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Just ban rental. If the landlords can't manage to sell their now worthless properties, the state can buy them and give them to homeless people (or the current occupants where applicable).
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Jul 1, 2020 10:56
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Tiggum posted:Just ban rental. If the landlords can't manage to sell their now worthless properties, the state can buy them and give them to homeless people (or the current occupants where applicable). What options would you support taking its place? I'm asking because I'm actually interested, I'm not trying to throw it in your face or anything. If you took an area like LA and removed renters, I think a major effect of that would be to alter the makeup of the community, and not necessarily for the better. Sure, housing prices may decrease slightly, but many folks who currently live (or would like to live) in these areas still wouldn't have the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to convince a bank to offer them a mortgage. I mean, my wife and I could probably swing a down payment at the moment and we would love to be homeowners, but we have lived in 4 states in 6 years and will be moving to a 5th sometime next year. You still need temporary housing options, and those options are still going to be limited in some way by the desirability of the area.
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Jul 1, 2020 18:09
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Baronash posted:What options would you support taking its place? I'm asking because I'm actually interested, I'm not trying to throw it in your face or anything. Well if you banned rental the massive rental properties with tens if not hundreds of units wouldn't be instantly worthless. You can sell the units as condos. Let's say you do ban rent, which for the record would cause a lot of unintended problems, you would have to have some sort of government backed heavily subsidized Federal loan system in place to allow the people who live in an area to buy their current homes if they are renting. But really eliminating rental entirely isn't the greatest idea. You can and should eliminate the massive rental properties but encourage owner/operator rental units. People are going to always need short term home solutions. You can't expect an 18 year old to want to buy a property, same as someone who is living somewhere for training or a contract job. You do however want to make the need for rental properties to be lower by making more property available for purchase and making the barrier for entry much lower. In an area like LA there will always be a demand for property both for purchase and rental due to the area, industries and demographics there. But putting in limits and heavy monetary penalties on multiple property ownership will keep things more affordable for the average person. Theoretically you would also put a 70+% tax rate on income above a certain threshold like we had before Reagan in 1981 started lowing the top tax rate which also directly helped cause the massive income inequality we have now. That is an entirely different discussion though.
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Jul 1, 2020 20:28
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Azhais posted:Yeah, the rent just goes up. Just like a trade war, pass that extra cost on to the consumer. Right. I imagine that the other thing that would have to exist is way broader and more enforceable rent control. If landlords are free to set the rent to whatever they want, then yeah they'll just pass extra cost onto renters. If they literally can't do that, they'd have even more reason to re-assess how profitable the speculative real estate market is in the first place. The thing that really gets me about real estate as a market investment is how short-sighted it is. Places become desirable because of unique characteristics of the community, the local businesses or other smaller institutions or amenities it already has there. The goal of real estate developing is to flatten over all of that to maximize profit, essentially destroying the primary selling point of the area in the first place. Eventually, when the only things that can afford to operate there are 6 banking locations and a boilerplate Chipotle, who's willing to pay an exorbitant rent to stay there? It's such short-term thinking, like a cultural version of fracking. Until, I guess, everything around it looks the exact same and renters have literally no choice but to be gouged in one of a dozen identical, strip-mined places. Which is also a depressing LA reality I try not to think about.
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Jul 1, 2020 22:17
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Xealot posted:Right. I imagine that the other thing that would have to exist is way broader and more enforceable rent control. If landlords are free to set the rent to whatever they want, then yeah they'll just pass extra cost onto renters. If they literally can't do that, they'd have even more reason to re-assess how profitable the speculative real estate market is in the first place. Well this kind of gentrification has gone on all over the country in any metro area. Places where 20-15 years ago white, wealthy people wouldn’t even step foot into are now effectively transformed into safe little quasi-suburbia with a 15-30 minute commute to your job. You have all your big corporate chain shops that are trendy to that crowd. All of the local art, food and culture that originally brought interest to those communities all got priced or pushed out in a short amount of time. LA, Chicago and New York all have prime examples. Hell it is happening where I live right now. In the last five years many of the little locally owned shops have been forced to close due to rent hikes or their buildings being sold out from under them to be torn down, turned into high priced condos with a big chain on the first level. There was a pizza place about two blocks from me that had been in the location for 40+ years. The new landlord priced them out and forced them to close. The entire bottom level of the building has been empty for almost 2 years now as are many units in the area. I am all for investing in neighborhoods and making things better for the residents but not at the expense of people and culture that live there.
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Jul 1, 2020 22:31
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You see that sort of short-sightedness in a lot of other areas of the economy, where the economy is at its healthiest, most productive, and with the most growth when there's lots of people with about the same amount of money who all have similar buying power and bargaining power who can be a market for goods and all be motivated independently to improve things, but short-term gains inspire everybody to cut wages to the bare minimum so that employee performance suffers and nobody can afford the goods or services they provide. Most of the historic friction on land ownership was more about farming, and you have some ancient societies whose crop yields usually relied on large-scale irrigation projects, so naturally there wound up being more state control over farming. More relevant is probably the late Roman Republic's issues with land use where small farmers kept running into issues where they had to sell their land to the big wealthy landowners, in a large part because the "middle class" of Rome kept getting called upon to go fight in wars, which involved leaving their farms vacant, and reformers kept trying to distribute some of the conquered land to recreate the middle class, but never got any headway against wealthy opposition until the Republic fell. Then there's Georgism, the proto-socialist ideology that had the idea that all land should be owned by the state and that land ownership should be heavily taxed until the state could take hold of it. I think it's mostly extinct because all the Georgists eventually joined with "proper" socialism and then got wiped out in the red scare, but you can see its legacy in the anti-capitalist propaganda game Monopoly. I don't know what the proper original rules were, but I think they included a final round after one player won, where everybody else would have to experience the life of a tenant, going around the board, hoping that your meager salary from passing Go could cover the trip around the board as you pay rent to a player who mostly became the landowner by random chance.
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Jul 2, 2020 02:19
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Baronash posted:Sure, housing prices may decrease slightly, but many folks who currently live (or would like to live) in these areas still wouldn't have the tens of thousands of dollars necessary to convince a bank to offer them a mortgage. Baronash posted:You still need temporary housing options, and those options are still going to be limited in some way by the desirability of the area. 
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Jul 2, 2020 07:27
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Xealot posted:
Right now places is desirable because people need a place to live. Most people can't afford to consider the unique characteristics of the community, that's reserved for the wealthy.
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Jul 2, 2020 09:44
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Xealot posted:This is a really interesting solution I haven't heard before, and it's pretty elegant. That is, punishing real estate hoarders without ruining single homeowners in the process. Land Tax here in Australia isn't charged on the principle place of residence, or at least it wasn't when I worked for the land tax office wayyyyy back in the 1990s. Their database was particularly lovely and I liked nothing better than to put aside an hour every day just to go through random files and repair data, quite often merging duplicate listings which would usually mean that a landlord who had been undercharged for years would suddenly be issued a recalculated bill for thousands of dollars. 
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Jul 2, 2020 12:29
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All I know about Australian real estate is that for a while, most of the wealthy were people who literally stole land (or stolen a second time after the aborigines were chased off) that was supposed to be government property and intended to be divvied out to settlers, and there was a whole thing where a guy built a suit of armor and went around attacking places to erase the records of people's debt. Also something about landlords being ineligible for political office.Tiggum posted:If you always have the option of selling your house to the state then there's no reason not to buy in most cases, even if you're planning to move again. I think there's problems that can result from areas that have too many temporary landowners who plan to move in a little while, because it means that none of them will be willing to foot the cost for long-term maintenance. I'm also not sure that developers would be able to recoup the costs of building a building if they can only sell to the next tenant instead of getting a smaller amount over time, although most solutions to the housing crisis would involve the government building housing anyways. You could also say that the potential issues from favoring tenants largely don't matter because we're so far on the other side of the scale that there's little danger of going too far the other way, but another reason you can't get rid of rental is that you can't get rid of hotels, and every landowner is going to try fixing up a lovely hotel scheme instead. Come to think of it, I wonder what the situation is with landlords of office buildings. So many of those businesses are going under and may refuse to pay rent for space they're not using. Obviously it's not going to be as much of a crisis because businesses get better access to welfare than human beings.
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Jul 2, 2020 18:34
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Tiggum posted:If the prices didn't decrease dramatically due to the sudden and dramatic increase in supply then you still have the option of the government buying up empty houses and just giving them away (or at least letting people live there if that's too radical for you). quote:If you always have the option of selling your house to the state then there's no reason not to buy in most cases, even if you're planning to move again. Fundamentally the core problem in most of those areas is a staggering lack of supply, and speculators, rental companies, etc, while lovely, are all just misdirection. Unless you want to go full FYGM an area is going to have culture changes as people come and go unless you build enough housing, public or otherwise, to allow people to come and stay (and you'll still get culture changes unless you engage in racist excluding/pigeonholing). Zachack fucked around with this message at 20:18 on Jul 2, 2020 |
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Jul 2, 2020 20:13
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Zachack posted:The problem is that this only works once and then you're stuck with the same core problem of lack of supply. And the government may be on the hook for maintaining those properties, and possibly being legally responsible (or at least a much juicier target) for the behavior of the tenants. You also see how this works out in actuality with public housing throughout the country. They were and are chronically underfunded so maintenance goes out the window quickly. You quickly have the only people living there are those that have no other option. You have violence and crime increase so they become a place where people and business avoid. In general we need to not only acknowledge that we live in a post-scarcity society but also using that to our advantage. We shouldn't have people going hungry or not having a place to live. Everyone should be able to have whatever they need and mostly want. As automation continues to increase there will be even less need for labor. We should be living in a golden gilded age of peace and prosperity for everyone. People shouldn't be working meaningless jobs for 40+ hours a week anymore.
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Jul 2, 2020 20:41
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SlothfulCobra posted:All I know about Australian real estate is that for a while, most of the wealthy were people who literally stole land (or stolen a second time after the aborigines were chased off) that was supposed to be government property and intended to be divvied out to settlers, and there was a whole thing where a guy built a suit of armor and went around attacking places to erase the records of people's debt. That guy with his homemade armour is still a national hero.  He and his gang got to wear their lovely suits of armour in just the one shootout with the police, things were going really well until the cops realised that they hadn't made any leg armour so they kneecapped 'em all and that was the end of that.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:15
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That's why you gotta get those videogame chest high walls to take cover behind.
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Jul 3, 2020 03:48
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Snowglobe of Doom posted:That guy with his homemade armour is still a national hero. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4HJAm0xrF0 But the inverse thereof
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Jul 3, 2020 10:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:another reason you can't get rid of rental is that you can't get rid of hotels, and every landowner is going to try fixing up a lovely hotel scheme instead. Zachack posted:And that's without getting into democratic action where the populace, upon being notified of fraud (real or imagined), starts hamstringing or imposing weird requirements on the property.
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Jul 4, 2020 08:10
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Tiggum posted:dignity This is why I loathe the Tiny Houses thing.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xwJvrWRRxg Do you want to sleep in a cutesified shed? Yes it is better than a bench, or a tent, or even a shelter, but that it is humiliating is the point. You don’t deserve dignity. You haven’t earned it. Yeah I guess I’d rather sleep in a Shame Shed than under a bridge, and maaaaybe instead of my car, but you could just let people live in actual loving buildings, too.
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Jul 4, 2020 09:23
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So what's the proper square footage required for dignity
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Jul 4, 2020 10:16
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Azhais posted:So what's the proper square footage required for dignity At least enough that your bedroom is not also your living room.
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Jul 4, 2020 11:51
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pwn posted:This is why I loathe the Tiny Houses thing. It's good people that are making this happen, but I agree that it shouldn't be necessary. The state should provide these people with proper homes, no one should be homeless.
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Jul 4, 2020 11:58
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Tiggum posted:Only if you let them. That's kinda the point. You can't just maintain a simple black and white rule like "no renting", because you'll still end up having to do a complex analysis of every landowner to find the ones breaking the system. No shortcuts around that. And you'd still have to do extra programs on top to create new housing to meet demand. California is real big on its disgusting sprawl of expensive low-density housing that makes any infrastructure serving more than a few people at once hard to create. You need a lot of bulldozing and rebuilding to make that mess work.
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Jul 4, 2020 13:03
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SlothfulCobra posted:That's kinda the point. You can't just maintain a simple black and white rule like "no renting", because you'll still end up having to do a complex analysis of every landowner to find the ones breaking the system. No shortcuts around that. I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Yes, there are many things wrong with the current system and all of them should/would have to change.
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Jul 4, 2020 14:25
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Azhais posted:So what's the proper square footage required for dignity About the same as what everyone else has. It's all relative - if everyone lives in tiny bachelor apartments then that is just "normal" and there is no shame in having a small living space. But a tiny shed that is right next to a big house is clearly diminished status.
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Jul 4, 2020 23:43
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There's nothing wrong with tiny houses, I've been considering going that route once decent internet shows up in the rural part of Wisconsin I'm from. The things in the video aren't that, those are just Menards garden sheds with a mattress. If they actually manage to keep it going (which the end of the video casts some doubt on) I hope they get some actual tiny house designers involved. Widen those slightly, raise the roof slightly, loft the bed, and you can actually have a decent living space. Don't do that and you might as well just buy out a self storage facility and stuff the homeless in there, at which point I agree wholeheartedly about the whole dignity thing
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Jul 5, 2020 00:27
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Tiggum posted:I don't understand what point you're trying to make. Yes, there are many things wrong with the current system and all of them should/would have to change. I guess my point is that there's no one single rule you can make to be a silver bullet and crack the cartel over land and bring balance to the housing market; you need to really commit to long-term management and funding development of new buildings, or else financial investors will find a way to sneak back into the system and take control over things to the detriment of people who actually use the resource they're using for speculation. Which is politically more difficult.
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Jul 5, 2020 00:45
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Kamrat posted:It's good people that are making this happen, but I agree that it shouldn't be necessary. A friendly reminder that there are more vacant or unused houses in America than there are people without homes.
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Jul 5, 2020 03:16
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:A friendly reminder that there are more vacant or unused houses in America than there are people without homes. A friendly reminder that vacant or unused homes are often in states of disrepair that range from just a couple dozen thousand dollars away from passing inspection to literally falling apart and scheduled for demolition. Housing is a complicated issue. There is a reason why every simple solution instantly falls apart under even the slightest bit of scrutiny. Listening to people try to solve the housing crisis with a brilliant, can't-fail, simple solution is like watching Trump solve COVID-19 after reading the back label of a bottle of Clorox. tarlibone fucked around with this message at 05:31 on Jul 5, 2020 |
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Jul 5, 2020 05:29
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How much maintenance gets done on those empty apartment buildings that are used money laundering? They're a bigger problem in India, but I assume America has them too. Housing has a lot of logistical issues on top of the moral decision of deciding to provide housing to people who need it at reasonable prices, but the financial industry, which gets heavily involved in housing due to the extravagant costs from speculators trying to get safe returns on investments, is almost entirely built around willfully obfuscating things. There's a lot of literal crimes that just fly by under the radar thanks to clever accounting.
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Jul 5, 2020 05:47
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Azhais posted:So what's the proper square footage required for dignity I'm in a 'luxury' apartment lol.
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Jul 5, 2020 05:54
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pwn posted:Do you want to sleep in a cutesified shed? Me? No. Some people appear to want to though, and to be willingly and unnecessarily trading larger houses for smaller ones because they think it has some benefits (be they mental, physical, environmental, logistical, whatever). I don't know who started the Tiny Housing trend, but it does appear to have gained some social traction due to people adopting it as a solution to their life being overly complicated and cluttered, similar to minimalism, and not because it's a cheap way to fob off the homeless. Which it doesn't seem to be getting used as a solution for much anyway, if only because most people would prefer to ignore that issue entirely than to enact even cheap and humiliating solutions. Putting a tiny house next to large, "normal" one wouldn't engender dignity, but putting a cluster of them together in their own area (i.e.with some division from other spaces), even if it's close to larger ones, probably wouldn't inherently foster indignity either.
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Jul 5, 2020 14:09
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Djarum posted:compounding real estate tax This seems like a way to make apartments larger and remove any incentive to build new apartments.
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Jul 5, 2020 15:35
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tarlibone posted:A friendly reminder that vacant or unused homes are often in states of disrepair that range from just a couple dozen thousand dollars away from passing inspection to literally falling apart and scheduled for demolition. I'm talking about vacant hotel rooms, houses that have been built and maintained but are currently unoccupied, and secondary housing for the wealthy that is occupied for less than 2 months per year. We don't even have to break in to the piles of broken homes and abandoned houses...
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Jul 5, 2020 17:32
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Toxic Fart Syndrome posted:I'm talking about vacant hotel rooms, houses that have been built and maintained but are currently unoccupied, and secondary housing for the wealthy that is occupied for less than 2 months per year. We don't even have to break in to the piles of broken homes and abandoned houses... But are those wide swaths of unused houses where the homeless, or pretty much any people are? Would a group of homeless people from New York city get forcibly relocated to Hellplains, Kansas because those houses would be way cheaper? Could you force people to relocate in such a way? Many would argue that you could and should. New York would be kinda glad to get rid of the homeless, rather than giving them hundreds of thousands in property value. But those are people too, they have friends and family and often enough work around there. Homelessness is not a simple problem which has a silver bullet and I don't like it when people act like it is. If you have a simple solution to a complicated problem, most of the time there are some giant holes in there.
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Jul 5, 2020 22:01
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Here's what I'll say, housing is a big complicated with no silver bullet to fix it, but right now most of the government is dedicated to solving the problem with those suction dart arrows instead of using any bullets.
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Jul 5, 2020 22:08
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cant cook creole bream posted:Could you force people to relocate in such a way? Wouldn't be the first time!
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Jul 5, 2020 23:10
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SlothfulCobra posted:Here's what I'll say, housing is a big complicated with no silver bullet to fix it, but right now most of the government is dedicated to solving the problem with those suction dart arrows instead of using any bullets. The silver bullet is "decommidify housing" but sadly it's far too radical an idea for your average American, especially the homeowners.
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Jul 6, 2020 04:59
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New metaphor I'm working on: I don't think there's a way to change the tires on this bus while it's moving and as of right now too many people are stake-holders to willingly vote pulling over.
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Jul 6, 2020 07:11
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WampaLord posted:The silver bullet is "decommidify housing" but sadly it's far too radical an idea for your average American, especially the homeowners. It's definitely too radical for me, because I literally have no idea what would even mean. I would assume it means something like "a house no longer has a value", but then, how do you even convince people to build and maintain them en masse, if doing so doesn't have any economic return?
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Jul 6, 2020 10:10
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tsob posted:It's definitely too radical for me, because I literally have no idea what would even mean. I would assume it means something like "a house no longer has a value", but then, how do you even convince people to build and maintain them en masse, if doing so doesn't have any economic return? Because we like to live in houses?
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Jul 6, 2020 10:28
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So your theory is you'd be happy to spend $200k building a house you didn't ultimately own at the end? The general argument I've seen is this theory involves the government owning all housing and letting the people live there for free. The dream: miles and miles of Khrushchyovka
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Jul 6, 2020 10:34
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