slashed....

[telotortium]

At the very least, the apartments would have to be quite large, closer to a house in floor area, for Americans to accept them. Few Americans would be willing to raise 2 children in an apartment less than 200 m^2.

[shuckles]

No, apartments are very popular with Americans. The few that are allowed to be built are very expensive.

[ketzo]

A significant fraction of Americans would object explicitly on that point, yeah. Wouldn't matter if the apartments had solid gold toilets.

Neoconservatism is a hell of a drug.

Wouldn't matter for the areas that could actually use more housing (dense urban ares), but there is an extremely strong anti-government streak in the U.S.

[shuckles]

The various preferences for heterosexual, married couples with kids wouldn’t be popular either.

[ChickenNugger]

Which is funny, because that's the very thing that a nation should be very invested in: producing more of its own citizens.

[anonymouskimmer]

> I don't think there's a great solution for the American rental system yet other than less profit-maximizing owners or schemes like HDB flats in Singapore.

There are various co-ops that exist in the US to buy things like apartment complexes that the tenants then take ownership in.

There are things such as Council housing in the UK.

There are various alternate reality types of systems that basically haven't been tried, or have only been tried in small numbers.

Once you bring in profit-maximizers into a larger, mostly free-market sector you tend the entire industry in the one direction of profit-maximizing (as the profit-maximizers can outbid the others on newly entering housing).

[98codes]

> to buy things

Exactly. That's not renting, and co-op owners aren't landlords unless they turn around and rent the unit out.

[anonymouskimmer]

Yeah, but it's an ownership alternative for people who are otherwise stuck being long-term renters. And for long-term renters I think ownership is the better alternative in many cases.

[fsckboy]

> but especially for less mobile or [less] financially-secure tenants

the burden of taking care of people who are less able to take care of themselves is not a burden that the government should place on certain individual people or individual companies, so rest of us can go on about our days happy that we don't have to think about it any more. If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'. If you think that the govt should buy all this property so it can do a great job of being a landlord and tenants will be happier that way, get those laws passed. Till then, the fallback is not to simply punish rental property owners. (disclosure, I own property but I don't rent it out because I don't want the hassle, the money is not worth it)

[Avshalom]

>punish rental property owners

Y'all see this rhetorical jump right? arciini made no mention of any action against landlords but to get out ahead of any possibility even as small as social-pressure against raising rents fsckboy has both escalated the framing language to "punishing" them and also shifted the frame from the plight of renters to the plight of rentiers.

[rootusrootus]

It's not that big a rhetorical jump, though, is it? There's already a lot of anti-landlord rhetoric in this discussion, and historically it heads that way every time.

[anonymouskimmer]

It's not about punishing, it's about constraining power, and aligning power with particular responsibilities. Is allocating certain powers to certain branches of government "punishing" the other branches? Is requiring certain duties from certain industries "punishing" those industries? I guess we're punishing Norfolk Southern by requiring them to pay for the cleanup in East Palestine, OH.

"If you want us to redistribute money to people in East Palestine so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just Norfolk Southern's."

[anonymouskimmer]

> If you want us to redistribute money to people so they don't need to move, the bite should equally come out of your and my income and bank accounts, not just landlords'.

So you're saying everyone should pay for an externality of a particular industry? Socialize the costs?

[giraffe_lady]

This conclusion hinges on viewing landlord as a range of human identity, like mother or craftsman. Landlords aren't a type of people, it's an activity, an economic relationship.

Deciding that the correct place for that burden is on landlords is a valid and consistent view. That this is part of the risk and responsibility incurred by the action of landlording. No one is forced to be a landlord and so in this view if you don't like that responsibility you simply don't landlord.

It's not "punishment" to reevaluate where we let burdens fall, and require that some roles now carry burdens that they were once free of. And if it is, shit, we punish lots of people for all kinds of things, why are landlords exempt.

[ROTMetro]

Car companies shouldn't be required to add safety features. If the market wants it car companies will add them. Seatbelts should be an add on expense like they were in the 1960s. Get the government out of the business of looking after citizens!

[anonymouskimmer]

I think you're getting downvoted because the analogy doesn't quite parallel, as car purchasers are indeed paying for those seatbelts in the car price.

A better car analogy would be the mandate of safety features such as back-up cameras that the purchaser pays for, but ultimately benefit others.