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Just sayin (mander.xyz)
submitted 8 months ago by fossilesque@mander.xyz to c/memes@lemmy.ml
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[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 187 points 8 months ago

No one gets a second home until everyone has their first.

[-] BeardedGingerWonder@feddit.uk 99 points 8 months ago

Rental has its place, there have been plenty of occasions in my life where rental suited me better than ownership. Regulation and enforcement of said regulations would do a lot to protect people in this situation.

[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Rent apartments. Own houses.

*Since some people really need every combination addressed: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.

[-] Yondoza@sh.itjust.works 19 points 8 months ago

How do you handle situations where people want to live temporarily in houses? An example would be a traveling nurse that doesn't want to be in an apartment building.

[-] Bocky@lemmy.world 16 points 8 months ago

May people prefer to rent houses over owning one. Many of them I speak to tell me they want nothing to do with house maintenance and upkeep and they prefer to rent so that they don’t have to think or worry about any of the repairs. They like being able to just call the property manager when the hot water stops working or when their kiddo accidentally breaks a window.

[-] BritishJ@lemmy.world 28 points 8 months ago

When the kids breaks a window, they still have to pay. They just don't have to source it, which means they might not be getting the best deal.

Plus, most landlords leave things till the last minute or make it such hard work for the tenant to report it, they don't bother.

The maintenance is built into the rent, so they're already paying for it, just not getting the best deal and losing the option to do it how they want.

[-] Bocky@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago

Everything you are saying is true, and even with those facts noted, some people still prefer the convenience of renting and some like the carefree aspect of not having to be responsible for the upkeep.

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[-] thedirtyknapkin@lemmy.world 12 points 8 months ago

that's significantly less bad of a problem than the current issue of no one being able to afford homes. that nurse might just have to go for the apartment... that's really not that big of a deal.

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[-] dojan@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago

Rental property should be publicly owned. Landlords shouldn’t be a thing.

I can see there being exceptions if you say own a property but have to move swiftly elsewhere and can’t/don’t wish to sell it, in such a case letting it out makes sense.

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[-] JoYo@lemmy.ml 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Dude from Ukraine was telling me that most people own condos. He was weirded out that the vast majority of people in the US don't have a vested interest into their neighborhood simply because they believe they won't live there for long.

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[-] Riven@lemmy.dbzer0.com 46 points 8 months ago

People who own second and third homes aren't even the issue. It's mega corps that literally own tens of thousands of homes each. A better way to go about it is to just progressively tax people more per home. That second home gets taxed at the same rate but any home after is taxed way way way more. If someone can still afford it then that's fine, just more tax money coming in. That and don't let corps own rental properties.

[-] iAmTheTot@kbin.social 16 points 8 months ago

Nope, I said what I said. No one needs a second home. Lots of people need a first.

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[-] rekabis@lemmy.ca 125 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:


The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:

Housing as an investment.

That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.

A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.

But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.

Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.

No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:

  1. Flippers
  2. Landlords-as-a-business.

1) Flippers

The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:

  1. Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
  2. Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.

Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.

And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.

So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.

A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.

Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.

But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.

This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.


2) Landlords-as-a-business

The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:

  1. It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
  2. Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.

As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.

  • Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
  • Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.

By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.

Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:

Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.

By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.

Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.

[-] Makeitstop@lemmy.world 33 points 8 months ago

Creating massive penalties equal to the whole cost of a house for anyone that sells after less than 6-8 years would have devastating unintended consequences. It might make flipping impractical, but it would also hurt a lot of people who find themselves in a position where they need to sell, and would increase the risks associated with buying a house for lower income buyers.

It would help if you targeted the profit from the sale instead of the whole price. Flipping is about buying low, minimizing the cost of improvements, and then selling for a massively inflated amount. Without that profit it's not worth it. For a normal person, being able to make money on the deal is nice, but at least recouping your costs can keep you economically stable and allow you to move on with your life.

I also think that you would want to combine this with some plan for helping low income buyers with the restoration of neglected properties that would normally be snatched up by flippers.

I also think the arbitrary age restriction on owning a rental property needs an exemption for inherited properties if nothing else. A 20ish year old who inherits a home or rental property when their parent(s) die is not abusing a loophole, and immediately hitting them with additional legal problems and forcing them to sell a house that has a tenant already in there is just unnecessary chaos for everyone involved.

I'm also curious how large apartment complexes fit into this plan. Are they also banned? Do you just need an owner to occupy a (potentially much nicer) apartment in the building? If you can still operate a huge apartment complex, I would expect the market to shift heavily towards those. If you can't well, that raises it's own issues around urban housing and population density.

[-] ShouldIHaveFun@feddit.ch 19 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In Switzerland we have a tax when selling a house on the value it gained since you bought it. So if you buy a house for price X and you sell it for more than that, you will be taxed on the price difference. Even if the price difference is just because of market fluctuations.

This is probably a better solution against flippers, since only those making money by increasing house values are taxed. The tax can then be made more or less aggressive as needed.

Edit: here are some more explanations about how this tax works https://www.ch.ch/en/housing/homeownership/taxation-of-real-estate#are-you-planning-to-sell-your-house-or-apartment

[-] flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works 13 points 8 months ago

That's a quality rant, I love it! The other guy had a point about zoning to allow greater density, but I think that's a separate but related issue.

Obviously these will never come to pass while your leaders are all landlords, though

[-] driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 12 points 8 months ago

I can't find the video, but the YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity! Did a pretty well explanation to why housing is so costly on Canada and the main problem is actually zoning laws. Like in 99% in Canada you can't built anything but single family detached houses.

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[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 64 points 8 months ago

No person should be allowed to own more residential property than they're realistically need for living.

[-] TimeSquirrel@kbin.social 17 points 8 months ago

I'm just curious how we'll define "realistic", because someone who's into just software programming might be satisfied with a studio apartment. I can't live without my basement workshop however. I like to make stuff.

[-] Dirk@lemmy.ml 30 points 8 months ago

That's valid. But, for example: You don't need a dozen of different houses.

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[-] Norgur@kbin.social 47 points 8 months ago

That sounds like a solution but isn't. In my experience, the corporations I had as landlords were completely aware of what they are allowed to do and are obligated to do. The private landlords I had were the craziest bitches imaginable. Stuff didn't happen as it should have, laws were intentionally misinterpreted and twisted, etc.
The reason why my experience differs so much is laws. Here in Germany, we've got strong renter's protection laws. They are still too weak in some places but really, really clear in most. So while my private landlord tried to make me pay for repairs, the company doesn't bother with such illegal bullshit, sends over a contractor they work with regularly and shit gets done.

[-] AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 29 points 8 months ago

We have those problems here (the US) too but the greater problem is that corporations buying up homes is driving increases in housing prices. Greater housing prices leads to higher rent and higher mortgage payments, fucking over regular people every which way, unless of course you happened to buy your home 30 years ago, in which case everything's peachy and you can reverse mortgage yourself into a vacation home in Boca.

[-] ironhydroxide@sh.itjust.works 12 points 8 months ago

Then with all that cash they drop some of it on buying the lawmakers, preventing or removing renter protections. Once that's done, remove things from the lease that cost $$, up the rent. Profit even more.

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[-] frezik@midwest.social 44 points 8 months ago

A co-op is another form of corporation. Dense, multi-family structures should be done that way.

What we don't want is for housing to be a speculative investment. Remove the profit motive of holding a house that's empty and reselling.

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[-] snake_cased@lemmy.ml 39 points 8 months ago

Landownership is wrong all together.

If you think about it, it is completely absurd, why anyone assumes the right to 'own' a piece of land. Or even more land than the other guy. Someone must have been the person to first come up with the idea of ownership, but it is and was never based on anything other than an idea, and we should question it.

After all inheritance of landownership is a major cornerstone of our unjust and exploitative society.

[-] UnrepententProcrastinator@lemmy.ca 30 points 8 months ago

Every generation, people want to try new things and it's nice. But landownership can and has been and good thing in a way that just going back to "anarchy" wouldn't work. E.g. creation of ghettos, who gets to farm the best land, etc.

So then the suggestions are that the land are owned and "managed" by the state apparatus. Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.

I'm open to better suggestions but just shitting on land ownership seems easy and unproductive.

[-] Aasikki@sopuli.xyz 20 points 8 months ago

If someone owns a house, they kinda have to own at the very least some land around it. I just don't really see any other way for that to work. Would be interesting to hear how that could work otherwise.

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[-] Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 12 points 8 months ago

Now we have a few famines in history to show us how gaining favor in a political system is not the best way to manage the land.

Doesn't that also mean The Irish famine shows private land ownership isn't the best way to manage land?

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[-] Blackmist@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago

That's all well and good but I don't want you living in my garden.

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[-] scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech 24 points 8 months ago

We have one area of actual steady investment in our lives - our homes. And they can't handle us making a tiny bit of money

[-] Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world 22 points 8 months ago

I need an ironic WWII style scaremongering propaganda poster about class war. The 1% have class awareness. Do you?

[-] kamenlady@lemmy.world 16 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Scrath's comment made me check with Bing - i put your comment as the prompt, word by word:

Edit: a week later i was wondering how far image generators get political context right. So i tried the same prompt on civitai ( without any additional resources ). Bing did a better job with the context, at least it repeated some of the input.

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[-] Easyreever@lemmy.world 21 points 8 months ago

Or contribute to political campaigns….or a thousand other things they abuse.

[-] ruplicant@sh.itjust.works 17 points 8 months ago

no real estate taxes for the first house owned, heavy and progressive taxes starting on the second, is an idea

companies get called people all the time, i'm starting to believe it, but i still think they don't need shelter, so they shouldn't be able to aquire a basic human need

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[-] set_secret@lemmy.world 15 points 8 months ago

investors should not be able to either.

[-] haui_lemmy@lemmy.giftedmc.com 14 points 8 months ago

Easy solution in my opinion:

  1. only humans can own residential buildings
  2. you must live in the building you own
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[-] bruhduh@lemmy.world 14 points 8 months ago

B-but CoRpOrAtIoNs Is PeOpLe

[-] Neato@ttrpg.network 14 points 8 months ago

I'll believe corporations are people when Texas executes one.

Weirdly enough new York is on track to do that with Trump's company.

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[-] Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 13 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

One to four units should only be owned by people and the owner should have the obligation to live in it or there should be a radius around their property in which they can't own a second one.

Five to eight units should only be owned by well regulated corporations with the fiscal responsibilities this implies. The alternative would be co-ops.

Nine and more should be under a non profit state corporation that charges rent based on trying to break even only (that's how road insurance for people works around here, price is adjusted based on the previous year's cost to the corporation, it's way cheaper than private equivalents elsewhere in the country).

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this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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