881
'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
881 points (97.1% liked)
News
23679 readers
3200 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The core problem, which causes that shortage, is that we have conflicting views on what housing is for.
On one hand, we want housing to be a right. On the other hand we want our houses to be good investments.
Those are conflicting goals. We need to pick one and be ready to sacrifice the other.
If you want your house to be a good investment, it needs to appreciate in value at a rate higher than inflation. The only way for that to happen is if housing keeps getting more expensive on a real money basis. That's a fancy way of saying that housing will be a bigger and bigger chunk of income.
Every single policy that reduces the cost of housing also degrades its effectiveness as an investment. If people can get housing any time they want, they have no incentive to pay somebody a bunch of money to someone hoping to fund their retirement by downsizing.
Your suggesting to legalize more housing will destroy the ability of homeowners to make a profit off their homes. Even though I stand to earn huge amounts of money from the appreciation of my own house I would support that, but I'm afraid I'm in the minority. The US has a 65.9% home ownership rate and for most people their home is their single biggest asset. If we address the housing shortage those people will all see their single biggest investment asset drop in value.
I mean, boo hoo?
I bought a house, not because I wanted an investment, but I wanted a place to live. Fuck the CCP, but man were they on the money saying "Houses are for living in," their current, ironic, housing bubble aside. Houses are homes. You want an investment vehicle, buy stocks or bonds.
If the people who see housing as an investment are outweighed by the people who simply want an affordable home as a right, it's become an unsustainable and unjust privilege and needs to be rectified.
Also, I think this ignores the larger factors of: poor zoning due to NIMBY-friendly policies at the local level, and corporate greed as companies, not people, buy up supply. Solve these two problems and we don't have to pick between housing as a right and housing as an investment.
The problem with this plan is that it assumes that we're only hurting some cigar puffing Wall Street fat cats but, in reality, the pain would be felt much more broadly.
In the US, the majority of people own the home they live in. https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by-state-and-city/ Those aren't big corporation or greedy landlords, they're 50+ percent of the population of each state. Some of those people are billionaires and many of them have below median income. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-assets-make-wealth/
Those super wealthy people that we're happy to throw under the bus don't have their wealth tied up in their homes. Their real estate investments tend to be small fractions of their portfolios. The ones that would get hit the hardest are the ones with less than $100k. I'm glad that you're in a position where you can survive a large financial loss on your house but a lot of people don't have that luxury.
Any plan that just kills their investments without some way to take care of those people will create a disaster. Maybe we could bump up Social Security somehow? That would involve significant tax increases but it could plug the gap.
Huge swaths of our economy are set up to assume that houses are financial assets. NIMBY policies are largely about maintaining or increasing the financial value of the real estate. The corporations buying up all the housing are kind of a red herring. The US has one of the highest owner occupancy rates in the world. There has been a slight (about 1.6%) in non-own occupied housing and only a fraction of those 1.6% are corporations. So it's technically true that corporations hold more residential real estate but they hold so little of it that it's unlikely to be a primary factor in home pricing or availability.
As I said elsewhere, the data is very clear on the matter. We don't have a lot of empty housing inventory being horded by greedy investors. By any reasonable measure, we have a housing shortage.
I don't.
I understand you're speaking in general terms here but no, i think having housing being tied to investments at all is a terrible idea we've just normalized.
The flip side of course we've experienced, like 2008 when the market went sour, putting people out of home and destroying retirement funds
I don't think it's a good idea either but we live in a society that effectively decided that we do want houses to be investments decades ago. That's entrenched now and many people bet their life savings on the promise that their house would be a good investment.
If we change that without taking those people into account they're all screwed. While some rich people would get screwed in that process a whole lot of poor people would get screwed too.