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.
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.
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.
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.
Well that’s all well and good until every house rental in your area starts requiring you to either do the maintenance anyway, or pay for it. So you get to pay for the house, and you get to maintenance the house, but you don’t get to own the house.
I’ve watched things change in just the last 5 years where renting a house means you have to maintenance everything that isn’t structural, including lawn care, but you don’t own any stake in the house, and you can forget about putting up a shelf or a new coat of paint. And now that you’re paying the mortgage and taxes on this house, you’re paying for all the utilities for the house, and are fixing all the problems that occur with the house, the landlord gets to send people over whenever they want to that get to go inside your house and look around without you being home just to make sure you’re taking care of it the way they want you to. And then when you leave, either because you found a better deal, or the landlord just doesn’t feel like renting it to you anymore, you get the pleasure of walking away with nothing.
Why do you care so much how someone else chooses to live their life? Some people want to rent and it’s no one else’s business to make them do any different.
If you want to own a house and a buy a maintenance contract go for it.
I personally wouldn’t wish dealing with a home warranty company claim on my worst enemy. They are all scams geared to deny claims.
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.
I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.
As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people's needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.
But if you can't summarize the solution to a complex societal problem with a history to it into a single simple sentence that can be used as a punchy "hot take", clearly you just don't want a solution! /s
Way too many people in the world who are more willing to believe that things suck because everyone's too stupid to try the "obvious" solution, instead of the fact that most societal issues are icebergs of complication and causes.
Not getting your home infested with bugs because of having a nasty neighbor
No loud honking at night
Not having your door accidentally knocked on to ask if your apartment neighbor is home when they’re not answering their door
Parking in your own garage
Having a yard for your dog/kids to play in
Apartments fucking suck in so many ways. I get that they’re pretty handy in City Skylines where everyone bases their urban planning experience from but there is a reason people prefer to live in house and it’s because it gives you separation from other people in a way apartments cannot.
Literally the first image in that page is a picture of Singapores public housing, and a claim that they have the highest home ownership rates in the world.
Using Singapore, which has the death penalty for drug use isn’t comparable.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that's related to public housing policy in any given country.
I'm also gonna like, cite the soviet bloc style apartments, or china's rapid urbanization in around the same time period that the US decided to make public housing be a thing. I know for the soviet lunchboxes, you had your standard complaints of, oh, long wait lists, subpar build quality, yadda yadda, and then of course towards the beginning of the program you had a large issue with people who had previously been unindustrialized farmers basically just not knowing how to live in an apartment, shit like having your pigs stay indoors and stuff like that. I think similar issues were/are probably a part of chinese publicly subsidized housing complexes. I think barcelona's superblocks are also publicly subsidized but I don't know to what extent, and they seem to be working out pretty good. Now those are all places that provide publicly subsidized housing and have provided it to those who were pretty impoverished at the time. They also had/have (again idk barcelona don't even know why I brought it up) work programs and shit, which we used to have in america, so that might contribute to your point more, but I still think, you know, it is bad to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The projects were majorly flawed, but they are probably preferable to the whole like. rust belt suburban crime shit. I dunno, realistically it doesn't really matter what context an apartheid ghetto scenario is happening in, because it's going to have basically the same consequences on everyone involved.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that’s related to public housing policy in any given country.
Drug use is rampant among the poor because it provides escape for some and profit for others. But it is destructive to communities creating greater poverty.
Singapore has draconian crime laws where you will be whipped for graffiti and executed for drug use. It creates a safer culture but at what cost?
Is that what's created their safer culture, though, or is that just something that they also have? uhhh ummm the nordic countries the nordic countries! you ever heard of those! everybody loves those for all their cool examples of policies! no but fr like, portugal with their decriminalization has also had success in eliminating large swathes of their drug problem, oregon, not so much. So I question whether or not it's that singapore is really having success with their draconian tactics "but at what cost", or if the draconian tactics are just a secondary element, and then they're also just doing other shit that would cut down on their drug problem, like having disproportionate funding for their DEA equivalent. I dunno, I just find it hard to believe that draconian crime policy is doing the heavy lifting there, cause those come with some pretty heavy caveats in most places.
I dunno singapore might just kind of equivalent to a slightly more privileged hell joseon though so what do I know.
I think I would rather die than live in an apartment again. Being told how you have to live, whether or not you’re allowed to have a pet and what kind, dealing with constant noise and odors from the many other people living around you against your will, no guarantee that you’ll be allowed to stay there this time next year, etc. Paying rent and not gaining equity in your home definitely sucks, but it’s honestly the last complaint I have against apartment living. In my opinion it’s a subhuman condition that nobody should be forced into.
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.
Did he mention that a lot of the real estate that people own in most post-Soviet countries is inherited when (grand)parents die, this being first if not the only step towards the market for most people?
None of the people I know from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus bought their first apartments on their own through hard work or anything: it's mostly apartments where your grandma died, apartments that you're either massively helped with or outright gifted by parents when yuu have a significant other to move in with (so both families join funds, most coming from selling some dead relative's apartment) or on a wedding day (a rarer occasion), or some mix of that.
Without any help or gifts, you're lucky to be able to get a mortgage that you can pay off before you're 60 (at least).
The real estate prices outside the US and the EU may seem nicer, but salaries and expenses sure don't.
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.
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.
We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.
Not sure if you actually meant logarithmic or exponential. An exponential tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot more in tax, while a logarithmic tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot less in tax. See x^2^ versus log~2~(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x^2^) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.
In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don't own more than 1 though.
Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I'm going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.
At some point the taxes would be so high that nobody could afford to rent and the owners would lose money forcing them to sell. Which is fine. Just gotta make the taxes higher for more than x houses.
Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.
No one gets a second home until everyone has their first.
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.
Rent apartments. Own houses.
*Since some people really need every combination addressed: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well that’s all well and good until every house rental in your area starts requiring you to either do the maintenance anyway, or pay for it. So you get to pay for the house, and you get to maintenance the house, but you don’t get to own the house.
I’ve watched things change in just the last 5 years where renting a house means you have to maintenance everything that isn’t structural, including lawn care, but you don’t own any stake in the house, and you can forget about putting up a shelf or a new coat of paint. And now that you’re paying the mortgage and taxes on this house, you’re paying for all the utilities for the house, and are fixing all the problems that occur with the house, the landlord gets to send people over whenever they want to that get to go inside your house and look around without you being home just to make sure you’re taking care of it the way they want you to. And then when you leave, either because you found a better deal, or the landlord just doesn’t feel like renting it to you anymore, you get the pleasure of walking away with nothing.
Then buy a fucking maintenance contract, just like landlords do.
Why do you care so much how someone else chooses to live their life? Some people want to rent and it’s no one else’s business to make them do any different.
If you want to own a house and a buy a maintenance contract go for it.
I personally wouldn’t wish dealing with a home warranty company claim on my worst enemy. They are all scams geared to deny claims.
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.
We can't solve the problem for 99.99% of people because of this 0.0000001% person. /s.
I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.
As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people's needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.
But if you can't summarize the solution to a complex societal problem with a history to it into a single simple sentence that can be used as a punchy "hot take", clearly you just don't want a solution! /s
Way too many people in the world who are more willing to believe that things suck because everyone's too stupid to try the "obvious" solution, instead of the fact that most societal issues are icebergs of complication and causes.
Why? A co-op can own an apartment with occupants as co-owners. There's no need for rent.
Sigh: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.
I ask again: why? What does renting accomplish that a co-op couldn't? Other than making a landlord rich.
Sigh. I'm saying that corporations can own rental apartments if they want because there is enough room for both. Corporations should not own houses.
Houses are pretty terrible for a multitude of factors:
We should be building apartments that everyone can own, live and be happy in. It shouldn’t be reserved for home owners.
Houses are pretty great for a few factors
Apartments fucking suck in so many ways. I get that they’re pretty handy in City Skylines where everyone bases their urban planning experience from but there is a reason people prefer to live in house and it’s because it gives you separation from other people in a way apartments cannot.
We tried that in the 50's. They became known as "the projects".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing
You end up quarantining the poor into small areas.
Literally the first image in that page is a picture of Singapores public housing, and a claim that they have the highest home ownership rates in the world.
It’s nearly as if public housing can work?
Public housing can work but not without addressing poverty. Using Singapore, which has the death penalty for drug use isn't comparable.
Otherwise it only makes it worse by concentrating poverty into a ghetto.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that's related to public housing policy in any given country.
I'm also gonna like, cite the soviet bloc style apartments, or china's rapid urbanization in around the same time period that the US decided to make public housing be a thing. I know for the soviet lunchboxes, you had your standard complaints of, oh, long wait lists, subpar build quality, yadda yadda, and then of course towards the beginning of the program you had a large issue with people who had previously been unindustrialized farmers basically just not knowing how to live in an apartment, shit like having your pigs stay indoors and stuff like that. I think similar issues were/are probably a part of chinese publicly subsidized housing complexes. I think barcelona's superblocks are also publicly subsidized but I don't know to what extent, and they seem to be working out pretty good. Now those are all places that provide publicly subsidized housing and have provided it to those who were pretty impoverished at the time. They also had/have (again idk barcelona don't even know why I brought it up) work programs and shit, which we used to have in america, so that might contribute to your point more, but I still think, you know, it is bad to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The projects were majorly flawed, but they are probably preferable to the whole like. rust belt suburban crime shit. I dunno, realistically it doesn't really matter what context an apartheid ghetto scenario is happening in, because it's going to have basically the same consequences on everyone involved.
Drug use is rampant among the poor because it provides escape for some and profit for others. But it is destructive to communities creating greater poverty.
Singapore has draconian crime laws where you will be whipped for graffiti and executed for drug use. It creates a safer culture but at what cost?
Is that what's created their safer culture, though, or is that just something that they also have? uhhh ummm the nordic countries the nordic countries! you ever heard of those! everybody loves those for all their cool examples of policies! no but fr like, portugal with their decriminalization has also had success in eliminating large swathes of their drug problem, oregon, not so much. So I question whether or not it's that singapore is really having success with their draconian tactics "but at what cost", or if the draconian tactics are just a secondary element, and then they're also just doing other shit that would cut down on their drug problem, like having disproportionate funding for their DEA equivalent. I dunno, I just find it hard to believe that draconian crime policy is doing the heavy lifting there, cause those come with some pretty heavy caveats in most places.
I dunno singapore might just kind of equivalent to a slightly more privileged hell joseon though so what do I know.
I think I would rather die than live in an apartment again. Being told how you have to live, whether or not you’re allowed to have a pet and what kind, dealing with constant noise and odors from the many other people living around you against your will, no guarantee that you’ll be allowed to stay there this time next year, etc. Paying rent and not gaining equity in your home definitely sucks, but it’s honestly the last complaint I have against apartment living. In my opinion it’s a subhuman condition that nobody should be forced into.
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.
Did he mention that a lot of the real estate that people own in most post-Soviet countries is inherited when (grand)parents die, this being first if not the only step towards the market for most people?
None of the people I know from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus bought their first apartments on their own through hard work or anything: it's mostly apartments where your grandma died, apartments that you're either massively helped with or outright gifted by parents when yuu have a significant other to move in with (so both families join funds, most coming from selling some dead relative's apartment) or on a wedding day (a rarer occasion), or some mix of that.
Without any help or gifts, you're lucky to be able to get a mortgage that you can pay off before you're 60 (at least).
The real estate prices outside the US and the EU may seem nicer, but salaries and expenses sure don't.
Everybody is screwed, everywhere.
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.
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.
We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.
Logarithmic scale of increasing property tax rate
Not sure if you actually meant logarithmic or exponential. An exponential tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot more in tax, while a logarithmic tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot less in tax. See x^2^ versus log~2~(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x^2^) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/7l1turktmc
In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don't own more than 1 though.
Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I'm going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.
And all that higher tax cost is passed directly on to tenants
At some point the taxes would be so high that nobody could afford to rent and the owners would lose money forcing them to sell. Which is fine. Just gotta make the taxes higher for more than x houses.
Yup. Housing is for people to live in, not for speculation.
How would you move? Need to time the buying and selling just right?
Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.
Just have a government agency be a middle man.