This is basically the late stage of us continually not building enough housing for years and years. I'm not sure how anyone thought this would turn out differently. As long as housing is an "investment", which in turn means that people lock up big portions of their net worth into housing, and then vote against policies that would make housing cheaper (it's the rational thing to do) then this will be the outcome. Just look at the 30 year fixed rate mortgages. They're an insane subsidization for homeowners.
This is not to say that people shouldn't own their homes. I think in an ideal world, most people would own, or even all people would own and the market would just be liquid in terms of selling and buying. I think ownership has a lot of downstream benefits to communities, but by enacting so many policies to safeguard owning as an investment we've basically killed homeownership in the future.
Edit: 30 year fixed rate mortgages are just an example, there's tons of other issues. We've basically given homeowners the keys to power to fight back against any and all building developments. Zoning too is part of the issue, and is frequently used to fight back against building. If you want change, vote for a land value tax which is a good start to aligning incentives properly
What's the point of building more housing if it's all owned by the same handful of investment firms? In my community, over the last few years, one investment firm has spent billions, purchasing nearly 60% of the rental properties. There's smaller players that also own a significant chunk. These handful of investment firms control the rental market, setting the price however they want, since their product (housing) is a necessity and the alternative (competition) is nearly non-existent.
Local political leaders tried to pressure the investment firm to lower the rents, but they responded with "fair-market rent, blah blah blah", and nothing changed. The shameful thing is that the web page of the large investment firm (sorry, don't have a link) basically spells out their strategy: "Purchase rental units in small, low-ish income communities. Raise the rent. Profit. Rinse and repeat." The web page boasted about huge returns; it didn't talk about "fair-market rent, blah blah blah".
Or what happens in London (and probably other higher value land over the world): developers buy land for building or properties for renovation, and then drip feed it into the market to keep prices high. It's better, in financial terms, for them to sell new developments over the course of 2-3 years than to dump them in the market, and thus creating negative pressure on prices.
When developers are well financed there's no counterbalance to this strategy, they can keep these units off the market until the price point is right and drip feed some more, without a cash flow crunch they are not losing money.
I've seen this strategy being used in some São Paulo's neighbourhoods, new developments would sell maybe a tranche of 10% of apartments, after 6-12 months a new tranche of some 20%, then another 6 months and 30-50% would appear, crashing the price of the previous owners. Rinse and repeat.
And what happens when we run out of places to build? Or when we build so much it will take an hour or more to go to the grocery shop to buy milk?
Simply “build” is not the answer. “Building smart” would be a better answer. Build “vertically” instead of “horizontally”. Build 10+ stories residential buildings. And build shopping malls vertically too. Build walkable cities so that people don’t have to rely on cars. Etc.
simply build only happens with relaxed zoning, and relaxed zoning will result in building vertically or at least, mixed use. The current way of building is a result of stupid policies to protect homeownership as an investment among other things. If you want to further incentivize smart building, a land value tax is the answer
> Or when we build so much it will take an hour or more to go to the grocery shop to buy milk? Simply “build” is not the answer. “Building smart” would be a better answer.
If you have residences that are an hour away from groceries, even with no empty lots nearby, I think people would find it obviously profitable to buy a residence and convert it into a grocery shop. Capitalism alone takes care of the need to be this smart.
> This is basically the late stage of us continually not building enough housing for years and years. I'm not sure how anyone thought this would turn out differently.
Absolutely! Build more housing, at any price level[0], and rents will stop growing and maybe even come down.
What about them? They make it more feasible to own a home. The rest of your comment appears to favor people being able to own homes, but this comment opposes one of the few things that help make it happen.
> We've basically given homeowners the keys to power to fight back against any and all building developments.
How is that? As a home owner, I didn't get the memo. The local government approves or rejects all kinds of building sites without ever polling or asking anyone outside their agency. Homeowners of the area don't have any input.
Any explanation for the explosion in housing costs cannot simply consider the United States. The U.S. has some idiosyncratic problems, but it’s not the only place with expensive housing.
pretty much every country follows the US in terms of not building housing. In europe, they block for historical reasons (aka not killing the vibe of the cute towns and stuff)
> pretty much every country follows the US in terms of not building housing.
If nowhere builds enough, maybe it's not a practical solution?
Also interesting to observe that the places that build by far the most, that is, the places which are most densely inhabited, are also the most expensive (NYC, SF).
I know the counterargument that even NYC simply hasn't built enough. Need to build more, a lot more. But I have to ask, if the #1 densest place in the US isn't dense enough to be cheap (instead of the most expensive), maybe density just can't make it cheap in practice?
Maybe it takes a place like (Isaac Asimov's) Trantor, with buildings miles and miles dense to achieve cheap housing in a dense place? Will there ever be such a place on Earth? (Do we want to live in such a place on Earth?)
>Just look at the 30 year fixed rate mortgages. They're an insane subsidization for homeowners.
Canada is in worse shape, and doesn't have 30 year fixed mortgages (most are 5 years), and you can't write off mortgage interest expenses. In other words, our homeowner incentives are worse, and yet the house crisis is also worse.
That's leaves what you mention off-the-hop: we aren't building enough. But why? Is it a supply or demand problem? My country is starting to believe it's the latter.
i mean 30 year fixed mortgages aren't the only thing. I just pointed it as example. The insane keys to power we've given homeowners to essentially fight back against any kind of building in the form of environmental reviews, and community boards are a much bigger problem. It's all a problem. Most western countries have fallen into the same trap in terms of homeownership.
> The insane keys to power we've given homeowners to essentially fight back against any kind of building in the form of environmental reviews, and community boards
That's right. The states that have the least land-use freedom[0] are some of the worst in terms of housing availability.
California is even more screwed up with property tax laws which essentially subsidize boomers (who have property taxes locked in based on the value of a home purchased in the 1980s!) to the detriment of anybody buying their first home (who pay tax based on current value).
I live in the Bay Area and know multiple households making well over $250k who rent largely due to the fact that those who bought 10-20 years ago are paying about 1/3 of the property tax of a new buyer today (even setting aside interest rates).
This has been disproven so many times. There’s more vacant homes in the US than homeless people. But homes == money. As someone who is a real estate investor, it’s no secret, we are jacking up the prices. It’s what we do for a living.
> This has been disproven so many times. There’s more vacant homes in the US than homeless people.
It hasn't been disproven. There being more vacant homes than homeless people just means that the market isn't clearing, because the minimum price acceptable to the landlord is higher than the maximum price acceptable to the homeless. This could be from any number of reasons, none of which "disprove" the fact that the laws of supply and demand do in fact apply to housing.
As an analogy, there are always jobless people even when there are vacant positions to fill. Why? Because of a mismatch between the price of labor, which is artificially inflated by minimum wage laws and another hundred laws and regulations that make it costlier to employ someone, and the economic value generated by that labor.
Great idea, but incomplete. I think you need to take the logical next step that those that aren’t valuable in terms of earning power should be executed en mass to make commutes of the wealthy more enjoyable. How many people clogging up 101 really need to be alive anyway?
They don't have to be executed; just stash them away someplace where the wealthy can't see them, don't let them leave, and let them basically fend for themselves. Needs a sympathetic name, though... maybe something like "Sanctuary Districts".
So maybe instead of (just) building, make real estate a poor investment? High taxes for more than one home, more difficult eviction procedure and on the other side affordable mortgages for first homes. This way you make them unattractive for investors and more affordable to actual users.
Of course, this could also result in just rents going up, so maybe also put a cap on that?
There isn't enough mention of AirBnB in this discussion.
There are areas where a lot of housing is being built but most of it is is siphoned off the local-resident market by investors who convert them into AirBnB rentals. So now all this housing stock exists, but only to serve tourists, and the locals can neither rent nor buy a place to live.
The article touches on this point, that many properties for rent are not being maitained in a timely or quality manner. I split $2000 a month in Philadelphia and our property management group doesn't even shovel snow at our building. I can afford it, but I cant pretend that about half my net income going to rent is exactly thrilling
A useful starting point in dealing with this (and the housing crisis in general) would be to determine what proportion of homes are not being used as a primary residence. I suspect it has risen dramatically over the past couple of decades. If it turns out that that is the case, the next step would be to find out why.
1. Homes that are vacant for more than 6 months out of the year
2. Homes that are short-term rentals for more than 6 months out of the year
Incentivize owners to either get long-term tenants in, or sell.
AirBnB is making things much worse. Landlords have discovered that turning a house into a short-term rental property is more lucrative than having a long-term tenant. That's horrible for the long-term rental market when everyone does that.
We don't need to make it illegal. Just tax the shit out of it and disincentivize it.
A graph from Statista [1] indicates the opposite: the fraction of US housing units occupied by the owner in 2022 was almost double what it was in 1975.
Another pertinent question would be the overall supply of housing: one obvious factor that could help explain the graph I just described is that the overall supply of US housing has gone down, meaning that fewer owners are in a position to rent out property at all. Hence the supply of rental properties is significantly decreased, which will drive up the price.
If I'm not mistaken, the graph you have referred to shows the total number of owner occupied homes - not the proportion.
Edit: I'm also not sure that their definition of owner occupied excludes second homes. From the linked page:
> Owner occupied housing is where the person who owns a property – either outright or through a mortgage – also resides in the property. Excluded are therefore rental properties, employer-provided housing and social housing.
You hit the nail on the head here. The simplest way to solve this problem is a stepped increase in property taxes for home which are not the primary residence.
Just as an example:
Assume a baseline property tax level of say, 6%.
Primary residence - 2% discount to 4%
Non-primary residence, in same region (county/city) as primary = 6%
Non-primary residence, not in same region as primary = increase 2% to 8%
Non-primary residence owned by a corporate entity rather than a citizen = increase 4% to 10%.
You do that, it should make doing things like this much harder.
Isn't that going to push up the price of lower end apartment rentals? Why would we try to squeeze more money from poor people to the benefit of richer home owners?
we absolutely need to progressively tax property by number of properties owned.
As you own more of a scarce asset, margins on rents are driven toward zero.
An aside, I often see worry of corporate ownership of property. While of course this is an issue, the bulk (72%) 1. of the problem lies with simply affluent people who own (fewer than ten) investment properties. I do think however, a fair penalty is to just tax based on the degree of rentiership from property investing, therefore a marginal tax on number of properties owned seems reasonable.
Essentially yeah, it suppresses the crowding out effect of homes rented out which otherwise crowds out first time home buyers in terms of price and access to capital. Also by making each marginal investment property more costly, instances of collusion or monopolistic conditions will reduce as, if occupants have a preference for renting (which I would doubt), there would be more smaller landlords -read as more market competition.
Unfettered use of housing stock as an investment is inefficient and frankly undemocratic as the delta between ownership and renting entrenches inherited wealth. Ideally, although up for debate, would be to use marginal tax to fund creation of low income housing units as Santa Fe NM has recently implemented as a luxury tax on new home purchases.
Important to note is that rentiership, by definition, is a non productive use of capital. (A housing unit does not produce anything, as other deployments of capital do)
In the past, owning a 'second' or 'holiday' home was an expensive proposition - it actually cost you money. For some time now - because of rapid capital gains and the short term rental market - it makes you money. Many more people are willing and able to do it.
Actually, this seems to be largely an American problem. In Europe, Canada, and Mexico (at least just these areas I'm familiar with), it was common to have a cottage or small home in a faraway part of the "countryside" as a mini-vacation home. Definitely wasn't accessible to everyone, but was FAR from the level of wealth needed in America to operate a "second-home"
The same applies to New Zealand. Lots of families would own a 'bach' in some remote area near a lake, river, or on the coast. These were typically very basic - what you might call a cabin in North America.
Nowadays though, it's common to own that second dwelling in a city or other built up area.
Just last week I was talking with a family member (mid-60s, about to retire). They are planning on buying a small apartment in the city their son and grandchildren live in. They are not selling their existing house in another city to do this. They plan to use it only while visiting and have explicitly stated that they see it as an investment. They are by no means 'rich'. 30 years ago this would have been unheard of for people in their position.
If a house in a popular area sits dormant, that's one less unit available to house the general public.
Reductio ad absurdum... if rich Chinese businesspeople buy every home in Vancouver (strictly to park money, not live or rent), nobody who works in Vancouver can live there and everybody has to commute from the suburbs.
Edit - at an indivual level, you're right, who cares. At a policy level, ensuring reasonable housing for the general public is a good thing.
If people want to buy houses and not live in them, more power to them as long as they pay their property taxes. Housing is not a finite resource, more can simply be built as long as there is demand for it. At a policy level, we sure are spending a lot of time worrying about the fraction of a percent of houses that are not being rented and not nearly enough time worrying about why not enough new housing is being built to meet demand.
I think most people would be a bit put out if a significant portion of the radio spectrum was owned by people that were not utilising it (or only using it to send their Christmas messages).
Land is a finite resource that nobody created. Would you be offended if someone claimed to own a cubic kilometer of the sky and declared nobody else could use it without paying him?
Just for the record, building vertically is also a finite solution, just as building sprawl is horizontally constrained, so to is vertical ( and subterranian ) expansion.
Manhattan only exists due to Manhattan schist, exceptional bedrock due to old volcanic flow.
Many locations have poor subsoil for tall buildings, even with the best foundations there are other limits to building height.
There's a lot of potential space, sure, but not infinite space - it's finite on planet and bottlenecked by transport and terraforming off planet.
In LA there are tons of "co-living" spaces where they're basically renting out bedrooms for $2500-$4000 a month! It's the similar to living with roommates except each roommate has their own lease and you have no choice in who becomes your roommate.
I don't know any actual stats, only that in searching for an apartment they came up a lot in searches and I assumed it was partly to make more money (a 3br apartment with 3 people paying $3k each is $9k vs renting the whole apartment for $6k-7k)
But, also, rent in general is too damn high and it's lowers the price "for some definition of lower".
This is inevitable when vast numbers of people all want to live as close to the centers of a handful of major cities as they can. You either build megacities, let the market dictate who can afford to live there, or maybe start seriously realizing that from an economic and environmental point of view... maybe remote work is the solution.
I'm not convinced remote work is better than the market solution from an environmental point of view. Seems like having people as densely concentrated as they can be is best from an environmental standpoint.
Remote is definitely better than the status quo of subsidized suburbs housing car commuters though.
This is a Y Combinator forum, don’t give them ideas, I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody is already shopping out that pitch deck and Sam A is opening his checkbook.
Looking to learn more on the subject, but why isn't it in the interest of any city these days to NOT build more housing?
They are almost perfectly incentivized to attract working young people and families to help increase their tax base (property tax, income tax, sales tax) and housing would help them do that. Given most large cities are facing huge financial deficits, wouldn't this make sense?
(Yes, I'm aware of regulatory capture and the inefficiency of local government, but shouldn't there be SOME common sense?)
It IS in the interest of the city. This does not translate into policymaking because of the intersection of these realities:
1) The 'special interest' effect — where narrow groups of highly-motivated individuals become more politically organized and effective than the rest, whose interests are at odds with the minority group but whose members are, on an individual basis, not affected enough to take political action. This is especially true when the special interest group is highly-resourced.
2) The USA system of deciding what gets constructed where is slow, bureaucratic, and tends to have lots of nucleation sites for local special interest groups to assert their political power.
2) NIMBYs are, by definition, landed gentry, and therefore more highly-resourced than young renters.
The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not because their individual net worths are mostly in their home prices. Since a city is really just a set of geographically constrained voters, housing supply decreases.
In my city in California, developers are replacing old single-family homes with multi-family (apartments, condos, townhomes). It's great, it's needed.
Every time a new development gets started in our neighborhood, Facebook neighbor groups explode. The older generations hate how it's ruining the character of the neighborhood. The younger generations ask where the fuck they're supposed to live when prices are so high.
Thankfully, in the last few years it feels like the YIMBY voices are getting a lot louder.
> The city is incentivized to increase housing supply, but the voters are not
I have difficulty understanding this often repeated assertion.
I've been voting for over 30 years. I've never (to my best recollection) had a ballot question about increasing housing supply in my town. The town government is constantly approving (and sometimes rejecting) housing developments, but they have never asked me.
For California specifically, there's proposition 13 which caps the rate of increase of property taxes for housing to a rate that's below inflation.
For areas like the Bay area where the cost of living is high (making city employees expensive), zoning for residential instead of commercial means that they're limiting their future tax base while having to provide services to these houses, so cities avoid building housing as much as possible.
Prop 13 restricts reassessments for commercial properties, too. Ultimately, the fundamental calculus is similar in that commercial development is deemed to be better for city finances, but the difference is much smaller than if commercial properties weren't part of Prop 13.[1] And perhaps the difference disappears or inverts in urban contexts. Suburban services aren't financially viable long-term even for commercial zones, but that's not true in dense, urban areas where inviting people to live can definitely have a positive RoI long-term.
The reason urban areas, especially coastal cities, don't permit more housing has more to do with NIMBYism and, more recently, leftist politics that sees all private and even much public development as evil--because so-called gentrification, because money changes hands, etc.
[1] Note that the way schools are organized and funded in California means there's less local disincentive stemming from the need to fund schools than might exist elsewhere. I'm not familiar with the numbers, but if you're a municipality looking to keep tax money flowing through your area as opposed to being redistributed elsewhere, I wouldn't be surprised if public schools are a net win.
This is quite simple, cities are run by voters. Any property owner, and all the landlords, are incentivized to keep housing stock as low as possible. To get around this you need federal housing regulation to prevent local governments from doing what’s clearly in their loudest voters best interest, and instead change the incentives to favor building high rise condos and dense housing
I’m surprised by all the anti-landlord talk in this forum. If we “increase in property taxes for home which are not the primary residence”, or prohibit “own[ing] more than one property in which they do not reside”, these are policies that give an advantage to homeownership over renting but do not stimulate new supply. So they may lower house sale prices but only at the expense of raising the rent, exacerbating the problem that the article is about.
If you want the rent to go down, you should make it profitable for investors to build lots of supply of housing, rental or ownership. Lots of non-owner-occupied houses is a good thing if you rent.
Again, the article is about rents being too high. If you force investors to sell existing housing stock to owner-occupiers, what direction do rents go? Up. If you are anti-rental property investor, then you are also anti-renter.
Instead of pitting renters against homeowners, think of policies that reduce costs for both renters and homeowners by adding supply. E.g., relax zoning to raise height limits and allow apartments, allow more worker visas and encourage people to work in the trades, subsidize construction loans.
I see now that you are making the distinction between single-family homes, which are primarily owner-occupied, and multifamily homes, which are primarily rental, and you are saying that the shift of some single-family homes to rental is a bad thing. First, there’s nothing wrong with a household buying a condo or renting a single-family house, so I don’t see why one should be banned.
But to explain the increasing share of rental housing, the book Kevin Erdmann, Building from the Ground Up explains that the problem is not investors overinvesting in houses, but residents who are locked out of the mortgage market due to post-Great Financial Crisis regulations that killed the homebuilding industry across the country. If residents had the same access to credit that they did before the GFC, then they would be able to outcompete investors. There’s no point in suppressing rental investment just because we mistakenly suppressed mortgages.
But whether you are looking to buy or looking to rent, more supply helps, so that is the underlying problem to address.
After WWII, the US government made it a point that returning service members needed a place to stay and so they subsidized the building of homes across the country. If landlords have decided as a bloc that they need to gouge the living crap out of their tenants, then the government should step in and either put in price controls or spend a few hundred billion a year to subsidize new housing. If we can throw $50B at Israel and $60B at Ukraine, then we can spend $100B on homes for our citizens.
Idk why this is such a mysterious or unexpected thing. Housing construction crashed through the earth following the subprime crisis and the deficit in available housing has not yet recovered. Prices are up due almost entirely to supply and demand. Current pace indicates the problem will probably sort itself out in a few years barring any further disaster. Some YIMBYism could speed it up.
I assume you're referring to the graph on the page you linked. Is there an explanation somewhere of exactly how it is calculated?
I tried to read the "article" underneath the graph but it just seems to be a disjointed collection of assertions strung together with inappropriate connectives and insane formatting.
The caption is a little vague, but it says the source is census data by which they mean the US Census Bureau which does an estimate of housing every year.
Moodys has a more technical analysis if you have patience to read it all using both census and realtor data:
I had the fun idea to fix the minimum wage to the price of the average house in some radius. Say 10 km. It use to be that you could buy a house for 1-3 years of salary. If a house costs on average 360 000 the monthly salary should be 10 000. It doesn't have to happen abruptly, it can gradually phase in. The fun angle is that having rich people build in the area everyone benefits. If a lot of cheap housing is build people will leave for places with better salaries but others will enjoy the access to cheap labor.
Even a less “extreme” version would be: you pay 2x property taxes on your second home, 3x on your third etc. Sorted from lowest to highest property tax.
So if your property tax on the first house (chronologically) is $1, and the property tax on the second is $5, you pay 1 + 5x2 = $11.
Sadly a lot of landlords have learned that they make a lot more money by doing exclusively short-term rentals on AirBnB. That reduces the supply of long-term rentals and drives prices up even higher.
Even for normal long-term rentals, some landlords own enough properties that it is more profitable to hold some of them off the market to raise prices than it is to rent them all out at lower prices. So it's also a product of the concentration of the housing rental market. I seem to recall seeing not too long ago a "market intelligence" product that basically allowed landlords to collude with each other to do this, except the collusion was through a service and algorithm that provided plausible deniability with regard to price fixing.
Exactly - a apartment I know of had 7 units with long-term low to moderate income tenants - one by one each unit was evicted (or non renewed), a quick sprucing up and now 6 of the 7 are only available on AirBNB - and the landlord gets as much per week as he was getting per month before - the tenant in that 7th unit is getting pretty nervous that she is next.
No - taxes are going up only as a percentage of rising market apprisals of existing housing, which is covered by the renter paying market rates for rent.
Electricity - not paid by landlord.
Labor - not sure what you mean.
Maintenance - fixed rates for home warranty for big things, minor costs for maintenance otherwise which are factored into rent monthly regardless of whether they are used. So that could account for single-digit percent rise in rates.
So one out of the five costs only applies to some properties? How does that make me wrong?
You also failed to say, “nothing needs to be fixed at MY property! Why did my rent go up!?”
Because it takes several years to save up to replace an HVAC system or a rotten deck or plumbing failure and I have to charge based on the projected cost.
Sewer, trash are negligible compared to the cost of rent. If they double you’re looking at rent going up by around 3% and that’s if the landlord isn’t making the renter pay those fees directly.
Maintenance costs and taxes are the only ones that could be a factor out of your original 5 - your point is drowned out by the poor supporting facts.
And taxes aren’t even going up, just the valuation of the properties - which drives higher rent anyways.
And since you’re a landlord, you should have a maintenance plan that would reimburse you for things like HVAC.
I will say that market rate has outpaced these costs. My wife and I ignore market rate and are always below, but we do adjust based on our actual costs. For a 3 bedroom in a Midwest metro area we had to raise rents based on our actual and projected costs by 300$/month last year. We are still below average rents in our area by 300-500$/month
I am not making a political argument about the economics here. At the end of an inflationary cycle (if we are at the end) the markets, including the housing market, have to find equilibrium. Costs and vacancy are rising for landlords.
Suppose you are a homeowner. You definitely know then that utilities, insurance, possibly the mortgage, definitely maintenance costs have gone up. You pay those as your "rent" because you are the owner. So the rent went up, even though you are the landlord.
Welcome to the rentier economy. Where less goods are produced & the workers are homeless...While people who own multiple properties extract maximum rent to barely get by themselves.
It is worth pointing out that those who cannot afford rent often will not subsidize their situation by renting out extra space and taking on roommates, but instead suffer in isolation living alone.
This false premise that "living alone" is some sort of social achievement needs to end.
>It is worth pointing out that those who cannot afford rent often will not subsidize their situation by renting out extra space and taking on roommates
small unit (<10) landlord here. fwiw: I explicitly forbid any sort of sublet/short term/airbnb type thing in my leases. think that is the rule vs exception around here. too much abuse potential and problems. so dont just blanket blame tenants. and each unit only can have so many, two plus a kid or two maybe.
will say that "cannot afford" does not really come up for me anymore. I will not rent <650 credit score, good savings, income ratio, recommendations, work etc. tenant protections are so strong and courts so backed up now its just wildly expensive to get rid of people. so after two bad experiences of taking a chance now I don't take chances on people would rather have a unit be empty for months then pay 1-2 years or more for a bad tenant. but you are wrong to blame tenants current situation is hard on all sides. painful to impossible to replace/expand old buildings, hard to make things cheaper, good tenants get screwed by bad ones just as good land lords do, bad landlords abuse things, everything is way more inefficient then it should be. everyone just does their best with the various perverse incentives.
> I will not rent <650 credit score, good savings, income ratio, recommendations, work etc. tenant protections are so strong and courts so backed up now its just wildly expensive to get rid of people.
This speaks to a fear of mine, which is that laws meant to protect tenants end up backfiring against tenants because they reduce the pool of landlords willing to rent to them. E.g. from the article:
> At the state level, Colorado lawmakers have proposed a bill to limit the reasons for which a landlord can evict a tenant.
(fwiw I am not blaming you -- you're not running a charity. Just pointing out the tension between what lawmakers are attempting and the cold reality of the situation.)
>This speaks to a fear of mine, which is that laws meant to protect tenants end up backfiring against tenants because they reduce the pool of landlords willing to rent to them. E.g. from the article:
yes. really wish "game theory" was something more commonly (ever) in politicians dictionaries. Like not opposed to decent tenant protections at all! but worst words to hear are 4 years after some law "oh we didnt mean for THAT to happen!" like it was friggin obvious it would. think through incentives please!!! there are lots of very reasonable policy goals one could choose, course got my own opinions, but in a democracy can accept if after reasoned debate some other goal is picked. but what sucks is then doing policies that dont help at all vs making things more efficient all around.
- a really good fast dedicated "small claims" style judicial system for example. like for ip or corp law in delaware or whatever, if people can resolve matters quickly with quality and without lawyers big expense/risk reduction.
- or we got all this crazy 3d scan lidar stuff now right? been very impressed by what even old phones can do, got used iphone cuz cant afford new one and made basic floor plans and point cloud of my house, not perfect but neat. and apparently the real deal are amazing. $30k is too much for one but not actually that expensive at gov level. so imagine states have official neutral service, couple of inspectors each with a fast scan unit, paid for by very low rental tax. as completely normal standard required and no extra cost part of renting a unit and leaving a unit, they come by and just do a scan of the whole thing. everyone signs, takes like 5 minutes. now there is official before/after down to centimeter 3d of entire apartments held by the state. or be paid to come again as part of any dispute. no more debate about "that was already there" on either side, for anyone ever again. single inspector could do dozens or even hundreds per day in an area. would not solve everything but stuff like that would add up in terms of getting facts straight, at low cost.
- gov backed insurance for aid programs like section 8 so landlords get made whole for property damage and expenses from the poor, not just rent?
dunno. not a genius on this but would like more innovative approaches tried. but if its risky to rent then risky people wont get rented to, more deposit will be requested, or more consolidation. but incentives always will play out in the market.
>Just pointing out the tension between what lawmakers are attempting and the cold reality of the situation.)
right and define what is "tenant protection" too, like WHICH TENANTS POLITICIANS/ACTIVISTS!?!? because the tenant protections we have now meant it took me 6 months to evict someone yelling racial slurs at other good tenants! it's not always about money. that tenant was well protected from me, but what about the other tenants? racial slurs, domestic screaming fights but not violence are protected speech not like they can sue or have the police arrest them for it. eviction should be the answer lease says you won't ruin other people's enjoyment of their own property but proving stuff is hard. and law compounds. at least we don't live in two party consent state here but if you do and now it is illegal to record them saying slurs now what if no-cause isn't a thing?
anyway sorry for the rant. just wish things were better, wish bad landlords got stomped, wish bad tenants could abuse things less too tho.
one of the many reasons I have chosen to never be a residential landlord - some people make it work, and grow their wealth (good for them) - I don't need or want the hassles of dealing with bad tenants that (at least in my state) have way more protections than the person who actually owns the property.
Is there any evidence that more people are attempting to live alone now than in the past (in the US)? Genuine question -- don't know the trend national trend.
Mean is a bit of a misleading number here since the distribution really is discrete - and there are a lot more 1 and 2 person homes today than before, which is contributing to the lower average.
Note, these questions are not explicitly aimed at you to try and answer, I’m just throwing out what I’m not clear on
Could this really just be showing that less people are marrying and having kids?
A further question would what is called a “household” (and how that has changed over time). Is a 4 room house with 4 renters room renter, 4 households or just one by the owner?
How does people owning multiple houses affect this number?
It is cultural, because it used to be norm. That being said, that overcrowding did caused quite a lot of social and relational issues. Families want own flats and singles want own rooms for smart reasons.
This is not to say that people shouldn't own their homes. I think in an ideal world, most people would own, or even all people would own and the market would just be liquid in terms of selling and buying. I think ownership has a lot of downstream benefits to communities, but by enacting so many policies to safeguard owning as an investment we've basically killed homeownership in the future.
Edit: 30 year fixed rate mortgages are just an example, there's tons of other issues. We've basically given homeowners the keys to power to fight back against any and all building developments. Zoning too is part of the issue, and is frequently used to fight back against building. If you want change, vote for a land value tax which is a good start to aligning incentives properly