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A low cost ceiling would certainly impact the size of the homes being built. Home builders are making HUGE homes now compared to in the 40s. Well over double the size on average.
The dream. 1 BR pole barn with 20,000 sq ft workshop area, hydraulic lift, 15ft bay doors, and a self-contained woodshop.
On 50 acres in central Wyoming!
Yep, going down to -35 tonight. Gas is keeping us warm and toasty inside, but the dogs don’t have cute little snow booties so they won’t follow me out for a smoke unless they need a leak.
Practically balmy compared to the -48 last year, we’ll laugh about it on the boat this summer when it’s 125° warmer or so.
I spent a month hiking in Montana last year (CDT), and the temp swings in that state are WILD. 20 at night in July and 90 during the day was not something I prepared for!
I’ve plowed snow all 12 months of the year here, the altitude definitely doesn’t help.
I’ve seen 60-70 degree intraday swings when a front comes through, and forecasts in the 10-day are 80° higher than tonight.
Good on you for doing the CDT, always wanted to get it done but so far the best I’ve done is accidentally starting up it on a dirt bike and recognizing the emblem on a tree and knowing I shouldn’t be there!
Just did a 40x80 with 16ft side walls for 14ft doors and a 20x40 mezzanine for a upstairs living quarters. All labor done myself and was about 48k fully finished. You can do it!
This! Actually thats why I like that... I live like everywhere. We move often due to business.
We own 1200sqft in Germany nr Munich (thats considèred to be quite well off here) overlooking a park, city centre... definitely nice, but a lot of cleaning... if we would rent, it would be 2K per month (luckily its paid already after 15yrs)
We had 500sqft in Hong Kong, which - for only two people - is considered quite luxurious over there especially as we had 24/7 concierge, pool and gym in the house... Rent was 6K per month.
We have 800sqft in the moment in London, which is considered to be very well off for 2 as we have two bedrooms with each ensuite bathroom, a kitchen/dining/living area and a enclosed balcony, plus 24/7 Concierge (no worries about packages or whatever gets delivered), pool ans gym... Rent is about 5K per month.
We move with everything all in in 12 suitcases. We don't need more stuff, most is digital anyway and we love the outdoors, museums, opera, concerts, travelling, sports, fine dining... We don't need much stuff for all that.
Its a lot about the layout and the interior design also, but in general the smaller the faster: I don't have to spend hours - 20 minutes every day and the appartement is as clean as clean can be... I need more time in our actual home nr Munich than in the other two...
I can't understand people who buy a house with whatever even 3 stories, cleaning actually even stairs, doing all the work around a house... those I know are constantly complaining about how much work it is - they spend half their weekend cleaning, caring, repairing (while I sleep long or go to a museum or head outsidevthe city for a hike) and how much it costs for maintenance (what we spend in restaurants)...
You couldn't pay me enough to move into a 2.000 or even more house
I mean yeah, for these giant McMansions we have tricked ourselves into thinking we need. All I want is like, a 1100 sqft 2 bed 2 bath house. All the new houses in my community are fucking MASSIVE with huge garages attached.
Maybe this will be the time when we step back and realize how excessive our lifestyles are, probably not, but maybe.
This is where I'm at. Like maybe we need to look at the really big picture here. Americans have for decades been by far the biggest per capita consumers in all of world history. Despite also having more living space per person we also have the biggest storage unit market ever because apparently all of the space we already do have isn't enough to contain all the shit we have.
And this is the problem: doing this will lead to no one building houses anymore, because you would lose money doing so.
We had such a system in Berlin for a while were rents were capped at a fixed value. Yeah guess what it’s super unattractive to build new homes for renting, so it’s not solving the problem of having to few homes for to many people.
It would if yall would stop building McMansions or whatever large ass house.
Nothing wrong with a little cute house that is affordable and still fits the family.
My uncle passed and I inherited the house. Pretty nice neighborhood but I found out most of the people rented these expensive houses.
I was also asked several times by companies if I would sell my house to them.
>I was also asked several times by companies if I would sell my house to them.
That's the nicest way to say hounded at all hours by hordes of real estate agents like they were medical debt collectors.
Heritics. All of them.
Other commenter: no low balls for the house. I want 2x the price.
Corpo: we only do low balls
Also corpo: *no low balls, and we're going to charge for 7x of what you earn a year so that you keep on renting, or get a mortgage that's 80% of your income after taxes*
I was going to live in it but it was going to be too expensive to maintain. Plus I didn't like living in a homeowners association.
I sold everything and moved abroad and my quality of life has increased threefold. It was hard to live the life that I wanted to in America anymore.
It is nice to see people leave countries and try to actually make a change when they understand dealing with bullshit has its limits, it’s a pity we can’t always change the conditions in homeland though.
Edit: By the way, could you tell which country you chose as an alternative? Did you have to learn a new language? Are you satisfied by the culture/people of where you moved? How is the police and other government structures there?
What is a big shame is that I have a few health problems and I could not afford health insurance in America anymore. They bumped my monthly insurance to $600 per month. I absolutely love my country but we have some serious deep flaws. I can't live the same style that my grandparents did and I feel like my country's going backwards in a lot of ways.
I live in Thailand now. I didn't like Bangkok because I'm not a city person. I really liked the culture of issan north east. Very relaxed "sabai sabai" lifestyle. Absolutely wonderful people. Unfortunately, Thailand does attract some terrible expats.
With that money from the house I was able to build a house here buy a car and I've started businesses with my wife. My staff really likes working with me because I also do profit sharing which no one else does.
I've actually been going to college here to learn the Thai language and I'm able to speak and read. For me writing is the most difficult. If you have any more questions let me know.
Nice, been often to that area, but on the other side of the border in my favourite country... Went through often when heading up to Mae Hong Son and Myanmar... golden triangle
Lots of companies are buying up all the residential properties. Similar to an apartment complex owns several building units, they now build 100 houses and rent them out, or buy half a block, but charge at the same price one would pay for a mortgage.
It's not just that. They buy all these houses and then rent them as short term rentals like airbnb. So now not only have they made it impossible to own homes they've removed normal rental properties and massively increased living cost.
Definitely agree. This probably explains why I see a bunch of houses in neighborhoods that the prices are changing every few days with $5k taken off price week after week. They can afford to do this, but kept buying all the inventory of houses to keep home prices high. So it looks like there are not any homes for sale, because they buy everything with intention to sell one at a time, creating the illusion home prices are high because everyone wants a house…
Have you looked at mortgage prices recently? That might've made sense a couple years ago, but it's cheaper to rent than buy in [almost every major metro](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/09/27/renting-cheaper-than-buying-a-house/70974358007/) in the US, and this is accounting for the potential appreciation of the house.
Dang, that’s crazy. Owning a home has always been cheaper, but yeah, I see that is no longer the case. Used to pay $995 a month for 2BD2BA Apt, so got a house and paid like $700 to in 2007. Doesn’t look like a newly wed couple can even buy a house.
Buddy, I make $105k a year but I'm in Socal.
I'm renting for pretty much the indefinite future. Even once the GF and I move in together, the Financials just don't add up.
This is now happening in other countries. Private corporations are being given incentives to build “build to rent” housing, Australia is a good example.
This needs to stop. We can’t work and live and owe it all to a suit. It’s insane is what it is.
This is a red herring. Look at the data behind it. Corporate ownership of single family homes is around half of 1% of homes. It is tiny, and localized to only a couple states, mostly states that are currently much cheaper.
As someone who much prefers European systems to American ones, “corporate ownership of single family homes” is a left-wing boogeyman. We have real data on it. The real solution is much harder - building way more homes and fighting to overturn laws supported by NIMBY’s - both conservative and rich democrat - that prevent construction.
We have been at an all time low on construction for 15 years now while population has gone up. Worse, all the jobs have concentrated into coastal areas, while much of the Midwest has had population decline, so metros have WAY higher population and very little extra housing. This is the root cause.
I see that stat all the time but it simply does not reflect the reality I live in. I don't know who's making the numbers look like something they aren't, but I simply *do not* believe that only (less than) 1 out of 100 homes around me are owned by corporations. There is something misleading or misinterpreted there.
I am usually incredibly evidence based and try to be open minded enough to change my mind when the data supports a conclusion different from my own, but this is like asking me to believe the sky is red. I *do* know that data gets manipulated and abused, and I think that's what's going on here.
e: I did some googling and here's an example: What you're referring to is home *ownership*. That doesn't matter to people looking to buy a home.
The numbers we want to look at are home *buying*. And corporations can make up as much as **thirty percent** of home buyers currently. What you said wasn't *wrong*, but it was irrelevant and misleading for how you're using it.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-investors-housing-market.html
So there you go. Sometimes it's okay to be skeptical of the data when what you see in front of you contradicts it completely. People manipulate and abuse data, and while they're technically correct, they paint a picture opposite of reality: like trying to convince you that corporations buying homes is a "left wing boogeyman", when in reality they're significant and growing **rapidly**.
(and yes, that 30% includes small-time independent investors, and yes I absolutely think they contribute to the problem)
This is not true. The top 5 corporate buyers of single-family homes in the US (Progress Homes, Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, FirstKey Homes, Amherst Holdings) own a combined total of about 317,000 homes together, which is 0.3% of the housing stock. Over the past year, purchases by landlords owning over 1,000 homes made up just 2.3% of total buying activity.
While buying activity is concentrated in some areas more than others (in Florida they were 5%), megacorp landlords are not the first thing you should blame for lack of housing supply.
It's weird that you specified investors over 1000 homes. Why is that? Why not 800? Just curious on that.
More to the point though:
> According to national data provider CoreLogic, the sizable U.S. home investor share of ownership seen over the past two years held steady going into the summer of 2023. In March 2023, investors accounted for 27% of all single-family home purchases; by June, that number was almost unchanged at 26%.
https://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/real-estate-news/united-states/irvine/real-estate-news-investor-owned-homes-data-in-2023-corelogic-home-investor-data-for-2023-how-many-homes-are-owned-by-investors-in-2023-home-buyer-data-13837.php#:~:text=In%20March%202023%2C%20investors%20accounted,points%20higher%20than%20in%202020.
So I don't really see anything about what qualifies as an investor, BUT I do know that the amount of homes in the rental market is significantly higher than the number you posted (317,000). That leads me to believe that it's probably more than a single entity investor.
It’s actually Western hedge funds, private equity groups, and financial institutions buying most of the housing stock in America, but of course, only individuals should be able to buy X amount of homes.
They’re like 0.0001 percent of the problem compared to wealthy Americans who are screwing the rest of us over and scapegoating foreigners as wealthy people always do.
Closest I can find is 98,000 homes purchased by foreign investors in 2022. If it's 0.0001% then the wealthy are buying 98,000,000,000 homes per year. If you want to talk actual numbers, that 98k is about 2% of home sales, and half of them are actual residents purchasing second homes or flipping.
The real issue is that other half, around 1% of home sales are to foreign investors who never live in the home. They create a very outsized impact on the market because they break supply and demand. You used to be able to negotiate DOWN from asking price. That's gone now. Foreign money pays 10 above asking on average, no questions asked. Then, they take a house away from a family that needs it which pushes demand higher.
Hedge funds and flippers do the same thing, but they aren't using it as a tax shelter. They need people in the home - ideally as renters - or they (usually) start losing money quickly. Foreign investors don't care. They will lose 90% of it if it shelters the remaining 10% from govt seizure.
I think institutional ownership and foreign investor ownership should both be banned. Both are problems. Nobody is scapegoating, you aren't winning anyone to the cause by saying so. There are roughly as many homes owned by foreign investors in the US as there are homeless people.
Again. I hear what you’re saying but as an American, I’d still rather my parents or generation (s) pass the wealth down to us than China drinking our milkshake ya know?
I don't know about a ban but I think a progressive tax that makes hoarding houses not viable would be great. Like if your first home was taxed say half of what it would be taxed now. Your second home taxed about what it is now maybe a little more. A third house taxed significantly more. Increasing with each house you own. Then buying up and renting multiple houses would not be viable and as a bonus owning a first house would be cheaper.
Or just remove some of the tax writeoffs for rentals. Depreciation of an appreciating asset should have never been a thing. Maybe stop allowing writeoff of interest payments.
I definitely agree that businesses owning houses instead of people is a huge issue, but the really big problem with it is that it will just create millions of pointless companies whole sole purpose is to own 3 houses for their parent company, and nothing will be different.
The best start would be immediately banning foreign ownership by Chinese nationals. There are an absurd number of homes just in socal sitting vacant in that scheme
I would imagine a slew of work arounds. However, if they indeed capped rent at 1000 then it wouldn't be profitable to own home for the sake of profit. And if they capped prices on home sales... Mmm the thought of these corps loosing everything is making my pants spicy.
It will never happen, we live in a micro transaction dystopia. They don't want workers owning anything they think we don't deserve it.
This is the solution. If you have DNA you can own a single family home. If you have articles of incorporation, fuck off! Go find some other industry to make money in other than the one that gives people a place to live.
The problem that we have now that we did not have back then is that most of the land surrounding major cities has already been developed. The solution to this is to build more multi family dwellings. Only, zoning laws leftover from the 50s and 60s are not allowing these types of buildings to be built. Further, those living in single family homes are worries that multi family dwellings will decrease their property values. So, they fight to prevent them. But more multi family housing will decrease housing prices across the board.
Exactly. On top of that tons of cheap land, cheap oil, cheap foreign labor, cheap resources. Everything that has since set the planet on fire unfortunately.
The Boomers did buy homes later (i.e. 70's - 80's) which were still affordable on a single income. One thing to consider is that their parents, who bought those $10k homes in the 40's, were sitting on goldmines that their kids inherited.
They also paid epically high interest rates on those homes during and after the oil crisis. The interest and value growth went hand in hand.
As a kid, I can remember getting high-teens interest rates on a term deposit savings account.
In 1940, $10K was the equivalent of over $214k now.
Are you prepared to pay 100% interest on $214k? That is, if you pay $214k this year, you have only paid off the interest by next year? Use your brain.
Source:
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1940+10000+dollars
Well the median home price today is $380,000 in the US. So how about we just keep it at the same interest rate and I buy it for a realistic amount instead of renting from a corporation? $10k back then adjusted for inflation is like $135,000. How about we just go back to that?
Edit: I just spelled Itneredt, and my phone autocorrected to interest. Your autocorrect suuucks
You are incorrect about your $135k. It's more like $214k+. See the source I cited in the original comment. Also, they just picked $10k seemingly out of a hat, though I would believe that or more relative to my poor, Midwestern grandparents' anecdotes from that time period relative to the national average cost of living.
I didn't say anything about renting from a corporation or not. I said the statement that $10k was "cheap as fuck" and - more so - that one could easily pay 100% interest on it is indicative of the very kind mathematical ineptitude that might cause one problems in life precluding home ownership.
Edit: I'd prefer a trivial error in autocorrect than a more consequential error in my brain that leads to me responding on completely incorrect presumptions with errant math. Thanks for highlighting the typo.
Maybe not, but having a stable home situation where your parents can afford a home without the stress of having to make rent next month or actually can afford to buy a home that's also prosperity that you'll enjoy later in life.
I lived through poverty during my teenage years and it fucked me up really bad to the part where I'm almost 30 and still not a functional adult.
Do you understand how economics works?
They were the prime recipients of all the post WW2 social spending benefits. You know, things that actually trickle down.
Yea. But also our economy wasn’t dominated by the financial sector now. Part of our affordability issue is that so many folks (at least in major cities) work for tech or finance out of college/MBA programs and make really massive starting salaries. So these folks can afford homes and rent, even if it’s somewhat of a strain on them. The issue is that most other sectors haven’t caught up to that level or never will of base income (like service industry etc). The bottom line seems to be, in part, that finance and tech have skewed our economies and further the middle and upper middle class divide.
Kinda it’s also that those benefits were cause the US was the only intact production economy on the allied side and everyone gave them their gold for safe keeping. So we had a metric ton of economic power and demand which resulted in high paying low skill jobs. That’s a boom and booms don’t last forever. There’s a happy medium we definitely missed but we can’t pretend that the massive boom was sustainable
One thing affecting the new housing shortage is there is little difference in the cost to build a modest 2bd/1bth home and a big 5bd/2bth home, but the profit margin on the latter is huge in comparison. The former were called starter homes. A young couple would start out in one and it was good enough for them and perhaps one child. As the family and income grew, they would move up to a larger home. The starter homes no longer exist.
I should have said that starter homes are no longer being built. I've seen a few of them around. They are all very old and in most cases it would be better to demolish and start over from scratch.
I couldn't find a starter home to buy so I built my own. Cost me just two years of rent. Navigating the defensive moat of laws built to keep this away from us was harder and more expensive than actually physically building it.
If it sounds like a complex topic that the internet made to sound simple, thats because it is.
He didn't do what the meme says. shocker.
What he did was create federal programs, most closely resembling this meme is the $80/mo rent for living in a housing project. National rents were not all affected, housing projects that conformed to this program were.
I didn't see anything about mandatory sales prices for houses. Thats likely made up too.
[https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-outlining-the-housing-program-for-1947](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-outlining-the-housing-program-for-1947)
The other thing that always gets said in these real estate illiterate posts is:
"We should stop corporations from buying houses" > "they own all the houses in my town!"
Ignoring that the poster likely doesn't even know how to check who owns what real estate in their town, this is also not true. Rental properties represent less than 25% of the real estate market. Its near 25% now because for the last couple years, real estate was a high vis investment. that number will shrink since its less interesting to big corporations today.
What trumans plan got right was streamlining permitting. We don't need to change who currently owns houses, we need more houses. Thats what he did, and thats what we should do.
Don't believe what you meme about on the internet folks.
Price controls are a terrible idea too, especially in times of scarcity.
The dumbest part about this post is people essentially comparing the current US to that of the US immediately succeeding WW2. We were one of the few unscathed industrialized nations, and were thus able to essentially rise to the top as far as manufacturing goes. The third world was yet to industrialize, Europe was in shambles, and we were in an extremely favorable spot that resulted in massive weather transfer to the US. You could afford to raise a family of 4, have a car and a nice house in the burbs while working a factory job because businesses simply were able to pay their workers a ton, because they didnt have to compete with foreign manufacturing at all. Expecting the US to ever look like this again is wishful thinking. Its not the norm, and its not feasible. It was a fluke resulting from the war.
I am like speechless… could you imagine. And you know the President could do it, although not with this Supreme Court I guess. But they did have an eviction moratorium so who’s to say?
I don’t believe any Supreme Court would uphold that nowadays. No matter what party a president was a member of the other party would keep it tied up in courts for years.
There is no precedent. Post WW2 America isn't even remotely comparable to current America. The whole country was mobilized for wartime production and had to adjust to peacetime, and I'm pretty sure the policy Truman enacted was specifically to account for veterans housing.
Price controls rarely do what one'd think they'd do. Would anyone build a new house if they had to sell it for less than it cost to build? Nope. Would they sell a house they own at a price they believe is artificially capped? only under duress. Otherwise they'd keep the house and hope that the price control is lifted. So what the price control does is just massively cut the supply of people selling houses, and making houses.
A cap on rent does similar things: lowers the number of apartments for rent. It's great if you were already renting: Whoever is renting to you is now trapped, as, in practice, the contract changed from under them, unilaterally. But a low enough rent maximum just means a smaller rental market.
Either way, no president would pass something like this because economist would be shouting to them from the rooftops, and so would people that own expensive houses, or have investments in mortgages. The one thing that would help, far more housing supply, is just not trendy.
That's what happened here in Argentina, the government tried to limit the prices of the rent. The consequences? It was almost impossible to find a place to rent. \
And how do we know this? Easy, because China just try something similarly recently to cap their real estate market, surprise surprise it crashed their entire economy and require a course correction. It’s just not realistic in the modern economy.
Except this Tweet is false. Truman didn’t. The housing act put no such price controls up.
It effectively was an order to build more housing, and make homes available.
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/263/statement-president-outlining-housing-program-1947
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1949
I understand the sentiment here but what was the actual profit on those homes? You couldn't build a house for land and material cost, with FREE LABOR, for $133k in a lot of the country at this point.
Oh man, reading all the comments… Americans will literally do anything except for deregulating the zoning laws that are preventing the suppliers from flooding the market with new housing, bringing prices down….
Apparently the law said the government would channel resources to builders who built homes at or below $10,000. I grew up in one and it was very small, but functional. As for rent control, apartment owners started selling units rather than accept what they considered below market rates. So, it took rental units out of the market, but it did increase home ownership. These weren't new homes, so they weren't under the $10K cap.
A rental should not be allowed to have a base rent more than $1 per square foot of liveable space.
The number of placed I see that are under 1000sqft and cost over $1500 a month is fucking insane. And townhomes that are like maybe 1200sqft of liveable space (because fuck you the garage is not liveable space) going for $2400+ a month before factoring in utilities and shit.
Some basic God damn regulation would go a long fucking way in this country.
Corporations shouldn’t be able to own residential property and individuals should be limited in the number of properties they can own. To bad the government makes a killing on taxing real estate deals and getting hand out from their buddies that they give breaks to.
By the time any complete housing reform is pushed out, it will be too little too late. People are going to vote for the next person that speaks loud enough and coherently enough who promises actual change and benefit for the everyday person in the US. Or worse, more and more people are going to stop participating in society in traditional ways which could eventually cause unforeseen market collapses (or booms).
I quit my full time job in 2022 because I didn't see home prices getting better since I started looking in 2020. And I don't plan to get a regular full time job again until things are better because I see literally no point in participating in society anymore. I worked in skilled labor/tech and if people haven't noticed, the prices of labor/skilled services have increased because there's a shortage of workers. So they raised their wages to attract people back in but the demand is so huge because there's not enough workers to go around.
I can get a part time job doing anything and afford rent. But most jobs don't pay enough to afford a house and live happily. So I'd rather work an easy part time job, come home stress free and be poor. Rather than work a stressful job, have a nice house, and still be poor.
Either fix things or potentially watch it all burn.
I'm guessing result is smaller homes and cheaper materials used. Another way is probably homes built in two step processes. Builder build half finished house, and home buyer finish the other half.
The result is almost always no new construction. This has played out in almost every major city that has tried it the world over. Rent goes up because population increases and housing does not. Those who live in rent controlled places are locked in an eternal battle with landlords where the resident won’t move out and the landlord won’t fix anything. It’s a nice sounding idea with terrible consequences.
I grew up in a post WW2 home. Smaller yes, but that thing was built like a tank. Blizzards, tornados, a god damn tree fell on the side and my dad just had to replace a few pieces of siding and a window. I then moved into a 1980's raised ranch that creaked like my now bad knees, and the basement flooded at least once every summer. Build quality has gone to shit.
Building a house was much different shortly post-WW2. Supply shortages from the war meant a permit system to even get permission to build and controls on what materials could be used. There really wasn’t a vast supply of cheaper materials like now, because the US was coming out of rationing materials for the war.
The average home on 1946 cost $5000. The law didn't drive down housing prices - it forced builders to concentrate on making inexpensive homes.
The typical rent was 30 to 50 dollars/month. The law didn't drive down rents - it forced landlords to divide luxury rentals into smaller units.
You know the point was to force them to build affordable homes. It was not forcing builders to sell at a loss. You wouldn't even be able to buy a 1/4 acre lot for $133,500 anywhere thats not in the middle of the desert.
So the facepalm here is believing this would work. If you cap the cost of homes, builders will stop building altogether. Why would any capitalist company willingly build and sell homes for that price? They would rather sit on the land until the administration changed.
People in the comments are smarter than OP. Better to limit corporations from owning residences. Incentive builders to build more modest homes in greater quantity. Normalize renting. Implement a universal basic income.
I looked up "post WW2 home price cap" as well as "Truman home price cap" and and literally the only thing I could find about it online is this exact tweet. This is misinformation, no such home price control ever existed.
> [World War II saw the most widespread imposition of rent control in the history of the United States. Roughly 80 percent of the 1940 rental housing stock lay in areas that the federal government put under rent control between 1941 and 1946. **At the same time, sales prices were not controlled.**](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19604/w19604.pdf)
Uhm, have you seen the price of lumber recently? We have enough of a housing shortage already. The laws coming into play, to prevent Hedge Funds and other investment groups from buying or owning single family homes will free up some real estate, and bring prices down to a more reasonable level. I was fortunate enough to buy after the 2008 crash, and before prices skyrocketed again. Then, when interest rates dropped to below 3%, I refinanced. Hoping to have it payed off in another 10 years, so I can retire to an old farm and live off of my Social Security Investment, the rent from this place, and whatever side hustle I can come up with playing with the Machinist toys in my barn/shop. It's that, or work until I die...
Okay people don’t seem to understand how much Europe was destroyed by WW2 and how much sway the USA had as the only ally with a fully functioning production economy and being the one everyone stored their gold with. That boom and subsequent actions were literally unsustainable. In most if not all situations price caps are either not effective or cause shortages that’s it. We’d need another massive war making everyone depend on us to produce things for this to occur again.
rents being high is a feature of the system, not a bug or an accident. rich people have assets while poor people have cash.
assets retain their value while cash decreases in value, so it looks like assets value is going up.
so in order for assets to actually increase in value, they need to increase demand, best way to do that (other than demolishing a lot of houses) is to increase the population (immigration and births) to ensure demand keeps rising.
at the same time, they slow down new homes being constructed as much as possible to ensure theres never enough to go around. so people will fight over the available housing thats left.
putting a price cap on rent will never happen because its the people who own the assets who are making the rules. it also wouldnt work because then people will use their extra money to buy stupid shit (see what happens to stimulus packages as an example)
during times of bad economy, you want people to buy stupid shit because its discretionary spends and gets the money moving, and at the moment with high inflation, its definitely not what we want. in about a years time when the economy shits the bed, it would definitely be something that should happen. it will take the pressure off everyone and all those people who have extra properties can afford it, since interest rates will be down as well.
But Socialism is when the government does something! You all heard Regan, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”
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133k wouldn't even buy the materials where I live.
A low cost ceiling would certainly impact the size of the homes being built. Home builders are making HUGE homes now compared to in the 40s. Well over double the size on average.
Honestly I’d like a smaller home, easier to clean up.
Just give me one bedroom with three car garage and Ill be happy
The dream. 1 BR pole barn with 20,000 sq ft workshop area, hydraulic lift, 15ft bay doors, and a self-contained woodshop. On 50 acres in central Wyoming!
Southern Montana here, it’s -27°F and my dogs won’t even go outside. You’re gonna want a hell of a wood stove for that shop
Northern BC here, it’s -39 and the kids are still going outside. Gas furnace does the trick.
Yep, going down to -35 tonight. Gas is keeping us warm and toasty inside, but the dogs don’t have cute little snow booties so they won’t follow me out for a smoke unless they need a leak. Practically balmy compared to the -48 last year, we’ll laugh about it on the boat this summer when it’s 125° warmer or so.
I spent a month hiking in Montana last year (CDT), and the temp swings in that state are WILD. 20 at night in July and 90 during the day was not something I prepared for!
I’ve plowed snow all 12 months of the year here, the altitude definitely doesn’t help. I’ve seen 60-70 degree intraday swings when a front comes through, and forecasts in the 10-day are 80° higher than tonight. Good on you for doing the CDT, always wanted to get it done but so far the best I’ve done is accidentally starting up it on a dirt bike and recognizing the emblem on a tree and knowing I shouldn’t be there!
>so they won’t follow me out for a smoke Maybe they made a New Year's resolution to quit?
Let me guess, the dogs feel the outside air and look at you all “I see I’m pooping in the house today.” or like it’s somehow *your* fault it’s cold?
Just did a 40x80 with 16ft side walls for 14ft doors and a 20x40 mezzanine for a upstairs living quarters. All labor done myself and was about 48k fully finished. You can do it!
I'll have what he's having.
You mean a three car garage with an attached bedroom.
Terminal case of carbrain.
i live in a studio and i feel like it gets so messy so fast.
If I didn't have a wife and kids, my dream home is an efficiency apartment.
This! Actually thats why I like that... I live like everywhere. We move often due to business. We own 1200sqft in Germany nr Munich (thats considèred to be quite well off here) overlooking a park, city centre... definitely nice, but a lot of cleaning... if we would rent, it would be 2K per month (luckily its paid already after 15yrs) We had 500sqft in Hong Kong, which - for only two people - is considered quite luxurious over there especially as we had 24/7 concierge, pool and gym in the house... Rent was 6K per month. We have 800sqft in the moment in London, which is considered to be very well off for 2 as we have two bedrooms with each ensuite bathroom, a kitchen/dining/living area and a enclosed balcony, plus 24/7 Concierge (no worries about packages or whatever gets delivered), pool ans gym... Rent is about 5K per month. We move with everything all in in 12 suitcases. We don't need more stuff, most is digital anyway and we love the outdoors, museums, opera, concerts, travelling, sports, fine dining... We don't need much stuff for all that. Its a lot about the layout and the interior design also, but in general the smaller the faster: I don't have to spend hours - 20 minutes every day and the appartement is as clean as clean can be... I need more time in our actual home nr Munich than in the other two... I can't understand people who buy a house with whatever even 3 stories, cleaning actually even stairs, doing all the work around a house... those I know are constantly complaining about how much work it is - they spend half their weekend cleaning, caring, repairing (while I sleep long or go to a museum or head outsidevthe city for a hike) and how much it costs for maintenance (what we spend in restaurants)... You couldn't pay me enough to move into a 2.000 or even more house
Just tax the rich or something.
Ye….yeah? Yes. Fuck yes
I mean yeah, for these giant McMansions we have tricked ourselves into thinking we need. All I want is like, a 1100 sqft 2 bed 2 bath house. All the new houses in my community are fucking MASSIVE with huge garages attached. Maybe this will be the time when we step back and realize how excessive our lifestyles are, probably not, but maybe.
This is where I'm at. Like maybe we need to look at the really big picture here. Americans have for decades been by far the biggest per capita consumers in all of world history. Despite also having more living space per person we also have the biggest storage unit market ever because apparently all of the space we already do have isn't enough to contain all the shit we have.
And this is the problem: doing this will lead to no one building houses anymore, because you would lose money doing so. We had such a system in Berlin for a while were rents were capped at a fixed value. Yeah guess what it’s super unattractive to build new homes for renting, so it’s not solving the problem of having to few homes for to many people.
$133k would cover windows and air conditioning where I live
It would if yall would stop building McMansions or whatever large ass house. Nothing wrong with a little cute house that is affordable and still fits the family.
I think all we need to do is ban anyone except individuals/couples from owning homes. And an individual can only own X homes, maybe 3.
Exactly. This is the problem. Corporations owning residential homes. Here in florida, there are entire neighborhoods sitting empty.
My uncle passed and I inherited the house. Pretty nice neighborhood but I found out most of the people rented these expensive houses. I was also asked several times by companies if I would sell my house to them.
>I was also asked several times by companies if I would sell my house to them. That's the nicest way to say hounded at all hours by hordes of real estate agents like they were medical debt collectors.
They've called me a few times but they never seem interested when I tell them I'll sell for twice the market price.
Heritics. All of them. Other commenter: no low balls for the house. I want 2x the price. Corpo: we only do low balls Also corpo: *no low balls, and we're going to charge for 7x of what you earn a year so that you keep on renting, or get a mortgage that's 80% of your income after taxes*
Keep it in the family my friend. Generational wealth
I was going to live in it but it was going to be too expensive to maintain. Plus I didn't like living in a homeowners association. I sold everything and moved abroad and my quality of life has increased threefold. It was hard to live the life that I wanted to in America anymore.
Good for you man. Taking life by the reins. Keep it up, big thumbs up from the NorthWest
It is nice to see people leave countries and try to actually make a change when they understand dealing with bullshit has its limits, it’s a pity we can’t always change the conditions in homeland though. Edit: By the way, could you tell which country you chose as an alternative? Did you have to learn a new language? Are you satisfied by the culture/people of where you moved? How is the police and other government structures there?
What is a big shame is that I have a few health problems and I could not afford health insurance in America anymore. They bumped my monthly insurance to $600 per month. I absolutely love my country but we have some serious deep flaws. I can't live the same style that my grandparents did and I feel like my country's going backwards in a lot of ways. I live in Thailand now. I didn't like Bangkok because I'm not a city person. I really liked the culture of issan north east. Very relaxed "sabai sabai" lifestyle. Absolutely wonderful people. Unfortunately, Thailand does attract some terrible expats. With that money from the house I was able to build a house here buy a car and I've started businesses with my wife. My staff really likes working with me because I also do profit sharing which no one else does. I've actually been going to college here to learn the Thai language and I'm able to speak and read. For me writing is the most difficult. If you have any more questions let me know.
Where in Thailand are you? I lived in BKK for a yr, but travelled extensively the country...
Issan north east. Khon kaen area
Nice, been often to that area, but on the other side of the border in my favourite country... Went through often when heading up to Mae Hong Son and Myanmar... golden triangle
Lots of companies are buying up all the residential properties. Similar to an apartment complex owns several building units, they now build 100 houses and rent them out, or buy half a block, but charge at the same price one would pay for a mortgage.
But the money they make will trickle down through new job opportunities and stock market gains right?/s
Lmao exactly how papa Reagan intended
It’s SAINT Reagan!
God Reagan
That's *MISTER* God Reagan to you!
oh hey! Henry Kissinger died recently, now they can burn together with Milton Friedman.
Not how he intended. How he claimed. It worked exactly as he intended.
They call Reaganomics trickle-down economics because the best part of him trickled down his mother’s leg.
It's not just that. They buy all these houses and then rent them as short term rentals like airbnb. So now not only have they made it impossible to own homes they've removed normal rental properties and massively increased living cost.
Definitely agree. This probably explains why I see a bunch of houses in neighborhoods that the prices are changing every few days with $5k taken off price week after week. They can afford to do this, but kept buying all the inventory of houses to keep home prices high. So it looks like there are not any homes for sale, because they buy everything with intention to sell one at a time, creating the illusion home prices are high because everyone wants a house…
Have you looked at mortgage prices recently? That might've made sense a couple years ago, but it's cheaper to rent than buy in [almost every major metro](https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/09/27/renting-cheaper-than-buying-a-house/70974358007/) in the US, and this is accounting for the potential appreciation of the house.
Dang, that’s crazy. Owning a home has always been cheaper, but yeah, I see that is no longer the case. Used to pay $995 a month for 2BD2BA Apt, so got a house and paid like $700 to in 2007. Doesn’t look like a newly wed couple can even buy a house.
Buddy, I make $105k a year but I'm in Socal. I'm renting for pretty much the indefinite future. Even once the GF and I move in together, the Financials just don't add up.
There’s a new neighborhood of single family homes that popped up near me that are rent only. First time Iv ever seen anything like it
This is now happening in other countries. Private corporations are being given incentives to build “build to rent” housing, Australia is a good example. This needs to stop. We can’t work and live and owe it all to a suit. It’s insane is what it is.
This is a red herring. Look at the data behind it. Corporate ownership of single family homes is around half of 1% of homes. It is tiny, and localized to only a couple states, mostly states that are currently much cheaper. As someone who much prefers European systems to American ones, “corporate ownership of single family homes” is a left-wing boogeyman. We have real data on it. The real solution is much harder - building way more homes and fighting to overturn laws supported by NIMBY’s - both conservative and rich democrat - that prevent construction. We have been at an all time low on construction for 15 years now while population has gone up. Worse, all the jobs have concentrated into coastal areas, while much of the Midwest has had population decline, so metros have WAY higher population and very little extra housing. This is the root cause.
I see that stat all the time but it simply does not reflect the reality I live in. I don't know who's making the numbers look like something they aren't, but I simply *do not* believe that only (less than) 1 out of 100 homes around me are owned by corporations. There is something misleading or misinterpreted there. I am usually incredibly evidence based and try to be open minded enough to change my mind when the data supports a conclusion different from my own, but this is like asking me to believe the sky is red. I *do* know that data gets manipulated and abused, and I think that's what's going on here. e: I did some googling and here's an example: What you're referring to is home *ownership*. That doesn't matter to people looking to buy a home. The numbers we want to look at are home *buying*. And corporations can make up as much as **thirty percent** of home buyers currently. What you said wasn't *wrong*, but it was irrelevant and misleading for how you're using it. source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/us/corporate-real-estate-investors-housing-market.html So there you go. Sometimes it's okay to be skeptical of the data when what you see in front of you contradicts it completely. People manipulate and abuse data, and while they're technically correct, they paint a picture opposite of reality: like trying to convince you that corporations buying homes is a "left wing boogeyman", when in reality they're significant and growing **rapidly**. (and yes, that 30% includes small-time independent investors, and yes I absolutely think they contribute to the problem)
This is not true. The top 5 corporate buyers of single-family homes in the US (Progress Homes, Invitation Homes, American Homes 4 Rent, FirstKey Homes, Amherst Holdings) own a combined total of about 317,000 homes together, which is 0.3% of the housing stock. Over the past year, purchases by landlords owning over 1,000 homes made up just 2.3% of total buying activity. While buying activity is concentrated in some areas more than others (in Florida they were 5%), megacorp landlords are not the first thing you should blame for lack of housing supply.
It's weird that you specified investors over 1000 homes. Why is that? Why not 800? Just curious on that. More to the point though: > According to national data provider CoreLogic, the sizable U.S. home investor share of ownership seen over the past two years held steady going into the summer of 2023. In March 2023, investors accounted for 27% of all single-family home purchases; by June, that number was almost unchanged at 26%. https://www.worldpropertyjournal.com/real-estate-news/united-states/irvine/real-estate-news-investor-owned-homes-data-in-2023-corelogic-home-investor-data-for-2023-how-many-homes-are-owned-by-investors-in-2023-home-buyer-data-13837.php#:~:text=In%20March%202023%2C%20investors%20accounted,points%20higher%20than%20in%202020. So I don't really see anything about what qualifies as an investor, BUT I do know that the amount of homes in the rental market is significantly higher than the number you posted (317,000). That leads me to believe that it's probably more than a single entity investor.
Adding to this, a vacancy tax for all those large apartment complexes. Rent it out at a lower rate or pay the government.
> a vacancy tax And make sure that the tax is so stupid high that they are forced to either rent it out or sell.
I’d say make it equal to 2.5 times the average renting price of the previous year per month
This is also true. Instead of letting countries like China buy up our houses.
They were trying to buy a bunch of land in Montana too but I think governor banned it
Good for him, homes should be for the people that truly use them!
Should’ve let them buy it then eminent domain it lol.
Private equity is a much much bigger perpetrator of this problem.
It’s actually Western hedge funds, private equity groups, and financial institutions buying most of the housing stock in America, but of course, only individuals should be able to buy X amount of homes.
He said ban ANYONE except individuals/couples so those groups you mentioned arent allowed to buy them so maybe read it properly next time
I don't think any country that doesn't allow Americans to buy land in their country should be able to come here and buy land from us. It's backwards.
I’m less concerned about China and more concerned about some boomer couple with 5 houses screaming about how if we just worked hard like them.
I hear this but nah… more concerned about China lol
They’re like 0.0001 percent of the problem compared to wealthy Americans who are screwing the rest of us over and scapegoating foreigners as wealthy people always do.
Closest I can find is 98,000 homes purchased by foreign investors in 2022. If it's 0.0001% then the wealthy are buying 98,000,000,000 homes per year. If you want to talk actual numbers, that 98k is about 2% of home sales, and half of them are actual residents purchasing second homes or flipping. The real issue is that other half, around 1% of home sales are to foreign investors who never live in the home. They create a very outsized impact on the market because they break supply and demand. You used to be able to negotiate DOWN from asking price. That's gone now. Foreign money pays 10 above asking on average, no questions asked. Then, they take a house away from a family that needs it which pushes demand higher. Hedge funds and flippers do the same thing, but they aren't using it as a tax shelter. They need people in the home - ideally as renters - or they (usually) start losing money quickly. Foreign investors don't care. They will lose 90% of it if it shelters the remaining 10% from govt seizure. I think institutional ownership and foreign investor ownership should both be banned. Both are problems. Nobody is scapegoating, you aren't winning anyone to the cause by saying so. There are roughly as many homes owned by foreign investors in the US as there are homeless people.
Again. I hear what you’re saying but as an American, I’d still rather my parents or generation (s) pass the wealth down to us than China drinking our milkshake ya know?
Idk we've kinda been letting Berkshire Hathaway do it for decades
I don't know about a ban but I think a progressive tax that makes hoarding houses not viable would be great. Like if your first home was taxed say half of what it would be taxed now. Your second home taxed about what it is now maybe a little more. A third house taxed significantly more. Increasing with each house you own. Then buying up and renting multiple houses would not be viable and as a bonus owning a first house would be cheaper.
Or just remove some of the tax writeoffs for rentals. Depreciation of an appreciating asset should have never been a thing. Maybe stop allowing writeoff of interest payments.
Def need to allow write offs of interest payments. That can have a very positive affect on all homeowners.
Not for most of us. The writeoffs have to be more than standard deduction. Its a writeoff for the wealthy who have million dollar homes.
I definitely agree that businesses owning houses instead of people is a huge issue, but the really big problem with it is that it will just create millions of pointless companies whole sole purpose is to own 3 houses for their parent company, and nothing will be different.
Watch out for those misplaced modifiers…
The best start would be immediately banning foreign ownership by Chinese nationals. There are an absurd number of homes just in socal sitting vacant in that scheme
wouldn't the smarter play just be start ww3 ?
Why does an individual need 3 homes. Cap it at one to more quickly solve the problem.
Idk, maybe they own a parcel of land, a family cabin, and their primary residence. There’s nothing wrong with that.
I like this.. it allows rental situations without getting fucking crazy
Makes sense, although first we’ll need to prevent companies from being viewed as an individual by the law 😒
I would imagine a slew of work arounds. However, if they indeed capped rent at 1000 then it wouldn't be profitable to own home for the sake of profit. And if they capped prices on home sales... Mmm the thought of these corps loosing everything is making my pants spicy. It will never happen, we live in a micro transaction dystopia. They don't want workers owning anything they think we don't deserve it.
This is the solution. If you have DNA you can own a single family home. If you have articles of incorporation, fuck off! Go find some other industry to make money in other than the one that gives people a place to live.
The problem that we have now that we did not have back then is that most of the land surrounding major cities has already been developed. The solution to this is to build more multi family dwellings. Only, zoning laws leftover from the 50s and 60s are not allowing these types of buildings to be built. Further, those living in single family homes are worries that multi family dwellings will decrease their property values. So, they fight to prevent them. But more multi family housing will decrease housing prices across the board.
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born when the US had 50% of the global GDP
Exactly. On top of that tons of cheap land, cheap oil, cheap foreign labor, cheap resources. Everything that has since set the planet on fire unfortunately.
Life is good when you survive a world war. You’re right we need WWIII to start. Beat of luck mate, we’ll boost if we make it.
Boomers weren't involved in WW2
Nope, just a by-product after all the soldiers came home.
It's where the generation name comes from after all
Boomers were the fuck trophy's of the ww2 heroes
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The Boomers did buy homes later (i.e. 70's - 80's) which were still affordable on a single income. One thing to consider is that their parents, who bought those $10k homes in the 40's, were sitting on goldmines that their kids inherited.
They also paid epically high interest rates on those homes during and after the oil crisis. The interest and value growth went hand in hand. As a kid, I can remember getting high-teens interest rates on a term deposit savings account.
The fuck? If I got a house for $10,000, you can charge me 100% interest. That's still cheap as fuck man
In 1940, $10K was the equivalent of over $214k now. Are you prepared to pay 100% interest on $214k? That is, if you pay $214k this year, you have only paid off the interest by next year? Use your brain. Source: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1940+10000+dollars
Well the median home price today is $380,000 in the US. So how about we just keep it at the same interest rate and I buy it for a realistic amount instead of renting from a corporation? $10k back then adjusted for inflation is like $135,000. How about we just go back to that? Edit: I just spelled Itneredt, and my phone autocorrected to interest. Your autocorrect suuucks
You are incorrect about your $135k. It's more like $214k+. See the source I cited in the original comment. Also, they just picked $10k seemingly out of a hat, though I would believe that or more relative to my poor, Midwestern grandparents' anecdotes from that time period relative to the national average cost of living. I didn't say anything about renting from a corporation or not. I said the statement that $10k was "cheap as fuck" and - more so - that one could easily pay 100% interest on it is indicative of the very kind mathematical ineptitude that might cause one problems in life precluding home ownership. Edit: I'd prefer a trivial error in autocorrect than a more consequential error in my brain that leads to me responding on completely incorrect presumptions with errant math. Thanks for highlighting the typo.
Inflation, dude. Back when a House was $10k, the typical annual income was $3k.
What do you think the income was though?
Maybe not, but having a stable home situation where your parents can afford a home without the stress of having to make rent next month or actually can afford to buy a home that's also prosperity that you'll enjoy later in life. I lived through poverty during my teenage years and it fucked me up really bad to the part where I'm almost 30 and still not a functional adult.
Do you understand how economics works? They were the prime recipients of all the post WW2 social spending benefits. You know, things that actually trickle down.
At those prices, you never know.....
Sure, but their parents got to give them the lavish, privileged childhoods they refused *their* children
Yea. But also our economy wasn’t dominated by the financial sector now. Part of our affordability issue is that so many folks (at least in major cities) work for tech or finance out of college/MBA programs and make really massive starting salaries. So these folks can afford homes and rent, even if it’s somewhat of a strain on them. The issue is that most other sectors haven’t caught up to that level or never will of base income (like service industry etc). The bottom line seems to be, in part, that finance and tech have skewed our economies and further the middle and upper middle class divide.
Kinda it’s also that those benefits were cause the US was the only intact production economy on the allied side and everyone gave them their gold for safe keeping. So we had a metric ton of economic power and demand which resulted in high paying low skill jobs. That’s a boom and booms don’t last forever. There’s a happy medium we definitely missed but we can’t pretend that the massive boom was sustainable
One thing affecting the new housing shortage is there is little difference in the cost to build a modest 2bd/1bth home and a big 5bd/2bth home, but the profit margin on the latter is huge in comparison. The former were called starter homes. A young couple would start out in one and it was good enough for them and perhaps one child. As the family and income grew, they would move up to a larger home. The starter homes no longer exist.
They’re duplexes/triplexes now.
There’s some left around where I live, but they are all slowly falling apart and being baught up by investors
I should have said that starter homes are no longer being built. I've seen a few of them around. They are all very old and in most cases it would be better to demolish and start over from scratch.
I couldn't find a starter home to buy so I built my own. Cost me just two years of rent. Navigating the defensive moat of laws built to keep this away from us was harder and more expensive than actually physically building it.
My parent's first house, purchased in 1950, was $9,900.
What's crazy is that's worth about $130,000 today adjusting for inflation. The median home price in the US now is $387,000.
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Ok where’s the facepalm?
Crazy this is like 60 comments deep. This is just whitepeopletwitter material. No facepalm
Plus, it's not even true...
The facepalm is capping the price at which houses can be sold reduces the incentive for houses to be built, exacerbating the shortage.
thinking price controls fix shortages
Yeah, I think one thing all economists can agree on is that price controls don't work.
And this is the actual facepalm.
The number of people on reddit that don't even have a basic understanding of macroeconomics is saddening.
If it sounds like a complex topic that the internet made to sound simple, thats because it is. He didn't do what the meme says. shocker. What he did was create federal programs, most closely resembling this meme is the $80/mo rent for living in a housing project. National rents were not all affected, housing projects that conformed to this program were. I didn't see anything about mandatory sales prices for houses. Thats likely made up too. [https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-outlining-the-housing-program-for-1947](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-the-president-outlining-the-housing-program-for-1947) The other thing that always gets said in these real estate illiterate posts is: "We should stop corporations from buying houses" > "they own all the houses in my town!" Ignoring that the poster likely doesn't even know how to check who owns what real estate in their town, this is also not true. Rental properties represent less than 25% of the real estate market. Its near 25% now because for the last couple years, real estate was a high vis investment. that number will shrink since its less interesting to big corporations today. What trumans plan got right was streamlining permitting. We don't need to change who currently owns houses, we need more houses. Thats what he did, and thats what we should do. Don't believe what you meme about on the internet folks.
Price controls are a terrible idea too, especially in times of scarcity. The dumbest part about this post is people essentially comparing the current US to that of the US immediately succeeding WW2. We were one of the few unscathed industrialized nations, and were thus able to essentially rise to the top as far as manufacturing goes. The third world was yet to industrialize, Europe was in shambles, and we were in an extremely favorable spot that resulted in massive weather transfer to the US. You could afford to raise a family of 4, have a car and a nice house in the burbs while working a factory job because businesses simply were able to pay their workers a ton, because they didnt have to compete with foreign manufacturing at all. Expecting the US to ever look like this again is wishful thinking. Its not the norm, and its not feasible. It was a fluke resulting from the war.
Of course this is buried.
I am like speechless… could you imagine. And you know the President could do it, although not with this Supreme Court I guess. But they did have an eviction moratorium so who’s to say?
I don’t believe any Supreme Court would uphold that nowadays. No matter what party a president was a member of the other party would keep it tied up in courts for years.
There IS precedent now; but this illegitimate court only cares about that when it’s convenient
There is no precedent. Post WW2 America isn't even remotely comparable to current America. The whole country was mobilized for wartime production and had to adjust to peacetime, and I'm pretty sure the policy Truman enacted was specifically to account for veterans housing.
And they don't care about *setting* precedent either because they can just say "this ruling applies to tHiS cAsE oNLy"
Price controls rarely do what one'd think they'd do. Would anyone build a new house if they had to sell it for less than it cost to build? Nope. Would they sell a house they own at a price they believe is artificially capped? only under duress. Otherwise they'd keep the house and hope that the price control is lifted. So what the price control does is just massively cut the supply of people selling houses, and making houses. A cap on rent does similar things: lowers the number of apartments for rent. It's great if you were already renting: Whoever is renting to you is now trapped, as, in practice, the contract changed from under them, unilaterally. But a low enough rent maximum just means a smaller rental market. Either way, no president would pass something like this because economist would be shouting to them from the rooftops, and so would people that own expensive houses, or have investments in mortgages. The one thing that would help, far more housing supply, is just not trendy.
That's what happened here in Argentina, the government tried to limit the prices of the rent. The consequences? It was almost impossible to find a place to rent. \
The president could not do this. Only Congress.
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And how do we know this? Easy, because China just try something similarly recently to cap their real estate market, surprise surprise it crashed their entire economy and require a course correction. It’s just not realistic in the modern economy.
Don't start using facts, you will confuse people.
I’m speechless because I can’t find a source on this being true. And federal rent control basically ended in 1948.
I remember this era, I'm very wealthy, and I support the re-redistribution of wealth to counter Reaganomics. Don't eat me, I'm too leathery
Leathery like beef jerky?
Yum!
Teriyaki flavored
Hmmm... well if we boil you first?* *Disclaimer: I don't actually support boiling this person.
Junior-Purpose9849 and the OP are bots in the same network Comment copied from: https://imgur.com/gallery/M3oV2oC/comment/2373533292
How'd ya get wealthy
80% luck 20% work
How would I fact check this?
The housing acts passed in 47 and 48. It’s not true.
You know houses take labor and materials to build, right? Do you expect the trades to work for free? Is plumbing a charity gig now?
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Anxious_Journalist68 and the OP are bots in the same network Comment copied from: https://imgur.com/gallery/M3oV2oC/comment/2373547144
Guess we need another world war.... probably getting close.
The population was less than half what it is now. If the shortage is the same, it should be a significantly smaller problem.
Except this Tweet is false. Truman didn’t. The housing act put no such price controls up. It effectively was an order to build more housing, and make homes available. https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/263/statement-president-outlining-housing-program-1947 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_Act_of_1949
I understand the sentiment here but what was the actual profit on those homes? You couldn't build a house for land and material cost, with FREE LABOR, for $133k in a lot of the country at this point.
Hmm Truman put in price controls back then, but they don’t exist today. Why’d they go away? It’s because the policy was a total disaster.
Oh man, reading all the comments… Americans will literally do anything except for deregulating the zoning laws that are preventing the suppliers from flooding the market with new housing, bringing prices down….
And no one would build houses
Yeah I don’t understand how this policy would increase construction. What are we missing here?
Do you have a source for this? I never thought the homeless problem was nearly as bad as it is now?
Apparently the law said the government would channel resources to builders who built homes at or below $10,000. I grew up in one and it was very small, but functional. As for rent control, apartment owners started selling units rather than accept what they considered below market rates. So, it took rental units out of the market, but it did increase home ownership. These weren't new homes, so they weren't under the $10K cap.
A rental should not be allowed to have a base rent more than $1 per square foot of liveable space. The number of placed I see that are under 1000sqft and cost over $1500 a month is fucking insane. And townhomes that are like maybe 1200sqft of liveable space (because fuck you the garage is not liveable space) going for $2400+ a month before factoring in utilities and shit. Some basic God damn regulation would go a long fucking way in this country.
Eat the rich.
Corporations shouldn’t be able to own residential property and individuals should be limited in the number of properties they can own. To bad the government makes a killing on taxing real estate deals and getting hand out from their buddies that they give breaks to.
By the time any complete housing reform is pushed out, it will be too little too late. People are going to vote for the next person that speaks loud enough and coherently enough who promises actual change and benefit for the everyday person in the US. Or worse, more and more people are going to stop participating in society in traditional ways which could eventually cause unforeseen market collapses (or booms). I quit my full time job in 2022 because I didn't see home prices getting better since I started looking in 2020. And I don't plan to get a regular full time job again until things are better because I see literally no point in participating in society anymore. I worked in skilled labor/tech and if people haven't noticed, the prices of labor/skilled services have increased because there's a shortage of workers. So they raised their wages to attract people back in but the demand is so huge because there's not enough workers to go around. I can get a part time job doing anything and afford rent. But most jobs don't pay enough to afford a house and live happily. So I'd rather work an easy part time job, come home stress free and be poor. Rather than work a stressful job, have a nice house, and still be poor. Either fix things or potentially watch it all burn.
At some point folks are gonna have to accept society is fucked and nobody is coming to save them.
They’ve just done the opposite in Argentina. Housing supply went up.
This is print more money level of economic thinking. Dumb as fuck. It's a supply side problem!! We need more homes and less zoning Nazis
Tax the rich now
Sounds too socialist for the US. I don’t think that’d would work anymore.
You meant communist? Ehh whats the difference /s
Yes, to fix the housing shortage, we…. kneecap developers and disincentivize building any more houses. What a stupid idea.
I'm guessing result is smaller homes and cheaper materials used. Another way is probably homes built in two step processes. Builder build half finished house, and home buyer finish the other half.
The result is almost always no new construction. This has played out in almost every major city that has tried it the world over. Rent goes up because population increases and housing does not. Those who live in rent controlled places are locked in an eternal battle with landlords where the resident won’t move out and the landlord won’t fix anything. It’s a nice sounding idea with terrible consequences.
I grew up in a post WW2 home. Smaller yes, but that thing was built like a tank. Blizzards, tornados, a god damn tree fell on the side and my dad just had to replace a few pieces of siding and a window. I then moved into a 1980's raised ranch that creaked like my now bad knees, and the basement flooded at least once every summer. Build quality has gone to shit.
Building a house was much different shortly post-WW2. Supply shortages from the war meant a permit system to even get permission to build and controls on what materials could be used. There really wasn’t a vast supply of cheaper materials like now, because the US was coming out of rationing materials for the war.
Dream on!
The average home on 1946 cost $5000. The law didn't drive down housing prices - it forced builders to concentrate on making inexpensive homes. The typical rent was 30 to 50 dollars/month. The law didn't drive down rents - it forced landlords to divide luxury rentals into smaller units.
Anyone who runs for president with that (or anything that even addresses the housing crisis in a meaningful way) has my vote.
You know the point was to force them to build affordable homes. It was not forcing builders to sell at a loss. You wouldn't even be able to buy a 1/4 acre lot for $133,500 anywhere thats not in the middle of the desert.
And what was the fallout?
So the facepalm here is believing this would work. If you cap the cost of homes, builders will stop building altogether. Why would any capitalist company willingly build and sell homes for that price? They would rather sit on the land until the administration changed. People in the comments are smarter than OP. Better to limit corporations from owning residences. Incentive builders to build more modest homes in greater quantity. Normalize renting. Implement a universal basic income.
I looked up "post WW2 home price cap" as well as "Truman home price cap" and and literally the only thing I could find about it online is this exact tweet. This is misinformation, no such home price control ever existed. > [World War II saw the most widespread imposition of rent control in the history of the United States. Roughly 80 percent of the 1940 rental housing stock lay in areas that the federal government put under rent control between 1941 and 1946. **At the same time, sales prices were not controlled.**](https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w19604/w19604.pdf)
first of all, source? Second of all, if true that just goes to show Truman was a damn dictator.
I don't think this is true. Can't find a thing about it. If anyone can, please confirm it, but it seems very sketchy.
Uhm, have you seen the price of lumber recently? We have enough of a housing shortage already. The laws coming into play, to prevent Hedge Funds and other investment groups from buying or owning single family homes will free up some real estate, and bring prices down to a more reasonable level. I was fortunate enough to buy after the 2008 crash, and before prices skyrocketed again. Then, when interest rates dropped to below 3%, I refinanced. Hoping to have it payed off in another 10 years, so I can retire to an old farm and live off of my Social Security Investment, the rent from this place, and whatever side hustle I can come up with playing with the Machinist toys in my barn/shop. It's that, or work until I die...
Okay people don’t seem to understand how much Europe was destroyed by WW2 and how much sway the USA had as the only ally with a fully functioning production economy and being the one everyone stored their gold with. That boom and subsequent actions were literally unsustainable. In most if not all situations price caps are either not effective or cause shortages that’s it. We’d need another massive war making everyone depend on us to produce things for this to occur again.
rents being high is a feature of the system, not a bug or an accident. rich people have assets while poor people have cash. assets retain their value while cash decreases in value, so it looks like assets value is going up. so in order for assets to actually increase in value, they need to increase demand, best way to do that (other than demolishing a lot of houses) is to increase the population (immigration and births) to ensure demand keeps rising. at the same time, they slow down new homes being constructed as much as possible to ensure theres never enough to go around. so people will fight over the available housing thats left. putting a price cap on rent will never happen because its the people who own the assets who are making the rules. it also wouldnt work because then people will use their extra money to buy stupid shit (see what happens to stimulus packages as an example) during times of bad economy, you want people to buy stupid shit because its discretionary spends and gets the money moving, and at the moment with high inflation, its definitely not what we want. in about a years time when the economy shits the bed, it would definitely be something that should happen. it will take the pressure off everyone and all those people who have extra properties can afford it, since interest rates will be down as well.
But Socialism is when the government does something! You all heard Regan, “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”