'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control

https://lemmy.world/post/2758313

'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control - Lemmy.world

Don’t allow companies to own residential properties… it’s that simple…
That is a bad idea as owning a house isn't right for everyone.
While that may be, companies should not be able to have a stronghold on what should be considered a basic human need. Housing is already in pretty short supply, and it’s worsened by the fact that these companies buying this short supply and then turning the purchased property into a rental.
“buying one home and turning it into 4 home reduces the amount of homes” and other fun takes.
“Buying a house and renting it out to families that were wanting to buy it outright in the first place” FTFY
Oh I’m sorry, do 4 families generally get together and purchase a house as a collective?
People buy parts of buildings all the time. They’re called condos and multiplexes.
Fuck you
Solid intelligence response there
Parse their response, instead of just the tone. That person’s mad and sad both at how tough living has become.
We’ve all had that one lazy piece of shit roomate that never cleans up after himself and I bet it’s him.
Rent is due on the first
The idea being proposed here doesn’t outlaw renting, only corporate ownership of residential property. It means that the people you’re renting from are human beings who will eventually die and either be estate taxed or the house will be sold, rather than a corporation who owns your property until they go bankrupt or until the sun explodes.

Bingo. A lot of current problems get better by:

A) 100% death tax on all money over 100,000,000.00 at time of death. B) Closing loopholes that allow hiding that kind of money in unnecessary corporate assets or non-charitable trusts. C) Cracking down on what qualifies as a charitable trust. Want to leave that money to trust that makes the world better, better have numbers to prove it or it gets disolved automatically into other more effective charities.

So corps pay higher taxes on property vs sole owners?
Lol no one gets forced to buy one just because prices become realistic, wth
And non US citizens.
As a US citizen living in another country and trying to buy a house, you want me to have to change my citizenship to do this? 0.o I've lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and am trying to buy a property where, hopefully, my wife and I can live for the rest of our lives. Having to become a citizen in Japan (which does not allow other citizenships except in some very specific cases) is a non-starter for me. I need to be able to freely enter and leave the US in case my family have any issues. Why should I be fucked like this?
They probably mean non-residents instead of non-citizens. Would make more sense that way at least.
Yeah, that would be reasonable.
And you could make that non-local residents and it would still work out well. Stop letting foreign and domestic “investors” buy up all the housing in cities they don’t live in.

I mean, housing issues and challenges in Japan are likely different than in the US.

If Japanese law required you to be a Japanese citizen in order to buy a home, then yeah, I’d expect you to become a citizen to get a home.

I just happen to live in Japan, but you can reverse the countries in my example if it helps. If I were a Japanese citizen living in the US almost 10 years and wanting to just buy a home for my family, I think it's unreasonable to have to give up Japanese citizenship just to get a house in the US. Using my example, I would not give up JP citizenship because I have aging family I need to have unlimited access to in Japan.

I’ll be honest, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to need to go through some form of certification to purchase residential housing.

To use US terms, as those are what I’m familiar with, a greencard would be sufficient, since it would allow you to legally live and work in the country.

I would say "valid status of residence/visa" (greencard/permanent residence can be super long processes of over a decade), but yeah that makes sense to me.
Just a visa would be too low of a bar, imo. Show you’re a permanent resident and planning to stay here.
So if that process takes a decade or more the person can just... go fuck themselves despite any intention of permanently living somewhere? This is especially rough on people who move mid-life. I also don't know if the US has an upper age on mortgages which could basically keep people out of home ownership which can also keep them in a position of less stability.

Young people can’t own homes now because we have a lot of corporations and foreign ownership buying them to either rent at exorbitant costs or leave vacant as investments. I don’t really care about the hypothetical person who might come over here at some point maybe pinkee swear when folks here are having issues now.

Also, I confirmed with someone who does mortgages that there isn’t an upper age limit on getting a mortgage in the US, so that’s not a concern.

I mean, this is just dodging the situation. I'm a hardworking, tax-paying person, but fuck me because some other people are doing bad things? That's not good policy. Stopping people living in the country on valid status paying taxes from buying a place to live is asinine.

According to your comments, you’re living and buying property in Japan in order to reside there for the rest of your life, so you’re arguing about policies that aren’t effecting you and that you’re not even a party to.

I guess you can find someone more in tune with Japan’s housing market and issues there to discuss the best practices for Japanese laws.

I have known people who have gone through the same thing in the US. I also have family in the US still who very much are impacted by the housing situation there.

This just reeks of "foreigners bad" and possibly racism.

There are many things that can be done other than banning foreigners who haven't yet achieved greencard status but just want to have a place for themselves and their families to live to still achieve that. I don't think you'll find foreigners are the big issue here, and you already mentioned corporations which are a big issue. Attacking foreigners wanting to buy a house is not OK; that's approaching apartheid-level bullshit.

Non-residents, not non-citizens.
That simply results in shitloads of homeless people
Good thing our current system doesn’t.
By comparison it does not
Good thing our current system doesn’t.
Who’s going to make apartment buildings? Isn’t that the best solution towards making more housing, to have compact apartment structures? How do you think those get built?

You could make every one an HOA and have it be condos.

Honestly I don’t think outright prohibition of companies owning buildings is good, but there needs to be a better mix of ownable housing units to rentable ones. There also needs to be better anti-trust enforcement so that three companies don’t own and price control nearly all of the housing in a city (I think there’s maybe 6 companies in my city that own almost all of the apartment complexes).

They should mandate that a certain subsection of newly zoned housing be owned by people instead of corporations. It would be a much better, much more competitive market for housing if it were possible to own apartments because you could get small time landlords in those buildings as well as people that own their places outright.

An apartment isn’t a residential building.
It is property…for residents…

I supposed we can both find sources to say whether it’s commercial or residential. www.google.com/search?channel=fen&client=fire…

I guess my question is, what’s the point in arguing about this? Are you saying the only housing corporations should own are apartment buildings, the biggest most efficient source of housing for individuals in large cities?

Google

My bad I thought residential prop meant single family homes.

But I didn’t say anything about who should own apparements. My only point was when people refer to residential property that refers typically to single family homes and is likely what op is referring to as well.

It’s literally the most residential of all possible properties, what are you talking about?
Already apologized, look farther down.

My understanding is that rent control backfired pretty spectacularly in the long term.

The better plan here would be to stop companies from buying residential properties, to incentivized the conversation of commercial properties into apartments, to penalize banks and individuals who are sitting on unused residential properties.

Oh, and wipe out all student loan debt so that younger generations have a prayer of buying a house someday.

@flossdaily @return2ozma

Who told you rent control backfired? Cause that's a lie. It was just never adopted as widely as it should have been, and rich owners always have the ear of lawmakers ... the same can't be said of poor/working poor people.

The one issue every economist can agree is bad: Rent control

The problem is rent control doesn’t do anything about the reason rents are rising.

The Washington Post

Capitalist/free market* economists.

Rent control works just fine in a more socialist model, especially when the government is a prime builder of housing without seeking profit, as almost every European country was during the 50s-70s. It’s only when government gets out of house building and everything gets privatisated and for-profit that rent control fails.

Don’t know if you’ve noticed this yet, but the United States has a capitalist economy.

Semi. It’s got bits and pieces of all systems, which is a hint that the “-ism” powering any country’s economy doesn’t have as big an impact as it’s leaders.

Unfortunately, capitalism tends to reward corruption, it’s much easier and profitable to be corrupt than to do the right thing™.

Libraries are socialist. Otherwise every person in a fully capitalist system would be expected to buy their personal copy of a book.

What you’re referring to is called a “mixed economy” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_economy

And you’re right - there are scales with capitalism and socialism weighing against each other in every western economy. Finland, Norway, France are examples where it’s tipped a bit more in favour of the “socialism” side. But the US has plenty of elements of socialism, from housing coops in the Bronx, to utility coops in the midwest (that helped pave the way for the electrification of rural America), to credit unions, to welfare policies, to the Alaska social wealth fund, and I could keep going.

Mixed economy - Wikipedia

Finland and Norway have among the highest percentage of private investment in the world, to the extent that investment is the leading economic driver in Nordic countries.
Libraries are not socialist. Socialism is not, in fact, when the government does things.

Thank you, boring and incorrect pedant.

It truly depends on the definition of socialism. Is it socialist anytime a service is provided by the govt? Or solely when public policy limits the abilities of capital?

You and I disagree, and that’s ok cuz I don’t care.

Yes we disagree on the meaning of a word, which means one of us is correct, and it’s me
Wrong again, as usual. How sad.
The US has lots of socialized losses but privatized profits. To call it a capitalist economy is a gross oversimplification which glosses over the fact that no corporation is actually competing in a free market at this point.
You may want to look at how rent control turned out there, and why Europe is broadly turning against rent control, and seeing it as a mistake bloomberg.com/…/berlin-s-rent-controls-are-provin…
Berlin’s Rent Controls Are Proving to Be the Disaster We Feared

A year ago, the leftist government of Germany’s capital region imposed central planning on the city’s housing market. That was a bad move.

Bloomberg