Let’s build a million new homes and sell them to people that don’t currently own any homes.
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This guy is clearly not scared of “crime”
Edgelord
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“Crime” is code word for boomers and nimbys to block proper development
Let’s
buildseize a million new homes and sell them to people that don’t currently own any homes.FTFY
Fuck these ogres hoarding real estate.
Doesn’t help if there is housing available but it’s 3 hours from where my work is :/
There’s no shortage of homes in the US. They’re just being hoarded for their increasing value.
I don’t believe that is the case. There is no value in letting a property sit empty accumulating value, when it could be doing exactly that while pulling in a hefty monthly rent.
It may well be the case that there’s enough homes empty to house everyone, but only if they’re happy to move somewhere they don’t want to be, and where there’s no jobs to pay for them.
renters bring risks. if the home is on the market, they also make it a half to sell
Timely.
Man this entire thread is just a perfect encapsulation of the perfect being the enemy of the good. What a bunch of useless chuds.
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I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that phrase. Do you mind explaining what you mean? (Just to be clear, I’m not trying to be combative. I just have no idea how to read that)
“Don’t make perfect the enemy of good” essentially says that it’s better to do what you can in the short term to reduce harm or make positive change than to wait for the perfect solution and do nothing in the meantime. The idea is that the good is still going to help some people while we wait for the perfect solution to the problem- which, crucially, may never come, or come too late for a whole bunch of people.
One example would be letting a parent having their kid eat fast food instead of a perfectly healthy diet because their parents live in a food desert; not ideal, but it’ll keep the kid fed and alive.
In simple terms, the failure to do something absolutely perfectly shouldn’t stop you from doing something that will still be better than the status quo.
What if the act of doing something carries a cost with a negative expected return on investment?
that doesn’t sound very good to me
…then the original saying doesn’t apply, does it? Is this some kind of “gotcha” I’m not understanding?
…then the original saying doesn’t apply, does it?
And that’s the million dollar question. I’m not arguing the perfect should be the enemy of the good. I’m questioning how much “good” I get by aligning myself with a fundamentally bad dude. Biden’s played this bait-and-switch game before, and there’s a real reason to believe 2025 Joe Biden won’t be willing or able to deliver on his 5% rent cap promise. In exchange, what is he asking you to give up?
An hour of your life in line to vote on election day? A small recurring donation to his campaign? A week block-walking your neighborhood to canvas for him? Three months volunteering to work for his reelection campaign?
Presidential elections aren’t cheap. I have to wonder what would happen if all the money and manpower pouring into Biden’s coffers was simply directed towards Habitat For Humanity instead. Would we get more bang for our bucks?
Dawg, I’m not even the OP. I was just explaining an idiom, and you expect me to answer a humanist philosophical question as if I’m the greatest thinker of our generation 😭
I can’t help you decide what extent you’re willing to compromise to vote Biden/democrats. I can’t even vote in the US.
This guy really larps these this trust me bro jaja
We want actual change.
Not this half-assed thing of “oh shit Biden isn’t polling well. Quick, do something popular!”.
Seeing this honestly frustrates me more because we all know they could do better than this.
What BS. This is like arguing that “trickle down economics” is good because money eventually trickles down to us plebs. We’re in a sinking boat filled with holes and you’re trying to argue that we should be happy that 1 of 1000 holes got patched up even though there isn’t time to patch the other 999 holes before the ship sinks because the crew would rather sit on their ass and drink martinis.
No this is like y’all getting mad at someone working on patching a hole because he’s not simultaneously patching every hole in the exact same instance. All why you sit there and don’t work on anything. Get a mallet get some wood get to work or shut up.
Cheap vodka comes in plastic bottles and landlords are faceless corporate entities on the other side of the country (if they’re in the country at all). So my ability to help is limited.
Except that you’re not in a sinking boat and you’re in the top 5% of the richest people in the world.
Interesting. We all have the same feeling about you. The sad part is that you might actually know something. Maybe you could say something constructive, if only you cared to do so.
You could have made an argument about how aiming for perfection is a bad strategy here. But you didn’t, so let me show how you’re wrong. The proposed solution doesn’t address the underlying problem, and it adds complexity. Rent can only go up by 5%, sure, but what happens if you sell the property you move into it or other exceptional circumstances happen? Then you can raise the price. Or perhaps you rent it through Airbnb, so the rules don’t apply either. It doesn’t really matter what the special cases are, because finance folk love complicated solutions. They’re always going to find ways to game the system at our expense.
But let’s suppose the 5% solution is somehow good. If it’s good for rent then it should be good for other things too, right? You can’t let electricity or gas prices go up faster, or people won’t be able to heat their homes. You can’t let food prices go up faster, or people won’t be able to eat. Oh, and you certainly need minimum wage to be going up 5%, for any of that to make sense.
So if we consider all of that, and we find the aforementioned proposal slightly lacking, maybe it’s not because we’re seeking perfection. Maybe it’s because you have no idea what problems we are trying to solve.
I stand corrected, this is the perfect encapsulation.
Also you are a disgrace to that username.
Lol it’s like you summoned the ancient spirit of not understanding incremental improvement, who then wrote a short essay to explain to you just how much they don’t understand the concept.
I also stand corrected. I thought you might actually know something. But then you double down with a witty empty response: two sentences with zero information. What good is that? Grandstanding is boring and pointless.
And then you want to trash talk my username? Jesus. Have fun with that.
Some people are here to learn, some people are here to teach, some people are here to share, some people are here to build community. You’re not doing any of those things. Meh.
Weird, I just bought a house and to be on the safe side I consulted with a real estate lawyer before signing the purchase agreement. I plan to rent it out for a couple of years before moving into it myself, and the lawyer offered me a copy of his standard rental lease agreement. The lease called for an automatic annual renewal with a 5% increase in rent, and I was shocked because in 30 years of renting I’ve never been hit with an increase anywhere near that (almost every renewal I’ve ever agreed to was at the same rent). It’s weird to think of increases even larger than that, such that a 5% cap would be beneficial.
It is set at 2.5% where I live.
Realistically that’s about what it should be. 3% tops. Average worker wages haven’t gone up that much yearly in forever.
That’s still way higher than anyone’s raises each year…
Raises have nothing to do with inflation or cost of living. Companies that pin raises to those things are severely underpaying employees and hoping they don’t seek greener pastures.
Market rates set compensation. The best way to know your market rate is to find a new job.
If the company is doing COLAs right then their employees wouldn’t need to seek greener pastures.
COLA is almost always lower than what you’ll get by job hopping
I didn’t say they were doing it right.
what the fuck? you get less than 5% raise in a year in the US?
edit: in light of responses, I’d like to reiterate, what the fuck… this is the most obscenely wealthy country in the world.
Most people are lucky to get 2%… my company set the max at 2.5 last year and you only got that if you were IT Jesus
Yep, company loyalty is dead here. The only way to get a significant raise is to switch jobs.
i mean that’s what happens if you don’t give a raise. what a stupid market.
People are lucky to get a raise at all. Much less 5%, usually it’s 1 or 2. For at least a decade the only way to significantly increase your pay has been to move jobs.
Acording to this report: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/eci.pdf
The average Wages and salaries increased 1.1 percent and benefit costs increased 1.1 percent from December 2023.
Oh and then people that did get raises averaged 4.4% last year. So its really raises for some and poverty for most.
You know what would get more votes? That student loan forgiveness thing! Maybe the kids who never graduated or used their expensive education should get their loans forgiven???
Remember that? Yeah?
Cuz 5% is not gonna do much if you got a 15% loan.
Seems kind of weird to blame the guy who is trying to do the thing you want and not the people who keep blocking it from happening.
I’m just reminding him since I got a certain loved one that I inherited a certain amount of this debt from. Like WTF. It’s like buying a slave…how much is that slave over there? Oh that one? Yeah that’ll be 5000 Dollars in student loans please!.
trying to do the thing you want
Except he isn’t, at this point all he’s doing is claiming to want to give the poor some crumbs, so that those who haven’t yet, don’t turn on him.
A 5% increase limit is still an increase, he’s not doing you any fucking favours by continuing to allow landlords to gouge you, only a little more conservatively.
I was responding specifically to the implication that Biden isn’t trying to do loan forgiveness, which is factually incorrect. It’s the courts that keep blocking the plan and forcing it to be narrower in scope, not Biden.
As for this proposed cap on rent increases, I fail to see how a limited increase is worse than an unlimited one. Is it less action than we need? Definitely. Is it insulting that it took the credible threat of a fascist dictatorship to extract this tiny concession? Absolutely. Am I going to kick and scream because it isn’t everything I wanted? Hell no! Just the fact that the President is seriously discussing this is an improvement, and we need all the leftward momentum we can get if we ever want to start pushing the Overton window on economic issues.
I used to scoff like this at early efforts to decriminalize marijuana. “Lower penalties? State-issued medical cards with heavy restrictions? None of that actually solves anything! It needs to be completely legal!” Now look at where we are: Fully legal in 24 states, partially legal in most others, and the DEA has started the process for rescheduling to a less-restricted category. It was slow going and we’re still not quite where we need to be, but that’s way more progress than I ever thought we would get!
the supreme court literally rewrote a law to prevent loan forgiveness.
Such buttholes! Gurr. The supremes and the president electoral college. I tell you, we got no say at all.
He literally forgave my loan and the supreme court said no. fuckin pissed
Basically, if he loses, I gotta pay someone’s loan. WTF!
I suppose he has to do something to signal to voters that he’s going to try to fix the housing affordability crisis, but this is pretty meaningless. But, what can he say? The truth? That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix? Probably not going to go over very well.
How is this meaningless?
Well, for one, it almost certainly won’t pass. So the chances of it becoming law in the first place are pretty low. But even if it were passed, I think it would be difficult to enforce. Even if it were enforced, landlords would just hike the rent 4.99% every year.
4.99% is way better than the 50% my previous landlord tried. You can always vote Republican if you want. See what they’re going to do for you.
You can always vote Republican if you want.
No thanks.
Not to mention that unless wages also rise by 5% per year, which mine haven’t recently not sure about others, then it’s still unsustainable for renters.
Not allowing landlords to drive people into homeless on speculation and greed is a good first step to solving the very complex problem that will take decades.
That the housing crisis is an extremely complex problem that will take decades to fix?
No? There’s currently no cap on single housing investments, and at the very least private equity needs to be banned from buying housing in any form.
“Here old man, rattle off this list! It’ll save you! Get 'em, Joey!”
And then he screwed it up and read the teleprompter wrong as “capping rent at $55 dollars.” No joke.
I think people are focusing quite a bit too much on Biden’s speaking abilities and too little on his policies.
I’ll take Biden’s policies any day over Trump’s policies and his toxic personality.
It’s over…
Pelosi privately told Biden polls show he cannot win and will take down the House
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/17/politics/nancy-pelosi-biden-conversation/index.html
Polls say different things. This one says the opposite: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-polling-data-five-thirty-eight-1926226
If you think Biden has any chance of beating Trump at this point then I’ve got a bridge to sell you
I didn’t say it, the poll said it.
I’m down
5% is crazy talk when workers wages are going up 2.5% per year. Landlords need at least 20% more every year.
Is 5% really that crazy when the current rate is 20% as you describe?
You gotta get something that will pass
This is what happened in California. The statewide rent control is 5% plus inflation per year, capped at 10% per year. There’s a bunch of exclusions too, like the property has to be at least 15 years old, and single-family homes that aren’t owned by a corporation are excluded too. I think the builders and landlords had quite a bit of a say in it, hence the limit being so high above inflation (assuming inflation of <=5%).
Still a lot better than it used to be. It applies to month-to-month rentals too, so you can get the flexibility of a month-to-month rental while still having a limit on the rent increase per year. Evictions also need to have just cause and there’s a notice period of 60 days if the tenant has lived there for longer than a year.
But if it pass, then it is first win. I fear that landlord are not going to let it happen without a fight
I’m curious what the federal government can actually do in this situation. Most private leases are contracts under state law, not federal law.
You can always put new limits in that private contacts have to abide by. The only limit is the Constitution.
I would think tax law could make it completely untenable to own residential properties as rentals and give federal tax breaks to developers that build affordable housing? I’m sure there could also be federal grants to cities for easing zoning restrictions. Not sure how much of this is possible.
Threats I guess 🤷
I thought it was $55?
That’s great!!!
Need to stop corporations buying houses next, and tamper foreigners buying up houses too (almost every country I’ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?)
I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.
I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.
Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.
I disagree. No need to force development to destroy natural landscapes just to avoid a tax. Simply tax multiple residential properties somewhat exponemtially.
100%, 133%, 200%, 350%, 500% or something
Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.
Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.
Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.
exponentially would be e. g. 100%, 1000%, 10 000%, etc.
you meant geometricallly
No, i was picturing an exponential with scale factors and coefficemts.
Right.
Owning one or two residential properties is fine, more is problematic.
I say “two” to handle the very common case of children putting their parents’ homes in their own name because Medicare clawback rules will take the home after they die if you don’t do it early enough.
The Medicare clawback crap is why we can’t expect to fix one issue with capitalism without addressing all the issues simultaneously. Can’t just raise minimum wage because landleeches will raise rents. Can’t just have universal healthcare because a lot of people would become unemployed when the insurance industry dies its overdue painful death.
Universal healthcare, student loan cancellation (and free state university), UBI, and the elimination of for-profit housing. All within one president’s term to have a chance of sticking past four years.
Crazy idea.
How about instead of corporations owning the unit, maybe the person who lives in the unit gets to own part of it.
I know crazy.
Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.
I almost bought a condo in a multi-story building a couple of years ago and I’m glad as hell I didn’t. It was a one-bedroom unit for $125K, which is fine except that the monthly condo fees are $1000 (which includes utilities, at least), property taxes plus insurance are another $400, and the last three consecutive years residents have been hit with a special assessment of about $10K - which means I would have been paying around $2500 a month to live in a one-bedroom apartment that I’d already paid $125K for.
I agree about taxes. Tax the ever loving bejesus out of vacant rentals or speculative residential real estate. That will keep them from buying in the first place or deeply incentivize them to keep them rented out.
The biggest issue with corporations owning low income multifamily housing is that they act like slumlords. When you have nowhere else to go and the landlord won’t fix major issues then it takes a toll on you. When a kid sees this growing up, then it leads to antisocial behavior. Investors think that “passive investment” means no input at all when it requires a great deal of active management if contracts are being followed. They just know that the residents have no reasonable way to enforce the contract.
Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.
Look up Monarch Investment
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Some countries have a large yearly tax if you leave a house vacant for longer than 6 months or a year without a valid reason. More countries need to do this.
Not sure about the USA, but it’s a big problem in Australia. Foreign investors (that don’t live in Australia nor have any intent of moving to Australia) buy properties then just hold them as speculative assets. They don’t want tenants, because they don’t want to go through all that effort. All they want to do is hold them and watch the value go up, in the same way you’d hold stock or Bitcoin.
Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.
Strong disagree. Can you imagine what red states will do with the power to demand proof of citizenship to own property? Or all the hell couples where one is a Permanent Resident the other a Citizen will go through?
You should be terrified of someone like Jeff Session or Kris Kobach able to just veto any random person from owning land. You can see it now in your head
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Them drafting letters on government stationary to real estate agents demanding paperwork from anyone with a Latino or Chinese name. Effectively making agents terrified of dealing with minorities.
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Random spot checks, having deputies show up to open houses asking for papers or waiting until after closing then interrogation of the family
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Activists courts arguing that all members of the household must be citizens based on vague feelings
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New rules that state that the entire inheritance path must all be citizens
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Non-citizens being forced to sell at a 1/10th the value
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The lawsuits from groups like the ACLU pointing out that it is a obvious violation of the civil rights act, which goes to the Supreme Court who then declares the Bill of Rights only applies to citizens
If you are interested the experiment has been run already. Go read up what Kris Kobach did when he got a town to pass a law requiring citizenship tests to rent. He not only near bankrupted the town due to lawsuits he personally sent threatening letters to Latinos who lived there.
ve traveled to won’t let me buy so why not do the same?
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Have you traveled much? More countries do this than don’t. The trump nazis will abuse everything yes. But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Have you traveled much?
Again
The standard is good behavior, not other people.
Must I repeat it again?
The trump nazis will abuse everything yes.
And yet you want to give them more? You don’t hand a gun to a person who went to jail repeatedly for using a gun.
But people not being able to afford a place to live is also giving us trump nazis in the first place
Assertion, please demonstrate it. Also demonstrate that your method of handing Nazis more power will make them less powerful. Lastly compare the US grabbling with fascists to other nations who have rules like you are advocating for and how they are also grappling with fascists.
It’s a little thing but I kinda want you to acknowledge that the one time this idea was tried in diet form in the US it not only didn’t work it also legalized racism. You are suggesting an idea that we tried and it not only failed in the task it was meant to perform it also created a host of new problems.
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I really didn’t mention a word about anything you are saying to me now. I am pro-development anti-nimby and admit I haven’t studied the issues of corporate housing enough to weight in on it.
My apologies if that came across as challenging your point with the nimby stuff. It’s like a fuselight, it wasn’t for you but just directed out in the open. Retracting the comment. Housing is something that’s sensitive to me because we just lost a family member to suicide, and while not solely that person’s rationale, among many factors housing was a significant one.
Housing and healthcare on the trajectory it’s pointed at today, robs our youth of their hope, and signifies quite loudly that we as a society do not love or value the futures of our children, however people may feel internally.
My only message for NIMBY people is that of hate and revulsion.
Right but I am on your side about this. I want everyone to have housing that is awesome and within their price range. I just don’t agree that finding ways to punish immigrants and minorities is the best way to go about it. There is a difference between me saying “I want X and don’t think Y is the best way to get X” and me saying “fuck your family, I hate Y and lets do X to hurt them”. Me discussing how to solve a problem is not me denying the problem exists or should not be solved.
Also you and me are good. I am sorry for your loss. I imagine I would be very sensitive to this subject in your situation.
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It should be reciprocal IMO for each country. The ones I’ve looked at buying in I couldn’t because I’m not a citizen
If not too personal, which countries have you looked at?
All those cases are clear. Is a person (not a corporation) buying a residence to live in, that is be physically present in for a minimum of 70% of the year? If so, they can buy. If not, they can’t buy. I’d rather a million unauthorized immigrants buying houses they live in than one overseas corporate entity buying a house to rent out.
I’m sure this comes with a guaranteed 5% increase to minimum wages at the same time right? … right? Any amount of minimum wage increase from the last increase 15 years ago?
Not better to cap it at 5% of the property value?
