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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.
I don't see why they can't own the property and pay a property manager of sorts.
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.
Maybe because corporate ownership of houses is taking over the market and driving people out of home ownership? Have you missed the news of the last many years? And because there is limited number of houses in reasonable distance (aka it's not like selling widgets).
Thanks for your reply, I hadn’t really thought of it this way before
A maintenance company is not a home warranty company.
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.
Houses are pretty terrible for a multitude of factors:
- urban sprawl
- congestion
- pollution
- high cost public works
- low income for public bodies doing those works
- environmental erosion
- flood protection
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
- Not sharing a wall with a neighbor
- being able to be louder in general
- Not being woken up by neighbors
- 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.
How does a detached single family home prevent honking? Why haven't you explained to my neighbors they have to stop honking? Because they definitely still do, and it is still a nuisance
Detached homes definitely have many benefits, but they're incredibly expensive. If we didn't subsidize them so much, we'd have a whole lot more people living in denser housing. The US has something like 85% single family homes compared to around 40% in Germany
It's not that Germans are just so much better neighbors that they can put up with shared walls/spaces. It's just not worth the cost of a detached home when it isn't as heavily subsidized (they do still subsidize them compared to dense housing options)
TL;DR - Detached homes are fine, but we need to quit giving such massive subsidizes to them
It’s nearly as if there’s no single solution. Houses suck and apartments suck for completely different reasons.
(But tbh, nearly all of the reasons you mentioned apartments suck have been maybe an issue once 10+ years of living in apartments)
Yes you can also buy condos which are apartment style.
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.
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.
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.
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.
No, no exceptions. Once there are exceptions people will abuse them. Even if you inherited your parents property if you already have one you should have to pay extra taxes on it from the day they die until the day you sell it, period. Any person, family, business, or corporation should only own one property, zero exceptions.
Edit: /S. Thought that was obvious
It can literally take years to sell a property even if you want to sell it. I don't think it's fair to penalize people who are unable to unload an asset and I also don't think it's fair to expect them to just give it away.
Added a /s. I should have in the first place. My b.
No problem. It's often hard to tell because of Poe's Law.
Even if you inherited your parents property if you already have one you should have to pay extra taxes on it from the day they die until the day you sell it, period.
This seems needlessly callous to me. At least give them a 6-12 month period to clean up, do repairs, and sell the house. Not everyone that inherits a house is making enough to pay increased taxes right out the gate like you're proposing. Also, from personal experience, cleaning houses of deceased relatives tend to require a bit of work to get ready for selling and is incredibly emotionally draining. What you're proposing is going to be extremely painful for the people at the bottom, and emotionally wracking, since as soon as a loved one dies you're now under the gun to sell.
I agree though, second homes should be extremely heavily taxed. I just think we need to approach it with an even hand and make sure that we are targeting big corporate rental agencies and the very wealthy, and not some family that just lost their parents/grandparents. Something about targeting those people seems needlessly aggressive and not really the intention being discussed...
Yeah that's not far off from some folks' actual unironic opinions so the /s is unfortunately not obvious, lol. The Poe's Law situation isn't even hypothetical in this one.
Yeah, I realized that I should have known better.
Regarding the edit, I've seen people unironically post this take on lemmy.
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.
So have apartments operated by the government with strict regulations.
What do you imagine these "strict regulations" would be? I live in public housing right now and it's fantastic. It's also significantly more democratically run than private housing because it's mandated to be that way. I also like knowing that nobody is profiting off of my need to live somewhere.
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.
Nope, I said what I said. No one needs a second home. Lots of people need a first.
So what is your proposal? If anyone doesn't get any second houses how it will help other people? Let's say it will make houses cheaper. How is it any good? Lot's of building companies will go bankrupt in days after announcing such law. Can you imagine what type of chain reaction it will start? Also, people can easily need second homes. 1- For where your work is at. 2- For where your homecity is at. 3- For where you are spending your holidays at. It's nice of you to be thoughtful of poor people/people in need but socialist dreams are just what they are. Dreams. It's much easier and logical to make another cake then trying to split a small cake to hundreds of pieces equally.
First of all, I did not suggest that we flip a switch tomorrow that enacts a law restricting home ownership. It's something we can work towards.
But if you think that it's reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don't think we are ever going to see eye to eye.
But if you think that it’s reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don’t think we are ever going to see eye to eye.
I think there's an "OR" there, not an "AND". Or are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it? If that's the case, why?
Also, if it could conclusively be shown that keeping people from having a second home wouldn't affect homelessness (which I suspect is true), would you still want to prevent ownership of a second home? If so, why? Just want to stick it to the middle class?
I'm sorry, but considering the top 1% has more than twice wealth of the entire bottom 99% combined, it seems counterintuitive to pass radical reforms that have a larger effect on the lower 99% than the top 1%.
I mean, if I were filthy rich and that kind of thing passed, I would just deed out a single plot of land with a 100-mile or more strip between two 100-acre squares (probably work with other 1%ers to have a co-op of that thin strip of land) and I'd get away with having as many houses as I wanted.
But someone like you or me finds a good price on a little 800sqft second house close to work saving time, money, and environment on commuting? Banned?
are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it?
Yes.
If that’s the case, why?
I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.
I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.
Your first comment did not include a "why". But you also don't seem to want to engage. Just throwing out a horrific idea on purpose to troll? I think I'm going to presume you're acting with self-awareness because I don't want to insult your intelligence.
So you do you. I'm out. Not like what you're suggesting will ever happen for people to lose sleep over it.
People who have different world views than you are not automatically trolls. You'd do well to consider that.
What about vacation homes? They are quite common in countries that used to be in the soviet block.
Or mountain huts
It helps other people because more units available leads to dropping prices.
I don't think there is any data to back that up.
1st year econ says something supply demand curve something something price. But that's not true in practice
basically tax it so much that anything beyond a third home is impossible to generate income from.
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.
Bingo. Most of these tax schemes will hurt the renter, not the landlord.
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 x2 versus log2(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x2) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.
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.
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.
News flash junior: That’s how most real estate deals go.
That’s why the first house is so hard to get into because you’re not using the sale of your existing house to fund the down payment, you have to come up with that all on your own.
If you’re wealthy enough to be able to afford buying a house before selling your existing house you’re in the minority.
I haven't sold or bought a house before, so I'm not the person to ask. But from people I've talked to, both buying and selling are months long processes with a ton of variability in the exact dates when things are signed. Maybe you could use the existing house as collateral until it's sold for the down payment? I don't know how it works, but I hadn't seen many people living in hotels for months after selling their houses before closing on their new one.
I have recently bought a house, and had front row seats to several deals that friends and family have gone through plus spent most my life around the process as my dad was a residential loan officer for most his career. You are correct, it is a long process. But to kick off the official process you draft a purchase and sale agreement, a document saying I want to buy your house for X amount, you also put in the terms and conditions under which you’d like to buy the house. More often than not the document will say the purchase is contingent on the sale of your existing house. The seller can reject this document, counter with altered terms or select a purchase and sale agreement from another buyer more favorable to the seller. Another condition you may hear is the deal is contingent on the results of an inspection. One of the things you may hear lately are that buyers are waiving the inspection due to the competitive nature of the market. Contingencies on the sale of your existing house as the source of the down payment is pretty standard. It’s part of Escrow’s job to coordinate between the two deals to shuffle the money from where it’s coming from to where it needs to end up. Another reason to add the condition to the purchase and sale agreement is most people can’t afford two mortgages at once. My Aunt opted to give her son-in-law’s brother a chance at his first attempt being a real estate agent. They both learned the hard way the importance of this contingency, because though my aunt could afford the down payment they didn’t link the sale of their existing house to the purchase of the new. The pending sale of their existing house fell through but the new house deal closed so for several months they were struggling under two mortgage payments until their original house sold.
Part of the purchase and sale agreement is earnest money and an expiration date. If you back out of the deal without triggering any of the conditions mentioned in your document you forfeit the earnest money. Similar to how Musk would’ve had to forfeit something like $2b for not buying Twitter at $44b. Or Microsoft buying Activision by X date. The document can be amended if agreed upon by both parties, like an extension of the expiration date, but these topics while not directly related linking a sale and a purchase, do add to the complications.
The purchase and sale agreement document is the hard part for standard sales (short of finding something you want), that should be whirlwind fast, but can drag on depending on the circumstances. Some people have a draft ready with their terms and effectively pencil in the numbers once they’ve found a potential house submit and get a response within hours of a house going for sale (mine took ~6 very stressful weeks of back and forth for a complicated situation). The actual sale, the long part, is all that follows with inspection, appraisal, loan rate lock and approval, title, etc. (~4-6weeks at the quickest). There’s lots that happen, but it’s mostly waiting on a crew of other people doing their niche jobs and jumping when they say jump. Though part of the terms could be selling their house, they’d either have their house on the market or have it ready to list as soon as they get an accepted purchase and sale agreement. With that could include a longer safety margin on the expiration date, but your loan rate lock only lasts so long.
It’s a complicated balancing act, but tying the deals together is pretty standard procedure. Though there does have to be breaks in the chain otherwise every real estate transaction in the world would have to buy/sell a house same day in a closed loop like musical chairs which isn’t the case. New buyers, people who forego the condition for a more attractive Purchase and sale agreement and those with enough money to support both are where those breaks in the chain come from.
PS - The only way to use an existing house for part of a down payment without linking the sale of it to your purchase is to refinance or take out a second mortgage on the existing house so you get cash to give to Escrow. Not likely something you’d want to go through on the way out the door. Plus it would raise some eyebrows on your credit report for any potential loans you’d need to buy the next house. The money from the sale should cover the outstanding principal on the previous loan. Refinancing would make that outstanding principal higher digging yourself a deeper hole. The standard option is to use it directly without jumping through other financial hoops.
Just have a government agency be a middle man.
Oh so the government can own residential housing! Theres no way that could possibly go wrong
Too bad. You need a centralized authority to manage territory and governments already do this for land, so they can combine land and the real estate on it and distribute it to people fairly.
If you think it's problematic, then you need to take better control of your government.
It's either that or corporations who don't care hog all of the land and housing.
Sure I will just go ahead and take control of my government, great suggestion.
Chop chop
I don't see the issue with that, unironically