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Comment by esel2k | Hacker News Reader

I am not an economist but if we would treat house ownership something that is beneficial for the whole society (less traffic from commuters, less homeless etc) and remove the speculations/foreign investments around housing?

Why not apply the following: - every house not used for primary living place is highly taxed (removing all speculative ownership) - charge foreign investors heavily (australia will do this soon) - tax reduction for renting places for lower than median per square meter price - incentivising affordable homes

Just trying to understand why this wouldn’t work?

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None of that addresses the fundamental problem which is that there's just not enough housing. Greater Dallas builds more housing than the entire state of California.[1] Until that changes California's housing costs cannot be fixed.

[1] https://x.com/JosephPolitano/status/1794495929266983191

Renters in CA should be ready to tell owners resistant to new development to go fuck themselves. Oh, you put all of your eggs in one basket (real estate)? Seems like a bad decision.

This is extremely unlikely to happen because the people who own multiple houses have more political power than those who don’t, and they don’t want to give them up. And even if it did, there would be ways to pay experts to get around it, just like the tax system.

Are speculators the problem is it the fact that housing prices are always expected to go up due to such limited supply? Instead of targeting a symptom, like speculative investment, why not target the root problem of prices always going up so that people can afford housing?

But then what is your description of the root of the problem?

At least in cities or places with a trainstation here the demand versus supply is out of band. What do you want to do against growing population and limited space?

Don't expect in a country like US where basic stuff like good education and healthcare are heavily charged and privatized to just move housing into basic human right category.

Other places, with surprisingly little success, can do and actually do it, but it magically doesn't solve underlying issues, so results don't move needle as much as expected.

This is partially implemented in the Netherlands, most new houses are move-in only, a second mortgage requires 40% downpayment. Rules were updated recently to include an extra 300k homes in the rent control scheme. People I know who are landlords are trying to sell.

And yet, supply is so constrained that house prices continue to rise. Either cities need to stop growing, or build a lot more housing.

Interesting but I don’t think having 40% downpayment solving the issue because banks, speculators and foreign investors will have the money to exclude normal buyers.

I am in Switzerland an 20% downpayment is a must. Secondly you can only take money out of your retirement scheme for a move-in house. But still supply is highly limited making prices explode. Most people I know have about 500k to 1 Mio in debt (about the same in Euro).

As rent prices seem to go up as well the problem aggravates for low income people.

What else is Netherlands thinking about doing?

>> less traffic from commuters

I always rented within walking/biking distance to my work. Try that with a house.

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