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Comment by tptacek

4 days ago

Why? Why should I care what the balance of rental and owner-occupied is? Owned is not strictly better than rented!

27 comments

tptacek

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brightball  4 days ago

At scale, it limits the supply of available homes to buy which increases the prices.

When we constantly read stories about people not being able to afford homes today, it’s all driven by pure supply and demand. When a firehose of money gets aimed at any aspect of the economy everything gets more expensive.

This is from institutional investors. Sometimes it’s government when we are talking about the price of education or healthcare for example.

  • tptacek  4 days ago

    None of this is happening "at scale", but either way, you're talking about the price of deeds on houses, and affordable housing isn't about home ownership; in fact, the urge people have to drive this issue towards "starter homes" is a big part of the problem, because the highest-opportunity areas have strictly limited carrying capacity for single-family homes in the first place, and what we desperately need to do is upzone and diversify the housing stock.

  • sokoloff  3 days ago

    It’s literally a new development. Someone went out and turned some raw land into rental houses. If they had left it as raw land, there also would have been no change in supply of houses to buy.

    Instead, now they’ve created a slight reduction in demand for houses to buy by offering a housing alternative that didn’t exist before.

  • kgwgk  3 days ago

    > it limits the supply of available homes to buy

    It also lowers the demand (it increases the supply of an alternative).

lupusyndrby9  4 days ago

Isn’t manipulation of zoning an example of why it’s important and how even with a small share they can have an outsized influence on the market? Also I seriously doubt the return to work directives are driven by anything more then the projected drop in property values.

  • tptacek  4 days ago

    No. I actually don't give a shit whether corporations can buy single-family houses, by which I mean, I don't care if that's banned. My problem is that high-opportunity high-value residential areas are deeply resistant to upzoning and are actively using this "corporate investor" narrative as a reason why they should wait. Corporate investors are not why the inner ring suburbs with the good schools in major metros are expensive; zoning is. This is literally a distraction from affordability work.

Eddy_Viscosity2  4 days ago

And neither is rented strictly better than owned. You would care if you wanted to own but couldn't.

  • tptacek  4 days ago

    I agree, in the same way I'd care the other direction if I wanted to rent, which is why I don't understand the concern about inventory shifting to rentals.

    • epistasis  4 days ago

      In my experience, there are a lot of people who don't consider renters as people that deserve consideration in governmental decision making. So if rental supply becomes available, it doesn't matter, not only because the person doesn't want to rent, but more so because renters are not considered permanent citizens of the local city and therefore they don't matter.

      This is a recurring theme k see among both right wing and left wing people when it comes to looking at single family homes.

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