I've been wanting to buy nice furniture for a very long time... unfortunately the housing crisis has prevented my from ever having a sense of permanence. If I had known I'd live in my last place for nearly a decade I would have purchased nice things, but as it stands, until I have a mortgage of my own, I refuse to spend good money on something I may need to replace next year.
The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
AirBnb should also be banned. And the people who profited off that startup, who must've known they were creating illegal hotels and destroying rental markets, should be hit with devastating fines, maybe also imprisoned.
Airbnb was never meant to be what it has become. It started out as an easy way for people to rent out a spare room. The name “Airbnb” came from air mattresses on the floor.
It’s the get-rich-quick types who decided to be professional Airbnb landlords. Short term leases make no sense at all to anyone actual invested in rental properties, without something like Airbnb to back it. A long term tenant who pays on time should be the dream of every landlord, but with all the Airbnbs, it’s not even considered.
I don’t know if this is the fault of the early investors, but I’m all for pulling the rug out from under the the people who own dozens of properties for the sole purpose of doing Airbnb. They are likely extremely leveraged, due to the low interest rates from years past, so they’d be screwed and be forced to sell fast.
I agree on the international investors as well. Priority should always go to people who will actual live in a place. All those multi-million dollar places in NYC that sit vacant are a horrible. What’s the point of housing if no one is there to live in it.
> starting with institutional and overseas investors.
This would do next to nothing. The landlords buying up real estate are mom-and-pops with fewer than 10 properties. Which makes sense, because residential property is a pretty decent passive income that's only accessible to people with wealth but are not a good asset for large institutions.
Otherwise banks wouldn't sell foreclosed homes at a discount, they'd hold onto them if it was more profitable.
You might want to read into data like this (1) to get a better view of how much housing stock those companies own as a proportion of the total market (it's very little). The data is kind of hard to get, because many small landlords have incorporated as LLCs/LLPs and they make up the bulk of "corporate" ownership.
But it's pretty clear that the big time owners like institutional investors/REITs/etc own less than 2% of all units.
I really don't expect that appointing a committee to decide if your use of a space is acceptable is going to improve the problems caused in large part by having a committee decide how space should be used.
>The buying up of precious housing as investments by non-residents should mostly be banned, starting with institutional and overseas investors.
What's the issue with them buying houses as investments, as long as they're being rented out? If that's the case, their net effect on the housing supply is zero.
>maybe also imprisoned.
I find it extremely disturbing that people are effectively demanding for bill of attainders for jail sentences for what are basically zoning violations.
Sounds like the actual problem is that landlords can engage in "greedy rent seeking behavior" at all. Allowing people to opt out, but only if they can afford a 6 figure downpayment and keep 7 figure amounts of their wealth parked in a single non-productive asset that's highly correlated with their job prospects is an imperfect solution to say the least. Everyone deserve protections from "greedy rent seeking behavior", not just the people who are in a position to buy.
Good lord man what first time homebuyer is putting down $100k down payments? I just bought a nice house in a well established in demand neighborhood and my total cost down was less than $30k. No assistance program, no special deal, definitely not a cheap house oof this market.
Was your <$30K down a <20% down payment and are you paying PMI as a result? I totally understand that %20 down is a big pile of money to conjure up, but PMI wouldn't have been cheap for us had we been unable to conjure it.
Our cost to close was under $100k with a 20% down payment, but still substantial. And yes, we were first time homebuyers. Obviously we did not buy anything approaching 2M.
With closing costs of $10k-15k, 100k doesn't even break a half million at 20% down. That's (sadly) not even table stakes in e.g. most parts of Boston.
We were ready to drop 20% on the house because like you I was also scared of PMI but when we ran the numbers with the bank the cost was small enough that it didn't make one iota of difference in the long run so we paid 5% down and have a very flush emergency fund.
Someone with good credit and currently renting would be nuts to "wait and save" for even 1 year because the total cost of PMI was like 6mo of our rent and accounting for paying it off over time with inflation it's probably even less than that in real dollars.
Maybe we got lucky with PMI but googling a bit it doesn't seem that out of line with the calculators.
This is quite common trope here among young generation, feeling left out of property ownership like its some basic human right guaranteed by UN charter. Like previous generations were not left out of same/other stuff as well. That the post you respond to is not flagged tells you quite something... Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.
There are whole highly developed countries (higher than US for example in terms of personal freedom, ie Switzerland) who simply don't have home ownership as something usual and folks focus on actual quality aspects of living. Populations are consistently among the happiest (and healthiest) in the world.
Correlation != causation but maybe not joining property rat race (which was always the case, just tools were few and apart for most) has some significant benefits. And if its just about safe investing then we moved topic completely elsewhere, back to good ol' universal greed.
Countries where middle class people rent have pretty "communist" tenant protection regimes. Being perpetually 30 days from a potential eviction is not a position most people can or should be okay with.
Feels a bit pointless to explain basics but I'll bite for the others - I dont know which country is like that, definitely not Switzerland, not Germany, France, Czech republic nor Slovakia (listing personal multiyear experiences).
Neither of them has any (significant) rent control, definitely abolute 0 for young and able, and people have rental agreements which run easily decade(s).
Ie in France its the opposite - owners are properly scared of long term rentals, since rentees can trivially just stop paying and it will take you 6+ month of courts to have an attempt on evicion. They can trash the place and no real recourse. Not empty threat neither, everybody knows such a case personally. Thus everybody -> airbnbs. Blame the system if you grok the situation, french one is one of the worst in the west.
> Too often these folks have outright communist mindset to set the world as it suits their current needs, which to somebody like me being raised in pretty hard oppression and practically slavery from russians is a proper insult.
The cost of houses in my area went up $100k less than 2 years after I bought my house. The cost of food where I doubled in less than 20 years. Rent went up $1000.
Sorry that people wanting "affordable housing" is an insult to you. I'm sure when the Neo-Maoists promise to massacre landlords, the masses of rentcells out there are surely going to take your sob story seriously and choose to live in good American style "practically slavery" and choose not to join them. Surely they think your comment comes across as empathetic and understanding, not callous and dismissive.
I’m 40 years old and trying to buy a home in a high COLA city with my partner and our child. We are currently renting. Everything is either absurdly priced or surrounded by people of color and crime.
This realization has convinced me that it’s not a supply problem. I go on Zillow and there’s HUNDREDS of affordable condos and single family homes and 2 flats on offer. I can buy many of them cash. But they are in the ghetto. And ghettos are not some sort of act of god or timey-wimey opopsie-dasie. They are deliberate creations of a society.
Similarly, I look on Zillow at houses in second-tier cities an hour or two drive and everything is reasonable. My partner and I work in person five days a week, and yet millennials and Gen Zers working remotely except for once a month have no legitimate reason to be in high COLA markets except for their love of marg towers.
It’s not a supply problem. It’s an “I’m a racist white person and I’m okay with the carceral industrial complex” problem.
All the crime I see in these areas that frankly makes living in them a threat to my female partner’s survival is due to 60+ years of stupid welfare policy and 50+ years of the War on Drugs removing fathers from homes and incentivizing criminal culture.
Sofas, perhaps especially, are pretty hard to fit for non built-in furniture. I bought a used sofa off my brother. (Ironically, their replacements ended up being terrible because they lasted about a year with their dogs.)
I was also very lucky though. I thought I could configure the sectional in a couple different ways. Turned out I rolled the dice the right way because I couldn't. And only discovered this after many months because I was on crutches at the time and couldn't do anything about the sofa sitting in my garage.
Good furniture holds value especially buying used good furniture. If it doesn’t work out next year you can sell it for about what you paid if you haven’t destroyed it. Hard wood holds up to abuse much better than the particle board stuff too.
