The right reason for not investing in residential real estate is because it’s immoral.
Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
The landlord renter system has divided our society into haves and have nots. It’s modern serfdom in which landlords own families.
So sure, you can avoid investing in real estate for financial reasons but you can also avoid investing in real estate for the same reason you don’t invest in gambling smoking or fossil fuels….. to invest is to support something fundamentally wrong.
No doubt the commenters will all jump in with "but waddabout this, waddabout that, so you want no homes to rent eh!?!". I don't care, my point remains - he landlord/renter system is destroying the fabric of our society, has destroyed the social bargain, is robbing young people of the future and if you're a landlord then you are part of the problem even if you hide your identity and sense of guilt behind a managing real estate agent.
That’s very absolutist. There’s a place for rental accommodation. I moved to Australia as a backpacker in 2003 and found a cheap rental. What was I supposed to do, buy a house?
The absolutist position is to think I am advocating for an end to renting, and thus dismiss my message.
Only a fool or someone choosing to would think I am advocating for an end to renting.
But sure if you want to be right, you made your point. My point remains - the renter/landlord system is toxic for healthy society, for families, for young people, for old people, for everyone who is not a landlord - if you have personal integrity then you should not be a landlord.
Realise that you are in the minority. The majority eventually desire security and stability in their housing for obvious reasons. A system that incentivises a minority with the means to increasingly squeeze potential from those without is not sustainable long term. One doesn't need to look hard now to find sentiment in younger generations that amounts to "what's the point? I'll never afford a home". If you think that's healthy for a society, or justified, because a small portion of the population like the freedom of renting, not sure what to tell you.
And where are people supposed to live before they are ready to buy a house of their own?
One of the issues young people seem to have is that they have been conditioned to want immediate gratification. They are 23 and want a house on par with their parent’s home. Their parents didn’t start out with that place and worked up to it over decades.
My parents didn’t even have a shower in their first apartment. They had to take baths and use a mug to scoop up water to wash their hair. I had it better than them when I started out and got my first place; I actually had a shower.
People in general would be a lot happier if they dialed back their expectations.
agree with you, how would it work otherwise? if rent still works, who are we paying rent to that's not paying into all the negative stuff you mentioned?
Of course not everyone should own a house, but 90% owner occupied/10% rented it the right mix.
Housing in most western economies today is a ponzi scheme - a deeply immoral ponzi scheme, perpetrated by politicians with large housing portfolios who stand to benefit from the immoral corruption of the ponzi.
The first thing to do is point the finger at the landlords who are buying up houses and who think of themselves as good people and let them know they are the toxic perpetrators of the ruin of the fabric of our society. Every houses a landlord owns in a house that a young family will never own. When you own houses you own families like serfs.
> The goal of society should be 90% owner occupied.
Why 90%? Why not 85%? Why not 95%? Why not 70%? Why not 99.21237%? Where'd 90% come from?
What if 11% of the households genuinely want to rent? Have rental prices skyrocket forcing people into the complications of buying, holding, maintaining, and selling real estate?
I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy.
Lee Kuan-Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore said:
“Soon after separation, I resolved to enable every household to own its own home. If we were going to get the people to take National Service seriously, I could not ask their sons to fight and die for the properties of the wealthy. We worked out a personal savings scheme that allowed them to own an apartment painlessly through installments over 20 years. We sold the apartments to them at below cost to enhance their assets. Today, 95 per cent of Singaporean households are homeowners. It has immeasurably increased their wealth and our social stability. Without home ownership, we would have become like Tokyo, Seoul or Hong Kong, where the voters in the cities are disaffected because they pay a large proportion of their salaries in rents.”
Yes, most people own their home. But those homes are small flats in giant shared blocks. Your laundry hangs out the window and there are hawker markets on the ground level where everybody eats because there’s so little room to cook upstairs.
How many Americans, or British, or Australians would settle for that? It ain’t 90%.
Of course Singapore is an outlier, geographically. It’s a tiny island-nation-state. And by the way those ground-floor hawker markets are terrific; when you do go, make sure you visit a few. They’re a highlight. (Take cash!)
Edit: “But at least”, you might say, “the private housing market in Singapore must be sane thanks to this incredibly high level of pseudo-public housing?”. To which I respond, lol, and invite you to browse listings for real estate.
We have friends who live there and a nice (like, nice) house is currently renting for ~$25k/month.
So it's whatever number you're going to pull out of the air at any given moment. Thanks for being honest about it. Because the owner occupied percentage of Singapore isn't 95%. That's just the rate of ownership of citizens. There are these people called "immigrants" who might also participate in the housing markets. They might have a different owner/rental housing dynamic.
You really should have just stuck with your 90% number, because that's really closer to the owner occupied rate in Singapore. But hey thanks for really showing you're just making things up as you go instead of actually thinking things through.
It's sad too because I generally agree the ownership rate in most US cities isn't great and would prefer to see more owner occupied housing units to be built, but people spewing nonsense and making things up as they go really do a disservice to persuading people. Pulling numbers out of the air and blindly assuming that number should be a target probably does more to harm your arguments than helps.
> The first thing to do is point the finger at the landlords who are buying up houses and who think of themselves as good people and let them know they are the toxic perpetrators of the ruin of the fabric of our society. Every houses a landlord owns in a house that a young family will never own. When you own houses you own families like serfs.
Let’s point instead the fingers at leftists and collectivist who have deceived you and tricked you into believing this. This shows you don’t understand economics whatsoever, like zero. You are driven by Envy and anger which is a deep source of evil. The real evil is in spreading such hatred and nonsense.
> Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
> the renter/landlord system is toxic for healthy society
> Only a fool or someone choosing to would think I am advocating for an end to renting.
I mean, you use terms like "every" and say the whole concept is toxic for society. Its not some misreading of your statements to see you're stating for an end to renting when "the renter/landlord system is toxic". If that relationship is toxic for everyone who is not a landlord, isn't eliminating the whole thing the cure for this toxicness?
> No doubt the commenters will all jump in with "but waddabout this, waddabout that, so you want no homes to rent eh!?!". I don't care, my point remains -
No, your point doesn't remain if other people have valid points that refute it.
You're making a very strong statement which I imagine most economists would disagree with. Characterizing anyone who disagrees with this as "whiny" or something doesn't make it true - you just might be wrong (and probably are, IMO).
This is especially weird since you're making a strong moral claim here - it's not even "we disagree about economics here", it's "we disagree, and you're evil for thinking differently than me".
Soon to be ex-landlord here. Maybe I'll regret it someday, but I'm winding down all of my rental properties. Being a landlord in Seattle is just not a good idea financially anymore, with how out of whack rents are compared to house values, and how more and more restrictions are making it hard for small-time landlords. So I'm selling everything. Some will be bought by owner-occupiers, and others will be bought by huge property management firms with the analysts and lawyers to still be profitable.
> Corporate mega landlords should be banned too.
> As should foreign owners. Housing should be owned by the citizens and permanent residents of a country, not corporate mega landlords.
This is completely insane. Envy is one hell of an evil disease, individually and especially socially.
I have an alternative proposition. Re-zone and deregulate to allow new developments. Lower all permits and taxes. Remove all barriers to capital and investment, foreign or otherwise.
Your housing costs will immediately drop.
Collectivism is the economic equivalent to creationism in biology. A false evil fantasy proven endlessly as failed ideas but fueled by primitive human emotions, envy and pride respectively.
> Envy is one hell of an evil disease, individually and especially socially.
I agree that envy is toxic, and free markets are pretty good technology.
But housing is a protected class of assets, just like clean water and radio bands. Taxes on non-primary residences are high, as they should be. Perhaps they should be higher.
> I have an alternative proposition. Re-zone and deregulate to allow new developments. Lower all permits and taxes. Remove all barriers to capital and investment, foreign or otherwise.
Would this make it far easier and probable that a Chinese mega-corp can buy up neighborhoods in the US? Not implying that's a bad thing. I wonder if it's already happening to an extent.
Are you joking about Chinese mega-corp? You realize China is desperately trying to avoid catastrophic economic collapse? They have so much malinvestment there have been emergency discussions between them and the US Treasury. Between ghost cities in China and unfinished empty highways to nowhere (used for embezzlement by their leader fwiw) they are on the edge of collapse. However a disorderly economic collapse in China is assessed by globalist US leadership as against US interests so it’s being careful managed between the two powers.
However back to a hypothetical mega-corp. Let’s say a megacorp buys up blocks of old houses and redevelops it into new supply .. will overall housing prices go up or down? Obviously down! supply increases. However due to fundamentally broken education system that has been coopted by neo-Marxist collectivist gibberish even highly educated and technically literate individuals in western countries don’t understand that. And worse yet they have been trained to instinctively label me and anyone who tries to explain simple empirical economic facts as “racists” or “fascists”.
Yeah I'd think mom and pop citizen landlords with one or two long-term rentals should be the least offensive of the bunch. But we're the ones least able to adjust to the regulations and changing economics. I'm thankful that I'm able to get out without taking a big financial hit, but I'm not sure if the end result is better for society.
I predict you're gonna get a lot of flak for your comment, but this is something I've started feeling myself in South Florida, where I grew up. We started noticing more and more homes in our neighborhood without permanent residents -- almost every new neighbor we get is a renter who's there for 6 months to a year, and then leaves. Or, we end up finding out that a home on the block is actually an AirBnB that is empty for weeks at a time. The cohesion of a neighborhood where you meet and know your neighbors that I had as a kid is mostly gone.
Not to mention the housing prices down here have skyrocketed with a bunch of wealthy folks from up north moving down, buying up real estate, turning them into VRBOs or their summer homes. Meanwhile, a friend of mine who graduated with CompSci from a state university is being offered peanuts by companies down here; he can barely afford to rent an apartment.
Anyways, I know this is kinda the norm in places like NYC, so I don't want to sound like a crybaby. Maybe city enshittification is just normal in the US. But my observations have turned me off from real estate investment, which was something I was considering last year.
The issue in system is cost of housing and appreciation of thus. With both being lower and appreciation even being negative renting might not be unreasonable deal. Renting is just a service like any other. Someone put initial capital in on housing and should expect reasonable return on that. Problem becomes when capital is too large compared to product and the value of product goes up where as it should go down.
>Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
Or, another landlord.
What I see is that if we leave things up to contestants, then the contestants will do everything to win. What can be done is a change in the game itself. So, regulation.
In Australia, the property market has been artificially inflated for years with favorable tax incentives that encourage investors to hoard properties and sit on them, while writing off any losses as tax deductions.
Meanwhile, renters are being squeezed because landlords are trying to pass on the cost of rising interest rates to their tenants, who are forced to choose between groceries and making rent.
And yet, I would bet my kidney that when interest rates fall we won't see landlords pass on the savings to their tenants.
As the OP's point, the landlord renter system HAS "divided our society into haves and have nots", and it causing serious bitterness in division in our country. And the issue is politically intractable, because the propertied class are not going to accept any reform that lowers the value of their house.
> Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
And every ounce of food owned by a company is not owned by a person. Oh right, that's why we allow people to produce more food.
As Communist China discovered, getting rid of landlords doesn't magically house more people. That just makes it harder to move to areas with more economic opportunities and ensures that any home that requires significant renovations will end up completely uninhabitable. You can offset this by asking the state to fund more housing development, but that still requires you to allow for housing development.
How how how does a fairly selective and educated group such as HN users come to believe such collectivist nonsense. What a failure of education systems we have. Unbelievable.
History has shown repeatedly that policies to restrict free markets and centrally plan makes everyone poorer and produces catastrophic results.
There is absolutely NOTHING immoral about being a landlord or a real estate developer. People need housing but cannot afford to build it themselves. Capitalists take capital they and create housing for people who need housing. This is a fundamental service to the economy and society. A necessary service.
It’s simply foolish to have this view that landlords are unethical. It’s been shown over and over and over that high housing prices are a result of restrictive supply caused by government regulations and that without such restrictions and regulations landlords and real estate investors LOWER housing prices this is a fundamental fact of economics!
The problem is that long division and poetry is a requirement but economics isn’t. And even when it is, the teachers skew so strongly leftward, kids don’t get a balanced view.
Ideally teachers and professors would go back to being 50/50 left/right, like how it used to be in the days before the Soviets started their global mindgames.
I grew up in the US and was in high school 10 years ago. Economics was required for me, and if anything, my teachers skewed right-wing. In fact, being "left-wing" largely meant being pro gay/womens/colored rights, but still neo-liberal. I still get that sense from most Dems I meet, so I don't really get this Soviet mindgame speak.
Also, in what era were all teachers and professors 50/50 left/right wing?
Admittedly that last one does not describe an infiltration on the scale I’m talking about. But my thing happened around the 1920’s - 1930’s. Just look at all the Confucian Institutes on campuses and academics getting into trouble for illegal ties to China.
If you’re an ideological enemy of the West and seek to undermine it in the long term, this slow infiltration of the teaching institutions is exactly what you would do.
Thanks for the article. It's a bit of a goofy partisan piece though, and provides some hand-wavy conjecture like, "It is unclear why elite research institutions have been untouched by these changes, though it is possible that these institutions use less-politicized criteria when selecting faculty, and thus make it easier for talented conservative scholars to find jobs." The article never explains what criteria. It also makes funny statements like "if one wants to be exposed to a broad spectrum of political ideas, it is still far better to attend Notre Dame or Baylor than Berkeley or Cornell" Because... more faculty are Republican? Does the American two-party system accurately represent the wide spectrum of political thought?
You seem to be implying that the rise in liberal professors/teachers is a result of covert infiltration of American universities that is brainwashing students and faculty. I find it more likely that less conservatives want to be teachers/professors than liberals do in the first place.
Yes, it’s partisan, but I don’t think there’s a news site that isn’t partisan and, as you say, goofy.
> “I find it more likely that less conservatives want to be teachers/professors than liberals do in the first place.”
This is true. But consider that a little bit of subversion applied over a decade or two can make things uncomfortable for one side, tipping the scales that way.
Soon the whole field becomes unwelcoming to outsiders and a political spiral begins.
A century later, you’re 1000x more likely to find Das Kapital being read at university than Atlas Shrugged.
I just think we need more granola-eating chemical engineers and more libertarian English professors. Running society is about negotiating tradeoffs. How can we make intelligent tradeoffs when only one perspective is present?
> Yes, it’s partisan, but I don’t think there’s a news site that isn’t partisan and, as you say, goofy.
I guess what I was trying to say was it's not a very good piece and doesn't offer a balanced perspective.
> This is true. But consider that a little bit of subversion applied over a decade or two can make things uncomfortable for one side, tipping the scales that way.
I considered that, but I think this has less to do with universities politicizing their hiring process, and more to do with shifting societal norms and external factors; ex., Universities are more secular and multicultural than they were 50 years ago, public schools pay less.
> A century later, you’re 1000x more likely to find Das Kapital being read at university than Atlas Shrugged.
I think this is a bad example and false equivocation -- Das Kapital is a scientific text and analysis of economic models that was a work-in-progress for the entirety of Marx's life. Atlas Shrugged is a fiction novel written by a person who literally named her own philosophy and tried to build rules around it.
Also, Atlas Shrugged is commonly assigned reading in high school in the US.
> I just think we need more granola-eating chemical engineers and more libertarian English professors. Running society is about negotiating tradeoffs. How can we make intelligent tradeoffs when only one perspective is present?
I guess what I'm saying is: more perspectives are present. Just because all professors in a university vote Democrat doesn't mean they all hold carbon-copy political views. There's room for nuance outside of a meaningless metric like "50% of teachers should be Republican".
> I think this is a bad example and false equivocation -- Das Kapital is a scientific text and analysis of economic models that was a work-in-progress for the entirety of Marx's life.
There is absolutely nothing scientific about Marx’s works. The Envy driven garbage produced by Marxists and current neo-Marxists leaders is directly responsible for unimaginable human suffering.
I remember well trying to explain to an academic audience that teaching anything or even reading Marx is the economic equivalent to reading the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and taking it seriously. Both are 100% fantasy and evil. Das Kapital is a slanderous attack on the capitalist heroes improving the human condition by an evil dark and envious soul.
I'm not sure how to respond to this -- I'm almost certain you're just going to lament that I'm a product of a broken education system infiltrated by the evils of neo-Marxist propaganda. But I'm curious of your credentials when you mentioned explaining to an academic audience, and I'm wondering what capitalist heroes you think Marx slandered in Capital?
Your characterization of Marx as an "evil dark and envious soul" is humorous to me. Also, why do you keep capitalizing "Envy"?
Let’s take a look at a few highly referenced quotes from Das Kapital:
- "Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!"
- "Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks."
- “The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range."
- "Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society."
- "In proportion as capital accumulates, the lot of the laborer, be his payment high or low, must grow worse."
These are from your supposedly “scientific” Marx. To call Marx a scientist is effectively calling a doomsday cult leader one.
As far as my own personal credentials. I graduated as the top analytical student in a large american high school in the late 80s. From which I went on to an top 5 university and was exposed to the methods of leftist indoctrination. However fortunately for me, having completed all mathematics classes available to me, including all offered at the community college by 15. I discovered markets and programing. I also discovered Hayak and Austrian economics, along with Smith, and many others, independently studying. This combination of extremely high analytical ability, max score on all standardized math tests ever taken, and exposure to actual legitimate political scientists, sociologists, and economists, made all attempts to indoctrinate me with collectivist nonsense futile, much to frustration of my college professors and classmates.
I am extremely familiar with the global banking and financial system. I also was able to comfortably retire before age 40 but instead continue working and expect to until I’m unable.
Marx is an evil man. His envy and hatred has inspired some of
the worst atrocities in human history. The fact he is even taught with any degree of respect or labeled by anyone as a “scientist” is outrageous. He has no numbers, no measurements, no evidence, and every single one of his assertions are categorically false.
So how is this possible. We come to capitalizing Envy.
Envy: A Theory of Social Behaviour
By Helmut Schoeck
I now see I am in the presence of a true genius, and that my Marx is not scientific as I once thought, but simply an evil beast fueled by his hatred of the human race and that he must be stopped. Thank you for enlightening me to the evils of Marx and the evil Left.
It’s just society hasn’t realized they continue to teach the equivalent of creationism to biology when giving legitimacy to Marx and collectivism for economics.
It’s absolutely infuriating and frankly disgusting.
Wait until you read his poetry. Truly a twisted soul. Even the worst dictators thought they were helping their own people at least; Marx just wanted everybody dead.
Angry with God. Makes sense it’s obvious to any real believer. You can feel the Envy and Anger dripping from his words. No submission to the Lord, no respect, no Love.
Obviously he has to try and ban religion also. Very interesting. Thank you. I never knew about this somehow.
—-
The Fiddler
The Fiddler saws the strings,
His light brown hair he tosses and flings.
He carries a sabre at his side,
He wears a pleated habit wide.
"Fiddler, why that frantic sound?
Why do you gaze so wildly round?
Why leaps your blood, like the surging sea?
What drives your bow so desperately?"
"Why do I fiddle? Or the wild waves roar?
That they might pound the rocky shore,
That eye be blinded, that bosom swell,
That Soul's cry carry down to Hell."
"Fiddler, with scorn you rend your heart.
A radiant God lent you your art,
To dazzle with waves of melody,
To soar to the star-dance in the sky."
"How so! I plunge, plunge wihout fail
My blood-black sabre into your soul.
That art God neither wants nor wists,
It leaps to the brain from Hell's black mists.
"Till heart's bewitched, till senses reel:
With Satan I have struck my deal.
He chalks the signs, beats time for me,
I play the death march fast and free.
"I must play dark, I must play light,
Till bowstrings break my heart outright."
The Fiddler saws the strings,
His light brown hair he tosses and flings.
He carries a sabre at his side,
He wears a pleated habit wide.
No Capitalism is the greatest force for the improvement of the human condition known. That’s a fact and the problem is you have somehow been taught it’s only an opinion. It’s not, it’s an unambiguous empirical fact.
Tax breaks for property investors, tax incentives for property developers, handing large swatches of public owned land over the mates of the politicians for virtually nothing, selling houses to foreign buyers, selling houses to global money laundering criminal.
All to pump up the value of the housing portfolios owned by the politicians.
Whenever anyone says "let the market sort it out" I cheer and say "finally, the rich will stop getting their socialist handouts".
If that is your capitalist market economics then you might need to rethink how pure it is.
To be fair, (to be faaaaiiiiiiiiiiirrrrrrr) that's besides the point, and every successful capitalist nation routinely contradicts free-market principles anyway.
i'll check out and will consider it in good faith, thanks for sharing. my knee jerk reaction:
> And also we can look at the cases where collectivism replaces capitalism and the catastrophic consequences that inevitably occur:
at a glance, that book ignores the role the US played in these country's downfalls, particularly in south and central america. why is the US so afraid of a different system that they interfere with cuba and venezuela — i thought capitalism was the greatest system and could never be beat? oh that's right, it needs to kill any dissent in order to survive. do you ever consider all of the suffering that the US inflicts on other countries in the name of freedom and capitalism, to this very day, happening right this very minute?
it's true, the USSR created a lot of suffering, but looking at the chapter intros, that book doesn't seem to consider the contribution of the authoritarian governments had in the suffering. instead it blames the economic system. nor does it cover the diversity of political opinion that led to the establishment of the USSR, most of which was quickly silenced (aka executed).
imo, the USSR's problems were much like what's happening in the developed capitalist countries right now. american capitalism is a centralized economy controlled by few people with the power of the government, just like the USSR. i'm not talking about small business here, i'm talking about corporate capitalism that controls the federal government and all of the commerce, what we eat, where we get our energy, etc. very centralized. (aside, wouldn't it be amazing if the small businesses had as much power?)
and regardless of how you define the USSR's economic system (an authoritarian government can never be socialist, as socialism is a democratic system by definition), we can agree that the USSR was not capitalism, yet it's responsible for some of the technological gains of the 20th century. capitalist dogma lead us to believe that the 20th century changes were only because of capitalism, but that's simply untrue. if capitalism is responsible for all of the technological changes, then how were the soviets able to reach space first?
lastly, neoliberal propaganda from the world economic forum isn't a good source for an argument imo. and who said that socialism is the only alternative? regardless, your sources conveniently ignore countries with democratic socialism that are thriving. (queue: "tHaT'S nOt SoCiAlIsM!!!!" arguments...)
> corporate capitalism that controls the federal government and all of the commerce
Correct! That is not capitalism and is fascism. I agree with you on this 100%.
I’m a classic liberal libertarian not an advocate of crony capitalism/aka oligarchy or fascism.
However regarding USSR. It was an absolute disaster. I have direct personal family knowledge of what occurred. You are demonstrating a new phenomenon of revisionism with USSR romanticism.
The US is currently a war machine. Fueled by corrupt politicians alliance with the MID.
The speaker is Milei trashing the WEF. It’s an epic speech.
It is certainly true that USSR’s investment in basic science was probably one of its best achievements. I agree we can’t deny that.
Libertarianism is likely rising as we see a multipolar global economy develop and state power eroding along with collapsing fiat currencies worldwide. I highly doubt you’ll have a successful commune anywhere but anyway I’m confident we won’t be needing it.
Every house owned by a landlord is another house not owned by an owner occupier.
The landlord renter system has divided our society into haves and have nots. It’s modern serfdom in which landlords own families.
So sure, you can avoid investing in real estate for financial reasons but you can also avoid investing in real estate for the same reason you don’t invest in gambling smoking or fossil fuels….. to invest is to support something fundamentally wrong.
No doubt the commenters will all jump in with "but waddabout this, waddabout that, so you want no homes to rent eh!?!". I don't care, my point remains - he landlord/renter system is destroying the fabric of our society, has destroyed the social bargain, is robbing young people of the future and if you're a landlord then you are part of the problem even if you hide your identity and sense of guilt behind a managing real estate agent.