Hacker News Reader

Comment by stouset | Hacker News Reader

I’m generally with you, though I live in CA so my effective tax rate is around 50%.

I am very troubled when people who proclaim to be liberal move here—an area with high potential—to “strike it rich”, do so, and then immediately fuck off to another state where they can sell their vested shares without paying CA tax rates. CA does try to claw back avoided taxes from the worst offenders of this, but mostly they only go after people who move out on paper but still lead lives here.

One of the biggest problems though is that bumping marginal rates doesn’t affect the ultra-rich, who use tax-avoidance schemes like loans against invested assets to live off extreme wealth with nearly zero taxable income.

View on HN

Probably because CA politicians want to spend tax money on things like providing $150k of housing loans to undocumented migrants

Losing out on a house bid as an American citizen to an undocumented migrant thanks to this policy, truly the type of stuff only a CA politician could come up with.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/california-democrats...

Humans deserve housing. My undocumented neighbors are still my neighbors.

We shouldn't have to decide between which of two humans gets housing. House all my neighbors.

House them yourself, you make $750K a year.

I do. I provide housing units at the cost of maintenance. I believe profiting from rent is deeply unethical. My renters have paid basically for their share of heating, electricity, water, sewer, and wear and tear on the building itself.

But I cannot house the thousands of unhoused people in my city alone. I can provide housing for 2-5 of them at any given time.

That said, do you know what offering housing for a couple hundred bucks a month does for a struggling family? It fundamentally changes their ability to establish themselves. Build savings, escape poverty.

Edit: I'm not trying to signal or whatever by posting this. I have ethical beliefs about supporting one's local community and try not to be hypocritical about it. When people challenge me, suggesting I might be hypocritical ("why don't you spend your own money on it!") I try to respond with, "I do. And I see the changes it makes in real human lives."

But always as a response to someone trying to call me out, never unprompted.

No, pay for all of it, not what it costs you to maintain while your properties balloon in value far more than any rent you could have collected on them. You are no more ethical than any other landlord so please stop pretending to be. You and real estate investors like you are contributors to the homelessness problem.

I put the land I buy into a trust that removes my ability to profit from it. The trust cannot take actions that would cause them to profit from selling the land.

Any equity the trust holds is from me or others putting in funds that are held solely for the purposes of providing housing for the community at cost.

My personal mortgage I do pay for, and I will be ceding whatever land I hold to that trust upon my death so that it can provide housing in perpetuity.

The only reason the land is not currently in the trust's hands is because I need the ability to move freely. I could arrange to sell the house to the trust, and lease it from the trust, but because there's a bank involved with my mortgage that gets more complex.

I assure you, I am not profiting from housing.

You've been a refreshing change of the typical mindset on Hacker News

Thanks. So many people are like, "sure, I'd love to live in a world like X, but there's nothing I can do about it". Well, you can model it, make the change. Maybe someone will be inspired by you.

I read about someone who paid all his tenant's rent back to them after he became an anarchist or whatever. I crunched the numbers, and found out that for like 15k I could pay back every penny I had collected over maintenance, plus the appreciation of the principal. I sent out checks with amounts between $1500 and $4500, along with a note saying I didn't believe in rent any more.

I saw someone else do it, so I did it. Maybe someone on Hacker News will see my posts and do it too. Odds are small, but non zero.

I can tell you it made a material positive change in the lives of those people. That's a much better legacy than, "I died $15k richer" or "I went on vacation at a resort an extra time".

thank you for doing this.

I actually would love to do something like this. Can I contact you outside of HN to point me in a good direction to start?

The thing I discovered is that it's highly variable depending on location. Step one is talk to a lawyer who knows real estate and landlord tenant laws in your specific area.

Alternatively, search for a "community land trust" in your area and discuss with them how you can manage your property upon your death.

why are you so miserable?

> The program is currently available to low- and middle-income first-time home buyers in California and Arambula’s bill aims to open it up to tax-paying, undocumented immigrants.

This drops about fifty tiers down the stack of things I can manage to get myself seriously worked up over by actually reading the article.

I’m finding it pretty hard to find a lot of outrage over “taxpayers now eligible for government services”.

They're being offered loans, which they'll have to pay back. This won't cost taxpayers anything. And anyway, these undocumented migrants ARE TAXPAYERS THEMSELVES. I fail to see any reason to be outraged about this.

Offering loans to people that couldn't otherwise get one increases the pool of buyers, driving demand and increasing prices. I don't raise that as a reason not to have the program, but you are missing second order effects if you consider there to be no cost to the broader public.

More importantly, how exactly is an undocumented immigrant paying taxes? Do they somehow have a tax ID or SSN without documentation? Or are you just referring to things like sales and fuel taxes?

It used to be that immigrants would simply invent a fake SSN in order to get a job. The e-verify system may have complicated that, but I imagine it's still pretty much the same for smaller businesses. And especially agricultural work, meat processing plants, etc. All the businesses that rely on undocumented labor.

So the immigrants are paying into the SS/medicare system, but they don't receive any of the benefits.

I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.

> I think the solution to the housing problem is to increase supply. Not to try to prevent a whole group of people from being able to buy homes.

That seems totally reasonable if there's demand for more houses and the ability to build more.

Phrasing it as though people who already can't to buy a home are being prevented simply by not providing government assistance is a big disingenuous though. Preventing them implies that they could otherwise buy the home, and if that were the case a government program wouldn't be needed.

Yes because undocumented migrants are highly motivated to pay back the loan versus making a bunch of money and going back to their country of origin.

Also have you talked to any Gen Z or millennial? Most cannot afford housing, why in the world would you introduce even more demand for scarce housing?

They aren’t being handed $150,000 in unmarked bills. It’s loan assistance for a house which is pretty fucking difficult to throw into the back of a truck and haul over the border.

I am a millennial.

And supporting migrants isn't introducing new demand, it's just exposing the demand that's there. Like, the migrants are there and they need housing.

The us vs them attitude is an artificial division. We can, and should build housing for all.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com