This has been a key factor in my fiancée's and my decision to move away, as it's simply unsustainable for families with children.
There's risk in owning housing and so we should make sure people get rewarded for that instead of rewarded for owning land.
You still lose relatively though because the next person with their money in the market made some %
Land and real estate assets are generally a poor investment relative to the market without a ton of active management. There are god knows how many millions of people who own land that would be incredibly valuable if not for the civil engineering lobby getting environmental rules and laws written to their favor.
Meanwhile, where do the money for OpenAI and the SpaceX IPO comes from? Who got hold of so much money? How did they got hold of it?
And here's the killer question: would they, and the rules and system supporting them, change in any way if there were less immigrants?
I’m sure many immigrants had money on the IPO as well?
Either it's bad faith or you don't understand the implications. Either way, GL with whatever.
That sounds like a great place to live. Good weather, quiet, Italian food & culture, safe & stable, public transit to the city…and you can work remotely.
Increasing wages will not fix the housing crisis, and will just drive prices higher. How convenient for a bunch of realtors...
So the second-hand/used market is red hot. Renting has become so expensive, that many landlords have exited - so we're likely heading into a really bad crunch in the near future for the renters. I've read about people spending 50%-60% of their net pay on rent alone.
I recently entertained the idea of building a new house. Not terribly surprising, but worth mentioning that the time and materials to put up the structure was going cost even more than buying a used house. If nobody can afford to buy a less expensive used house then naturally nobody is going to build the much more expensive new house either.
Therein lies the bottleneck.
The real killer for them is interest rates, as they finance the whole thing and then can pay it off when all the homes are sold. High rates make the finances much more challenging to work.
There is a crazy amount of land in the world, but either it's too expensive or you're not allowed to build over it, or a combination of both. Houses have been built for millennia but somehow in the most advanced period of humanity you're supposed to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a roof over your head.
I think that low key the ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing, so the whole system works to create artificial scarcity. How's the population going to be forced to work unpleasant and low paid jobs if not by controlling their access to housing? You have to be too naive if you think that a few minds in your country's parliament haven't thought of this.
If someday economic activity gets automated enough, and the majority of people are not needed anymore for regular jobs, and this populace gets violent with their ruling class, then I think a lot of housing will be built outside of cities, and the supply of houses will no longer be a problem.
And those laws were passed with the political will of who?
Now with the benefit of hindsight what causes that seemed legitimate were used to hoodwink those people?
Have those causes and their peddlers lost credibility or legitimacy?
Western society is basically slowly recreating old world landless peasantry because we have adopted bad world views or bad morals or bad ideologies (or whatever else you want to call them) that allow us to be manipulated into incrementally creating the system that produces that outcome.
This is true, to a degree. There is another factor and thats WHAT kind of housing we build.
> ruling class + landlords are not interested that housing be an affordable thing
Off the mark, the real people pinning housing prices where they are, are home owners. Home ownership is the leading predictor of voting, and issues that maintain or raise current home prices will drive that up. https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/insights/if-you-lived-here-you-...
Furthermore home ownership is a functionally unmovable number: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N (that fed data is interesting and says a lot, capturing the 2008 financial crisis, bad lending hardly moved the needle in real terms).
> controlling their access to housing?
The reality is that this is a social problem.
Boomers are living longer (higher quality of life) and alone. They either took their parents in (cohabitation) or put them in homes. I know plenty of elderly people who are living in large houses, by themselves, who had their parents, at that same age living with them. You're not going to see a bunch of retirees moving in together to save on bills - The TV show "Golden Girls" would not make sense today.
On that note, cohabitation among younger generations is down. Fewer people have roommates, and lots of them "want to live alone" - sharing a house with 4 friends is much cheaper than living in a studio or one bedroom. And there are whole categories of housing, like boarding houses, that have disappeared. Again this is a cultural problem, look at the TV show "Bosom Buddies" - this is something that would be lost on a modern audience for so many reasons.
Part of the cohabitation issue is "renters rights" have gone way too far. There are plenty of people with space, who will not cohabitate because the risk, cost and pain of a renter turning into a squatter is WAY too high. The rules to protect good renters from bad landlords have only served to push out good landlords because of bad tenants.
> If someday economic activity gets automated enough... This will never happen. If you dont think were going to find new things to keep busy and if you dont think were going to find new ways to compete for "dominance" I have news for you.
The grim reality is that over-financialization of markets combined with a lack of regulations against predatory practices (like surveillance pricing and algorithmic rent setting) added gasoline to the bonfire that was a fundamental housing shortage brought about chiefly from treating housing itself as an appreciating asset rather than the land housing sits on and taxing accordingly (don’t even get me started on residential property tax schemes popularized by the Baby Boomers and the associated gap between sale price and tax assessed values dictated by law). Growing wages won’t fix this, nor will cutting interest rates. Building more housing is the only way out, but existing homeowners don’t want their assets to decline in value, so that’s generally not happening. Rent control is becoming increasingly popular, and I think it’s a good idea to protect existing renters and force landlords to side with wanna-be homebuyers instead of homeowners by forcing revenue growth through volume creation (new housing) instead of rent hikes.
"The biggest flaw: It uses gross income, not take-home pay
One of the biggest issues with the 30% rent rule is that it’s based on your gross income—not the amount of money that actually lands in your bank account on payday.
To illustrate this flaw, let’s use some real-world numbers. According to the latest FRED data, the median household income in the U.S. is about $84,000 per year, or roughly $7,000 per month before taxes.
Under the 30% rule, you could theoretically spend about $2,100 per month on rent if this is your income.
But let’s take a look at what your take-home pay could be with this salary. "
And unless your argument is that public services are 2.48x better now, then yes, I know that the problem is, as usual, that the government is taking workers money away to do as they please.
Modern budgets are not much more complicated. The rent is too damn high!
Inefficiently taxed land, and artificial scarcity via laws, turned housing into an asset class. This problem will not go away, in any country, as long as those two things are not resolved.
Also depends whether you can about the middle more than the 10-20% of the people most struggling who can earn much less than the mean or median
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
Baumol plus zoning and NIMBY driven real estate hyperinflation basically explain the modern economic malaise among especially the young.
I’ve also heard this called “in-deflation.” Inflation in everything you need, deflation in everything you make.
To add, politics usually responds to Baumol by subsidizing demand and/or more regulation. Needles to say both make it worse. Article: https://www.niskanencenter.org/cost-disease-socialism-how-su...
This thought terminating cliche is getting real old. What are your solutions? and what evidence do you have that those solutions will solve the problems? Shaking your fists at "the elites" and regurgitating populist slop is not going to
You could start by reading Marx, who laid a lot of the groundwork.
> Shaking your fists at "the elites" and regurgitating populist slop is not going to
I like the way you trailed off halfway through your knee-jerk reaction, underscoring just how much your response is an automated result of indoctrination.
https://www.nytimes.com/1973/04/08/archives/108-a-month-rent...
Median rent in the us today is around $1,750, or around $21,000/year. Today's median income in the us is around $89,000. So, housing cost has nearly doubled, while wages have only risen by about 5%. And that's just housing. I'm sure the math for healthcare and education costs is even more grim.
Real estate cost is local and there are parts of america where the prices have gone nuts. But there's a lot more where it hasn't and housing is affordable.
We need to allowed for revealed preferences. In developers we trust.
Also compare a 1960s or 1970s house to one built today. Today's houses are bigger and much more luxuriously appointed, with gourmet appliances, stone countertops, multi-head showers, walk-in closets, huge bathrooms, etc.
Once the boomer generation dies off or goes into assisted living you'll see a lot of those 1970s houses coming back on the market.
That is in line with expectations:
1. The average house is ~60% larger than in 1970. More house equates to higher costs.
2. In 1970, the typical working-class man would spend time in a public house 5-6 nights a week. Today, third places are nearly nonexistent. Houses, largely driven by the internet opening it up to the world, has become more than a place to eat and sleep. Monetary spending is naturally directed to where one spends their time and energy.
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-requires-r...
What do you mean by “blame?”
I felt like my post was generally in the less-finger-pointing direction.
Ed: obviously the 50/30/20 rule sums to 100% so would need to be net - although the US is weirdly treating health insurance as a "premium service" that go into the 50% here, not into taxes like in a modern society.
So when you say landlords are the least productive class in society, it is that they are totally unproductive by their nature. There is literally nothing to be produced! The land is there regardless! Then the fact that they collect a tax on consumption of a good they did not create makes them a negative-productivity component.
If you remove landlords (but keep property managers, developers, etc, which are all different jobs sometimes played by the same people), it would be a strict improvement to everything about our economy.
In this scenario, who owns the property? And if you are advocating that everyone should own their home, what is the point of a property manager? What about the people who do not actually want to own their home?
Nobody would be allowed to rent out a space they owned because it would turn them into a landlord. All of the rooms people rent out to others would go away. You wouldn’t be able to rent a private house from someone, you’d have no choice but to live in government owned housing developments.
This would be incredibly unpopular if implemented because it wouldn’t resemble the utopian fantasy it’s supposed to represent. It’s a vacuous idealism in the same category as “billionaires shouldn’t exist” that serves as a placeholder for an unspecified utopian government-run economy. The details are never specified, you’re just supposed to imagine it works and nothing is lost as a tradeoff.
Of course it is not a solution to current situation when real estate are very expensive, but in theoretical discussion where real estates are affordable you can buy it and sell when you move.
Instead of:
Investor owns the land
Investor pays for construction, finance, maintenance
Investor receivers rent
Government owns the land
Investor pays to lease the land for 30 years or whatever
Investor pays for construction, finance, maintenance
Investor receives rent
The problem is always financing. If you're going to own a place you need a lot of upfront capital. If you own a place and plan to maximize rent increases it's easy to leverage your new asset to buy more properties. But if you just want to keep it near cost then you need a new infusion of capital for each new property. So, by their nature such endeavors don't grow as fast as rent maximizing landlord can grow.
You need to be specific about what you mean by “remove landlords” because that’s a nonsensical statement by itself.
Some party must be responsible for the investment to produce the property. Some part must own the property.
The most charitable interpretation of what you’re trying to say would be that private rental contracts are forbidden and the government would have a monopoly on renting properties out. So only the government could own properties that are rented and the entire rental market would depend on how much housing the local government decided to build and manage.
You could, for instance, require people who own habitations to actually live in that location. You could tax people who own property they do not actually live in very aggressively until they would be willing to sell for less to avoid the tax burden. You could have a system which taxes aggressively and builds lots of houses and gives it to people who own it as long as they live there.
There are quite a lot of ideas between "government owns everything" and "let vampire landlords do unlimited rent seeking."
As it happens, I think there is quite a lot to be said for the free market solution of just letting supply meet demand more or less freely, but I think your interpretation really is not the most generous one.
But investment in housing can definitely create more housing, and that is by far the most common type of landlord.
Landlords assume a similar role in economy that banks do, they assume risk on your belalf. We have quantified this to an extent that you can reliably put a dollar amount on how much risk there is.
When you are renting and there is a job change or war or natural disaster or really, anything inconvenient at all, you can more or less walk away without losing much.
This is why strong regulation is important.
As we speak, close to a billion people are in the middle of ongoing wars. There are entire countries where land is worthless. Ukraine has several hundred square kilometers of land with a thick covering of fiber optic cables from drones.
This is how I know that you've never tried to run houses. If you hire out a property manager and all of your maintenance you are not making money.
I have to be an electrician, a plumber, a painter, a drywaller, an engineer, a salesman, a delivery driver, a businessman, an appliance repairman and a lawyer. And that's to make a measly 8% on my money.
> There is literally nothing to be produced! The land is there regardless!
No one rents bare land. They are renting a depreciating asset that you have to upkeep.
Yea yea yea, Henry George says that the value is provided by the citizens around your property. I call bullshit. The value is the shelter, the heat, the comfort. That's what people need.
Because you can't acquire attractive real estate. Who cares about a unit in Slutdrop, Idaho?
A crack shack with a busted roof and broken utilities in a good location sells for the same price as a pristine, functional mansion in the middle of nowhere.
Amazing how many people insist on being landlords despite it apparently being a life of sawdust and sackcloth.
Landlords do not manage properties. Property managers do that. Property managers should get more reward for managing properties and landlords should get less.
Sometimes these are the same individuals and they lump their fees into a single check, but these are not the same jobs and they should not be treated the same.
From who? Someone has to pay them to do the development, right?
you mentioned supply and demand, if everyone is struggling to buy houses, downpayments wouldn't just go down a little.
in the end, everyone needs housing, every single house would be occupied just as now, but instead of having renters being squeezed by supply and demand you would have owners.
how is that a worse scenario?
let developers have rent, they are the risk takers, they deserve it.
Without renting everyone would have to buy a house / apartment on each move.
For instance: I bought my wife's grand fathers house. It appraised for $165k, and he sold it to me for $130k, I put $50k down, and got an $80k mortgage. I earn a very decent amount around 4x the median household income. I have 22 years of employment history with 0 days "unemployed". I have maintained a DTI of less than 10% and a Credit Rating of 800+ for at least the last 15 years I've been tracking. I have more money in my brokerage than the house is worth, let alone the mortgage, and yet it still took 3 different banks, and over 13 months to close on the house. I was denied by Bank1 (who I have over 20 years of history with) and Bank2 (who owns my business accounts and holds $10s of thousands on average up to $100k regularly). Bank3 approved me, but by the time they approved me, interest rates climbed from 2.5% to 5.75%.
TBF, would you give some randomer a few hundred grand without a strong guarantee you'd get it all back?
Mortgages are backed by the asset you are buying. $400k for a house is backed by the house. On top of that, almost every bank can sell off those mortgages and get the cash back immediately.
So, you are correct, I would not lend hundreds of thousands unsecured to a random person, but if I had the disposable capital, though, I WOULD buy a house with that money, and price in their credit rating to their interest rate, and turn around and sell it to Fannie/Freddie and recoup the principal that I lent.
Banks aren't on the hook for any of this (except for mortgages that don't conform, but most banks don't touch those, you have to go to brokers for those).
I personally think it’s usually a shitty investment and a waste of my life, so I’m glad to pay someone else to use theirs.
You cannot live in Musk's banking account. You have to have the actual physical structure, and current laws in hotspots like San Francisco and New York do their utmost to prevent new development.
Places like Austin, which are less restrictive, don't have this problem.
Its close to a pigeon hole problem. If there are 10 houses and 11 people, the homes are going to go up in price until the 11th is homeless (or moving away to somewhere cheaper). If there are 100 people, its the same issue except magnified, this is what happened in the bay area. Significantly more people than homes. But if there are 100 homes and 10 people, it doesn't matter how rich they are, the prices will drop because there is less demand. It will also be less attractive as an investment vehicle, because they will demand less rent.
>Places like Austin, which are less restrictive, don't have this problem.
Not really fair to compare 2 cities on the waterfront with no obvious space to build over to a city in the middle of Texas. San Francisco is even worse than New York(IMO) because of the hills.
very kind of you to offer them all a job at twice that. how do i reach out to you?
(I'm not gonna spoil it, I wanna see if anyone else can figure it out)
"Most" who are in those positions tend to make at least minimum wage, if not more, but that is not a guarantee, and it is harder to claim tips as "stable income" when trying to get credit/housing.
Median wage/rent is hard to apply. Totally different results if you look at what the typical renter makes (at least in my area). Minimum wage is one thing...but when it takes 3-4x minimum wage to stay at 0 every month things get difficult.
[1] https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/state/minimum-wage/tipped
"Go tell that to the middle school travel team in my neighborhood."
Why are you even making this comment? The comment you responded to was obviously talking about median wages of the entire US population. Real Wages are near all-time highs - it's just a fact, you can look up the data yourself.
And finally, why do so many people kill themselves in America? Can't be that great. Don't know of many hunter gatherers offing themselves
You can choose your realtor. You can discuss with them.
This person just bought a 2m house!
It's literally in the first paragraph of the article.
"At trial, a federal jury found that they violated antitrust law by conspiring to force home sellers to pay inflated commissions to real estate agents."
also, they don’t get paid if something doesn’t sell for being overpriced.
it’s a market system.
Are they legally required to do that? How would you even prove it was due to them?
Realtors negotiate for themselves, not for either buyers or sellers.
I did have one who dropped their commission a little to close a sale, but that's not a common experience. (And they still did very well out of it.)
I’m not sure how or why this article got published by an organization that should, given its very nature, understand economics. The article doesn’t paint them or their members as people I’d trust in either side of a major financial transaction.
They can be some great people but as a profession they are known more for their extroversion and soft skills than their high IQ understanding of economics lol
On the buying side, they do more such as drive prospective buyers around to look at houses, though it's been long enough since I bought a house that I don't know how much virtual tours have replaced this. Either way, it's not what I'd call difficult work.
I've bought and sold a handful of properties in a couple states through my life and have dealt with probably 2 dozen realtors in some professional capacity, and only 1 has been what I would call "good" and that was basically just him giving us insight into the market, being willing to tell us not to buy a house because it wouldn't fit our needs 5 years in the future, etc. Basically just willing to sacrifice a faster or larger commission to get us what we wanted rather than just closing a deal ASAP, which IMO should be the minimum and not the mark of a "good" realtor.
The realtors I’ve met understand economics and markets very well. Not as academics but as practitioners.
They want wages to go up so that home prices go up even more, and their members make even more money for doing basically nothing most of the time.
The folks I’ve worked with have been as dedicated to their career path as anyone, and while their expertise and skill varies that isn’t different than any job. I understand your point, but your (mis?)characterization hits me as a little biased and shallow.
It’s not “theory”; it’s literally what they do.
They either don't understand that addressing wages without supply simply increases prices, or they do understand and don't care because it's good for their pocketbook. Which one's worse?
This is true though?
But the current housing market doesn't feel sustainable. I don't understand how a proper middle class family could afford to buy in this environment, unless they are willing to put off any savings indefinitely.
We get out of it by building more, read Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson.
Its extremely simple.
Relaxed zoning requirements for SFH and MFH buildings, relaxed or eliminated height restrictions for high rise density projects in urban areas, eliminating rent control, and a laundry list of other things would help alleviate the upward pressure.
I grew up with 6 family members in a 3/2 house that was 1250sqft. Houses today start at 2000+ square feet in the USA. We DON'T need that. On top of that, there is very limited stock of homes for people who no longer have kids.
Every type of manufacturing in the US has gone toward lower throughput, higher price. Luxury apartments, 2500 square foot houses with no yard, $50k for a car. And it is because we are all comparing ourselves to each other and wanting to appear like we can afford this lifestyle, and its finally breaking. But it was allowed to go this way, because it was working. Pricing out the bottom 25% didn't negatively affect the profitability of the companies making these items, in fact, it made them more profit.
Homes skew larger and more expensive precisely because it's so hard to build them so developers need to make more money from each one. The fixed costs per unit are too high, so the ones that need to be lowered or eliminated should be. That will incentive building more units not just more expensive units. You'd see a lot more 1200sqft new builds if it was more economically viable and developers could make a profit on a $125k home instead of needing $400k.
In other countries with lax address registration laws like Poland, real estate can be the only investment vehicle without capital gains tax. Yes, if you sell real estate in Poland after 5 years you pay zero capital gains tax (please invest and pop that mofo).
It's just pure human greed.
Anyway they got into the housing market because the margins are so good because everybody refuses to allow new housing to be built. Congratulations, you played yourselves.
And I don't just mean in this thread, I mean ever. It's always hand-wavey "it doesn't work like that" when the evidence suggests that it does.
We also have a pretty high number of unoccupied dwellings that are left empty, since some investors see the bother of renting them out as not worth the money, since they’ll make so much when they sell that it doesn’t matter!
1. https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/is-population-growth-...
Build, and keep building until it is cheap. Also, you would need to consider the specific places.
Allow me to introduce you to Bryan Caplan - https://www.amazon.com/dp/1952223415
You would be surprised.
Apartments are a different beast.
https://x.com/heimbergecon/status/1943925791055917417
As for how it all happened, I don't have a comprehensive exploration of this to share, but look at interest rates and house sale prices:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS
Sale prices begin rising immediately once interest rates dipped to the lowest ever (borrowers could "afford" more principal - sale price - for similar monthly payments).
Combine that with houses making up a significant chunk of balance sheets for the US, and we (collectively) are loathe to let prices fall:
https://eyeonhousing.org/2024/02/homeownership-is-key-to-hou...
"We currently have 10 houses renting at $2500 for 15 people who have $2000 to spend on rent. WHAT IF, we gave those 15 people $2500 instead. Housing crisis solved?"
-This article...basically.
I feel like I get very little value out of what seems to be a mostly fixed/required price.
I know flat fee realtors exist, and if/when we sell our home, I’ll be looking into this heavily.
But I feel like they rank up there with car salespeople/dealers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/28/technology/sell-house-wit...
> I was transacting in a thriving market, with no special circumstances
Yeah, a hot real estate market is where a seller is likely to derive the least benefit. Although a talented agent in a hot market can drive a more competitive process, potentially generating higher offers. All of which is, to the author's credit, highlighted in the article.
Agents earn their keep in more normal/weak markets.
Also, it's true this article isn't recognizing the root cause, overpriced housing, because realtors in general do better when prices are high. But "realtors in general" is a very different category than "your realtor".
The only reason I’ve ever used a realtor is because I don’t have the time to deal with the contract/legal side of everything. Most would be better served by hiring an attorney and title company if your state allows.
The realtor cartel still enforced a 6% commission, with half to the seller's agent and half to the buyer's agent. Our contract with the buyer's agent refunded half of his commission to us. So basically we got a 1.5% home discount. Our buyer's agent still made 1.5% but didn't have to babysit us while traipsing through dozens of potential homes, so it feels like everyone wins.
I bet there is a middle ground where we could relax or eliminate a lot of building restrictions and NIMBY policies to ease the upward pressure or even exert some downward pressure on home prices. We're also fighting against 6-7% interest rates after an extensive period of 2-3%.
I live in an apartment in Stockholm but I also own an old forest cabin. It’s perfectly legal for me to live in said cabin permanently, but it would be strictly illegal for me to build a new house to the same simple standard. The building codes are basically making it illegal to be poor.
Similar patterns exist for student housing. The old style of student corridors with small rooms are no longer being built. Instead we are basically getting full apartments with individual huge bathrooms because the building codes mandate that everything is wheelchair accessible even when it’s practically temporary housing and they could get by with making 1/10 apartments accessible.
And that’s not even getting into how NIMBYism is enabled by laws that basically guarantee stagnation anywhere housing is in demand.
Shit’s fucked.
Where I live, people are blocking the construction of new apartments because the cost of the new ones is a bit higher, 10%-50%, than the average existing apartment.
The idea behind blocking the new apartments is that "new expensive apartments don't help anybody" and people get very upset that the new housing is going to the type of person that can afford to pay slightly more for the newer apartment. Rather they would prefer that new housing is only built if it's cheaper than existing housing.
So when housing does get blocked, the existing landlords demand the higher new rents that those wealthier people pay, driving up the overall costs on old apartments. The poorer people get displaced, the wealthier people have housing but worse housing, and the only people who are better off are the landlords of the older apartments.
Relying on that is the root problem. I could technically afford the new house, but in the end I couldn't find a good reason to tie up that much capital for something that does the same thing as what I've already got, only shinier. If the price were more reasonable then I'd make the move and then someone else could move into my much cheaper used house. But, as things sit, I occupy the cheap house instead, leaving the next guy out in the cold. Trouble is that just because I can afford it doesn't mean I am willing to be a buyer. The price still has to make sense.
I am not alone in this. It has been well reported that people are now staying in their "starter homes" instead of upgrading like past generations used to.
- Boom of AirBNB's and apartment rentals with tourism, with real low tax rates
- Limited liability abuse - company opens up, sells 30 apartments in a new building, build out the building, don't get any permits, just close the company down and open a new one. Legally, they are untouchable, and getting the permits is now on the apartment owners. Multiple friends live in such buildings, and maintenance is a PITA, trying to legalize it is a PITA, getting water/power is a matter of making shady deals with the neighbours, basically even living in it is technically illegal but not much they can do.
- Large influx of illegal money into the housing market (we have no law to investigate source of income), so money could be laundered easily.
- "Legalization procedures" where if you built a house before a certain year, or just started construction, it could be legalised. This caused people to build "fake roofs" and then claim it as a real building later on.
- Recently, immigration joined too - workers from non-EU countries are now allowed to get work visa's, and a lot of landlords are renting out a small 50m2 apartment to 10 people at the same time for ridiculous prices. The poor workers have to share bedroom with 10 other people, which is a terrible living condition, causing accidents like a whole floor collapsing due to 50+ people living in the building. While it's not legal, inspections are rare and the grey market is thriving.
- And my favorite - as a large number of apartments are bought as investments and uninhabited - around 22% in the capital, according to official estimates, with about 500k free total, in a country of 3.5 million people - the government got a great idea:
They will free up more housing, by offering the landlords of the empty apartments to rent thenm out with government guarantees. This means the government will pay them out 60% of the future rent money immediately, so the landlord can buy another apartment as an investment immediately using that money, and just get richer.
Now, we're in an interesting situation:
- Prices have risen quite a lot, like 3x over the last 5-6 years
- Existing landlords will get funding from the government to buy more apartments
- Meanwhile, new loan rules came out, prevent people from getting a loan that is more than 45% of their salary (after subtracting the costs, including your current RENT). 10% of the value has to be provided immediately by the buyer, and after loan payment and living expenses, you need to have at least 900 euros remaining each month from your salary.
In a country with a median salary of 1300 euros, with median rent being about 500-700 euros, this puts a lot of people in a locked position - you can't get a loan to buy, because you are renting. So from the 1300 euros of your salary, the bank subtracts 500 euros of rent as your "living expense", leaving you with 800 euros monthly total, which is under the legal limit for getting a loan, even tho once you buy the apartment you would not pay rent anymore.
So to get a 30 year loan to buy a 50m2 apartment, you need to have about double the median salary.
Now, they are talking about property taxes, which will force people barely making ends meet to sell the inherited land/houses/apartments for cheap to people that can afford it.
I have a much better idea: point, laugh, and say "sucks to suck!"
I'm telling you why the system works like it does now. You can, of course, choose to deliberately not understand it.
My neighbors, the homeowners who don't rent, are typically on the other side. And it's not unreasonable to want to keep SFH neighborhoods predominantly SFH.
My main risks have have absolutely nothing to do with more housing. It's more physical risk to the property and depreciation.
gonzalohm•1h ago
foolfoolz•1h ago
MSFT_Edging•1h ago
cpburns2009•1h ago
nullorempty•1h ago
Rent for one bedroom apartment was 500$ in 1998, cold / hot water included other utilities are extra.
I was making 35K back then and it was enough to afford relatively good living - car, groceries, gas, occasional meal for 2 at a restaurant.
And gas was 35cents on the Wet Coast of Canada.
rafram•1h ago
nullorempty•52m ago
where as the 72K vs 35K is only x2 increase
So, no, your math doesn't work.
john_strinlai•51m ago
median asking rent in 2026 for NYC is $3616/mo ($43,392/yr) meaning rent alone would be 60% of that income, assuming that the $72.5k figure is after taxes (which it probably isnt).
if you take taxes off, you're probably at like 55-60k. that means rent alone is 70%-77% of income!
"living pretty well"?
rafram•15m ago
The median household income in New York City is only $81,000 per year! People make it work!
api•1h ago
HVAC, transportation, anything beyond maybe emergency medicine, Internet access, education, drinkable tap water, …
The fact that the bulk of the US population has these things is what makes us a first world country.
gravypod•1h ago
It was common plot point in media to: 1) kick your kids out at 18, 2) if two men lived together they were assumed to be dating.
bglusman•57m ago
littlexsparkee•54m ago
also - gentrification of apartment housing stock over time raising the price floor and phasing out of public housing
sethjgore•1h ago
antonvs•1h ago
The common factor: the capital class screwing over the working class.
ajmurmann•1h ago
mrweasel•1h ago
ghaff•43m ago
TimorousBestie•11m ago
ajmurmann•42m ago
bruce343434•1h ago
gravypod•1h ago
Cost of money (inflation), building, and maintenance is the floor for rents.
selfmodruntime•1h ago
bantunes•1h ago
datadrivenangel•59m ago
Per state breakouts: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/decennial/tables/ti...
jmclnx•59m ago
In the late 80s early 90s I was paying 350 USD for a 2 bedroom.
throwforfeds
api•1h ago
vorpalhex•1h ago
https://usafacts.org/answers/are-wages-keeping-up-with-infla...
It is in fact rents, especially with mandatory add-ons. The actual cost of renting a place is a lot more than the direct rent payment.
sethjgore•1h ago
bee_rider•58m ago
On the other hand, wages haven’t kept up with inflation and the super-wealthy are constantly capturing more of the value. At least in the case of small-scale landlords, maybe they are just the only lower-to-middle class people who’ve managed to defend the deal they had in the 90’s, proportionally speaking…
shlant•53m ago
hgoel•42m ago
shlant•13m ago
hgoel•4m ago
littlexsparkee
MiscCompFacts•53m ago
[1] https://www.zillow.com/rental-manager/market-trends/tx/
alphawhisky•50m ago
littlexsparkee•27m ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48399957
HumblyTossed•50m ago
littlexsparkee•30m ago