The "investors" are profit maximisers. Housing suppliers do not have to be like that.

Then I encountered a senior lawyer. They earned in a month what a person on an average wage gets in a year. They were running out of places to put money and some of it went into property, as a "stash". They had not much thought of "return". The high pressure hose pipe of cash they were receiving swamped that.

Being a lawyer they would have no illusions about the morality and ethics of the "financial advisor" system, so would not use it. Hence leaving money lying around, in houses. Tenants were just another bother and the financial return of tenants when compared to the cash income....

It happens. Rich people by housing ad leave it empty.

Astonishingly high land taxes on empty houses in shortage areas is the only solution I can see

Also, these kind of things get priced in, leading to lower property values. There will always be a willing buyer as long as the market price is above $0, implying that the benefits exceed the costs of ownership.

Around here, most bigger buildings are corporate-owned (equally good or terrible to all), or small enough where loopholes allow everyone to be evicted at sale.

It’s not an “opinion” the law is bad. It is a well understood part of capitalism.

A surgery enthusiast startup for cardiac surgery or a garage side hustle pharmaceutical dispensary do not sound like a good idea.

Yes, regulation costs, and a lot of that is reasonable.

In reality, these massive companies buying up apartments can hold apartments vacant for 20 years. If an investment company has $100 billion in funds, what does it matter to them if they have $100 million in apartments in Manhatten? It's only .001 of their funds. It's nothing to them. And as new properties become available to them, they can snap them up creating even more of a oligopoly and quasi-price-fixing - or at least contribute to it.

And the problem is that it is everywhere, not just New York. "Fundrise LLC, an online property-investing platform that purchased 124 houses in Conroe, Texas, for $32 million, paying building firm D.R. Horton Inc. "roughly twice what it typically makes selling houses to the middle class" — illustrating how home builders stand to make more money by selling houses to investment firms instead of middle-class Americans who want to own their first home." The report goes on to detail how "yield-chasing investors are snapping up single-family houses to rent out or flip," contributing to the scarcity of houses for sale and driving up prices for everyone. According to one estimate from John Burns Real Estate Consulting, as many as 1 in 5 houses sold in the nation's top housing markets is purchased by someone who will never move in. As a result, the consulting firm expects prices to continue to rise. "You now have permanent capital competing with a young couple trying to buy a house," said company CEO John Burns. "That's going to make U.S. housing permanently more expensive." Burns notes there are more than 200 big money companies and investment firms competing with families and first-time buyers for houses, including titans of finance J.P. Morgan Asset Management and BlackRock Inc.

These companies will buy up new neighborhoods or start buying piecemeal in desireable neighborhoods and due to the near monopoly will jack prices up double.

All this can lead to a housing bubble, to be sure, but then the capital companies snap up undervalued homes and hang on to them, just like they did in 2008.

Invitation Homes is owned by Blackstone Group, the world’s largest real-estate investor. Created after a company called Treehouse Group was folded into Blackstone, then renamed in 2012, Invitation Homes was on a $10 billion spree, purchasing $150 million worth of houses per week. “At an auction in Sacramento, a house flipper named Ryan Heck was bewildered by a bidder who bought every house that hit the block,” Dezember writes, noting that the bidder went one dollar over every other bid until the other bidders conceded. “He had a handful of cashier’s checks,” Dezember writes. “The new guys had duffle bags full.”

The bonanza really took off in 2011, when Morgan Stanley issued a report called “A Rentership Society.” With over 1.6 million foreclosed homes in the United States and more on the way, the report forecast “a surge in the number of renters and a potentially massive opportunity for investors to convert the glut of repossessed homes into rental properties.”

America’s investment managers were all in. By 2012, “more than $1 billion had been raised by investors for the purpose of doing just that. Some of the biggest names in finance were hoarding houses.”

Soon we will return to feudal times when there are a few vast landholders and everyone else is a serf.

There is even a lobbying organization, the National Rental Home Council, to look after large investment companys' interests in the government, such as defeating rent-control laws.

a three-bedroom, two-bath home in Spring Hill, Tennessee, that went on the market in April 2017. In the strong, fast-growing market, the seller had four bids on the house within hours.

“The high bid of $208,000 came from a couple with a child looking for their first house,” Dezember writes. “American Homes 4 Rent matched their offer, all cash.”

American Homes got the house, the seventh it had purchased on that street. since 2010, 700 houses in Spring Hill have been purchased by just four companies, including American Homes 4 Rent and Progress Residential, Dezember writes. As a result, rents skyrocketed. The town’s vice mayor, Bruce Hull, in April 2017, said, “It hasn’t been that long since you could get a three-bedroom, two-bath for $1,000 a month.” Those houses were now closer to $1,800 a month, and this was by design.

Personally, I think the government should put limits on how many units - houses, apartments, duplexes, etc - that a corporation or subsidiaries can purchase. I don't like this, but the larger societal implications must be taken into account.

Meanwhile, people need apartments right now. To live.

There's no economic value in "providing long term housing to residents". You hodl the asset which someone else required and added no economic value. They could've bought the asset themselves because they wanted to be there for a long term. But they can't because everyone is hodling. When economic incentives are good, you should sell an asset or an investment when you do not expect to gain economic value from it anymore.

Why do people "provide long term housing" instead of just selling their assets ? I see houses as an asset similar to cars. They decay, they break, old houses are horse trade, they require high maintenance. Their economic value only goes down, and their prices would too if there wasn't a housing cartel opposing new construction and high population growth combined with bad government housing policy, but most importantly, if the regulation around mortgages was similar to any other asset.

You're absolutely right and we need more of that.

Absolutely.

> It's extremely different from an investment in many ways

That is not so true, and is part of the problem, in two ways.

(1) People are buying properties to live in at one stage in their lives, when they have high incomes, or prospect of high incomes, thinking they will sell when they are older and make a large profit they will use to fund their retirement. This drives up prices and drives out people with lower incomes.

(2) The above is part of the cause of the housing bubble. Also driven by increasing populations. As that bubble goes the way of all bubbles, especially as population decline sets in, those people get to retirement with an asset that is not worth anything like what they expected. This will cause a lot of impoverishment (some actual poverty too) amongst a lot of those older people

Yes. We all need somewhere to live. Also most of us (those who have incomes) need a place to save.

It is a problem that the two things are confused now.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/06/21/how-american-racism-is-...

My wife is actively involved in redistricting litigation, in Texas, and core root of it is from pro-segregation redlining in the early-to-mid 20th century; the intent is disenfranchisement. The set of laws, covenants, HOAs, and attitudes (NIMBY) towards the construction of suburbs is entirely rooted in segregation. That was one of their literal selling points. To this day, there are home purchase covenants restricting Jews and Colored Persons — it's super unfunny when the real estate agent laughs and asks "you're not Jewish, are you? There's this weird, unenforceable provision..."; and, then, you still have to get a Judge to strike the restriction.

Investors have different motives, and those motives are often self-fulfilling.

I’m from New Zealand.

But rental changes are literally neighborhood-specific. COVID had some neighborhoods in NYC flat, others rising, others falling.

In any case, rents fall. That's the point. It's normal.

> Consider the following hypothetical example:

>> Trespass: George is walking across a field when David jumps out from behind a bush, grabs him, and gently but forcefully removes him from the area.

> In this example, it certainly looks as though David is the one committing an act of aggression against George. After all, George is simply walking along, minding his own business, when David comes from out of nowhere, physically lays hands on him, and drags him off the field.

> But suppose that the field in this example is David’s property, and that George is knowingly trespassing across it. In that case it is clear that most libertarians would say that it is actually George who has committed aggression. David’s violence, they would say, is simply an appropriate response to George’s impermissible intrusion upon his land.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/social-philosophy-an...

Libertarians oppose expropriation and eminent domain because the government is the one initiating the aggression against the property owner by forcible seizure. (Although libertarians support limiting the power of the state, it is not the same thing as eliminating the state entirely. That would be anarchism, not libertarianism.)

When I think of private property I not only think of the object itself but also a stream of public services for which you barely even have to pay something. If you are a landowner you could now come up with the idea of selling the public services. The revenue that this process produces is called ground rent.

Is the market distorted by the landowner who is basically just selling free services from the government or is it the government that makes these blatant gifts paid for with taxes unrelated to land ownership?

Manipulation of rents will not reduce those public services, the value of the land remains.

I mean if you own a parcel of undeveloped land are you going to build a small mobile-home park or expensive condos? One of those two is going to make you a fantastic profit.

The rate of increase is falling everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa, last time I checked a decade ago.

Many developed countries have falling populations.

It is still (as of a decade ago when I stopped actively studying this) a mystery as to why.

It used to be thought that it was because of life long secure prospects for the children you do have and for yourself in old age. What children you do have will live, and you do not expect to need a lot of children to support you in your old age.

But them some developed countries went into serious decline. The USSR, as was in particular. The population rate did not go up.

The latest theory (a decade old, "latest") is that it has to do with the education of women.

It has nothing to do with availability of contraception, surprisingly.

China has a median age of 67 I think now, they went from 1.8b to 1.4 or 1.2b, they are not growing in pop.

Japan was just leading the way, outside of Africa, the USA, France and Mexico to a degree it's all old people.

1.5 kids per women is below replacement and 100 men per 1 women means you have a hard limit on the # of possible children.

China will drop down to less than 500m over the next 2 decades

There's a lot of vilifying of landlords here. I was a landlord for a while because I wasn't ready to move. That got me my two first and only legal cases (one settled, one won but never collected $10k owed because the con artist skipped country). The insane level of stress got me out of that and I was lucky because only months later, all landlords got left holding the bag with the covid non-eviction mandate which meant renters could just stop paying rent. I'll never ever rent anything out again.

It’s interesting how rent controls work perfectly but property tax controls (prop 13) is widely known to be the cause of all ills.

The landlord can decide to change the rent to anything up to the legal rent, but cannot go over.

There's no more choice in using roads than there is to live somewhere.

THIS!

I live in Ontario (Canada) and my property assessment shows something similar, the value of the home is ~40% of the assessed value.

There are plots of land in Toronto where the house is not livable selling for north of a million dollars. Given they have no house, it is purely land value.

Yes. Plenty. It is not unknown. Not common but it definitely happens

Whether these actions work or not, it is not immoral to attempt them.

There is no 'human right to profit at the expense of others'.

The discomfort you experience of having to let out your bought-for-the-purposes-of-renting properties, instead of letting them sit fallow is less important to me than the discomfort of the person you're evicting. Fortunately, vacancy taxes can solve this problem very easily.

You want to be a landlord? Comply with tenant laws. If you don't like it, you won't be missed, it's not like you can leave and take that apartment with you.

This is positing that landlords engage in complicated schemes to lower the rent they are paid. I speak with supreme confidence, the median landlord is not going to do that unless these 'preferred renters' are measurably better than the people getting kicked out, in ways that make objective sense. Frankly, if a landlord is engaging in this practice then they probably aren't a 'landlord', they've just taken the property out of the rental market so their kids can live there or something.

> ...drive out a family to subdivide an apartment into multiple rooms to rent.

A landlord is much more likely to do that, but the complaint here is that there are people willing to value the m2 of the apartment higher than the family. There is no way to block that from happening without price controls and, eventually, shortages emerging.

The landlords in the article are greedy, they don't want their apartments to be empty. They want to be renting them out for whatever the most willing renter is going to give them. But they also aren't stupid, and they aren't going to rent them out anticipating that they will make losses.

In any case, the exact same economic phenomena has been observed regardless of if you fix rent increases to inflation or never allow for rents to increase, because the two approaches are just incredibly similar variants of price controls.

Housing on the supply side is relatively inelastic when compared to other markets. Even if demand is high it might not quickly lead to new construction.

On the demand side the market is also relatively inelastic as moving has a lot of friction compared for instance with not making a luxury good purchase or postponing a holiday.

I’m sorry you live with such a negative view of others.

I don't understand this at all.

A market is designed to solve the problem of allocation of resources (think: scarce).

Can you state your non-market proposal to provide housing (in economic terms)? Sorry, but the idea of managing allocation of resources without a market is very foreign to me. I just don't know what you're proposing, and I can't imagine how it would work.

Separately - not much talk about the importance of location. NYC housing is expensive... why live in NYC?

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20464/beijing/population

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20517/guangzhou-guangdong...

https://www.macrotrends.net/cities/20667/shenzhen/population

If they own that part of the river, they are dumping it on their property. This is the definition of an externality.

It doesn't account for massive differences in power, there's nothing in libertarian philosophy which takes into account that a multi-trillion dollar corporation will, always, have absurdly more power than any citizen or small collection of citizens.

Suing someone/something is not a magic bullet, in your utopian libertarian world you'd have to pay lawyers for that. You'd require lawyers that want to work with you instead of large corporations, corporations which would be free to blacklist any lawyer working against them to work for them. Not taking into account that these corporations can just slowly dial up the inconvenience to communities they'd like to push out, are you gonna sue them multiple times? What exactly do you expect that your powerless minimal government be able to do if you win a trial against such actors, to fine them? If they can just pay the fine, over and over, and they calculate those fines are just a cost of business that will be paid off by ROI, is that ok? Or do you expect the government to take action and shutdown a company that's constantly breaking the law?

I simply cannot understand why you really believe that suing a massively more overpowering force in a libertarian world is achievable, not only achievable but required to keep a balance of... Power.

It's absurd.

"noun a reduction in the value of an asset with the passage of time, due in particular to wear and tear."

Given enough time, depreciation leads to zero, or some "scrap value".. this is literally part of its definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depreciation

When house values "fall" this is NOT depreciation, but market forces (supply/demand, interest rates, mortgage rates, government policy...).

The point of "depreciation" is normally to allow things to be written off at a reduced value over the assets lifetime.

Cars do "depreciate" because over time, they face wear and tear and at the end of their lifespan they are traded in for "scrap value".

Homes do not depreciate because there is no logical reason why this asset's value would reduce over time/wear/tear when it can be properly maintained, as is the case of the houses from the 1700's i sent you.

I regularly see these takes hn and I don't get what's so assholeish about my situation. I know that my tenant is on a temporary visa. Are we arguing that ethically he should have bought my property?

I'll also point out that despite the fact that rent stabilization isn't required for new rental construction, there are a few areas in nyc where the city offered incentives in the form of property tax abatements in exchange for the landlords agreeing to rent stabilization - what do you think happened? Almost all of the new construction in those areas agreed to being rent stabilized. If it was so bad, so ruinous, why would they agree to that?

The story here isn't "rent stabilization is bad", it's "landlords are having a hissy fit that they can't exploit their tenants as much as before, so they're keeping apartments off the market on the off chance they win a court case"

A van does not solve the problem. A van is a shitty place to raise a family. And remote working is not going to cut it - if your job does not pay you enough to afford a house, it's unlikely to be a nice middle class job where you can sit at a laptop.

For a claim like this you’re going to need to do better than “lots”.

It is often true that the old house on a piece of valuable land would cost more to repair than it would cost to build a new house on that land.

Often enough the added cost of removing the old house (the use of asbestos in the past often vastly increases that cost) added on top of everything means that the land itself can loose its value.

We see this a lot with old industrial sites, but it happens to residential buildings too.

As for "timescales", do not be mean. The time-scale for depreciation of a car that is in use is measured in seconds New cars loose a third (? I know more about property than cars?) of their value when driven off the lot. Houses take a bit longer, but not "geological time-scales"

If you genuinely cannot understand that the concepts of depreciation, wear and tear, etc., can exist side by side with the concept of appreciation of the underlying land value, then I recommend you do some reading before engaging in conversations on HN that simply discredit yourself.

In any case, since the last reply seems to not make any coherent points at all, I won't try to deduce if there's any further meaning.

Please look up how much subsidy is given to the American farmers. It's probably more than you think it is.

> And for loans.

Might have agreed more with you, but then 2008 happened.

When you said:

> The state works because they have a monopoly on violence and imprisonment. As long as they operate for general good and operate via a strict system of laws which prevents abuses and maintains rights, then that is a good thing.

did you think that most libertarians would disagree? The status quo is that the state has a role in protecting human and property rights, and in regulating public and common goods. No pragmatic libertarian would suggest removing the state from these roles without finding a suitable replacement.

When people say things such as "Libertarians don't account for externalities" and use a caricature of a "libertarian utopia" to attack libertarianism at large, it pigeonholes libertarians as extremists, and does not paint a realistic picture of how libertarianism actually influences politics every day.

That's because it's a good argument. And no, people don't need nutritious food either. Unless you _want_ them to live healthy lives. To satisfy your "want", there is a list of "needs". If you really want to, you can turn any want into a need by applying it to a higher level want. I happen to want people to live long healthy lives but I'm not going to frame that as a "need" because it simply isn't.

> The point is that society should agree on some level of basic needs

Ok, let's start there.

> how you view other people and their requirements for life.

I would _like_ everyone to live a happy and fulfilled life free of suffering. I pay taxes and donate to charity to help provide that for people. It is, however, not a requirement for life or a "need" in any way.

> And yes, if you want the future to be in any way a human future, "being able to raise a family" is absolutely in the "need" column.

Ok. If that's the goal, yes. Is that the goal? People are having children at a sub-replacement level. It doesn't seem like that's really a goal for those people.

I _want_ to live in a free society. I _want_ there to be no or minimal human suffering. If humanity goes extinct through a process of dwindling birthrates because people choose not to have children, I really could not care less.

Every "need" has an implicit "in order to accomplish [goal]" on the end of it. Framing something as a "need" assumes a common goal which is often abused people to put more and more things into the "need" column when there is no consensus goal.

So what do people "need" housing for? The availability of affordable housing is already an accomplished goal. The availability of affordable housing in NYC is not an accomplished goal.

The availability of affordable housing in NYC is only a need for the survival of NYC itself which I, again, could not care less about (provided humans don't suffer in the collapse).

People talk past each other constantly by omitting their priors discussing these things. When you say "housing is a need", for what? And in the context of this article, I'd interpret your statement of "need" to be NYC specific so, "housing in NYC is a need", for what?

The problems I have with libertarianism are around these issues and your handwaving of them, and this is compounded by the fact that you haven't defined what libertarianism actually is, besides that it is 'not anarchy'.

Have you really thought about these things, or do you just find the idea of self-sufficiency and absolute personal freedom enticing?

Since the first-past-the-post voting system used in most U.S. states makes it difficult for third parties to gain traction, most politicians who prioritize winning elections run under one of the two major parties. A libertarian candidate who focuses on reducing taxes is more likely to become elected on the Republican ticket than the Libertarian ticket. A libertarian candidate who prioritizes legalizing marijuana will stand a better chance on the Democratic ticket than the Libertarian ticket. The goal is to push for changes that would advance the libertarian agenda on specific issues while maintaining the status quo party line on other issues, since it is easier to enact targeted changes than to fight on all fronts. Political candidates who choose to be affiliated with the Libertarian Party need to be sufficiently radical to reject the two dominant platforms that are much more likely to win them elections.

Voters know that third parties including the Libertarian Party are disadvantaged in U.S. elections, and in races that Libertarian Party candidates are certain to lose or do not participate in, many libertarian voters select the candidate from one of the two major parties that they believe would do the best job advancing or preserving the parts of the libertarian philosophy that they prioritize. This is the most effective short-term voting strategy when voter prefers one of the major party candidates more than the others. In the long term, libertarians in the U.S. support ranked choice voting and other reforms that would empower third parties like the Libertarian Party. If the Libertarian Party does manage to gain traction, its platform would adapt to become more moderate, mainstream, and pluralistic to accommodate its larger voter base and encompass more of the libertarian philosophy.

There aren't many surveys that focus on libertarians, but this 2014 one from the Pew Research Center shows that self-described libertarians tend to be more diverse and less radical than you perceive them to be:

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/08/25/in-search-o...

At this point in time it is clear you are not going to change your mind on this -- and as long as you continue to claimn that I am wrong and fallacious for making assumptions about libertarian political ideas based on my direct experience with people espousing them, then I am afraid we are at an impasse.

> convincing people how reasonable you can be instead of distancing yourself from the crazies

Again, I did not express any political ideology. When I saw you making comments conflating libertarianism with anarcho-capitalism, I explained the difference and brought in evidence to show that self-described libertarians generally do not hold the radical views that you believe they do. Equating libertarianism to anarcho-capitalism makes as much sense as conservatives equating progressivism to antifa and warning of a far-left takeover.