Eric đď¸
JA WestenbergIf anyoneâs wondering what the dude who sang âchocolate rainâ is up to these days, heâs dropping absolute bangers about housing and heâs fucking right
Ericka Simone@Daojoan never forget - years later we found out Chocolate Rain was about racism against Black people.
enoch_exe_inc@ErickaSimone @Daojoan It even contains references to certain racist studies in The Bell Curve.
@enoch_exe_inc @Daojoan deep cuts.
Lunar đ¸ âž@ErickaSimone @Daojoan I'm honestly surprised it didn't get picked up on sooner
missed_sla@ErickaSimone @Daojoan Wait, that wasn't common knowledge? Did anybody listen to the words? Yeah, it was performed in a funny way but the lyrics were pretty clear.
@missed_sla @Daojoan I mean, *we* knew. But people didnât believe it until he confirmed it in an interview later.
Sashin@ErickaSimone @Daojoan He's released a number of bangers on economics since! Like Mamma Economy and Fiat Fire!!!
Viraptor@Daojoan he's also TayZonday on Twitch if you want to catch him live.
Dave Spector@Daojoan this is a crisis created by private equity firms whoâve spent hundreds of billions hoovering up every kind of housing stock across the country, as well as trailer parks and apartment complexes
Then, theyâll do what they always do: squeeze every last dollar out of the asset â then theyâll leave hollowed out towns/neighborhoods with destroyed housing stock when theyâre done and then demand huge tax breaks for their ill-gotten gains.
Unregulated capitalism is social darnwinism writ large
Jo - pièce de rÊsistance@Dhmspector @Daojoan and student residences as well.
Matthaus Woolard@Daojoan yer we have the same issues in NZ as well. I woud also limit short term rental (airBNB) to only permit if the freehold title owners live on sight and are onsite during the stay. (Eg a farm can have an airBnB cabin but a townhouse or apartment in a city canât be an AirBNB, a room within a home can be though)
Perspective
Jennifer Moore đˇInteresting idea!
Would you allow the situation where someone AirBnBs their _own_ house while they're away?
Zimmie@unchartedworlds @hishnash Thatâs potentially open to abuse. âI live there, I just travel 364 days out of the year.â
Some occupancy ratio based on the national minimum paid time off could be interesting. If federal standards say full-time workers get two weeks of PTO per year, you can rent out your house while traveling for up to two weeks per six months.
Billy Smith@bob_zim @unchartedworlds @hishnash
In London, people would buy a flat on a mortgage to let it out for Airbnb.
The SME model for an Airbnb landlord.
There was one Airbnb locally that a couple of friends used, that had one person renting a room permanently on a cheaper rent, to avoid being hit by the local legislation.
They were not the flat owner, and told my friends this, but when dealing with any bureaucracy, acted as the owner's agent.
Loopholes will exist and will have to be patched.
@BillySmith I would say the title owner must be resident and that the title owner can not own any other property.
Most of the AirBNB investment owners aim to own many properties limiting it to only being permitted to own a single one would cut things down a lot.
Which was the original pitch made when Airbnb got started.
Use your spare room to generate extra income.
What it became afterwards is a different question, but that's always the case when VC funding demands the ridiculous ROI that VC funds have promised their investors.
@unchartedworlds @hishnash Yeah, itâs just that when proposing policy, you have to think like an evil djinn. Thatâs basically what billionaires are, after all: amoral, insatiable hunger for *more* (djinni are the people of the fire, after all), and entertained by tricking people.
@unchartedworlds The simpler one is to ensure the tall the freehold owners only own this property.
Eg you cant have short term rental on a title if any of the title owners own any other property. This would shutdown 99% of the AirBnB property investors.
@bob_zim @unchartedworlds The solution for this is constrain this to people that only own a single property and do not rent any other. (gov in NZ knows were you rent and what you own)
winter@bob_zim @unchartedworlds @hishnash In Montana, you're required to occupy your house for >50% of the year if you want to air BNB it. That prevents it from getting too out of hand (in Montana, anyway).
@unchartedworlds I don't consider that AirBnB but rather house sitting (typically you do not pay to do this... you are commonly intact paid to house sit, water plants, feed pets, etc).
Rizzmaster Zero@desertgoalie @Daojoan yer the good AirBnB I have used have been this, were its a cabin or guest house on a vineyard etc were the owners live there... they meat you when you turn up, they pop over with a local cheese board and even pre-fire the wood fired hot tub so its all ready for you to do some midnight stare gazing.
KSev đłđ´đťđ˛@Daojoan AltTxt:
There is no American "housing crisis" â there's a supply-hoarding crisis to rig local market prices above the liquidity of local buyer capital.
The policy solution is simple: poison-pill tax all non-occupant-owned housing to force immediate sale to local buyers at actual market rates.
Allowing unlimited non-local capital to supply-hoard vacant housing is simply anti-resident eugenics. Current residents are too poor, so replace them with richer onesâ even if it causes widespread homelessness, forced migration and absurd energy costs for the displaced to commute. It's as discriminatory as Federal Housing Administration redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s.
Potung Thul
iwein@Daojoan that txt looks familiar. Still true though.
Nicklas Johnson đłď¸âđ@Daojoan
We also need to ban corporations from buying single-family homes.
I was told a while back that Meta was on a buying spree in and around our neighborhood, buying up houses with cash, pushing real living and breathing people out of the market.
Gurre Vildskägg@Daojoan
sure, do all that. But also: build more effin' housing. Build it sustainably: full walkability & bikeability, dense enough to support local shops & services for daily needs within walking distance, dense enough and with a structure to make quality transit a real thing, and with parks etc.
David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)@Daojoan Iâm not sure how true this is in the US, but in the UK a lot of the âshortageâ is caused by geographically limited indirect subsidies.
Itâs cheaper to fly to the US from London than from one of the airports in the West of England, even though the distance is a few hundred miles longer. Thereâs over an order of magnitude more per-capita spending on public transport in London than in the North of England. Thereâs no requirement on BT OpenReach to provide high-speed Internet everywhere and so itâs clustered in places that already have high population densities.
If you want to set up a company in a place thatâs easy for international visitors to access, you are constrained to the south east. If you want to be able to work remotely, you are constrained to existing cities (unless you have enough spare cash to pay for a few kilometres of fibre).
There are lot of houses for sale outside of the south east for low prices, and a lot that have been on the market for a year or more, but they arenât where the jobs are. The previous governmentâs insistence that civil service workers go back into the office after two years of proving that they could work effectively without doing so made this worse.
Support in the tax system for remote work would go a long way. Iâd love to see a 10% payroll tax for office workers who are required to be in the office and who do not need access to specialised equipment.
@Daojoan All these years I've just been seeing him in random YouTube comments sections being unrelentingly based.
Radical Resilience Film
Wren Reilly
Jorkin MahJongus@Daojoan if you actually listen to the lyrics to "Chocolate Rain" you'll realize he's always been based af
Alon@Daojoan This isn't "truth," this is NIMBY bullshit masquerading as social policy. He's proposing taxes on rentals, but not on home ownership, so renters will end up paying more than homeowners. Then he repeats the canard about vacant housing, when American housing vacancy rates are low; New York has a regular housing survey with a line item for units that are vacant because they're held for occasional or recreational use, and they're 1% of the supply. Less NIMBYism, more housing construction.
Chris@Alon
"Poison pill" means the taxes are so great on the rental owners that it becomes untenable to own a house just to rent it to others. That doesn't increase rents, it increases available housing supply for people to own a home that the can live in.
He's proposing a tax so people can become homeowners.
"Poison pill" means the taxes are so great on the rental owners that it becomes untenable to own a house just to rent it to others. That doesn't increase rents, it increases available housing supply for people to own a home that the can live in.
He's proposing a tax so people can become homeowners.
@RedOct Not "can" but "required to," because not everyone can get the required credit or even wants to tether themselves to one risky asset. In practice, taxes on landlords that are not levied on homeowners exist (for example, the American mortgage tax credit, or differential property tax rates, or capital gains taxes exemptions), and what they do in practice is redistribute wealth to homeowners from renters and not so much from commercial landlords.
đş Cat PÜùĂçkøvÄ
feld@pony @Alon @RedOct Especially when you consider that Americas housing is rotting because nobody can afford to maintain their property. Condos aren't any better. The one I was in needed a new roof. But the condo association only had $20k in the bank. Each condo building needed $30k for a roof... how do you fix that? Raise the monthly condo fees from $200 to $2000/month ???
@pony @RedOct @Alon people are also not aware of these issues either:
> By now, everyone should be aware of the moisture problems that exist in homes, and especially in stucco-clad homes. Our own testing shows that 90% of stucco homes built in the mid-80âs through the 90âs have major moisture problems causing structural damages that most people canât even see. While construction practices and codes have improved over the last 15 years, the old adage âhistory repeats itselfâ comes to mind when reviewing what the new 2015 IRC Building Codes are requiring in new home construction in MN.
and
> In the mid 80âs, in order to lessen our dependence on overseas energy products, new âEnergy Codesâ were put into effect to reduce the amount of energy used to heat and cool a home. The code required northern homes to have a vapor barrier (poly sheet) installed behind the sheetrock to stop or restrict airflow through the walls. While this meant homeowners no longer needed to sleep with three down blankets during the winter, the full and the long term effects of a tighter home werenât completely understood when it went into effect. As it turned out, within five-to-ten years after construction, these tightly wrapped homes couldnât âbreatheâ and werenât able to dry out before the next rain. The homes just rotted away, often without any visual indication that anything was amiss.
Lots of people have rotting walls and they don't realize it. It's like a cancer on the American housing stock and there's no bailout. Nobody is fixing this, we just think building new homes solves everything
> By now, everyone should be aware of the moisture problems that exist in homes, and especially in stucco-clad homes. Our own testing shows that 90% of stucco homes built in the mid-80âs through the 90âs have major moisture problems causing structural damages that most people canât even see. While construction practices and codes have improved over the last 15 years, the old adage âhistory repeats itselfâ comes to mind when reviewing what the new 2015 IRC Building Codes are requiring in new home construction in MN.
and
> In the mid 80âs, in order to lessen our dependence on overseas energy products, new âEnergy Codesâ were put into effect to reduce the amount of energy used to heat and cool a home. The code required northern homes to have a vapor barrier (poly sheet) installed behind the sheetrock to stop or restrict airflow through the walls. While this meant homeowners no longer needed to sleep with three down blankets during the winter, the full and the long term effects of a tighter home werenât completely understood when it went into effect. As it turned out, within five-to-ten years after construction, these tightly wrapped homes couldnât âbreatheâ and werenât able to dry out before the next rain. The homes just rotted away, often without any visual indication that anything was amiss.
Lots of people have rotting walls and they don't realize it. It's like a cancer on the American housing stock and there's no bailout. Nobody is fixing this, we just think building new homes solves everything
@feld @pony @RedOct American building codes are generally terrible; note that this problem doesn't exist in German or Nordic Passivhaus construction. Then there's the fenestration - American buildings love to use slide windows, which are harder to insulate than tilt-and-turn, but then one of the people in our program lives in a modern New York condo with tilt-and-turn windows and tells me they're not as well-insulated as German ones, for reasons neither of us knows.
@feld @pony @RedOct The poor insulation then makes city living less desirable because street noise filters into the buildings; every time I visit New York I have to deal with way worse noise than I have at home with the windows closed, and I live next to an elevated train in an extremely touristy area. But *none* of this gets resolved through taxing landlords (who then pass the tax on to the renters) - the US and Canada need to Europeanize their building codes.
Diego@Alon @feld @pony @RedOct Yeah, and let me add that making homes "breathe" through cracks in the walls is a very non-ideal solution for ventilation. Mould and other nasties can grow in such cracks, the air you're getting isn't high quality.
Much better to have proper mechanical ventilation, we have the technology to exchange air without exchanging heat
@DiegoBeghin @Alon @pony @RedOct I installed an ERV in my condo for this, it was amazing. Also dropped my co2 by 300-500ppm
Beeks
MacCruiskeen@RedOct @Alon but it doesnât make sense even in the best case scenario for everyone to own a home. There are times when renting is a better option. But it does make sense to have vacant housing available for use one way or the other. People do hoard units in expensive cities and keep them off market. People have second homes they only use a little. Cities have tried taxing them, but not enough.
@maccruiskeen @RedOct People don't actually hoard dwellings in meaningful numbers, is the point. In New York, 58,000 units were held off for seasonal, recreational, or otherwise occasional use in 2023, down from 2017 - but there are 3.7 million units citywide, for a 1.6% rate. https://www.nyc.gov/assets/hpd/downloads/pdfs/about/2023-nychvs-selected-initial-findings.pdf
@maccruiskeen @RedOct The number is down in half since 2020; it's not visible in rents. Annual housing approvals citywide (see https://socds.huduser.gov/permits/) are around 20,000-30,000; at Tokyo or Seoul rates, they'd be around 100,000. That's what's needed, rather than populist attempts to eliminate apartment renting as an option.
IIVQ@RedOct @Alon In the Netherlands, they just made laws setting a maximum rental price on most housing (whether social, corporation or privately owned). The max rent is based on a points system, which are awarded for surface, insulation, baths, heating system etc.
This system has worked for years for subsidized rent, but now is being extended to a far bigger range of rental housing.
It's too fresh to see the effects yet.
This system has worked for years for subsidized rent, but now is being extended to a far bigger range of rental housing.
It's too fresh to see the effects yet.
hex
TechTrav@Daojoan this is really thought-provoking. all my life, I've been a die-hard "limited government" kind of guy. this gives me a peek into the idea that "the other side" might have a point. thanks for sharing.
Jennifer@Daojoan I don't know who he is but he's totally correct.
Ryan Germann 
@Daojoan also if Governments took over the "basic, decent housing" market and built millions of new homes AND prohibited foreign "investment" in those properties AND held a lottery for whom could buy those homes AND restricted who was qualified to purchase those homes on the resale market, housing might get closer to being affordable for all. This doesn't rule out a private housing market for those with the means, but their homes would be more affordable as well.
The basics of human existence should not be subject to "market forces".
Mike Hicks@Daojoan I think he's basically talking about a vacancy tax, which is one tool in the toolbox, but there is no single magic bullet. We need to build much more housing -- I know the area where I live needs to build about 15,000 units per year to keep up with growth.
Over in California, a legal organization that has backed housing reforms has a tracker for cities throughout the state showing whether they're in compliance or not. Most places need to build build build https://cities.fairhousingelements.org/
Lufty 
@Daojoan No alt text? Really?
Here's what the screenshotted twitter comment from Tay Zonday ( @tayzonday ) says:
"There is no American "housing crisis"- there's a supply-hoarding crisis to rig local market prices above the liquidity of local buyer capital.
The policy solution is simple: Poison-pill tax all non-occupant-owned housing to force immediate sale to local buyers at actual market rates.
Allowing unlimited non-local capital to supply-hoard vacant housing is simply anti-resident eugenics. Current residents are too poor, so replace them with richer ones- even if it causes widespread homelessness, forced migration and absurd energy costs for the displaced to commute. It's as discriminatory as Federal Housing Administration redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s."