[yupitsme123]

I think San Francisco has something like this with their Below Market Rate (BMR) housing program. You have to be below a certain income to be considered, and basically you get to pay a fixed monthly rate to "own" a place that can only be sold for a fixed amount. It always just sounded like rent to me.

I think that NYC's co-ops (TICs in San Francisco) provided an interesting alternative model. They usually require owner-occupancy, can't be rented easily, and are difficult to finance.

These restrictions eliminate investors and speculators, and shields the the units from the inflation that happens from fed intervention and super low rates.

The result is that they're usually priced a lot lower and appreciate more slowly than they would be if they were condos.

[awongh]

TICs are a scam though. They are just condos with less legal protections for the relationships between the tenants. They don't solve any of the cost of ownership issues or deal with the idea of appreciation of the value of the real estate. afaik it's actually much worse because you're combining the appreciation of the asset, but you can't sell as easily as with a condo.

[yupitsme123]

Sounds like you want a super liquid asset that's not actually an asset because it doesn't appreciate, and also it needs to be really easy to buy, cheaply. That's unlikely to happen and what we have right now is probably as close as one can get to that.

I wasn't saying that coops or TICs are ideal, just that they show what happens when you remove the speculative and investment aspect as well as the subsidy of below-market interest rates and mortgages that any idiot can qualify for. The result is prices which are lower by 10-20%.

People seem to want an engineered, top-down, state provided solution that makes homeownership more affordable. But we've already tried many of those solutions and they just inflate prices and encourage speculation and securitization.

A better approach might be to end the various implicit and explicit subsidies on mortgages and homeownership, keep speculators, investors, and big developers out of the market, and focus on owner occupied dwellings. I think this would disinflate the housing market and allow it to get back to where it should be.

[awongh]

> end the various implicit and explicit subsidies on mortgages and homeownership, keep speculators, investors, and big developers out of the market, and focus on owner occupied dwellings

Yes, totally agree. I think my impression of TIC is that it's a legal loophole because condo-izing buildings isn't politically tenable, but offering a worse option is. A TIC owner still owns an asset but now it's just devalued because it's harder to sell.

My original thought was that a true co-op without the pressure of the owners accumulating pent-up capital in their home would be a healthier situation. Maybe that lost value can basically be recouped to make the overall cost of ownership lower. Maybe a different co-op legal structure makes it easier to pay a true market rate to live in an owner occupied dwelling, for a slightly different definition of "owner" (someone who doesn't plan to profit off the appreciation of their home, but still "owns" a place to live).