
Ask HN: What would happen if renting/landlording was made illegal? - poorrenter23
Would it make home prices reasonable?<p>The first answer will be: What about lower class who can&#x27;t afford to rent. Maybe a HUGE increase in quality&#x2F;quantity of public housing, some of which working class people pay for?
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tim333
It would make it pretty hard to get a place to live if you move and weren't
rich enough to buy.

If you want to make living cheap there are other ways. Increase supply for a
start. In London for example you are often limited by planning to 2 or 3 floor
houses where tech and finance would support 40 floor blocks if they were
allowed.

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fratlas
I agree, regulation is largely what's keeping supply down. That being said, I
think there's something wrong with purely living owning 10+ investment
properties while millennials in Syd and Toronto are being priced out of buying
a dwelling.

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tim333
Yeah it's probably not a good idea. Taxing them more might be a solution. Like
a 2%/year annual tax on properties with an exemption for your main residence.

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gaspoweredcat
would it not just cause economic chaos?

what is more baffling to me is that as people in our generation are not as
regularly living as couples leaving huge amounts of people either stuck
sharing a house with strangers or living with their parents into their 30s
that there is not a push towards more reasonably priced single bed flats and
studios etc yet every building development here is 2, 3 and 4 bed houses.

more so many of us dont need the space we used to, i live in a 2 bed terrace
myself and the vast majority of it is dead space. all i really need is
somewhere to cook, somewhere to wash and somewhere to sleep, my laptop handles
most everything else so i dont particularly need much space to store things.
id move somewhere smaller if i could but in many cases smaller places are
actually more expensive

im not sure id actually want to own a house either, it can become an anchor,
if i want to move right now all i have to do is give notice and leave, if you
own then you cant really move until you have managed to sell your current home
which may well not be as quick as you want/need.

id argue a better solution would be to allow only one loan on a property per
person, ban buy-to-let mortgages, or restrict them to being no profit, the
owner is already getting the mortgage paid for by the tenant so theyre
basically getting the house free anyway

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Piskvorrr
"It looks like you are trying to create an extremely large black market. Would
you like some help with that?"

In other words, renting would remain, supply would decrease, prices would go
up, but they would now go to criminal organizations (by definition!). Oh, and
of course that's now money that wouldn't be taxed.

In other words, this would only help established crime rings, everybody else
would be worse off.

