[chao-]

It is difficult to balance the competing priorities of "home ownership is widely affordable" and "home prices must always go up".

When the balance is not broadly possible, our system seems to favor "home prices must always go up", at least in the short term.

[simianwords]

Mostly the priorities are not competing. You can and should build more homes but the end goal is to improve utility of land which can further drive prices up thus helping both cases.

You can first build more homes - prices go down and more people come into the city and prices start going back up because of increased economic activity.

[WarOnPrivacy]

> You can and should build more homes

Yes. The entry point to ownership lies within a state of affordability.

> but the end goal is to improve utility of land

For who? If it's anyone other than typical wage earners, this goal competes with home ownership by pressuring ownership costs upward and away from affordability.

For context, home purchases are mostly (if not fully) impossible for typical wage earners.

[simianwords]

For the city or country. Home ownership is not impossible, I know you meant it as hyperbole.

We shouldn’t mind if home ownership becomes costly if more economic activity results out of it. More economic activity means more money in the hands of wage earners (just that proportionally more money is spent on housing which is okay).

[WarOnPrivacy]

> Home ownership is not impossible, I know you meant it as hyperbole.

I did not. 25% of US households make under $40/yr.

(based on 2022 data that 25% of all US households make ~$35k/yr or less. +10% for minorities.)

[mathiaspoint]

Who says home prices must always go up? That's an incredibly dumb thing to say. Houses depreciate. Maybe land prices always go up (maybe over very very long time scales because of currency devaluation) but that's a tiny fraction of the value of a home.

There's no good reason to expect homes to magically appreciate.

[Dig1t]

There are many places in the US where you can buy a house for less than 50k.

If you want prices to drop in popular areas then we have to make it easy for people to actually build houses and increase supply in popular areas. Of course giving homeowners a say about whether housing is allowed to be built near them, of course they are going to vote against it because they have an incentive to keep prices high.

[mingus88]

I think it’s natural for homeowners to be resistant to new builds in the same way office workers hated the move to cubicles.

I was in the Midwest recently and it was wild to see a block of high density houses in the middle of farmland. Houses that look exactly the same, shoved onto tiny lots with little gap between them, and surrounded by miles of corn.

These are obviously attractive to developers as they are maximized profit vehicles, but the downsides to everyone else are enormous.

In my opinion, we need to build housing above stores, so communities can actually work. Build a town, not a subdivision. What’s the point of a $50k home if you have to spend two hours a day driving to make it work?

[gilbetron]

For whatever reason, those houses get snapped up quick. I've lived in the midwest my whole life, and those cornfield subdivisions are hugely popular. I have a house near a small city, and I've had numerous friends and family ask me why I would live where I am rather than in one of the "much better subs".

I don't think people quite wrap their head around the fact that the US population love their cars and their huge subdivisions. A massive percentage of the US have no desire for walkable cities.

It is a bizarre alien thought to me, too, but it has become very clear to me.

[HankStallone]

My place is actually rural, but there's one of those little cornfield subdivisions (I like that term) a few miles from me. I don't really get it either. I like living in the country, but they don't seem to, since they bring their town ways with them, landscaping their places to a T like they're competing with each other, calling the police on stray dogs, and stuff like that. They don't seem to live any differently than they did in town, so I guess it's about the presumably cheaper land and the distance from noise and crime that makes up for having to drive 20-30 miles to town for work and groceries.

[aaronbaugher]

It's unlikely that the people in that rural subdivision are driving two hours a day for work. In the US Midwest, you're rarely more than 30 minutes from a town large enough to have some jobs. For instance, there's a town of 1100 near me that has a veterinarian, general store, post office, gas station, auto mechanic, school, a couple bank branches, and so on, which all employ people, some at pretty good salaries. And within ten miles of that town, there are a couple of those little blocks of suburb-looking houses like you describe.

Or the people living in them might be retired, or work from home, or work on local farms. Whatever the case, they're not driving a long way for work.

[nunez]

They were probably 50 mi or so away from a large city, which is within "commuting" distance.

[gottorf]

> Build a town, not a subdivision.

I would really love to see a billionaire tackle this. There's loads of empty, or nearly empty, space in this country. Heck, take over a town if you really want! Sink a few million dollars into kickstarting small-scale urbanism.

I'm not usually much of a billionaire-hater, but today's lot for the most part seems to be uninspired, when it comes to projects like this.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

First institute a land value tax. If you have a regular property tax you are going to get speculators, and then eventually vacant lots

This is part of the housing supply mystery. It's not very profitable to build housing when you are punished for building upwards and making good use of the land

[seanmcdirmid]

Some states are biasing property taxes more toward land value to get some trade off. The problem with a pure land value tax is that you can be forced to sell your home ir redevelop (if you can afford it) if your land value appreciates over time (this should happen eventually, but will happen perusals too quickly with an LVT). Also, services (schools) rendered with property tax money scale as more people live there, and if you go for pure land value, you wind up with some whacky rates to support schools.

[gottorf]

I'm a big proponent of LVT, and even bigger of gradually replacing most taxes with LVT, but the great thing about being a billionaire is you can just buy up a whole town and develop it as you see fit and not have to worry about speculators engaging in rent-seeking behavior.

[mingus88]

I don’t think you’ll ever see a billionaire tackle this. To become a billionaire, you have to have a complete lack of empathy.

This is why the only solution we see are maximized profit vehicles. The qualities that would make someone want to create a lovely place to live exclude them from making billions of dollars in the first place.

[reducesuffering]

Did you both not see the project that is trying to do exactly this in Solana County CA and has had immense criticism at it, far more than positive coverage...

Damned if you do, damned if you don't

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Forever

[gottorf]

Looks like it's stuck in the typical hell of environment impact reviews and local politicians seeing how many sinecures they can obtain through the project. I wish the project well and will follow up on it.

[itake]

Do the homes selling for less than 50k have a job market to supports owning a home at that price?

[potato3732842]

And do they a) qualify for normal mortgage products b) need another $50-100k dumped into them immediately to be habitable.

[Dig1t]

Yes they do, there are many normal houses which can be bought for very cheap just spend some time on Zillow looking at areas outside of major metro areas.

You could very easily live in a big city and work a job to save up 50k or a down payment for a 50k mortgage and then buy one of these cheap houses to live in. But most people don’t want to do that. They want nice weather and fun things to do, access to a good job market, and good schools. But the reason why those houses are 50k is just because of simple supply and demand. There is very little demand to live in Louisiana or West Virginia and tons of demand to live in the Bay Area or Seattle. If you increase supply, eventually prices will fall and accessibility will increase.

[itake]

The demand isn’t there because there is no supply of money… it’s much safer for your life/family if you live in an area with an abundance of employers and not a small town with very few employers and low wages.

Also these areas have poor education systems for kids.

[chao-]

I agree with all of that, but I think there is additional nuance. I would love if the path were as simple as:

(1) Make housing easier to build.

(2) Receive sufficient housing supply.

Even if you make it easier to build houses, there is a market for the capital that housing developers access. Currently, that market also assumes that prices will go up (or at least not go down). Thus, once we go far enough past the point where existing prices are higher than the return on new housing, even all of our dream reforms may not lead to a flood of new housing starts.

I want to be clear: loosening zoning, reforming regulations, and so forth, are all still worth doing. It is better than nothing. But if the result is a shock of supply, the financing for new homes from the biggest players will dry up. That doesn't make a solution impossible, but it does complicate it.

[01HNNWZ0MV43FF]

There's a cute little shipping container

https://www.propertyunder50k.com/list_view.php?show_set_aler...

[totallykvothe]

And add to that an unsupportable tax burden to disincentivize large firms buying up hundreds or thousands of homes and then renting them.

[wakawaka28]

That does indeed seem to be a problem but there's a flip side. If you can't afford to buy a thing, then renting it is actually preferable. Rental is normally fine, unless there is a virtual monopoly on housing that forces people to rent and manipulates prices. In the absence of a monopoly, the rental price is just the time value of the place plus a reasonable service fee decided by a free market.

[pragmatic]

Many such cases!