this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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Some of them might've not been able to (or wanted to) pay for the home ownership. But if this assumes someone not making profit was renting it out then yeah
The reason they're not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.
They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.
It lead to gentrification.
The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.
There's a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it's less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.
They could have easily solved that by pegging unit ownership to income.
Or, better yet, we could just build more units.
Or both. There is no reason to offer discounts to wealthy people just because they're first in line.
we could just build more high-density units
Im sure they also thought the lack of poor people owning houses was "easily solved" by banning landlords.
But how does pegging the unit ownership to income even work?
Very simply- you have to be under a certain income threshold to qualify for these homes. The same way it's done for lower-income housing everywhere else.
Where does this happen? I was under the impression that low income housing was owned by the state, or maybe someone else but under strict control by the state, and you had to fall under a certain income to rent there, not purchase.
Nowhere. But it should.
Okay, do now we're back to my original point:
Im sure they also thought the lack of poor people owning houses was “easily solved” by banning landlords.
Yes, again, because they didn't do anything about rich people taking advantage of it. I'm not sure why you're suggesting that "don't let rich people have the homes" would still make it impossible to house the poor.
I'm not suggest that, I'm pointing out that was seems "simple" often isn't and also often leads to unintended consequences.
How many net new housing units did they build from 2011 to 2021?
They had renting back then too and way before that, and it was really large scale too. It's not really a new phenomenon. And obviously buying a house is still a lot (and I mean a lot) more expensive than renting. Not everyone can save off from their paycheck so that they'd be able to pay for even these cheaper houses.
But in this case I'm not sure if we are talking about situation where the original post's house was on sale (which would just make it a regular house you have to buy) or a situation where there isn't any renting at all (or profiting from it), in which case it'd still be more expensive but less so than renting.
I bought my first apartment because my monthly costs would be like 30% less than rent. Like with many things, it's expensive to be poor.
Absolutely. It's the same even in very small scale in buying groceries. You can save a lot by buying bigger sized packages but not everyone can afford to since they don't have such money on hand. So they're wasting money (or being less efficient about it) because they can't afford to not do anything else. Shitty situation.
This is literally not how renting works. Get a clue.
As a poor, I'd be happy renting at an affordable rate from the state if the "rental income" was used to fund maintenance and development of state owned housing or plugged back into other social services like my tax dollars are.
I don't like private owners and private investors profiting of my need for shelter.
Kind of like our reality of Section 8 housing which I personally think should be the universal norm, rather than a rare exception for which people have to wait on a waiting list for 15 years before they're granted the exception of subsidized housing. ALL housing should be based upon how much we're able to pay for it. It only makes sense because
A roof over every human's head is a basic human need like air to breathe & food to eat.
The first thing primitive humans do is seek out caves to live in, and they learn how to build huts. They don't have to work 40 hours a week and pay 50% of that to the sky gods for the privilege of shelter from storms.
The fact that food, shelter, clothing, medical care and education aren't all considered basic human rights that should be subsidized is depressing as hell to me.
No one should be forced to live on the streets or sacrifice their education.
Municipality owned rental housing is fairly common where I live. Students often live in apartments owned by a student foundation. As landlords, they seem alright. Private sector is much more mixed and varied, obviously.
I think having different sort of rental property ownership works well enough. Balances each other out. Cheap municipal apartments help keep the prices down in the private sector too while allowing the competition and profit incentive for the private sector to invest in building apartments.
Don't be poor, problem solved!
Oh shit, I didn't think of that!
Yeah, the whole "what about people who want / need to rent because of their current circumstances" problem really is easy to solve.
Create a crown corporation (for those not familiar, a not-for-profit entity owned at arms length by the government) to handle all rentals, with a mandate to offer rents at a (very low) rate established by a formula that accounts for factors of property value (footage, amenities, location), population density and rental demand in a given area.
Then you make it so that only this crown corp is allowed to charge residential tenants rent. Anyone else who wants to make money off of their second properties and the like will have to sell them to the crown corp. Anyone like in the OP who wants to rent for some months of the year will enter an arrangement with the crown corp where the corp rents the property on their behalf at the rates established by the formula.
Municipalities having their own rental apartments is very common where I live. Though here it works in tandem with private sector.
The tandem option is also viable, and is actually a really great starting place for this sort of thing (I will fully acknowledge that my proposal would be very difficult to get through any current political system). The public sector deliberately competing with the private to bring down prices has been proven to work. A great example of this is Sasktel in Canada, where the provincial government made their own publicly owned telecoms provider, and as a result all the big telcos, that functioned as an oligopoly everywhere else, offering identical plans at identical prices, had to offer plans that were much, much cheaper in Saskatchewan specifically.
Also there's absolutely room for debate as to whether a single massive rental company would be better, or whether it would be preferable to have lots of small, regional or municipal corps. I prefer the former only because it would give them more flexible buying power in terms of scooping up properties to rent out, but I'm sure there are strong arguments for the other approach.
Indeed, yes. There are actually a lot of such cases in EU (state sponsors directly or indirectly housing projects a few 100 units at a time), even if it's "just" a case of better priced (still market priced, but not that extremely "for profit" driven) offerings, people either get to buy or at least to live in contemporary housing of some stature/location (bcs commute is a killer in every non-economical sense). This builds local communities, art, places to live/visit/enjoy, and facilitates families/family needs.
It also helps to stabilize the market & gives a chance for normal people to (somewhat) catch-up up to the market they helped to built/their labor built.
Yes, same here - they are needed in times of turmoil and crisis ... in this case the "crisis" being landlords hiking rents.
So in recent years municipalities (and some EU countries) are investing increasingly more into such non-profit projects. It works, rents are low, communities live. Even if buying land and developing got costlier.
Even if this would cost taxpayers money (ie operating with financial loss), I gladly pay it, it benefits us all.
Who would rather pay monthly payments to a third party if they could pay the exact same amount but get to keep most of the money for themselves (ie in real estate ownership)?
Someone not wanting to commit to house ownership for whatever reason. Could be students, temporarily working somewhere, someone not sure if they want to live somewhere long-term etc. Or someone worried if they can get their house sold when or if they want to move. It can be a commitment and some just don't want to do that.
And this is all assuming you could get a loan and buy the house in the first place, have enough for the down payment and so on.
Exactly. Why would they pay for the ownership/ownership prices if they dont get it? Should it not be available to them at less than that?