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Comment by Gustomaximus | Hacker News Reader

> It's coming to Australia too

Is here. Was having an ethics chat with a friend involved with one group and their main point is this makes it better for renters as corp owners give long term stability for a 'home' vs private investors who turnover property.

That was the only point that resonated to me but overall I see this as a real loss for society to take away home ownership from people, or make it so difficult. There something in most peoples core that wants to own their home.

Given the pain points it's inflicting on so many people it's amazing how little political reform there has been other than the first home buyers grant, which was really more about economic stimulation that helping property ownership.

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It should really be called small-parcel-of-land-plus-a-residential-structure borrowership-with-eventual-ownership.

And it is not all upside. Changing from one "owned" "home" to another has high transaction costs compared to renting. This has all kind bad consequences: people wind up living in the wrong shape/size of house for their family size. It makes it expensive to move to follow economic opportunity.

And then there is all the downside from having such a large portion of your savings tied up in a single, often highly leveraged, asset. Nobody would let you lever up your retirement portfolio 20:1 on any other kind of asset. And home ownership turns otherwise reasonable adults into NIMBYs.

As for the demise of home ownership, the last few decades have seen it fluctuate in a relatively narrow band. See these charts: https://dqydj.com/historical-homeownership-rate-united-state... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home-ownership_in_the_United_S...

Look what happened to Berlin over the past 20 years. Same thing: skyrocketing rents.

> take away home ownership from people

The home ownership still belong to the people. It's just that some people are more people than others

>this makes it better for renters as corp owners give long term stability for a 'home'

I can't take this seriously. Given who writes the rules the end result will always be "better long term stability for whoever can afford it" - if the corporate owner things they can get more money then they'll kick out the current renter by raising prices again - like they're doing with the private market now.

We can make more houses

Corporations will own everything in city's, but don't worry, you can buy a house in the middle of nowhere! Oh, and those corporations are heavily against work from home, by chance.

All US cities are far below the size they would be with building up.

And the "investors" can buy them all up. Look at Vancouver Canada. They built and built and the investors bought and bought. Prices continued to climb.

And if corporations own the land?

You can always escape to the Metaverse™ to build in Minecraft™ for the low price of 9.99!

And don't forget Bill Gates buying up loads of farmland.

I assume this was said sarcastically because of the wider conspiracy stuff, but I do think this is a problem.

Overconcentration of ownership doesn't benefit society. Not only the extremes of monopolies or oligopolies, but generally shifting away from a single person being able to own and run a business. It feels we are regressing from last centuries significant gains here. Its particularly bad in downstream areas like abattoirs where 4 companies control most of the industry.

Bill Gates might only own 300,000 odd acres now, which is huge but hardly taking over the industry, but its growing and the historical norm is for this to concentrate over time and something we should actively avoid so we dont end up like Scotland or other places where a handful own the majority, which I think will happen if its not actively worked against.

You can still build it in your mind, probably.

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