Putting aside rent (which should be illegal IMO outside of rent to own—it just makes no sense as a social construct if you want to fight poverty instead of create it) the idea of an affordable investment is just bonkers. Any investment market necessarily precludes the idea of affordable entry or they wouldn't make good investments—the longer term you look at, the more this is true.
We also can't force developers to build. This is a major problem in cities: they budget for housing that's supposed to come online but there's no (general, broad, accepted) way to penalize developers for failing to follow through.
Public housing or bust, IMO. The housing market has failed this country for too many decades to trust it to suddenly start irrationally acting in our best collective interests with older generations selflessly sacrificing their retirements to not fuck over their grandchildren.
> Putting aside rent (which should be illegal IMO outside of rent to own—it just makes no sense as a social construct if you want to fight poverty instead of create it)
Suppose housing is less than it is now, but a house is still e.g. $100,000. There will obviously be people who can't get a $100,000 loan, so where are they supposed to live? "Rent to own" is just another name for a mortgage, except that you have to pay more for the right to give back the property at any time instead of needing to find another buyer yourself.
Suppose you take a two year contract job in a city where you're only going to live for the term of the contract. Should you be required to buy a house there? Why?
> the idea of an affordable investment is just bonkers. Any investment market necessarily precludes the idea of affordable entry or they wouldn't make good investments—the longer term you look at, the more this is true.
You can go to a brokerage right now and buy a share of stock for $10. This is clearly affordable, so now explain why it is inherently a bad investment.
> We also can't force developers to build.
Developers want to build. It's how they make money. The problem is we keep prohibiting them from building through single family zoning etc.
> Rent to own" is just another name for a mortgage, except that you have to pay more for the right to give back the property at any time instead of needing to find another buyer yourself.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. You can leverage whatever you're mortgagibg as an asset (or in this case, whatever portion of the property you now own). You can't leverage your rental property despite almost certainly paying more than the equivalent mortgage.
As you point out, rent makes sense for transitional or temporary living. I just think you should get ownership over some portion of the assets you are de-facto paying for.
> Developers want to build
Well, stalled developments are a problem across basically every metro market in the country. They don't make their money by building, they make their money by waiting for the labor & materials market to make an eventual sale profitable. In some metro areas with labor-this may be sufficient for some markets, but others (like the bay area) it's clearly not going to provide the housing people expect yimby zoning policy to deliver. Like yes zoning is a major issue in the city, but it's only one of many, and it's not sufficient to explain dysfunction where development was already zoned and approved years ago.
One really great way to encourage developers to perform the role they're allegedly already serving is by having public-sector competition (zero- or negative-margin development/property management) to give them an incentive to be realistic about costs and timeframe. Or just straight fine them for wasting city property on zero-or-arguably-negative-value use.
> That's not necessarily a bad thing. You can leverage whatever you're mortgagibg as an asset (or in this case, whatever portion of the property you now own).
"Not necessarily a bad thing" is the argument that it could have benefits under some circumstances. It's the argument that it should be allowed, not that its alternative should be prohibited.
The obvious cost is that you're paying more per month. Essentially, if you want a place to live, you're required to pay more in order to invest in real estate, even if you don't have any surplus to invest or you would rather invest in something else.
> I just think you should get ownership over some portion of the assets you are de-facto paying for.
When you rent, the landlord is covering the interest on the mortgage loan, property tax, maintenance, etc. The rent covers their costs and some profit to make it worth their trouble, which they often use to start paying off the mortgage. If there is no profit, there is no landlord to pay to build the building and either you can afford to buy it outright or you're homeless. So if you want to build capital, the money that goes to that capital is additional money on top of the rent, i.e. you'd be paying more per month because you'd be getting something you don't get when you rent. You're basically saying you think poor people should have higher expenses so the extra money can be used to force them to invest in real estate.
> Well, stalled developments are a problem across basically every metro market in the country. They don't make their money by building, they make their money by waiting for the labor market to make an eventual sale profitable.
They still make their money by building, you've just passed regulations that make building so expensive that it isn't profitable until rents are unreasonably high, e.g. by requiring them to knock down an existing multi-story building in order to add housing because most of the land is zoned exclusively for single family homes.
> you've just passed regulations that make building so expensive that it isn't profitable until rents are unreasonably high
This is just demonstrably false, though. Regulation does cause large overhead especially crossing municipal boundaries, but developers aren't building even where they've been approved to build. Either they accepted the work they knew they couldn't deliver under the current regulatory burden (essentially, committing fraud) or the bottleneck isn't regulations at all, but the other costs that dominate building.
Anyway, you can either pay off your investment or you can turn a profit. Doing both is just antisocial (ie malicious and harmful) behavior. If you're turning a profit, I better also get an equitable return. That would actually make sense.
Of course the world doesn't work like that, but nothing you're explaining helps me understand why this behavior is legal and people don't murder more landlords. This is simply not a reasonable way to divvy up resources in a community.
> developers aren't building even where they've been approved to build.
Suppose it costs $100,000 to add each additional housing unit if you could build them in areas that are currently zoned exclusively for single family homes, but they can't because the zoning doesn't allow it. By contrast, in the areas "where they've been approved to build", it would cost $800,000 for each additional unit, and the current market price is $750,000.
They're going to sit there and do nothing until the market price gets above $800,000 because otherwise they'd be losing money. If you want to change it you need to make it cost less to add housing units.
> Anyway, you can either pay off your investment or you can turn a profit.
These are not alternatives to each other. If there is any net profit, it would eventually cause the mortgage to be paid off. If there isn't any, why would anyone pay to build an apartment building?
If renting is illegal, moving without a buyer should be illegal. Wanna go land that cool new job in SV? Before you give them a start date you better find a buyer for your flat. Otherwise you're stuck. It's illegal to make someone else foot the bill when you decide to go somewhere else.
I believe the model is just like renting but the rent is a percentage of the value of the home. When you leave the landlord has to return part of the "rent".
> Putting aside rent (which should be illegal IMO outside of rent to own—it just makes no sense as a social construct
I understand the sentiment.
But many people at many stages of their lives do not want to be owning g property, so some rental properties make plenty of sense as a social construct
But. The current situation where the poorest third give most of their income to the richest third of the population is manifestly unjust and is a blight on our society
Why wouldn't you? The only reason I don't want to own a home is that it's very expensive. I own a lot of other things, because they are not too expensive. And there's an argument that if everyone had to own their home, it would bring prices down, until they'd still be expensive, but no so expensive they couldn't be afforded.
Hell, I don't want to own property right now as I'm in a transitional form in my life. I pay too much for what I get out of my current apartment and I'm looking to downsize/chuck amenities away. Trust me, I'm happy to not have to maintain my plumbing or HVAC and while the ikea-quality hardware is ugly and cheap feeling, it's not my problem. It hurts, but I know that I'm not up to the task of maintaining a house and it would cost me more than rent to hire someone else to do it for me + property taxes + mortgage + actual material costs of maintenance.
But if you want to solve homelessness, like actually try to remove it as a necessary reality of modern life (as many other capitalist AND socialist countries have successfully achieved), we fundamentally can't get there through mortgages and rents. I'm happy that people are more literate about housing policy than ever, but I think we can aim for more than marginally more affordable housing—we can completely defeat homelessness if we have the will to do so and don't have a dogmatic fear of subsidized housing destroying the value of the asset you'll leverage to retire on (if you're lucky).
Sadly, I suspect we'll see a lot more homelessness before people who legitimately have any of their interests at heart enter power.
We also can't force developers to build. This is a major problem in cities: they budget for housing that's supposed to come online but there's no (general, broad, accepted) way to penalize developers for failing to follow through.
Public housing or bust, IMO. The housing market has failed this country for too many decades to trust it to suddenly start irrationally acting in our best collective interests with older generations selflessly sacrificing their retirements to not fuck over their grandchildren.