[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.