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Comment by anamax | Hacker News Reader

Under that definition, almost all rental residences in the US are investment property, and thus would be banned under the proposal.

Consider a friend of mine who owns two houses. If he lives in one, the other will be "investment property" if he rents it a significant fraction of the year and thus banned. He can't move back and forth to avoid that because there are only 12 months in the year and it takes at least 8 months (per house) to satisfy the "twice as often" requirement.

The only way out is for him to leave the second house vacant the vast majority of the year. That pretty much defeats the purpose of owning a rental and it means that someone who'd want to rent is out of luck.

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What is a rental property if not an investment property? You are renting with the explicit goal of getting more returns (rent/equity/appreciation) than your costs.

Owning property for the purpose of renting it has serious negative effects on communities and society. Communities thrive when people live in them and value them, not when random people come for a few days, abuse the commons, and leave for somewhere else. If not banned, I'm all in favor of heavy regulation and taxation of investment properties, with a maximum number allocated as a percentage of the available housing. If renting becomes unpopular, people will actually have to sell and free up inventory, dropping prices.

I appreciate that you're honest about wanting to ban renting residences.

That said, I see renting as a good option for many people.

For example, I didn't have the money to buy after college so I rented.

Even if I could have bought, I probably wouldn't have because I was reasonably sure that I wanted to move in a year or two.

If there weren't rentals, what should I have done?

Apartments are perfectly fine and should be encouraged, as they're dense and serve an important purpose.

That's not what's happening with AirBnB. That's turning the limiter supply of ownable property (condos and houses) into short term rentals for the owner's profit at the community's expense.

Also, I never said that outright banning is the proper option. Heavy taxation on strictly limited rental options (liter to a level where the community is still able to thrive) is also reasonable.

Yes, we understand that AirBNB is having negative effects on communities. Perhaps something should be done. But banning “investment properties” in a way that de facto bans rental units is not only a nonstarter but also a terrible idea in general.

Why?

I'm not saying rich people can't have their second place on the lake or that companies aren't free to build apartment complexes. What benefit to society does allowing businesses and landlords to own portfolios of single family homes and rent them out offer?

Who will rent houses to people who can't afford homes?

People can't afford homes because investors are buying them all at high price to turn around and rent them out.

Some people can't afford homes because investors are buying them. There is zero reason to believe that prohibiting investment properties would allow everyone to afford a home.

Just like not everyone can afford a rent. The point is to make things better not to fix homelessness.

And you genuinely think that reducing the number of available rental units would make things better for the overwhelming majority of people who currently can't afford to purchase a home outright?

Reducing the number of available rental units this way would increase the amount of dwellings available to purchase (and reduce prices). Do you think rental is the only way one can have a dwelling?

> Do you think rental is the only way one can have a dwelling?

That's rich coming from someone who thinks that owning should be the only way to have a dwelling.

No, I don't think that renting is the only way to have a dwelling.

However, I do think that renting is a better option than owning for many people.

Moreover, I don't think that telling people how they should and shouldn't have dwellings is good.

And they either rent them at a high price or they lose money.

Like I wrote above, a friend of mine owns two houses. Under the proposed "no investment residences" rule, he can't, unless he leaves one of them vacant almost all of the year.

For some people, renting is the right thing. It's unclear how banning rental properties makes their life better.

Does your friend need a second property? If there was such a ban someone else could buy it that would have stayed in it/rented it anyway

How exactly do you think somebody else could have rented that property if somebody wasn't allowed to purchase it for the purpose of renting it out?

You misread what I said. The person would have bought it instead of having to rent it from your friend

Many people who rent do so because renting is better for them than buying.

The only legal rentals under the proposed rule is as room mates.

As I pointed out, your "residences can't be investment properties" rule bans apartment houses.

If you intended to talk only about very short-term rentals, you should have made that clear a couple of messages ago.

>For example, I didn't have the money to buy after college so I rented.

I think that's the main issue. One of the reasons housing is so expensive is because it's an avenue for investment/infinite growth. Maybe if you didn't have to outbid people that think houses are invesment you could have bought a house/afforded a mortage.

Land scarcity/livable land is the thing that makes housing expensive. Allowing people to use that to make profit is unethical.

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