[mchusma]

The issue is not investment at all, we want more investment into housing.

But you are absolutely correct you cannot both want housing to be a good investment (increase in value faster than inflation) and an affordable (drop in price lower than inflation).

Don’t subsidize demand. Allow more supply. Private homeowners, big developers, all of the above. Build.

[jgeada]

And stop allowing people who view their house(s) as an investment from being able to veto any and all building. While that incentive is present, there will be massive hurdles to being able to build the amount of housing that is necessary.

[ziofill]

The problem will keep persisting as long as the politicians who have the power to change the rules of the game have the opposite incentive to do so.

[ecshafer]

To be more specific, I dont think owning a sfh to rent out should be good. But building an apartment complex should be a good investment. Unrestrict building, and tax underutilized land.

[jimberlage]

I think the problem with getting this done in the US is the lack of public transit and the dysfunction in public schools.

If you could avoid a $700 car payment and still get to school/job/grocery store on time, a lot of Americans would.

But if you can't, and you are paying $700 anyways, why not at least use the fact that you're paying $700/month to travel anywhere and get a bigger parcel of land all to yourself? There's a big incentive to have single-family homes for rent as long as that math is true.

And if you can live in a dense area and get around OK, but paying $700/month saves you from $800/month in private school payments, then the math might still make renting SFH better even if the transit is there.

[cpburns2009]

No body is forced to have a $700 car payment. That's a luxury financing $30k+ on a brand new or nearly new car.

[jimberlage]

True (I certainly don't!) but I chose it because I had to do some research a while back and that was close to the average for Americans.

[1]: https://qz.com/average-car-payment-by-state#average-car-paym... [2]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/

[cpburns2009]

That's actually shocking. I've been in tech for 15+ years and have a good income. I've only recently purchased a new car instead of used, and with a monthly payment right by my state's average. Prior to this I never had a payment more than $250/mo.

[curious_curios]

Though with gas, maintenance, insurance on top of the car payment, that $700 is probably the floor of car ownership.

[cpburns2009]

Those will vary vastly depending on where you live. Gas and insurance are high where I live, and even though the environment is harsh on cars (winters with salt), maintenance has never been much.

[jmyeet]

This is just wrong. Western economies have largely been hollowed out from productive output in favor of hoarding land and property because there is inelastic demand and increasing prices has become a political goal.

It should be super expensive to own more than one house. This by the way is what China did where Xi Jinping famous said "houses are for living, not for speculation" [1] as he quietly popped the real estate bubble a decade ago.

Increasing house prices are just enriching the already rich and stealing from the next generation. Nothing more. Houses should depreciate in value. They should not be an asset class.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houses_are_for_living,_not_for...

[WD-42]

Investment certainly feels like a problem. The amount of completely empty homes in my area (coastal ca) is disgusting. There are entire real estate brokers that specialize specifically in investment - these people aren’t even pretending that their clients will use the house, they may never even step foot in it.

Meanwhile economic stratification continues and the other side finds it increasingly difficult to make the down payment.

[vablings]

The issue is that housing should not be an investment but due to rising labor and materials costs and also more restrictive code, they are now an investment.

[bombcar]

Housing should be an investment; you should be encouraged to invest in where you live and improve both your property and the area around you.

It should not be a good investment - it should, over time, boil down to below inflation once you take maintenance and taxes into consideration.

[em-bee]

housing should be an investment the same way that planting trees is an investment. it should not be a financial tool to make you money by selling it.

[jameshart]

Housing - more generally real estate property - can absolutely be a legitimate asset class, sustaining speculation and global investment; that is how we get capital invested in building out housing infrastructure.

But you shouldn’t have to make a leveraged loan-backed investment in a single asset class in order to afford shelter.

The problem isn’t ’housing is an investment’, it’s that people are long not on ‘housing’ but on their own single specific house. That’s a horrendously undiversified portfolio.

[FloatArtifact]

Get rid of property tax or somebody below a certain income.

[itake]

I really don't feel great how people in high density housing subsidize home ownership costs for the people in the burbs.

[FloatArtifact]

> I really don't feel great how people in high density housing subsidize home ownership costs for the people in the burbs.

That's a good point, and it's why I qualified my statement by saying under a certain income. You say high density as if it's a bad thing.

[itake]

Pros and Cons. I currently have an upstairs neighbor that plays piano at 4am.

As a high density resident, I would like to capture all of the pros of having a smaller foot print, since there is nothing insulating me from the negatives.

My neighbor in Seattle only needed 5 homes to convince the gas company to dig up our road and install a gas line down our street. There is no way the gas company had the money for that purely on the revenue they may collect from those 5 homes...

[all2]

Property tax is theft.

By applying a tax to a _thing_ that someone owns, you are saying 'actually, this thing you have is mine, and if you don't pay me for the privilege of having it, I will take it away from you'.

[jandrewrogers]

Property tax pays for maintaining the utilities and services connected to the property. If you buy land that is completely unconnected from public services, you will find that the corresponding property taxes are extremely low.

I've had annual property taxes as low as $1/acre.

[FloatArtifact]

For context, mine are close to 3 grand a year. For plot, just big enough to fit the home and a little yard in town

[itake]

Maybe I'm beating a dead horse, but who pays for the roads to houses in the suburbs and why is it the people living in apartments that don't use many roads?

[all2]

I'm not saying taxes are bad. I'm saying specifically that taxing property itself is bad. If someone 'owns' a thing, why would they pay rent to some landlord (the state)?

I acknowledge that I'm indulging in equivocation by saying 'assessing taxes from property is essentially paying rent to the state'. I assert that the equivocation is valid because the outcomes of not paying rent and not paying property taxes is the same: you get evicted.

[pandaman]

This depends on what you mean by "own". We have property rights, which are colloquially referenced as "ownership" but, by definition, these are rights and don't exist outside the state, which enforces them. So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them. If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, what are they going to do with your property if it had been truly yours?

[all2]

> So yes, your rights are given to you by the state and you don't really have any without the state enforcing them.

This ignores the Constitution and the acknowledgement of 'inalienable rights'.

   We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, [...]

In essence, the government of the United States derives its power from the governed, and otherwise wields no true power. The Constitution of this nation is written specifically limiting powers of the government, and not enumerating the rights of the people.

> If you could naively own your property then you could just tell the tax collectors to fuck off, what are they going to do with your property if it had been truly yours?

Yes. This is where the second and fourth amendments to the constitution are important. True sovereignty (not in the sense of that 'sovereign citizen' nonsense) comes with martial ability; that is, the right to take another life. Sovereignty is necessarily paired with 'power', as without it, there isn't any true ability to protect one's rights.

---

All that said, I'm appealing to an ideal when I say 'property tax is theft'.

[nisegami]

Land ownership is theft. Why should people have a right in perpetuity to the land that we all share?

[itake]

In the UK, a leaseholders get screwed if they forget to renew their lease before the 80 year mark.

The cost to develop the land needs to justify the development. If I spent $500k to build a house on the land, I would like to be able to use that house for as long as the house exists (or I sell it to re-coop the investment).

Many people are really bad at saving properly, but they will pay their mortgage. Landownership enables at least some old people to have a cushion in retirement.

[Giefo6ah]

You're mixing a house as personal property with the much broader claim of private property on land.

It is possible to protect those two uses you mentioned, and other reasonable uses of land, without at the same time spending state resources in enforcing perpetual, absolute, hereditary, exclusive titles on plots of land.

[FunHearing3443]

We may live in the same country or planet but that does not mean we inherently have any share of the land.

[marcusverus]

Motte: We all share the land!

Bailey: The state owns all land!

[BrenBarn]

Sounds fine to me! I mean, it depends on how much the person owns. But I'm fine just saying "you own too much, you don't get to own that much anymore".

[mrguyorama]

And when "Just build more" doesn't work because private builders have no incentive to build a million dirt cheap starter homes for a mediocre profit and instead focus on building a few mcmansions?

We have a lot of building going on where I am. It's all for $500k homes. Nobody builds cheap one or two bedroom homes on tiny plots of land because the target consumer is more constrained and therefore far less profitable.

So much of the problems in the US right now is that capitalism optimizes for maximum profit, not any profit. It isn't sufficient in the US business culture to run a business that merely employs a bunch of people and produces things, because in the US, the "business" exists to be an asset class for the extremely wealthy.

So if the free market has no interest in serving people with less money than god, what do we do then?

I don't know why people believe there is a regulatory impediment to building a home outside of a city core. My dad is a contractor and he serves pretty much exclusively rich (gay) tech bros who fled california to increase our cost of living here in maine because nobody else can pay what they pay. His clients that don't fit that mold all inherited a good mid sized business or are well connected families. He does this instead of the plan he had a decade ago to refurbish or build about 10 new homes on a specific plot because it's literally twice as profitable at 1/100th the effort. Instead of working himself into an early grave, he can work 25 hours a week and live as upper middle class with his $100k pickup truck that is owned by his business.