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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   30157 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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What can she promise to boost the supply of housing instead of subsidizing demand? As long as cities have downtowns, you are limited by the driving distance and the quantity of roads and parking downtown.

She can't promise to raze and rebuild the cities with decentralized offices.

She can't promise to found new cities to allow first-time buyers to buy new homes cheaply.

She can't promise to upzone existing suburbs.

Even if she can somehow double the supply of housing, this will destroy housing as an investment. Which is also something people very vocally do not want. It's not like Trump can do anything about housing either. Maybe when the US population finally starts to dip...

Let's say you are grandma who bought a good sized house for 200k. You are about to retire and all the kids are gone so you sell the house.

Situation 1, the price of your house rose to 1 mil, you net 800,000. You spend a third to buy a condo in an old person condominium, and now you have 700,000 on top of your 401k and SS to spend in your dotage.

Situation 2, the price of your home went back down to 300k. You net 100k. The price of the condo also fell, now it's 100k. You only have 200k extra to add to your nest egg. Assuming other costs stayed the same, you are worse off.

There are lots of people who would be better off too. But it's the Baby Boomers who are retiring, and they are such a huge voting block no one wants to mess with it for now. Maybe when Gen X retires.

Maybe when Gen X retires.

Gen X doesn't get to retire, because once the Boomers start dying off, the Millennials will vote to take all we've saved and all the more foolish of us believed we were promised.

God, I hope so.

Boomers as a voting block are too formidable but millennials outnumber genx so it might be the first opportunity in a generation to actually smash that Ponzi scheme to a million pieces.

Someone’s got to take the hit when we draw the line, and millennials got mega fucked economically by a combination the vagaries of history and poor public policy.

How much sharper than a serpent's tooth....

(ha, good thing I didn't have kids)

I’m a millennial with young kids so it’s do or die for me at this point.

Couple of thoughts:

  • People who own homes often spend against their equity, and dropping house values would at the very least put a stop to this money faucet;
  • People who own homes often don't want their neighborhoods to become more affordable, as they do not wish to live near People of Affordability;
  • People who don't own homes often have pensions and retirement accounts affixed to the nominal value of homes.

Under the current regime, if you're savvy, you can buy an asset that more than pays for itself, appreciates over time, becomes completely yours after 30 years, and even gets a lot of tax benefits. Why put your money anywhere else? This can't go on.

I agree with the general thought that homes as an investment is incompatible with a functioning nation, because it by definition requires housing to become only less affordable over time. When you consider the fact that what can't continue won't, it's simply inevitable that this arrangement will end at some point. The only question is who will be left holding the bag, which I imagine will be a hotly battled political contest.

Not sure if I want my money in that fight. Difficult to imagine that property owners will somehow win. On the other hand, the tide doesn't look like it's turning quite yet. We're still patching in buffs to what is already the best asset class.

I wonder how this will interact with population effects. Birth rates are below replacement and falling (though thankfully not as much as in some other places), which if that were the only effect, would mean that demand for residential housing should be decreasing. That hasn't been happening, because of other factors: increasing lifespans, a lower person:household ratio, and immigration. But we shouldn't expect that to continue, except maybe immigration—otherwise housing values will start falling as the population declines. So we can't expect houses to be a permanently appreciating asset (adjusting for inflation), without changes to society, or immigration.

Birth rates are below replacement and falling (though thankfully not as much as in some other places), which if that were the only effect, would mean that demand for residential housing should be decreasing.

Demand for residential housing increasing is in part why the birthrate is collapsing. Demand for properties drives up the cost of family formation, so fewer families get formed.

Under the current regime, if you're savvy, you can buy an asset that more than pays for itself, appreciates over time, becomes completely yours after 30 years, and even gets a lot of tax benefits. Why put your money anywhere else? This can't go on.

You usually can't actually do this; it only works in a few places and times. If you can see those times and places when they happen, go to town, but most people can't. Buying a house is still often a good investment but it's a rather ordinary one with the exception of the fact that it displaces a necessary expense.

My house has likely appreciated over $200,000 since I bought it in 2011. But I've put more than $100,000 into it outside of interest and taxes (which are not small either). It would be a loss if you didn't consider the fact that I get the use of it.

As for housing-as-investment requiring houses to become less affordable, no. It merely requires that any particular house grows in value in real terms. Housing-as-savings-vehicle doesn't even require that.

Once we have self-driving cars, there will no longer be any pressing need to have the parking lots immediately adjacent to the places that people are going. The cars will be able to drive empty to the parking area after dropping off passengers. This will also increase the willingness of people to commutte long distances, since people spend most of their time on their phones and laptops anyway.

This will also increase the willingness of people to commutte long distances, since people spend most of their time on their phones and laptops anyway.

Personally, I get motion sick if I try to read in a car, so that's useless to me.

But how far away are we from fully automated driving becoming a legal reality? I feel like I've been hearing it's 2-3 years away since almost a decade ago.

Waymo exists, and Tesla's tech is pretty advanced, I believe. I wonder how much of why we haven't seen it much yet is fear of heavy lawsuits and regulation.

and we were 2-3 years away from useful AI for 3 decades. And then chat gpt happened. There are self driving cars in SF now. So it could swing either way - the last couple of percentages could require new paradigm or we are very close.

and we were 2-3 years away from useful AI for 3 decades. And then chat gpt happened.

Right, so we still don't have useful AI.

Cubicles-on-wheels will be such a game-changer.

A first time home buyer is also just someone that hasn't owned a house in three years. I can literally sell a property to my wife and still qualify 3 years later. 'An individual who has had no ownership in a principal residence during the 3-year period ending on the date of purchase of the property. This includes a spouse (if either meets the above test, they are considered first-time homebuyers).' Hot tip!

I wonder if we'll see a black market in "first time buyers" who get paid a commission to buy the house, then immediately turn around and sell it to the real buyer for its cost.

Logically they'd have to do something like the Obama-era first time homebuyer tax credit, where if you sold the house in less than 3 years (or converted it to a business property, etc) you had to pay the money back.

She can promise (though not actually deliver) all of those things, but the only one of the three she's likely to want is upzoning existing suburbs (since doing so would encourage movement from deep blue cities to purple suburbs, turning them blue). She won't promise that either because the existing suburban residents don't want it, and she wants their votes.

Obviously she can’t fix local zoning. But if she was interested, she could do a bunch of things that make larger developments cheaper (eg reduce EPA regulations, OHSA, etc)

Are there any carrots or sticks that the federal government can wave in front of state governments to make them change their zoning laws?

They have enormous carrots and sticks that can be applied to Fannie and Freddie's purchases. If there's a condition that the GSEs won't buy mortgages that aren't on properties with certain zoning characteristics, that greatly limits financing options currently!

The big obvious one is boosting or restricting federal funding for related (or unrelated for that matter) stuff, which is how they went about sidestepping the 21st amendment and forcing every individual state to raise their minimum alcohol purchase age to 21.

In that case they withheld federal highway improvement funding on the order of dozens of millions of dollars per state until the state raised their purchase age to 21. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act

This is easier to apply to state level than local level obviously, but there are still plenty of federal dollars going to programs carried out at municipal levels. In fact such programs are probably concentrated in the unaffordable cities.

Even if she can somehow double the supply of housing, this will destroy housing as an investment.

I am slowly becoming convinced that this is eventually necessary, but will be incredibly painful for many. There still are places we can build -- home prices in Texas are mostly down from two years ago, and California is trying statewide zoning changes that might work somewhat.

But we seem stuck with the choice of following other Anglosphere countries in making housing cost a lifetime or more of wages, or burning a whole lot of folks who thought it would be a nest egg. IMO the best course is probably to spread the hurt over a generation or so rather than rip off the bandaid into a culture where housing isn't expected to appreciate (Japan, somewhat?), even though that will probably hit my net worth too.

It seems like the Anglosphere is trying to square that circle by (a) restricting supply in the high-income, liberal voting areas and (b) letting in a flood of immigrants to do cheap construction labor and build up new housing in low-income, conservative voting areas. We'll see how long that can last.

Of course housing should be destroyed as an investment. Living in a house is consumption. It causes wear and tear on the house. A twenty-year-old house is inherently less valuable than a brand new house. In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.

New builds these days kind of suck. They lack a certain classic style.

If my house burned down, I could then sell the charred frame for over $1 million.

I bought the house and the land it is on for much less than $1 million. My wear and tear on the structure and the aging waterheater and whatnot are round off errors in the property value.

So long as tech jobs remain hyperconcentrated in a few areas, housing prices will have to increase within commuting distance of those jobs. Unless we start making Chinese style housing blocks and Chinese style hard restrictions on urban car ownership.

My wear and tear on the structure and the aging waterheater and whatnot are round off errors in the property value.

Exactly. Amount of people I know who renovate and then try to claim that the 5% appreciation in their house's value in the time it took them is value added instead of just underlying market fluctuations is insane to me

This might not be the case in every city but in Toronto when the market was super hot plenty of homes would have increased in value if they burnt down to a pile of ash.

The people who make "heritage building" designations are quite overzealous since it doesn't cost the city anything. It just puts obligations on homeowners.

A pile of ash means that they don't have any justification to stop an owner from building a new home.

San Francisco famously maliciously designates random buildings historic in order to block development. You can't replace a dumpy laundromat with housing, it is "historic" you see. Multi-year legal battles trying to make some apartments. If the local government did nothing, then more housing would create itself all on its own. But instead they fight like cornered animals to prevent it.

https://missionlocal.org/2018/06/the-strange-and-terrible-saga-of-san-franciscos-historic-laundromat-represents-the-worst-of-planning-and-development-in-this-town/

Anyways, I bet that ""historic"" laundromat owner wishes that a freak tornado or lightning stike would have ruined that building so he could make an apartment complex out of it.

The sorts of people who own laundromats seem more likely than average to arrange for a "freak lightning strike" to cause a fire.

In a healthy economy, a house should depreciate in value like a car, albeit more slowly.

Houses tend to be maintained and upgraded better than cars. I never put a new roof on any car I owned, not even the convertibles.

Sure, and a car can last a million miles if diligently maintained.

I've lived in over 50 year old houses that are fine. Not as some ridiculous outlier like a million mile car, but in a neighborhood of perfectly suitable houses that just happen to be a few decades old.

Houses (the physical structures) depreciate very little over very long periods of time.

I know people who live in 100-year-old rowhouses, in a city of sufficient age to have substantial numbers of them. The neighborhood's inconvenient if you have a car, since it wasn't designed to accommodate parking, but the houses themselves are perfectly liveable.

It can, but the result will likely be you pay a lot more than replacing it a few times. And the result will still be a million mile car with high maintenance costs. So it makes less sense to keep maintaning an old car, and as a result they lose their value. It only very rarely makes financial sense to tear down a house and build anew, so old houses maintain their value.

Of course in areas where the land is far more valuable than the house, there's the additional factor of the land not suffering appreciable wear and tear.

I agree, but I dread to think of what kind of economic crisis would be required to make this realignment palatable. 2008 wasn't big enough to do that. American-Chinese war?

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