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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Well considering that’s never happened in history (“buy multiple houses until they own them all”), I’m not too worried about that.

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Hasn't that happened many times in history? The landed gentry owning land, everyone else "renting".

In many countries today, home ownership is pretty rare, and the majority of people rent.

Airbnb is making this a distinct possibility. I regularly run into people in my small, tourism based town who own 2 or more properties they sit on and rent through airbnb. The most frustrating was a guy who after receiving inheritance is doing exclusively this. Meanwhile the city is spending money buying run down apartments above market rate, competing with these investors who bring little value, to meet the demands of the community to protect the tenants from being forced out.

It is wildly inefficient and would not exist if airbnb followed local laws. If this is allowed to continue, I could easily see airbnb units exceeding the number of hotel units we have in town, where the total number of rooms is nearing 10% of the towns population.

And here's the problem - "investment". Residential property should never be an investment,it should only be a place one calls home.

So if someone wants to rent a house (for whatever valid reasons), we prevent that somehow?

Sorry, want to live here? You have to buy; we don’t allow residential investing here.

Surely there are a lot of ways it could be discouraged that would fall short of a complete ban?

Whatever extent it's discouraged would seem to reduce the supply of rentable residences, which is a negative for renters.

Renting a house isn't usually a problem, however there should be some safeguards in place,i.e. taxes that discourage excessive profiteering,etc. I remember working on this development( hundreds of flats)in London,where some Asian man walked passed, saw the building, went to the site office and said: I want to buy this block( at least 40 flats),I'll send the lawyers to sign the papers.The guy didn't even look inside. So he'd most likely end up renting the entire block.

> ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation’s premier property database, today released its 2018 Vacant Property and Zombie Foreclosure Report, which shows that nearly 1.5 million (1,447,906) U.S. single family homes and condos were vacant at the end of Q3 2018, representing 1.52 percent of all homes nationwide — down from 1.58 percent in 2017. [0]

> A report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development has found that just under 553,000 people are homeless, with approximately 65% staying in sheltered accommodation. Out of every 10,000 people in the United States, 17 experienced homelessness on a single night in 2018. [1]

It looks like this already happened.

[0]: https://www.attomdata.com/news/market-trends/single-family-r...

[1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2018/12/20/the-u-...

You ATTOM link doesn't specify if these are actually 2nd/3rd/etc homes. Some of them are mentioned in the article as foreclosures. A good number could be houses for sale or newly built apartments or abandoned houses in bad areas. The article mentions that Baltimore has the highest rate - a city with a very high crime rate. The next two are Flint and St. Louis.

Why does it matter if the homes in the report are owned by wealthy individuals, wealthy banks, or wealthy developers? They are clearly not owned by the "poor(er)" people!

Did you forget about abandoned houses in the worst areas in making your list? And it matters because what are you going do? Don't allow apartment owners to wait for new tenants? Don't allow people to have houses for sale? Don't allow foreclosures? Force people to live in unlivable conditions in areas with a huge crime rate? Etc. None of this is even remotely realistic.

If I had all the answers I'd be desperately trying to get them implemented.

I hear some places levy an extra tax on empty residences. This is a pretty good conservative approach that puts downward pressure on rents and provides some revenue that can be used to explore other solutions to these problems.

A more extreme approach would be to seize all the abandoned housing in a "bad" area and invest heavily on improving it and the area. Fix broken infrastructure and fund emergency services. Offer the housing for free, or low cost with favorable loans. Use tax incentives to entice businesses to move in so the residents have places to work and buy things. Etc...

Is any of this remotely realistic? Perhaps not, but it can't hurt to think about it.

I mentioned the tax proposal elsewhere in this thread and it seems to be the most workable solution.

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