The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better. We all need it, and we should figure out mechanisms to make it available to all.
Practically that means paying to build and maintain housing stocks, changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing, charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people), abolish mandatory minimum parking, and upzone neighborhoods (eliminating the "single family home" neighborhoods as a zoning type.)
I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case, that we should protect the rights of people to live where they've historically lived (eg, one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years), and we should offer extensive public housing (built as many geographically distributed small apartment buildings and 5 over 1s, not giant tenements or projects.)
The inevitable outcome of housing inflation and elimination of the middle class is slums: illegal housing. People will have to live somewhere. And when that becomes unaffordable they'll just improvise.
This is not a technical problem but a policy problem. The solution is changing the policy. The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing. This problem exists in most wealthy nations. There is no shortage of space. Just of access to that space. Mostly that's completely intentional and reinforced by generations of politicians acting on the will of the people they represent to ensure that can never change.
You have NIMBYs and vested financial interests basically. Nobody wants their property devalued. So, social housing always is unpopular with the locals. Places like San Francisco where the homeless take dumps on Market Street are of course a bit extreme. But same principle. No shortage of space there.
But it's all reserved and off limits. So, the homeless are camping out there. In the middle of a city full of some of the richest NIMBYs on this planet. That's not a temporary solution. That's a slum and it is growing. Complete with people just shitting all over the place. Slums are what happens when you let things escalate.
> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity.
This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France).
You seem to imply the problem is housing regulations and NIMBY preventing new constructions, but who cares when the houses are already there. I agree with you the problem is that of policy, but i would say the policy responsible for that immense suffering is "private property", the religious belief that land should be owned and that a piece of paper should dictate whether you can sleep under a roof or not and/or have access to food/healthcare/education.
We can eradicate homelessness in under 48h: it's just that no politician cares at all about poverty from their ivory tower! Just give the police instruction not to intervene for "breaking and entering" in *vacant* housing (or even better, abolish police entirely) and we can rehouse every homeless person in the next two days. Of course it would take a few weeks to rehabilitate some of the housing unit and make them real decent, but even in the meantime old housing would be much better than no housing.
The problem is, one, that those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live (unless we’re shipping homeless people off to empty homes), and two, that homeless people aren’t the only ones in need of housing - there are far more people living in overcrowded housing, or who are unable to move out of their parents’ house, or can’t afford to live without roommates, than there are vacant homes. That’s to say nothing of the people who are overpaying for housing today, whether in rent or mortgage, reducing their overall standard of living.
There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.
> those vacant homes are not necessarily in places people live or want to live
Good point, although i would like data to back that claim. For example in France, 200k empty dwellings are in Paris alone: this does not account for vacant industrial/office space which could also be converted to housing. In all cases, *proposing* (without coercion) homeless people a house somewhere does not sound inhumane at all.
> there are far more people living in overcrowded housing
Good point, too. Although as i said i would like to see data suggesting that the current real estate market (accounting for all vacant units) can't house everyone decently.
> There’s a massive housing shortage in the United States and it’s acting like a vacuum, sucking up wealth and diverting it to landowners.
To be clear, i'm not saying we should stop building houses entirely. But as long as you allow housing to remain vacant, prices are driven by speculation not by actual supply. I believe we should both rehouse homeless people immediately and keep investing in eco-friendly collective, affordable housing.
Also, just because it's "vacant" doesn't mean it can actually be used to house homeless people. It could be undergoing renovations, or on the rental market.
10% doesn't seem entirely reasonable. Maybe bit high, but still if the vacancy is because renovation, waiting for new tenants either renters or owners. You want some slack in any market. And ofc, there is some number of second or third properties in cities like Paris. Maybe part of solution would be to ban these and AirBnB entirely. Only allow hotels and like to exist.
> Parkmerced is a neighborhood in San Francisco, California, designed by architects Leonard Schultze and Thomas Dolliver Church in the early 1940s. Parkmerced is the second-largest single-owner neighborhood of apartment blocks west of the Mississippi River after Park La Brea in Los Angeles. It was a planned neighborhood of high-rise apartment towers and low-rise garden apartments in southwestern San Francisco for middle-income tenants. It contains 3,221 residences (after sale of five blocks to San Francisco State University (SFSU)) and over 9,000 residents, and is one of four remaining privately owned large-scale garden apartment complexes in the United States.
On my block, just on my street, there are over a dozen empty garden apartments, 2- and 3-bedrooms, that have been empty since (more-or-less) the beginning of the pandemic lockdowns. Folks started leaving and no one has moved back in. Next to my house there are three empty apt.'s to the left, one to the right, and four across the street.
The owners haven't lowered rents though.
The theory is that they would rather keep the rents high and the apartments empty than lower the rents because if they do that it affects their ability to raise rents later on (rent control is the only way I afford to still live here. For better or worse my family pays less than half the market rate. However, as I am describing, the market rate is not "clearing the demand" or whatever the economic jargon would be. No one is renting at "market" rate right now.) The other problem is that rents going down affect the valuation of the property, something like that. IANAEconomist.
Anyway... There are literally hundreds of perfectly fine apartments ready to rent here in Park Merced, with the M line light rail going directly to downtown SF in about 20-30 minutes and a BART station in walking distance.
- - - -
Get this.
Some folks moved in to the place across the street on Monday, but then Wednesday the staff was here kicking them out: they were squatters. I spoke to one of the staff who told me that this was a group of people who were breaking in and squatting in units all over the property, that they had changed the locks on the house they tried to squat in, and that he had called the police, who asked if anyone was being violent (no) and then still hadn't shown up an hour later! They never did show up. The squatters moved all their stuff and their two dogs back into their vehicles and left.
This is one of the reasons rent-control is a bad idea. It is foolish to leave an unrented apartment empty, provided you can maximize your revenue when market conditions change. Only when locked into a low-rent does it make sense to keep it off the market. Not to mention it disincentives investment and improvements.
We need to make it easy to use the the housing we have, build more housing (of any kind) and subsidize those who need assistance.
Seems like rent controls are the issues. Causing markets to be inefficient. No surprises there. Get rid of them and maybe supply increases as it can better match demand and capability of renters to pay.
Markets are not a magical oracle of true value though, especially in our current, deeply distorted economy which has the rich gobbling up assets and increasing prices well beyond any livable standard, which is the point of TFA.
Isolating price controls as some kind of glaring inefficiency in an otherwise rational system sounds like ideology, not reason.
It should be manifestly clear that an unregulated market has not served us well for the issue of housing, not just for the indigent but for all non-wealthy individuals and families who spend well over 50% of their income now on rent or mortgage payments.
Attacking rent control in isolation is irrational. Yes it can create a bad situation for landlords in the absence of any other policies designed to mitigate the disaster we are in. But saying that "market efficiency" is the answer is just sticking your head in the sand.
In a world w/o rent control, how do you imagine things playing out here? If the landlord lowered rates now and got tenants (without rent control), then demand rebounds, does the landlord then increase the rent again? Wouldn't that put a lot of the new lower-rent renters back out on the street?
Anyway, the OP's point stands: there are perfectly good homes going empty. They aren't out in the woods. They are right here in SF.
Yes, terminate the contract according to local regulations. Rent again for higher price. Then those who can't afford would need to either move out to cheaper regions or find ways to pay the correct market rate.
That seems like it would make for a pretty precarious living situation for people who can't find ways to pay the correct market rate, eh?
The bottom line (no pun intended) is that the corporation that owns Park Merced has (presumably) done the math and they expect to make more money by keeping the apartments empty and eating the losses now (and paying the overhead of evicting gangs of squatters) so they can rent them later at the "correct" market rate (a pretty likely speculation, I'll grant them) than by renting them at a market rate that fills them up again now and getting locked in to rent control at the new, lower rates later on.
So, in other words, the poor people can't live there because someday soon the rich people will almost certainly want to live there again.
What you suggest would instead let the poor people stay in the apartments until the rich people wanted back in, so I guess that's an improvement?
But I don't follow how getting rid of rent control would incentivize supply increases?
> But I don't follow how getting rid of rent control would incentivize supply increases?
Leaving units empty, or locked into lower-than-market rates are going to reduce the average profitability of investments. Investment in new units is in part a function of how profitable they will be sell, or to rent out.
But honestly the incentive for bay area real-estate is there, what really is needed is the ability to build with fewer encumbrances.
> That seems like it would make for a pretty precarious living situation for people who can't find ways to pay the correct market rate, eh?
Yes, this is generally referred to as gentrification. But, renting, even to poorer people, nevertheless is still usually profitable, albeit with more risk requiring a larger portfolio.
"This is true but not in the way that you mean. As you said there is no shortage of space. But it's important to point out that on a global scale there is no housing shortage either. Vacant dwellings outnumber homeless people by far in most industrialized countries where homelessness is rampant (for example: 3 million empty dwellings here in France)."
I always wonder about public transportation. It never really took off in the US, but it IS way more efficient. If we had very fast subways / trains, we could theoretically stretch housing way out away from the city. Then there is more equal opportunity for jobs / attending universities without living on campus.
I know this is a bit off topic, but it always seems to me like having QUALITY public transportation is efficient, but I can't quite defend it.
Not even to the exclusion of cars. For example I know a lot of workers who drive their car to the subway station in Toronto (and other cities) and then spare themselves the traffic and gas cost of sitting on the highway for 2 hours. And this is the ONLY solution for a big city, since most can't afford to live by the jobs/colleges (even suburban single-bathroom costs are over a million 40 mins out from downtown).
EDIT: I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power. Makes their real estate cheaper (removes exclusivity of quick access to offices / educational facilities) and makes the downtown areas accessible to people who can't live there.
The housing away from the city still needs to be pretty dense, otherwise you're building a ton of infrastructure to transport few people (or people need to drive / take the bus to the train station which isn't the end of the world).
> I can see residents downtown paying the most taxes being against it though - all it does for them in personal terms is erode their power.
It could also help subsidize their taxes to some extent since commuters are occupying offices and spending money in the city without occupying housing. Depends how things are set up. I don't think the people living in Manhattan resent people commuting from Jersey or Queens for work.
It sounds incredibly naive to imagine that stopping enforcement of breaking and entering will suddenly give everyone a place to stay. It might work for a few minutes or a few weeks, but I guarantee that the freeloaders won't fix the window or door jamb that they break. Why should they? They have no pride of ownership.
I spent some time in the Soviet Union before the wall fell. It sucked. Idealistic ideas like this destroy housing for everyone.
The saying used to be that many think they are Temporarily Embarrassed Millionaires, but I think at this point it's fair to say that many people think they are middle class when in fact, the middle class has been swept from underneath them and they are now more or less comfortably-poor. Public services, housing affordability, food availability, product quality, fair pay and benefits. Previously middle class people are struggling to mesh it all together into a middle-class life, the money isn't there and the availability and quality of products and services isn't there either.
I think that in order to protect it's ability to offer a first world living by it's communities, the US needs to fatten up it's middle class with better wages. There could be a number of ways to do that, but the basic goal is to get more money into the hands of the average American so they can spend it in the community and make the whole country better.
You should read about inflation. Efforts to fatten up the middle class with free giveaways to certain voting blocks has and will continue to spur inflation and make those same voters ever less wealthy. But voters are myopic, so they’ll vote for free money every time. Eventually you get Venezuela.
A better way would be to protect people by not making policy decisions that reward bad behavior and punish those who avoid debt and save. Rewarding terrible behavior may get you elected but it’s bad for society. Like giving candy to pacify a cranky baby.
But such opinions have become verboten now, and actually censored.
I wasn't suggesting a handout though I can see how that's easy to read. I don't have the answers on how to achieve it, but policy changes to shift more people up the class chain rather than pushing them down is what I was thinking. Raising minimum wage, reducing service burdens on the individual, reducing the cost of housing, adjusting taxes perhaps. Generally freeing up money to be available and spent in the community and not caught up in financial instruments and real estate.
> The current policy is to drive up housing prices by creating completely artificial scarcity. All the land is owned and earmarked. Just not for housing.
That's not the problem either, the scarcity is (with the exception of foreign - i.e. Chinese and Russian - money laundering) natural and not artificial. The true problem is that following mechanization in agriculture many people emigrated from rural areas, resulting in a lack of infrastructure because it was unsustainably expensive for the low population density - particularly high speed internet and accessible (=walkable or within reach with a bicycle) basic infrastructure such as a grocery store, a GP and pharmacy and schools. That lack drives more people away, it's a vicious cycle that will need enormous amounts of money to break through.
If you want to work a modern service-oriented job or even a manufacturing/industry type job, you have to move to an urban or suburban area, and even if you have money and want to provide gainful employment you simply can't because there is no high-speed Internet for your business.
What needs to be done is that the government aggressively invests into "flyover" states to provide perspectives for the people living there and considering moving to a better place - but unfortunately I don't see that happening, not in the US and not in Europe where we have similar problems.
There's nothing natural about zoning restrictions. Those are designed to keep people out. Especially working class people. They get to live very far away from where their services are needed in some extreme cases.
Fix the policy and house prices will drop. That creates a new problem of course for those who then end up with a Mortage that is under water. That's the real reason the policy does not get fixed.
Zoning restrictions make sense - without them, rabid capitalism takes over, and the only thing that matters is extracting the maximum profit out of any given piece of land. That in turn means no green anymore, ugly AF buildings (especially high-rises), a severe issue with traffic because public transport usually isn't even in the picture and the existing roads can't take up the traffic resulting from the newer density, and as a result of that a whole ugly neighborhood with no quality of life for the inmates. If you want an example just how ugly a city can turn out, just visit Frankfurt.
Thanks but no thanks. I'd rather like if people can move towards rural areas where possible.
> while house prices went crazy roughly after 2000.
It began earlier, the problem (why the situation in urban areas exploded) was that after ~2000-2005 it simply became apparent that the future was the Internet and there was no way government or much less the private companies would ever put up the money to provide actual high speed Internet to rural areas - and so all the new "digital" companies set up shop in urban areas, and people flocked to where the new jobs were.
Had the US government taken care to make sure that the companies not pocket literal billions of funds without providing the service that the government funded [1] you would not be in the mess you are now.
more people need to move to cities, not more sprawl. there are lots of cities where NIMBY/ YIMBY stuff isnt an issue but people on HN dont want to live in those places.
I think a real issue is the cost of infrastructure and network effects.
Essentially, a big corporation could buy cheap rural land close to a big city, develop a small city there and reap the "overpricing" benefits.
But it's very expensive to build the basic infra. And even more expensive to convince enough people to move there and create minimum network effects for it to become a "real" community and livable space.
Nobody "decided" that housing is a market. If something can be bought and sold, then this is inherently a market.
Yes, we can and should regulate markets, and we probably all agree that the purpose of the housing is for people to have a roof over their head, as opposed to use housing as an (speculative) investment market. This can easily be regulated via taxes (on ownership and transactions), but it comes with a caveat: if something is over-regulated to benefit the user, then there is less incentive for investor/landlord to build housing, which makes housing scarcer and drives prices up.
I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market? I buy sewer and garbage service likewise.
There are some commodities we choose to operate as natural monopolies because competition and profit seeking leads to bad outcomes for society. My argument is fundamentally that housing is the same.
No, not at all. We don’t choose natural monopolies. We recognize them. The whole point is they are naturally occurring whether we want them or not. Housing shares nothing in common with the other services you mention which are anything but commodities!
The natural monopoly of the electrical company isn’t electricity, it’s distribution. Power is a commodity, and delivery is anything but.
Your argument that housing is the same is not well informed.
There is no reason we have to pay for anything. Money is not a natural construct and is a leaky abstraction. Our ancestors built housing long before currency was even invented.
Public services are not a "natural monopoly". They are a deliberate political choice (that was paid in blood by the lower classes, see also Haymarket Affair for example). We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).
> There is no reason we have to pay for anything. Money is not a natural construct and is a leaky abstraction. Our ancestors built housing long before currency was even invented.
As you note, there are other ways to pay for things than money. Whether it's "paid in blood" or other barter system, there is always a cost to pay.
> We could very easily make housing free for all, or just affordable (see also HLM program in France).
Would love to hear your very easy solutions. Affordability is relative. If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing) the only way to increase affordability in real terms is to shift the supply curve. This shift is not free, and somebody has to pay for it. This is where the "omg it's so easy" arguments typically fall apart.
> Whether it's "paid in blood" or other barter system, there is always a cost to pay.
I meant the social rights/protections had to be paid in blood. But nothing in itself requires payment. We just happen to live in a society which commoditizes everything. If everyone worked some field they're passionate about (and people are passionate about many things) and we evenly shared the work for undesirable jobs (eg. cleaning) we could have everything for free.
> If you have more demand than supply (as we do with housing)
This is highly uninformed. In many countries around the planet, empty dwellings easily outnumber homeless people so we don't need to build anything at all to house everyone. Moreover, if we just stopped tearing down housing and started renovating them, that's also much less work/resources. Finally, if you really want/need more housing, a government run program (such as the HLM i mentioned before) shows you can build affordable housing for 10-30k€/appartment and rent them for a final user cost (after government help for housing) of under 100€/month.
It's a shame like all public services across France the HLM system is being corrupted and coopted into money-making machine. The buildings in popular neighborhoods go unmaintained while administrators pocket all the money, and the little that's left goes into developing higher-classes "HLM" housing which we popular classes can't afford.
> If everyone worked ... we could have everything for free.
Nothing is free. As you say yourself, everything requires work. This is just physics.
> This is highly uninformed.
Ok sure, I'll bite. Your understanding of supply and demand is extremely naive. An empty dwelling does not mean excess supply. If I own two houses, it's because I want two houses. It's not because we have too many houses. In fact, hoarding is a classic sign that we don't have enough of something.
I think you ought to step back and understand why the things you mention exist. You will find out more by doing that than you will shouting into the void on HN. If it were as easy as you proclaim, we would be doing it. The world is not stupid.
The point is that 1 KWh is 1KWh, but your home on the top floor of Millennium Tower is not equivalent to my home across from the 680 overpass. Housing is not a commodity like electricity, it's not fungible.
Is anyone in this thread proposing this kind of system? This is kind of an insane strawman.
You can have a regulated market that still has prices. OP only proposed incentives to build and disincentives to hoard. Homes would still have prices, there would just be less scarcity.
OP is claiming that housing is a commodity. If treated as a commodity, all houses would be priced the same. Then the reality sets in and you have to deal with the fact that some houses are more desirable than others, so you need to distribute them somehow without changing the price.
I suppose, in the same way negative interest rates are just interest rates with extra steps.
Start from a position of "everyone gets a home" and then ask "in that case, how do we make sure folks who end up in less desirable homes are compensated?"
I suppose you could frame it in the language of prices, but in this case the price is paid to the tenant.
Indeed, it would be a tragedy if someone’s taxpayer-provided housing was insufficiently desirable that we must create a bureau to determine how much additional largess they should receive. That system seems likely to end well.
Ah hmm, that's interesting. How have lotteries for highly desired goods worked out in other centrally planned regimes? Did we find a pretty broad socioeconomic distribution among dacha owners in the USSR?
That’s exactly what Singapore does with new public housing - it’s a lottery.
And now they are “clawing back” future price appreciation because it’s literally like winning the lottery if you get a place in a prime location as public housing is heavily subsidized.
If you get selected for a prime area apartment it’s a huge financial win 5 years down the road when you sell at market prices.
And oh yes, Singaporeans game the hell out of the system. From carefully falling under household income limits, to bidding on a new public housing unit despite owning one now.
The government is constantly trying to keep up with all the new incentives each new rule creates.
This is a fair question, and one I'm not entirely satisfied that I have the answer for. Ideally, in my mind, I wouldn't own my home but I'd also be on the hook for maintenance and upkeep. But I recognize this does not meet everyone's needs and needs more thought.
I would also hope that we would tend to build fewer mansions in favor of more multi family complexes, cohousing, coops, and small community oriented housing on the beach.
You know this kind of leads towards communism... Which I think is the key problem with any kind of shared equality by force system, it will work nicely so long as no one running things decides they don't want it to, then it works really poorly.
Looking at any single step on a path and rejecting it because the extreme end of the path isn't desirable is a quick way to never make any progress.
We can improve things, we can do social good, and never slide to authoritarianism. (I assume you are talking about authoritarian communism vs, eg, council communism.)
Of course we can, but doing it at a society scale is very difficult and you have to be vary careful about who is on charge - or ends up with most influence - as history has consistently shown.
I think it's easy (well reasonably) to do if resources are plentiful, but what do you do if there are more people than resources available to support them, who starts making the hard choices?
You're confusing want and need though. You might not like to live in any house, and you might need to be roughly geographically located to do work, but for the most part any house that fits your family is interchangable.
When you take the other things, like job and where you want to send your kids to school it becomes a hell of a lot more fungible.
Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.
> Given that commoditization is a scale, I would say it could be toward that end of the spectrum if we wanted it to be.
Commoditization is only a scale inasmuch as the underlying goods are fungible. Corn is a commodity because nobody cares about differences between individual kernels, but if some process came around that only worked with super-specific kernels, then you'd be reducing the commoditization of corn.
I can, however, think of nothing that would make housing even close to fungible. Views, neighborhoods, neighbors, noise, history, location -- the list of things which are entirely unique per property is higher than basically any other market I can think of.
Those are things you're attaching because of privilege though. One visit to China will give you a view of just how much housing can be commodtized. Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.
If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.
Treating something as if it's a commodity does not make it a commodity. Treating two things as if they're equivalent does not make them equivalent.
You might say "your right to choose between houses is a privilege", but literally every culture in the world is going to observe differences between two houses, regardless of how they're allocated.
Even considering buildings where every unit has an identical layout, and all residents have access to the exact same amenities, one unit might be closer to the elevator and one unit might be closer to the garbage chute. These are fundamental differences between these units which make them not interchangeable.
> Endless rows of apartment buildings, each identical, supplying everything you could need.
"Providing everything you could need" is not how we define commodities. Fungibility is how we define commodities. One can argue that we should just be thankful with whatever home we get, but trying to act as if they're equivalent is just wrong.
I’ve been to Asia that’s not true at all. Higher floors are more valuable. Views are more valuable. And not even to mention fung shui and the direction doors open.
> If you're without a home, one house is very much like another. It's only once you have money and ambition that you might want a better view, better schools.
Particularly if you're poor, location matters a lot.
The very rich will build a mansion in a beautiful but inaccessible area and commute to work by helicopter. The merely rich have the nice cars to get to work. But the poor have no car so need to be either very close or within public transport (mostly nonexistent in the US) to get to that job.
Eh I see your point but I disagree. Look for housing in a highly competitive city, and soon enough you stop caring about geographical specifics and instead look for some combination of useful attributes. In practice, that's fungibility.
This whole thread is filled with similarly absurd statements like this one. That is not “fungibility” at all, not in practice, not in the slightest.
Fungibility is the absolute incontrovertible likeness of two separate units to the point where they are entirely interchangeable across all parties in the economy.
US dollar bills are fungible. Even BTC are not entirely fungible anymore. Houses are not even remotely fungible.
Just because you're willing to accept a wide range of houses does not make them fungible. Each house is unique and each home buyer has different priorities.
That's why houses a priced individually. When you go to the grocery store, they don't individually price each cob of corn. There might be two different buckets with a differentiator (organic vs non organic), but within the bucket each cob is fungible. It doesn't matter which one you grab.
I think gasoline or diesel is a commodity because for the most part a gallon of gasoline is a gallon of gasoline whether you buy it at Shell or at Costco. I mean Shell will probably try to say they have better detergents or whatever but for the most part they are the same.
Similarly, one unit of electricity from solar is the same as a unit of electricity because a kilowatt hour is a kilowatt hour. You could say well my unit of electricity is better because Elon Musk sold it but for the most part they do the same thing.
Housing is not that very interchangeable. For example, in the Denver area in Colorado apparently the Cherry Creek area commands a higher sticker price because of the school district.
Some homes are just more desirable than others. For me, I desire:
* Excellent public transit
* Excellent symmetric high speed fiber optic Internet connection to the home
* Costco or Sam's Club within half an hour or inexpensive grocery stores within walkable distance
And there are unspoken assumptions like somewhere an ambulance can get to me in time if I am dying and take me to a hospital so good roads and proximity to a good hospital.
I'll try and argue the point without the useless pejoratives in a companion comment.
Those payments are the equivalent of rent in the housing market. The thing that isn't a market and isn't being bought and sold is the right to provide those services, it's the power grid and generation plants, or the garbage infrastructure. The monopoly on those is what is anti-market and is the equivalent of not being able to buy and sell property.
I'm not making a political point there, I happen to thing some thing are natural monopolies and that markets have their limit. Housing is a complex issue in this respect. Flats in big city blocks are much like a commodity and limited urban building space naturally reduces competition, while nice houses in the suburbs or country are very much a market with lots of options suiting different needs.
> I buy electricity from a monopoly provider in my area, run the government. Is that a market?
It's not a market for you, but it is to your provider. And it naturally impacts the cost that's layed upon you, whether directly through electricity bills or through taxes if it's subsidised.
"then there is less incentive for investor/landlord to build housing, which makes housing scarcer and drives prices up."
This doesn't ring true, it just moves the incentive to people to build housing to live in them selves, and with less competition in the market it would drive prices down.
A more practical solution is housing coops like the BRF system in Sweden. Individual landlordism is mostly banned (there are some company rentals though) - you buy the place you live in, and there are restrictions on renting it out (no more than 2 years in a row, etc.).
It's helped a lot here.
I don't think that social housing is a good solution. It's a complete disaster here in Sweden, with 12+ year waiting times, and massive inequality between those who have those rent-fixed privileged first hand contracts and those stuck in the unregulated wild west of second hand renting. Often resulting in the working poor effectively subsidising wealthier, older people to keep their very cheap flats in the city centre, etc.
To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus:
Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible
Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple
In the BRF system, you literally do not "buy the place you live in", you instead buy the right to live there. The actual ownership of the property is with the BRF.
The word is "bostadsrättsförening" [1] which roughly translates to "living rights association" or something (Wikipedia uses "housing cooperative" so I guess that's the best).
The word "förening" is hard to translate, the closest seems to be "voluntary association" [1], it is a formal collection of people with some common purpose (like managing a house). There are legally various types with varying requirements, and so on.
Sweden doesn't have social housing. What you are discussing is called rent control and means that landlords can't decide rents for their properties by themselves. Without rent control you'd get even more segregated cities as many areas would become too expensive for most to live. Landlords and their lobby organizations want rent control abolished though because doubled rents would greatly increase their profits.
What of people who can’t or don’t want to afford to buy and maintain a property? Several times in my life I benefited from renting a room, apartment, or house (in college, just after college, after a breakup/move out, moving to a new city with an unstable job).
It would have been a massive financial burden and personal inconvenience if I had to buy/sell every one of those times.
The probability of an average person being able to afford to live in a home in a "nice area" is much higher in Sweden and other countries with rent control than in countries without. There is no shortage of homes, there is a shortage of homes that people can afford.
Has it really helped? I remember talking to a young Swede a while ago, just a few years out of college. He said he bought a flat in Stockholm pretty much as soon as he had a job, and that the price appreciation since has almost outstripped his salary.
Yeah, but my brother lives in Barcelona - and there it's even worse, on lower salaries.
We ended up paying the same price for relatively similar flats, but in BCN that's much harder to achieve, and they are older and need renovation - and there are thousands of AirBnB slumlords buying up everything.
So yeah, the price increases have been a problem (and hit me badly combined with the interest rate increases) but it's still better than most of Western Europe.
Not trying to be too skeptical, but that doesn't exactly sound like it's working too well. I remember charts by the ECB as showing Sweden with the most overpriced real estate in the EU. It might look ok in comparison to Barcelona, but that one's probably only second to Venice as the world's tourism hot spot and has an extreme concentration of AirBnBs, not exactly representative of Western Europe in general.
Heavy taxation on NPD (non-primary domicile) housing solves this by itself. It's just that convincing people this is in their best interest will take a lot of effort - not to mention that there's a fairly ubiquitous problem of local politicians being in the pockets of property developers in the areas where these problems are at their worst.
People still believe that their home is a good investment, without any thought given to who's going to buy it from them later or where that person will be getting the financing.
I really think most of the solution is in the first part of your plan.
There’s no need to micromanage tenant-landlord relationships or setup governmental panels on who historically deserves to live where, if the government can just make sure there is an oversupply of decent housing at all affordability levels.
The rest really takes care of itself at that point.
Hundred percent. I have a personal ethos that believes profit from rent is amoral, but we could probably address housing concerns without meeting my personal ethics standards, which I freely admit are more extreme than most.
“profit from rent is amoral”. Care to elaborate on this? Does this ethical standard also extend to other human needs as well? For instance should farmers not be able to profit from providing food?
I feel like there's a difference between making a sustainable profit and squeezing every bit out of a trade or contract. I'm not as idealistic as GP, but think we should aim at improving things.
Markets and competition work really well on frontiers in a situation where basic things are covered, because like this more people can participate freely.
There are many things that we have figured out to a pretty high degree and that benefit from collaboration and (very) long term thinking. I think housing, transport, basic medicine/treatment and perhaps to some degree food and water belong to that category. You can always have the luxury/explorative version on top with markets and that model works pretty well where it is applied.
To contrast, if your under such financial stress so you constantly worry whether some big bill is coming your way or you cannot even afford the very basics, then your stuck in a perpetual loop. Landlords, collectors and even police come knocking. It takes a lot of courage, discipline and enough luck and stamina to get out of this. In my opinion this is a a monumental task and effort _wasted_ on a inefficient and short sighted system of power relations.
A farmer and a landlord are different things. My family are farmers, I've been a landlord.
(FWIW, before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made from them plus appreciation.)
The labor that the farmer puts in should absolutely be rewarded. But the labor of a farmer is absolutely nothing like a landlord who makes money purely because they had enough money to buy housing. Plenty of landlords hire property management firms, and do little to no labor at all, but still make a profit.
That modality doesn't exist in farming and food the same way it does in housing today.
Why should labor be rewarded but not capital? Seems like an arbitrary distinction. Does your family allow anyone to farm and extract value from their land? No? Then they're no different than a landlord.
People mischaracterize the ease in which landlords make money. Take the past two years and eviction moratoriums for example. Landlords in the United States in many areas had to allow tenants to rent without being able to remove them for non-payment.
Landlords inherently have to be well capitalized in order to properly maintain the house as most individuals are not experts in all trades.
>before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I paid back every renter every penny of profit I made
I wouldn't have called you a hypocrite even if you didn't pay back anything. Living in the real world™ doesn't mean you can't criticise it. If we can't challenge things we take part in, how do we improve anything?
> purely because they had enough money to buy housing
The nominal assumption is that they must have earned that by providing someone with something of value to them. The money they receive is a formal/cultural recognition of their indebtedness -- that they have provided something useful but have not receive anything of material value in return. Money is a way of claiming something useful in return for something they had provided, but separated in time and place.
Of course this is the theoretical and intended mechanism. It does get subverted in many ways when one earns money without providing anyone with anything materially useful. Inheritance can be interpreted as one such. Although it can be interpreted charitably too -- dont compensate me for the goods and services I provided , I am dead, compensate Saul instead.
This really is wrong. There's so many contracts the landlord has to keep up with, and pay, the council on various cases like rates, water, upkeep of lawns or council will and bill, keeping up with changing building codes and rules such a fire alarms which update every x years, then insurances, then maintenance of the house structure, the plumbing, electrical .. as well as that the 'money' represents their savings from other work they did. It's serious job and you're not seeing the reality of it if you think the landlord does nothing but profit. It's a bloody business, with work, responsibilities and risks, and if everything goes well the expectation of a profit but not the guarantee. It's also a business that provides significant real value to people - a modern house has so many features and meets so many beauracratic and safety rules beyond just a roof over your head.
Living in a teepee is looking more attractive by the day haha.
This is just handwaving voodo - we expect better on hackernews.
Reality is landlords are in all different situations, some have spare money above costs of interest, rates, insurances, rental agent fees, etc etc and can use that to pay for maintenance. Many are putting in their own money to pay for maintenance, the same way they put in their own money to afford the deposit and purchase costs.
And when there's a problem a landlord can't just ring the first inflate-a-quote contractor and open up the unlimited checkbook you seem to be ascribing to them, they will be bankrupt very quickly if they did. Instead, they have to assess the issue, try to find a economical solution, get multiple quote and spend time finding a contractor who can do it reasonably well the first time at an affordable cost. That is not the same work as a farmer, but it sure is work. If it's not done the house quickly becomes unlivable with a broken toilet or whatever and being unlivable is also unrentable and produces no value to anyone. It's work, and it's important to keep the house functioning.
Really as you seem to think landlords do nothing but profit, similar to gnomes and underpants, perhaps you should give it a try yourself. If nothing else it will be quite a learning opportunity!
Yes, they use the money in order to maintain the house. Furthermore owner-occupancy is a thing, where the landlord does some maintenance themselves.
However no matter what, no landlord can maintain all aspects of the house alone. You think a single person can be a master of all trades and have all equipment on hand all of the time in an apartment, for instance?
Why does it even matter if someone pays others to maintain the house? Do you think there are people who build modern houses alone with no machinery?
Because homes are overpriced, because they're treated as capital instead of a durable good & because all financial / building policy advantages existing homeowners
> There’s no need to micromanage tenant-landlord relationships or setup governmental panels on who historically deserves to live where, if the government can just make sure there is an oversupply of decent housing at all affordability levels.
The problem is, that is outright impossible in urban areas where almost all space is already built out, not to mention it is immensely wasteful (8% of all CO2 emissions is caused by the manufacturing of concrete!).
Governments should rather look into making rural areas livable again (by subsidizing basic infrastructure such as internet, grocery stores, doctors and public transport).
Having had lived in urban areas all my life, American urban cities are criminally under built. There is sooo much room for growth (note room doesn’t mean land, it means airspace).
If you have a pastoralist dream, feel free to build rural housing units. But for the government to spread out the country and then try to connect it using extractive transportation technologies (gas, batteries etc) just seems like roundabout / inefficient way to achieve the same goal.
>Governments should rather look into making rural areas livable again (by subsidizing basic infrastructure such as internet, grocery stores, doctors and public transport).
And schools, churches, youth soccer leagues, parks, and playgrounds
I support government-owned housing at a variety of sizes and configurations, but I don’t want government involved in providing luxury housing. Government studios, 1BRs, 2/1s, 3/2s, 4/2.5s, and 5/3s for basic housing needs for singles and families? Absolutely.
Government 10 bedroom, 9000 sqft seaside mansions? Not just no, but hell no!
I agree of course, but I'm not sure what your point is, other than to be a little bit distracting. It seems pretty reasonable for a government to subsidize modest multi-family homes without subsidizing mansions.
Right, the government should make sure housing is available at all levels. Presumably it’ll have to do very little to make sure luxury housing is available.
If there’s ready supply at the low and middle end of affordable for all family sizes up to ~12, the program will have succeeded in my book. I would not want so much a single taxpayer dollar go to “improve” the situation from that baseline to one where luxury housing was also readily available.
Isn't the problem that housing isn't more of a market?
In an actual market, margins are competed away and prices drop over time, there's elasticity in supply and demand, and people don't view their 15-year old cars or whatever as "investments", they trade them up for a newer model and pass down the older stuff to people who can't afford them as much.
In housing, we artificially constrain supply with zoning laws and building codes, and we stimulate demand with subsidized mortgages and rent control laws. It's pretty much the opposite of what you want to do if you want there to be more affordable housing.
This is how I view it as well. And there'd be a analogous method for getting medical costs lower in America by increasing competition (within reason, I understand why no one wants to go back to the days of snake oil remedies in an unregulated free for all).
Also odd is how these HN threads on housing often devolve into redesigning a socialist utopia from scratch in America, as if such a radical revolution has any chance, when Californians can't even organize enough to get Prop 13 repealed. Removing red tape and zoning to get to a more efficient market is much more achievable.
> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better
Housing is already barely a market. An actual market would be much better.
We artificially restrict the construction of new housing supply by policy and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket.
The same thing is happening in medicine: we artificially constrain the training of new MDs and then act all surprised when demand exceeds supply and prices skyrocket.
Then people come out of the woodwork with "oh look markets aren't working!" -- but in fact the markets are working exactly as designed: those with control over the supply are acting to constrain the supply, in the process enriching themselves at the expense of all others. But instead of recognizing this fact, we look for other reasons. Sure, there are other reasons and interactions, too, but the primary drivers are supply constraints!
Imagine if we explicitly forbade the construction of new grocery stores, forced farms not to use modern agricultural techniques, causing reduced yield, and then bought up a bunch of farmland just to take it out of commission. What would happen? Food prices would, obviously, skyrocket! That's exactly what we're doing with housing.
Your proposed solutions probably won't hurt, but aside from making it easier to build housing, they're noise. In particular:
> upzone neighborhoods
This is the only one that matters -- and it needs to come with other changes too, including construction "by right", that is, without needing to go through a 3-year process of fighting with neighbors who will try whatever they can to prevent new construction because they've been convinced it will destroy their neighborhood and/or property values.
> changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing
We don't need to change tax incentives to get developers to build more housing, we just need to stop preventing them from building more housing. Developers are not sitting around waiting for incentives, they're actively being denied the ability to build. Let's fix that.
I can't imagine physical housing not being a market. Even in a post scarcity star trek world someone gets the penthouse, someone gets the house on the hill with a view, someone gets the beach front property, someone gets the house in a convenient location or close to public transportation. How would that ever not be decided by a market? Even without money it would end up as a market of "merit" or policial capital
> The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market, the better.
How do you or we decide it's not a market?
If people are paying money for housing, it's a market. And it's not just money, but the largest lifetime expense by an order of magnitude and more.
> I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case
That's already the case, at least in many places (I know not all). If you take it too far the result is no landlords, thus no rentals. Perhaps that's ok if everyone wants to buy, but if there is anyone who wants to rent, it's useful to have rentals.
The problem in almost every country with out of control house prices is low interest rates since the dot com crash.
That's where everything went wrong. At 0-1% interest you can get insane mortgages for 90-95% of the value of the property, pushing the price up to where people spend every last cent they can on mortgages, but at $xxxx per month you can easily afford hundreds of thousands of dollars in mortgages.
Raise interest rates (happening), go into recession, crash the market, stop people getting mortgages, house prices will drop insanely fast and hard.
Of course no government wants to do this because it will panic the home owning class. Well - you have to chose at this point. Make it impossible for young people to buy a home, or piss off homeowners.
Rental units on their own don't matter from a market perspective. There is some sentimental value in owning your own house but apart from that, costs have to be equal or demand shifts until they are.
Private equity can only make a profit if they corner the market and hold back units until prices massively increase.
This is possible to some extend but at its core it is most likely illegal because it requires collusion or a monopoly. So if that's an option, then there is a bigger problem than just housing prices.
But even in an entirely corrupt market, private equity cannot beat the market after Covid. Home office has become fully acceptable so huge fractions of the population are not bound to a specific city. People are free to choose where they live. There will be some municipalities that offer an abundance of housing so that prices will stay down.
Then, once people move there, companies will be founded there or move there, too. Wages will be lower because costs are lower, which will be a huge problem for the companies that didn't move.
So if the established municipalities allow the private equity companies to profit, they risk their own demise.
However, this depends on the willingness of the people to move. It is also contradicted by silicon valley being able to maintain its large housing prices.
My guess is that prices will rise for a while but some Asian city will crack the code and offer cheap housing despite being a cultural center which would make it the technological capital of the world.
I don’t have any proof of this but I strongly believe private equity, especially the big ones were the biggest beneficiaries of QE and they were closest to access the money.
If we are talking about a recession caused by fed tightening, PE won’t have any money. Especially as higher interest rates will mean they also can’t borrow lots to finance purchases or anything
Isn’t there tension between what I’m assuming is land-value tax to push developers to create more housing and keeping people in the home they’ve lived in for 20 years? That home has probably become inefficient from a public value standpoint and would better contribute if it was a multi-unit dwelling. I’m with you that people should be able to continue to afford to live in the same neighborhood even (with a shift in the type of building most likely), but attempting to protect their exact house just creates the equivalent of a public subsidy to exempt them from keeping pace with local land efficiency demands.
There is huge tension. We've forced ourselves into a situation where it is difficult to fix things because housing is such a huge portion of many people's wealth. Policies that improve things for the poor and lower middle class in meaningful ways will crush the upper middle class, who have a lot of local political influence because they've got enough money to have free time but there are still a lot of them. Somebody with a mortgage 4x their gross annual income is going to fight hard to prevent their house from tanking in price, even if that means promoting anti-social policies.
More generally, there’s tension between people who prefer nothing to change and those who want to allow change.
If you like your house and your neighborhood, you probably don’t want demolitions and construction, even if it’s not your house. It’s noisy, it brings uncertainty, and maybe when your neighborhood won’t be the same after buildings get replaced. Maybe the new buildings are too ugly or the residents undesirable or the infrastructure unable to keep up. Or maybe none of those are true but you personally are anxious from the thought of change so you don’t want to risk it.
In any case, the no-change crowd holds all the power except when those pursuing change have a lot of money. This further reinforces negative impressions of what it means to allow change in your neighborhood.
Yes! And thank you for approaching this with a thoughtful question.
One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built.
Alternatively, buy units from people who are leaving or who have passed away.
We do need to knock down some houses to build more housing, but we can do it in a way that is minimally disruptive.
>One solution to this would be to guarantee a unit in any multi family or apartment building to the current resident, and pay for their relocation while the new unit is being built.
You are just increasing the cost of the building's rent with this stuff. You'll have a few birthright units and everything else will be luxury to cover costs. This is the same problem we currently have with affordable units, huge missing middle.
The government would pay to do it. Or there would be taxes or rents paid to developers in accordance to the number of people housed x the quality of the housing. Or people like me would rent units because housing is important, and rent their space at cost.
We can choose to pay for housing for everyone, we just have to adjust the formulas we use to decide who benefits.
We already have voters deciding how much housing gets built. The result is we have not enough of it.
We’ve also seen, during this pandemic, what happens to rental prices when landlords are powerless over tenants. They go up. And landlords discriminate harder against tenants who look like they’ll be bad tenants if they can’t easily evict.
And just as my ability to get sued is what allows me to enter contracts, my ability to get evicted is what lets me pay cheap rent.
Today, if I cannot pay, I get no housing. Taxes allow us, as a community, to decide that we should all chip in a little bit extra (commensurate to our means) to make sure everyone has a roof over their heads.
Also, government operated facilities do not have a profit motive, so there's less incentive to maximize the cost of housing.
>Also, government operated facilities do not have a profit motive,
Great, so the shit-show we have now, except without any incentive to efficiently spend. Sure that will go over swimmingly. Everyone knows that government construction projects are known for coming on-time and on-budget, and for the best value.
Its not like private sector is free from overspending and funds misallocation - most of money that flows in there is still controller by the jerks on top that are stroking their ego by investing in buzzwords. The invisible hand of market is myth as much as santa is.
The US market is far from the invisible hand. There is a massive hand with a club attached called the Federal Reserve, which has artificially held down interest rates resulting in a major manipulation of the housing market.
Additionally, there are numerous governmental restrictions on minimum square footage, sometimes onerous building codes, impact fees, and zoning restrictions to name a few.
Yes, there are many artificial constructs that prevent true free market, but I still do not believe that capital accumulation by capital overs is not an property of this idealistic system. Do You have any real example of invisible hand working (by which I mean not ending with the top dogs holding all the bones) ?
You acknowledge the imperfection of the private sector, including wasteful spending. Now imagine that except with the power to waste even more money by sending an IRS agent to take your money at gunpoint and without being constrained by (at least if 'turtledove' word to be take) a ' profit motive'.
Profit motive is so primitive and so one dimensional constrained and yet it somehow mesmerized so many thinkers that we build build "golden idols" in praise of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charging_Bull).
I do not believe that this is it - there have to be other better constrains combinations. It just that there is so much vested interest in current system that no one will dare to contest it enough to really try something different.
The beautiful thing about art is you can interpret it however you want. You interpret it as a "golden idol" of the profit motive. I could interpret it as an angry bull sick of the ways of capitalism; a bull that wants to inspire free health care for all.
I marely tried to defend our ability (as humans) to create more complex systems that works. I do not believe that free makrets are the end game. The obvious inefficiency of public sector does not make capitalism the ultimate answer.
The invisible hand is just the profit motive. Most people are indeed incentivized by (not solely) by money and profit.
The advantage of a market in this context is two-fold 1) Private-losses, mispent investments should have the investors bear the cost of losses. Granted, we often bail out investors or banks, but that isn't a market phenomena, it is a political one. 2) Where there is more profit to be had (high prices) there is more incentive for more investment.
Now, one could argue that a market system is more likely to be corrupted such that the connected get bailed out or other advantages. But if you don't trust the political system to regulate the market, why would you expect it to better regulate a bureaucracy that more directly controls the relevant resources?
I think You are underselling it - that's just the mechanic through which it works.
But at the same time too mamy people treat it as idealogy and sell it as a silver bullet and not merly a tool which it should be.
My main point is that we should not see markets as an end game - this is just a primitive human made system that should be evolved.
Seattle just built a major light rail expansion ahead of schedule and under budget.
But I specifically believe in building more, smaller units. Places with eg 20 apartments. By building smaller scoped projects, costs are better understood up front, maintenance costs are lower, and you need less specialized construction expertise.
Building 50 20-unit complexes to house a thousand families is going to serve everyone better than building one mega project to house a thousand families.
"Sound Transit’s light-rail system, called Link, has also had its share of challenges. The 25 miles of light rail that voters were told would be completed by 2006 at a cost of $1.7 billion, have resulted in 23 miles of track which, when completed, will end up costing $5.2 billion."
"The $2.6 billion spent so far on the starter light-rail line takes the rider from Westlake Station downtown to an airport station 0.4 mile from the terminal in 37 minutes. "
Sort of? That's a very old article. The project was voted on as a $1.6B project, and was approved. It came in almost two hundred million under budget in 2016.
There are floor area ratios (FAR) now that prevent small units. I have a 6500 sqft lot. I can build 14 units. I have a FAR of 3, so 19500 sqft / 14 units is 1390 sqft per.
Zoning is your problem, not who is building.
Developers and landlords are working in the insanity that are municipal governments. Do you understand why we write people off when they say they want more of their involvement?
Loosen zoning and I'll take advantage of it. We don't need to pay some bureaucrat who has no incentive to do their job efficiently to sit in the middle of this. Zoning office budgets should be tied to number of permits approved or units built. Right now they get the same money for being impediments.
Oh, I almost forgot, I also need to have 14+ parking spaces if I build out fully. Again, zoning problem. Developers don't just love parking lots.
Ah, the classic "private enterprise is better than government" argument!
Private enterprise is good at projects where the project owner can (directly) capture the majority of the value created and is responsible for the majority of the costs involved in that creation. The mis-alignment is that this creates strong incentive to shift the costs outside the organization.
Government is better at projects where the majority of value created is diffused across a large share of the population and/or over a long time frame. They do have a strong incentive to keep costs down, because costs are paid by taxes and taxes are unpopular and lead to revolution.
This is simple economics.
There are numerous examples of government projects which may or may not have been under budget, but which created 10x or 100x or 1000x returns. Things like "public roads", "internet", "education" spring to mind.
>Government is better at projects where the majority of value created is diffused across a large share of the population and/or over a long time frame. They do have a strong incentive to keep costs down, because costs are paid by taxes and taxes are unpopular and lead to revolution.
>This is simple economics.
I'm sorry, but simple economics from where? By what authority is that some immutable 'simple economics?' I reject your thesis. Regarding 'costs' being 'taxes' and them going 'down', I invite you to study the change in federal taxes as a proportion of GDP in the past say 130 years.
>There are numerous examples of government projects which may or may not have been under budget, but which created 10x or 100x or 1000x returns. Things like "public roads", "internet", "education" spring to mind.
Yes now think about how much better return, and many other projects may have emerged, had the government not sucked that money out of the economy. "Muh roads" sounds nice but you can privately build a road without taking money at gunpoint from peoeple, and also get good returns. If I take $20 from you and buy you a $1 pen, I don't get to brag that because I bought you the pen you wrote a multimillion dollar book (even then it is true in some perverted sense the pen [road] had 1000x+ returns).
No doubt you'll need more "fixes" before you're done.
It's like rent control in SF or public housing in Singapore. Design a new system and you'll create loopholes to be exploited. Fix those and new loopholes are created. And on and on.
Easier to just remove government restrictions to supply and build until prices come down.
For who? How's that working out for the 1/3 of Singapore who is completely ineligible, yet pays taxes into the public coffers?
Singapore is unique in that they have a massive well (proportionally much bigger than US) of workers paying taxes who are ineligible for much of the fruits of those taxes. Only the 2/3 with Citizenship or PR can meaningfully get public housing.
I'm sure about any nation could have more affordable housing if they have endless wells of guest workers who can shoulder the cost without yielding that benefit for themselves.
If you're talking about providing housing in a country that had little quality housing 70 years ago, then yes, it's successful.
If it's providing affordable housing for young people, then I'd challenge that. You can't even apply for public housing unless you are married (otherwise wait until after you are 35). The government overbuilt before, so now it's a 4-5 year wait after you win a lottery to get a house. People are still pumping real estate like crazy and the average home in the resale market is >$1M now (which is a 3 bedroom, 100 sq m apartment with a 99 year lease).
Singapore is stuck in the exact same situation as every other developed country - housing is an asset that the middle class expects a healthy return on, yet increasing costs are a barrier to new owners.
I grew up in a "commie block" as everyone aaround me. There was nothing wrong with them (decently sized, balconies, etc.) besides the comparatively poor insulation. It was certainly much better than the quality of your average Parisian housing in a century old building.
There's a meme that shows "leftist housing", and it depicts concrete tenements. It shows "capitalist housing", and it depicts tents under a bridge.
Haha.
But memes aside, no, there are many, many examples of public and social housing that are not concrete slums. Look at Singapore, Paris, the Marxhof in Vienna. Quayside Village in Vancouver.
If you'd like, I can provide links to many examples from many countries around the world of successful public housing that isn't Soviet bloc housing.
Social housing here in the Netherlands isn't quite soviet block but it's poorly built and maintained to the lowest acceptable standard.
In streets where one side of the street has been sold to private owners you can see the difference. The privately owned houses are well maintained and have received upgrades where the social housing is merely 'acceptable'.
I'm also familiar with how the assignment process for social housing works. I'm not sure how acceptable you think it is to wait 10 years to be able to move to a different city.
Social housing must look nice from a distance but i wouldn't want all housing to be social housing.
As many people have told you repeatedly throughout this thread, your understanding of the great success of glorious public housing worldwide is seriously misguided at best.
But I suspect you most likely just glean all of your political opinions from memes, which could explain some things.
Profiting from housing, yes, is not something I personally consider moral. But also, I believe that we don't need to meet my fairly radical moral stance to make housing more affordable and attainable for all.
We can make incremental progress here by just tweaking incentives. We can go further by reducing profits. It's not some binary all or nothing affair.
Most types of profit are immoral. Providing housing is at least genuinely clearly useful.
Manipulating people to buy stuff they don't need (advertising, marketing, hollywood) is immoral in so many ways. Weapons are very questionable, massive markups on basic stuff (cosmetics) etc etc if you go on about 80% of our economy is actually immoral. Even foods which are a basic good, are generally bottom dollar hollowed out poisons compared to what they could be if health was the primary concern. Don't get me started on the corruptions of profit to the medical process.
I don't know what your problem is about housing but it seems out of perspective if you're not going to campaign against profit from just about everything.
Well then, feel free to buy a house and sell it at cost. Don't worry about all that money you put into the home over the years to improve or maintain it, either.
Oh, and to add to the utter inanity of what you're proposing, make sure that you sell it at your purchase cost and not the 200%ish extra that they tack on to a 30 year loan at 4% interest.
Go ahead. Chalk it up to a personal experiment and let us know how it turns out in 30 years.
And I've done what you describe. I was a landlord for a decade.
I paid back each of my tenants all the profit I made from them, thousands and thousands of dollars per tenant. Adjusted upwards by the amount the property had appreciated.
I now rent in a sliding scale, capped at the cost of the unit.
Granted, it's only been ten years, not the thirty you suggest, but it's worked out great. Nearly every tenant has used their time with me to build a nest egg or savings that enabled them to move into a house they owned.
You could also just donate to charity, the effect might be similar (or even stronger, since it would go to needier people). By the way, this is all very nice of you but it is off-putting how you seem to want to impose forced charity on every other landlord.
When most people are talking about home ownership, we're not talking about being someone else's landlord. We're talking about living in a place until we move, and then selling that property.
I don’t like landlords (such as those in SV) collecting so much of the value, but a more productive solution here is minimal zoning, a high land value tax (with other taxes lower), and letting people do what they want with their property, allowing some tragedy of the commons with respect to traffic and population.
This also means deadbeat tenants get kicked out, but I think that is intrinsically a good thing. Occupying somebody else’s home and not moving someplace you can afford is just immoral.
It's absolutely realistic, and the fact that you're writing it off so quickly shows your ignorance. Social housing is successful in many parts of the world. Look at Singapore, for instance.
Mandatory parking minimums are going away in cities across the US, and units are getting more housing as a result.
Washington State is considering removing single family zoning.
Cities like Paris have many smaller apartment complexes that are public housing.
Everything I've suggested either exists or is being discussed seriously in some capacity. But, by all means keep your head in the sand rather than try to engage with actual housing policy.
Oh my, clearly you’ve never lived in these places. I used to live in Singapore: it’s one of the most overheated housing markets in the world.
All of the things you mention exist in the US to much larger degrees (do you know how much the US spends on social housing??) You are slinging insults to other commenters but you are really out of your depth here and have picked a couple of things and hailed them as solutions. You know not what you speak of.
Source: American expat currently living in London, previously Singapore.
Washington State is considering removing single family zoning.
No, no they are not.
Washington state has more than Seattle in it. It has rural areas, and mountainous regions, and no, every house in a rural area is not on agriculturally zoned land.
Nor does it make sense to have multidwelling houses, miles apart from each other.
I think, as others in this thread have stated, you are mistaking musings, ponderings, and "feelz good" ideas for serious discourse.
I support public housing, but that has zero bearing on changing the housing market. Which, I may add, is in a tiny, temporary inflated bubble. A decade ago, it was still recovering from the largest crash in modern history.
In terms of public housing, as land value increases, so do property taxes.
Thus, municipalities then have more funds to... build and maintain public housing! Which means that housing costs do not change the percentage of a city's budgetary costs, to build and maintain public housing.
The singapore housing system is a great policy. I dont see it how it fits with your ideas. First landlord is protected over tenant (rents are through the roof in singapore as well).
The hdb scheme is worth look into: government build apartments sold to people with medium income and racial quotas.
About a third of Singapore is persons who don't have Citizenship nor PR. Their public housing is propped up by making like 1/3 of the often lower earning workers (who are ineligible for public housing) pay taxes so that the Citizens and PR holders can profit.
If 'Success' is your metric, the Singapore analogy to America would be to import way more Canadians and Mexicans, ban them from public housing and then make them pay for it.
It's funny. There are ignorant people everywhere. But smug ignorance, that I only find it in Americans, for some reason. Maybe it's that "best country in the world" mentality leaking. That mentality doesn't make humble people.
It's really incredible that you're saying "superficially similar policies are being enacted in multiple, disparate geographies around the world, in vastly differing cultural and economic contexts, so you can't deny that all of them should coincide in one totally separate place I've chosen."
I notice you didn't mention Berlin's rent control fiasco btw
The reason the housing has turned into such a market is not because the evil overlords are deciding. It's due to overwhelming demand and the supply cannot keep up, so landlords have the freedom to choose any prices. The reason there is so much demand is because there are way more people on this planet now than there ever used to be. So if you want cheaper houses, solve the overpopulation problem first.
Disagree that this is a universal desire. We don't all want to have more money than everyone else. Plenty of us just want to have enough money to live modestly and comfortably.
> have enough money to live modestly and comfortably
That necessarily means having more money than everyone else. If you don't, the people who do can and probably will make things very uncomfortable for you.
Landlords who acquired property 20 years will use 'market rate' as a justification. I know of someone making a living from such a building consisting of 2 small apartments and a single office. He doesn't have a job, just idols away at home at all day getting anxious about climate change and identity politics.
landlords are definitely taking advantage of the situation, but that's a consequence of the bigger picture. In EU the constant influx of immigrants from 3rd world countries is creating demand and raising the prices while decreasing the salaries since they work for half the price and quality than locals but companies hire them regardless and they don't mind living 5 people in 2 bed flat. Moreover overseas oligarchs and cartels are buying out properties and raising the prices even more.
We should enforce this with the law. Right now, landlords raise rents anyway. I've never once heard of a landlord lowering the rent once they finish paying their mortgage, even though their expenses are now far lower.
Let me be the first then. I've been a landlord for a decade. I've paid back each and every one of my tenants the rent I collected in surplus to costs. Adjusted upwards to reflect the appreciation of the unit.
I now rent at cost, choosing to believe that it's better to help the people who live with me establish themselves and build financial safety.
In some cases we have rented a mother in law unit. Are different apartments in the same building under the same roof?
I tend to be broader about community then many folks in the States. Imo, you live with the people in your local area, whether that's house, apartment building, or block.
I was inspired by someone else who did it and posted about it on Reddit somewhere a long time ago. So there are at least two, but likely many more than two of us out there.
Housing investment is a business. Buying the house is a risk, and you sink money and effort into it in the early phases, in the hope of getting profit out of it in the later phases.
If you are going to make that business unprofitable then no one will do it. People won't sign up for the risk, cost, effort and frustrations of being a landlord with no upside.
While we're on the topic, why not prevent programmers from putting their salary up? After all software is essential to society these days?
> charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people)
Housed people need parking lots though. Tons of places are not, and never will be accessible with public transports. I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car, as much as I'd love not needing one: I need to visit friends or family outside the city, I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough, I sometimes buy big housing furniture, I even had to retrieve parcels outside of the city sometimes... Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike, or anything can happen that I need my car to save 1 hour.
The majority of places where housing is a problem are places where it makes far more sense to go through the short term pains of minimizing car usage in favor of long term space optimization. Cars take an obscene amount of space when combining everything required to keep individual car ownership afloat.
Almost all the problems you present can be solved by planning differently. You don't need bulk grocery shopping with a shop open nearby in walking distance, available at least once every 3 day. Big housing furniture is a rare occurrence and can be delivered, or you can rent a car capable of transporting it. Punctuality can be solved socially. The main problem is density, and cities certainly don't have a shortage of population density.
Car ownership is a huge luxury with a giant price tag, and it's finally catching up to society.
> I live in a city with a great public transport network but I still need a car
Your experience doesn't match mine. I also live in a city with a good public transport network, but I've never had a car, or felt much need to have one, or even to learn how to drive. For your examples (except the parcel one, which hasn't happened to me and I have no idea how it would happen):
> I need to visit friends or family outside the city
The friends or family I have which live outside the city actually live in other nearby cities. To visit them, I'd take a bus to their city, and then a bus or taxi within that city.
> I have to make bulk grocery shopping sometimes and bags are not enough
Every store large enough that I'd do "bulk grocery shopping" in it has a taxi stop next to it, sometimes even within the store's underground parking floor. So whenever I do bulk shopping on one of these stores, I simply take a taxi.
> I sometimes buy big housing furniture
Every store which sells big housing furniture has the option to send the furniture to your home using their own truck. You might have to wait for the next day (since they batch the deliveries - it's a big truck), but for big furniture, you usually aren't in a hurry.
> Heck, even to go to work, sometimes I'm late, or I missed my bus, or public transports are on strike
If I missed my bus, I wait less than 10 minutes for the next one. If I'm late, public transport is still faster than a car (or a taxi). And if there's a strike, it's true that having your own car might help, but when that happens (and it's not common enough to make it worth it to have a car just for that), the traffic slows to a crawl.
At the limits of this, we will have people living in 5^2 meter boxes on the Pacific coast complaining that it's not affordable and that they should just build more supply.
The problem isn't supply. We have (practically) unlimited supply. People just don't want to live in Pennsyltucky.
Are you American? I feel like you are assuming taking extreme measures to solve US problems. Have you considered how similar measures already affect markets in other countries?
ad. "not a market" - When you do that are you going to also forgive my crazy large mortgage?
ad. "protect tenants" - In Czechia we protect the tenants more than landlords. If you mean that this should scare people from renting that works quite well. People do not have much leverage here to kick out tenants who are problematic or skip payments.
>The sooner we collectively decide that housing shouldn't be a market
Then how would you recommend houses trade ownership?
>so developers are incentivized to build more housing
How do you prevent the development of shitboxes (it's a technical industry term)? Because that's what builders build when they need to hit a particular price point at scale. Houses that are quickly built out of low end materials and will decay over about twenty year period unless a homeowner invests considerably in upgrades.
>one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years
I'm in full support of the concept, but when you start to look at the causes of this, it gets complicated quickly and many of the causes aren't even directly related to housing. It's not just as simple as property tax moratoriums.
At least in the U.S., you'll also need to replace the system of local governments being mostly funded by local property taxes. That results in local government (and the residents who elect it, and whose taxes fund it) being very strongly in favor of high-end residential development (ideal - a gated neighborhood of mansions, or a luxury skyscraper, with absentee owners), and very strongly against low-end residential development (worst case - a mobile home park). Vacant mansions will pay very heavy taxes, require minimal city services, and generally push up property values (good for all those already aboard the property ownership pyramid scheme). Mobile home parks will do quite the opposite.
> I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case,
At least you understand this is radical. Developers/landlords are the ones providing and maintaining housing, not tenants. The government is incapable of doing this themselves which is why it’s left to the free markets.
The only real issue is that the ‘free markets’ are anything but. Governments overly try to dictate policy which continues to hurt us (a well known feature is state run economies)
Examples of this are zoning restrictions (NIMBY) and rent control.
Broad, idealistic government policies are a disease; they will never be as efficient as entrepreneurs.
Housing shouldn't be a market? Then how would housing be allocated? The state builds and gives housing to everyone?
Maybe you should take a trip to Eastern Europe one of these days to see the final result of what you're advocating. Pros: everyone is given an apartment to live in. Cons: your city's skyline looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/5X1sIeP.jpg
"We collectively decide" just means you decide for me. You think you know better than everyone else and want to impose your values on others.
Eastern European cities aren't the only examples. Nordic cities (e.g. Stockholm and Copenhagen) are great examples - they have different problems but people are housed. Cities like Berlin don't have a speculative housing market due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term. Finally, Vienna is the poster child for "how to do social housing".
What is Stockholm a great example of? There's still a housing market with absurd prices and all signs of a bubble.
It's impossible to get an apartment in Stockholm unless you have a 20-year waiting time, buy an illegal third-hand contract or have the wealth to buy an apartment. The housing crisis in Sweden is extreme.
Almost every major city in Europe has the exact same problems. Or arguably worse, depending on your socioeconomic status. Where this myth of "European cities are great" is coming from I don't know, and I would love to know.
>Due to excellent renters rights meaning the majority of people rent long term
This backfires spectacularly once you realize landlords continue to hold the reigns and put up huge demands to avoid "bad renters". As long as the rights don't cover the entirety, landlords will continue to pressure renters in different, more obscene ways.
And in today's society, renting long term also isn't as great as people make it out to be, when your long term rent is a glorified broom closet and there's a great job opportunity a few cities over.
All these cities still have a housing market albeit a more regulated one than your average American city. Housing is still developed and owned by private interest and responds to supply and demand. We could debate the policies of these specific cities (for example, the trade-offs of Berlin's rent control: https://archive.ph/l3i2w) but that's beyond the point.
The parent's position is "housing shouldn't be a market", and I am showing an example of what soviet-style state control over housing looks like in practice.
Is avoiding "skyline is ugly" really worth the enormous cost to society when so many people can barely afford housing? Is that belief system not worth criticism?
I’m sorry but respectfully, literally none of this will effect the outcomes you desire. You will assuredly constrain supply and decrease vendors to produce new supply.
And how is that different from a market? All we have to do is tax land appropriately and remove NIMBY regulation that prevents higher density building. Over time the land tax will displace inefficient single family homes, parking spaces, etc where needed. A good way to celebrate the upcoming 150 year anniversary of the release and continued ignorance of the book that pioneered this policy.
I guess you are unaware of all the money people pour into their homes - renovations, furniture, upkeep, maintenance. People spend all kinds of money on nice things, but nothing comes close to the home itself. There will always be a market for this.
Housing isn't a market because there are 1001 restrictions on supply and subsidies for holding large amounts.
I'm far from right wing, but let's not pretend the issue here is a market not working. It's that we rigged the whole system and then blame "the market" for the results...
Cut down home ownership to max 3 homes per household. Otherwise rent from someone else.
And yes it’s possible to be capitalist and agree with sensible regulations. I’d rather we focus on building amazing companies and utilizing labor effectively.
I'd claim the big issue is Blackrock coming in and buying all the available housing and renting it out for the max amount possible. If you restrict individuals, but not corporations, you create a worse problem!
Capitalism does imply the absence of regulations imposed by a bunch of goons with guns that claim to be "a legit government representing the people".
Mixed economies are not capitalism.
You can say you're a bit capitalist - that's an easy one, we have plenty of data to show that positive economic effect for everyone are linked to free markets - but still believe fairy tales about the government being moral and caring about something which is not being re-elected and stealing money from people.
Bro I can also pretend government can buzz off, but we need a military to protect our interests. We need some semblance of order so we don't descend into anarchy and chaos. People who exist at polar ends and bring up edge cases without contributing to fixing them to bring us closer to the middle actively make things worse, imo.
These are not zero sum games, and people that think they are probably have no skin in the game. Even the people with lots of wealth and resources worry about losing them, and in order to maintain it you need to make concessions when necessary and be pragmatic.
In spirit I agree with some of your ideas, and I hate rent-seeking.
However, where I live, I nearly ended in a situation where I was not allowed to sell an appartment I owned and had lived in for 20 years.
I had moved to a different city to work and live with my girlfriend, and had rented out the apartment, because obviously it is expensive to both hold one apartment and pay for a second one in the new city.
I had rented out the apartment, because initially it wasn't clear if we were staying in the new city or going back to the old city, once my girlfriend had finished her degree in that city.
I had made a written agreement with the tenant they rented for 2 years.
1 and a half year later, we had decided we were going to buy a house in the new city and stay there.
I wrote the tenant to inform them, I had decided to sell the apartment, come the 2 year date.
"OK", replied the tenant, "it's just that, I've decided I don't want to leave this nice cheap apartment anyway, and prefer to stay.."
So I start to read up on the law in my country regarding these things. It turned out, in my country it is nearly impossible to make a pre-determined time-limited rental. In fact, there are only 4 scenarios where it is possible.
It turns out, our contract should have had the specific wording "I rent out this apartment for a period of 2 years, because after 2 years I am going to move back to it myself, on this date, because I have the following specified timelimited activity I'm doing at location X". Because my contract only stipulated the duration, but not specified the exact legal grounding for the limitation, it was not valid.
TL;DR. I ended up having to 'bribe' the tenant with a huge sum of money, to get their written consent to leave the apartment by the originally agreed-upon date. I also ended up losing a significant amount of money on the sale, because the presence of the previous tenants hurt the price I could negotiate on the sale.
In fact, I would have made 5x more money on the sale,
than I made from received rent for renting out.
(ie I received maybe 50000 some-currency in rent (without expenses subtracted, so in practice it may have been more like 10-20000).
But the reduced salesprice was ~300000 lower, because I ran the sale while the tenants were still present (in hindsight, I should not have put it up for sale until the tenants were gone, but I paid a huge price to learn that lesson :-(.
So if I had let the appartment stay empty for 2 years instead of renting it out, I would have made 300k instead of 20-50k.
Apart from the fact, that those 50k ended up being what I had to pay in "bribe money" to get the tenants to leave. So I basically let two strangers live for free for 2 years in my apartment,
in return for them making it very difficult for me to sell my own apartment.
A final caveat is, that technically it's even illegal to leave the apartment empty in my country - if it's empty for a prolonged period of time, you have to register it for "public rental", at a reasonable rent price..
So, yes, I definitely want the rights of tenants in place and protected, but it is possible to protect them so much,
you actually make the life of people who have bought a single property miserable.
A postscript: I know many won't buy my arguments about "losing money" here, since the money I would potentially earn or lose here, are exactly the sort of 'board game monopoly money' we are arguing about whether anybody should have or be entitled to.
IE the money I would make back on the sale of the apartment I have owned for 20 years, are exactly those 'the game is rigged' money,
that appear out of thin air, for not exactly doing anything (apart from maintaining my apartment against wear and tear.)
Ah yes, I also was deeply enamored with Coruscant the first time I saw it depicted. It never occurred to me to reverse engineer the planning policies which could give rise to such a nightmare however.
So many of these ideas are some other vision in disguise.
Cars are bad, you see, and therefore, let's pick some irrelevant problem (parking lots), and conflate it with housing issues.
First, most places have zero housing issues. Mostly, certain tiny areas(with large populations) of California do, but the rest of North America has no shortage of land to build on.
And unlike California, most of the world doesn't seem to have issues with zoning for new builds.
In fact, in most of NA housing is quite affordable, with the exception of a current bubble, which exists due to COVID issues, a once in a century event.
This has only been going on for a year or so, and is already starting to cool.
Californians: a note. Your issues are not nation wide.
Others: stop trying to solve other pet peeves, by conflating issues. I assure you, you just end up sounding uninformed.
No. The problem is "space is being used inefficiently." The reason to get rid of enormous surface parking lots is to build more efficiently, not to kill cars.
"Nearly every case" is very wishy washy, I assume you have some specifics, what about trashing a property, who absorbs that cost?
Living where one has historically lived is interesting, take London - you're implying it should be a birth right for natives - what about the immigrant flow into such cities, how would you reconcile the "right of natives" with human capital?
Not a birthright, I don't think it should move across generations, but I do think that it's needlessly cruel to force someone out of their home because wealthier people want to live there.
As for tenants v landlords, I believe it should be difficult to evict tenants except in cases where the tenant is clearly a danger to others or to the home itself. If they are vandalizing the property, that should be an eviction. Likewise if they are cooking meth. But I think tenants should be protected if, eg, their income drops due to a layoff or unforseen medical expense.
So the landlord what, eats all of the downside in that scenario? But I'm sure you'd also restrict their ability to raise rents on other tenants (if they have multiple units) to compensate, so why would the landlord even do this to begin with? It's potentially 100% downside and restricted upside.
Yep. You got it in one. Private landlords are a part of the problem. They have every incentive to prevent new housing from being built. It should be challenging to be better at providing housing than the municipality government.
Exactly. Landlords aren’t entitled to a good business. If you diligently maintain the home you rent out AND pay income tax, it’s not a great business now. The profits are in neglect and appreciation.
Depends. But what you label a flaw, I might label a feature. There is space for both of us to disagree about whether certain outcomes are desirable or not.
> But I think tenants should be protected if, eg, their income drops due to a layoff or unforseen medical expense.
They should stay if they can't pay? Who takes the loss? It would be sensible to have a government program to help people in such circumstances. But if you'd be asking for the landlord to just take the loss, that's not sensible. The owner is probably barely breaking even on rent vs. costs, so they can't afford it.
If you are passing laws to dictate what someone does with their property, then society should cover the losses. If they are free to do as they wish with their property then the landlord can cover losses. You're suggesting we privatize the costs of a social problem.
This also assumes good faith on behalf of the renters.
Why? If we pass a law dictating that chemical companies have to pay for cancer patients that developed the disease because of their use of those company's products, does the state cover the losses of the people who hold stock in those companies? No.
Landlords always say that they should be compensated for the risk of homeownership. If that's true, then some landlords need to lose money.
The system you purpose is not a loss some times, it is a system that can be abused all the time.
Who says landlords aren't losing money?
I am currently taking a loss. Two units are rent control at 600 per month, the third at 2300 hasn't paid in ten months with an eviction trial next week, I am in the last unit. I will be shutting down the property and using it as a single family home due to this loss. If you remove the incentive you remove housing or prices rise to cover the risk.
I see rent control as privatizing the cost of a social problem. You create restrictive zoning then say random landlords will subsidize people's rents. The single family home owners should share in the cost, and to a lesser degree, so should the renters who benefit.
Now you purpose an expansion on that same idea. Just remove zoning so housing can be built. Don't add more impediments like relocation fees and guaranteed housing in new construction for old residents and price controls. Then you will just have legacy units and luxury housing, an exacerbation of the current system.
You're putting landlords should lose money before there should be abundant and affordable housing. Landlords still lose money, these policies remove housing from the market, cause distortions, and lead to the luxury / affordable split.
Practically that means paying to build and maintain housing stocks, changing tax incentives so developers are incentivized to build more housing and less luxury housing, charging a premium for unused land in desirable areas (parking lots don't house people), abolish mandatory minimum parking, and upzone neighborhoods (eliminating the "single family home" neighborhoods as a zoning type.)
I'm also of the much more radical opinion that we should protect tenants over landlords in nearly every case, that we should protect the rights of people to live where they've historically lived (eg, one shouldn't be "priced out" of the home they've lived in for 20 years), and we should offer extensive public housing (built as many geographically distributed small apartment buildings and 5 over 1s, not giant tenements or projects.)