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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

I'd assume it was forced by all of the initiatives of making the "American dream" of owning a home a reality for as many people as possible.

Real estate shouldn't be an investment, it shouldn't raise in value, and it shouldn't be possible for a huge chunk of the population to fund the financial sector through mortgage interest. It's a tax on everyone designed to funnel wealth upwards towards a sector of capital owners that get paid for doing very little.

Regulations and taxes should be arranged such that it is very expensive to own real property that isn't for your own personal or business use. If you want to act as a gatekeeper for real estate, at least a large chunk of the profit should go to the state for the benefit of the public. If it's expensive and not beneficial to own things so others have to pay you to use them, the market will shrink dramatically and more people will actually be able to own homes.

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There are so many things wrong in this country: real estate should be highly taxed, financial investments should be rightly taxed. Failure to do so is just maintaining a constant drain of money from the larger part of the population to that small group of rentiers. Instead, politicians want people to believe that everyone can get rich at the same time investing in housing and stocks. We are starting to see the results.

> Real estate shouldn't be an investment, it shouldn't raise in value,

This is an economical impossibility. Land becoming more valuable is unavoidable, because of the weather, of the people that surround you, the availability of jobs. Rent is high in SF because people are moving to SF and finding high paying jobs. Its not an unrelated effect.

So if there is land more valuable than others, and you taxed away all the value of the land (lets supposed that rent is taxed at 200%, hence all rents drop to 0), you are now going to see something new: people buying land. Now instead of renting, the only operation left is buy and sell. Provided it is cheap at first, because investors would all dump their properties, it will be impossible to get later on. Its an extreme case of rent-control.

Yep. And as you also know, there's so much money in it that we won't see it change in our lifetimes. Why work when you can let the land work for you?

Why spend all your income today when you can save and invest some for the future, thereby allowing you to consume more later in exchange for consuming less now?

Investments, including land, are owned on the backs of consumption foregone in the past.

Just no.

All investments are not owned on the back of consumption foregone in the past.

Unless you believe that someone with 100 million dollars is "foregoing consumption" when they invest (particularly in real estate).

I do believe that. They can take that $X MM and put it into an investment xor into a yacht/airplane/supercars/vacations.

One is consumption; the other is investing.

Fancy-ass houses and condos are consumption. Most of these people buy up a place, then completely gut it, replacing everything with the new trendy kitchen or whatever. Even if they sold it for more than they paid, there's no way they made money on it after renovations, taxes, utilities, upkeep, and staffing.

But land is special in that it requires no maintenance. Its not the same as any kind of capital that requires care or maintenance in the long term,like a house itself.

There is a case to say that big money that buys land does something to make it more valuable, and hence there was care and investment. But most of the time, land is something bought long ago, that has benefit basically forever.

Does that then make unimproved land a particularly good long-term investment in your opinion?

No, but its still is an investment with an expected positive return. Otherwise nobody would have any and would tend to sell it at 0.

Land also has the chicken-egg problem capital doesn't have. The first one that built a house didn't consume his capital, the first one that got the property rights didn't consume capital whatsoever.

I am closer to your position than to the other commenter in this thread, just wanted to distinguish that land can capital do have some differences worth thinking about.

Most places have real property taxes (and to a lesser extent, adverse possession laws) that act as a beneficial (to society) drag on infinite holding periods of land. That tends to be a tax on the current (improved) value of the land, where others have made an argument that a tax on unimproved value would work differently (in some ways better, in some ways worse).

My apologies on the prior post; I meant to imply that buying unimproved land in the "right" place is a great long-term investment.

Where will poor people who are unqualified for mortgages live if there are no landlords? Some kind of government housing?

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