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Comment by sickofparadox | Hacker News Reader

I think the very wealthy buying houses they don't need to make yet more money is bad and should be discouraged. Buying a duplex and living in half of it is one thing, but people (that are not the very wealthy) should be able to afford a house that they own personally if they play by the rules.

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The only reason it is profitable is because the cost of buying an existing home is often less than the cost of building additional housing. If you want to discourage people buying houses to rent them out, the best thing to do is make it easier to create more homes. Prices only stay high when the demand is higher than supply. Too often people want to try to control the market rather than dealing with the reason a particular way to participate in the market is profitable.

The underlying issue is that we need more homes.

I personally don't want the headaches of being a landlord, but I have invested in apartment real-estate investment trusts (REITs). Such REITs do build housing, and I think that without them, housing costs would be even higher.

Small landlords can vary wildly, but in my experience, big landlords inexorably gravitate towards slumlord behavior to their tenants.

Do you advocate for policies that restrict home construction / increase prices, since that will improve your return on investment?

It's debatable whether such policies do what you say. Land on which you can build more and more freely is more valuable than land that you can't do anything with.

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