[pvdoom]

> A primary root cause of homelessness is lack of affordable housing.

Nah, I think that is still a consequence. The root cause is the fundamental assumption that homes should be a commodity that is bought, sold and rented out for profit, rather than something that everyone needs for survival. We should be looking at ways to limit the market here, or finding ways to not treat houses as a commodity, or something for rent-seeking

[koube]

I'm not so sure that renting out housing is a bad thing, unless there is somehow too much rental property. Dense rental housing, which is an inherently corporate thing, is key to affordable housing for people without a lot of wealth.

My intuitive sense is that the proportion of rented housing probably has a seesaw effect on the price of owned housing vs the price of rented housing. If you want them both to go down it's necessary to build a lot more housing.

[pvdoom]

Well, rental as another profit-driven thing, that has multiple consequences - it removes property away from people, it prevents people from getting their own place, it creates concentration of wealth, it drives policies that favour landlords, etc - i.e. big real estate corporations, and landlords generally have a lot more lobbying power than poor renters.

[tpmoney]

Rental also enables economic and educational mobility, and provides (some) shelter against severe economic losses that are risks when you own property. For my own part, renting enabled me to move across the country as an 18 year old for a higher education. Even if "affordable" housing could have been owned at that point in my life, I had no idea if I was going to stay in that area or move. And it turns out I did move, quite a lot. I moved almost every 1-2 years, sometimes chasing lower rent, sometimes to move closer to a new job (allowing me to save money and time on commuting). Having to sell a house or even a condo every 1-2 years would have been a nightmare at best.

And that doesn't account for all the economic risk that comes from owning property. When I was renting there was no way I would have been able to afford the tens of thousands of dollars I've had to outlay as a homeowner for everything from water main replacements, roof replacements, plumbing repairs, mold remediation and remodels, HVAC repair / replacement, appliance replacement, tree removal etc. As a renter, all of that is mandated to be repaired by your landlord. Sure, it's possible (and even likely) that your rent will go up next renewal if your landlord is outlaying $20k+ for an emergency roof replacement, but the best part of renting is you can just leave and go somewhere else. Where as if you own property, even if you put the roof repair on credit so that you have a similar "rent" increase, you can't just up and leave if you can't afford the rent anymore. That debt stays with you, not the property, and it just got harder to sell if you used the property as collateral for the loan.

Oh and that changing rent payment, yeah my mortgage payment is 50% higher than when I started. No it's not an ARM, thats just the increase from property taxes and insurance (see aforementioned emergency roof replacement and tree removals). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love owning my own home, and there have been times in the last handful of years that being in a stable location without needing to move or (mostly) worry about significant rent changes has helped me through some situations that would have sucked as a renter. But equally having been a home owner, I absolutely look back on my time as a renter and laugh at how naive I was to think that owning would have been a better deal for me. Renting enabled a degree of flexibility I no longer have. I don't necessarily need that flexibility as much as I did, but I also accept a commute that I previously would have considered moving to reduce.

[Symmetry]

If houses were just a commodity to be bought and sold we'd have much less of a problem. There were very few homeless a hundred years ago. Efforts to ban residential hotels aka "flophouses" were mostly an effort to remove undesirable people from their communities by making it impossible for them to find housing there they could afford. And the fact that many if not most voters don't want housing for what they consider undesirables in their neighborhoods is a huge problem for the construction of homeless shelters and affordable housing to this day. So I don't think that even completely socializing housing would do all that much to help with the problem.

[bell-cot]

I'd phrase that "homes should be a great investment for the haves. And who cares about the have-nots, anyway?".