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Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing mark

Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. For the sanity in the housing market, members of society need to be driven to participate in other business activities for income/revenue, not rentals.

lbarrow 8mo ago
Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.
- baq 8mo ago
  but it'll lower mortgages, which will lower rents.
- AstroBen 8mo ago
  Would it not also lower house prices, causing would-be renters to buy instead, reducing demand for rentals?
  - jazzyjackson 8mo ago
    This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Yes mortgage is often cheaper than rental, but the whole tradeoff is the commitment, just like all kinds of services, if you pay 40 years up front you can get a good deal, but do you really want to take out a loan to do that? Limiting landlords ability to buy property is reducing demand for construction, you want to increase demand for housing, not decrease it. As I said in a sibling thread, it does suck that property owners are incentivized to raise their property values, preventing supply from reacting to demand.
    - AstroBen 8mo ago
      I don't think this is a purely financial decision - my position on that is it's not a good investment if you're buying a single home. Taking on 5x leverage on a hugely concentrated asset is insane to me if it's a large % of your net worth The bigger thing, though, is so many people are currently priced out from owning something for themselves. Your home is such a fundamental part of your life and for a lot of people renting fucking sucks. They can't live their lives the way they want to. To have that be the case because others are buying it up to profit? Ehh..
    - caditinpiscinam 8mo ago
      That "less commitment" argument assumes that renters are content to be paying higher-than-mortgage costs for a property they'll never own. If they are, then it's true that the rental system is benefiting them. If they'd rather own their homes and be paying a mortgage, then the rental system is a hindrance. My intuition is that the majority of renters would rather be owners paying mortgages. This is less true of certain demographics (young people, students) and more true of others (older people, families). I also wouldn't characterize being a renter as low-commitment. Say you're renting a place for 1.2k a month. When you sign a year lease, you're committing to pay 1.2k x 12 in rent, plus (at least) a month of security deposit, for a total of 15.6k. That may not be a down payment, but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there.
      - tpmoney 8mo ago
        > but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there. Now imagine trying to asses the potential problems with a living space before committing the next 30 years of those payments, plus locking yourself into that single living space and taking on the single and sole responsibility for repairing or addressing all of those problems yourself. Look, I really like owning my own home, but when I signed a rental agreement, for the duration of the agreement that was the most money I would ever spend on my housing. And I never once worried about replacing a roof, or replacing an HVAC unit, or replacing a water main. I've owned my own home now for over a decade and my monthly housing expenditure is nearly 2x what it was when I started between tax increases, insurance increases and loans to pay for the various major repairs, and that's with a fixed rate primary mortgage. And that's my cost increases AFTER the insurance payouts. The townhome I first rented when I moved to the area currently rents for about $100 LESS than I pay each month. Granted when I bought the place, it was renting for about $200 more per month than I was paying but that basically means renting vs buying was a wash as far as costs go. Yes, to a degree I got unlucky, but that's also the point, I couldn't know if I was going to be unlucky or not before agreeing to the mortgage. As a renter I could get reviews and recommendations or warnings from prior tenants and at least have a chance of knowing what I was getting into.
    - rascul 8mo ago
      > This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Didn't we already try that with housing?
  - dghlsakjg 8mo ago
    Renting and purchasing are not perfect substitutes. There are many situations where a rental is a far better solution.
  - heartbreak 8mo ago
    Lowering prices would also disincentivize anyone to sell their house, sort of like the recent, relatively high interest rates. Those undesirable rates have not applied significant downward pressure on prices because they’re simultaneously exerting downward pressure on the volume of houses available for sale. No one wants to sell their low rate house for a higher one.
- lawlessone 8mo ago
  >that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals As someone that's renting because buying is impossible i think this would be fantastic. They should do it with Airbnb too. Not American or in the US, this is problem everywhere now. People thinking they're entrepreneurs for gouging. People will come up with all kinds of reasoning, its the property tax, it's migrants, its minimum wage, it's millennials, it's inflation ,when ultimately it's just that landlords will charge whatever they think they can get away. and sometimes they'll try to charge in other ways... https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/19/alarming-incidence-of-sex-for-rent-advertisements-survey-of-international-students-finds/ https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/...
- KptMarchewa 8mo ago
  This will release homes on the market, which will lower the prices, causing the rents to drop.
jazzyjackson 8mo ago
This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society. IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction! North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.
- mikepurvis 8mo ago
  I'm not sure if this is what you mean by secret society, but I could well imagine that these kind of limits would be hard to enforce. Like a person creates shell corporations to own their properties on their behalf, or buys them in the name of their kids, or employs randos to "own" pieces of their portfolio.
  - tadfisher 8mo ago
    They already do these things to take advantage of "primary residence" or "first-time home buyer" incentives; see the big hullabaloo over Letitia James doing it by accident.
    - sokoloff 8mo ago
      I feel like a lot of politicians get exposed making these “accidents” that just fortunately happen to be beneficial to them. Perhaps they ought to be more careful when filling out paperwork. Or perhaps they’re not accidents.
  - jazzyjackson 8mo ago
    Check out the origin of freemasons, a originally a secret society of stone masons whose labor was in such high demand after the black plague rolled through Europe and England that London set a maximum wage. I forget exactly what the meetings were for but it was something like a union / underground political resistance / price-fixing agreement club that worked in all the Pythagorean and Egyptian ritual later on .
kiba 8mo ago
Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country. IF you want affordability? Tax land. Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wall street.
- estearum 8mo ago
  > Landlord, or property management, This is literally not true. A landlord owns the property. Property managers operate the property. Sometimes these are the same people (in mom and pop scenarios), but typically and at scale they certainly are not. Property management is a job. Landlording is not. It is simply owning an asset. +1 on taxing land though.
  - derangedHorse 8mo ago
    Landlords have to allocate capital to fixing and improving the house, as well as taking care of insurance and taxes. Also, assuming that they're not living in the house and the value of the home goes up, they're taxes will rise whenever an appraiser reassesses their home value.
    - estearum 8mo ago
      All improvements are excluded from a land value tax, which actually means improvements are even more incentivized. Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.
      - svieira 8mo ago
        So when you build a sewage farm on your back 40 you should get wealthier (while your neighbors thank you because their land tax went down), but if someone snaps a photo of your area that goes viral on {THE PLATFORM DU JOUR} thus making your county more popular and driving up a bidding war for postage stamp sized lots of land (leading to the land being valued at a higher rate than it was a year before) you suddenly have a massive tax bill because "we noticed you are living in a popular county" and the benefits of living in a popular place should be taxed away? Or do we need some kind of a standard for "more valuable" that deals only with tangible things? And if so, which tangibles?
AznHisoka 8mo ago
Should this apply to multi-family homes or just single family?
imgabe 8mo ago
For affordability reasons, just build more housing. It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.
- orangecat 8mo ago
  This is obviously correct. Somehow people just can't accept the pigeonhole principle that if X people are trying to buy Y houses and X>>Y, a lot of them are going to be disappointed regardless of what laws you pass.
  - brailsafe 8mo ago
    It's obviously incorrect. If X people are trying to buy Y houses, and 1 of them can always buy Y/2 houses, then you'll need to build a hell of a lot more than Y houses if Y is only equal to X. Right now in most places, Y < X, and a certain percentage of people can still buy many more than 1, so it seems like that's a real problem shouldn't continue during times of scarcity.
    - ben_w 8mo ago
      That is an additional problem, but does not contradict what you replied to. N_dissatisfied > max(0, N_for_sale - N_individuals_and_couples_buying) When N_for_sale > N_individuals_and_couples_buying, it is still possible for N_dissatisfied to be > 0 for the reason you give. But N_dissatisfied must be > 0 whenever N_for_sale < N_individuals_and_couples_buying, even if everyone is limited to having at most one.
      - brailsafe 8mo ago
        Agreed, but I wasn't disagreeing with their whole sentiment, just their assertion that the GP was obviously correct, namely that it doesn't matter how many homes people can buy. Less supply couldn't possibly be helpful for those disappointed, but also there's less supply than there would be if access to it as a commodity was limited, supposing that all other artificial restrictions and funding models could rely on less concentrated investments, which I think they could
cloverich 8mo ago
This would certainly drive down prices - how much is an open question. But I think its a fair compromise, UNTIL we actually do have enough homes for everyone. Until then something has to give - right now its people who can't own a single home that are yielding, but IMO it would be much more fair to ask people who already own a home to yield (not buy more than one). Ultimately that's the tradeoff to discuss.
idiotsecant 8mo ago
This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause. Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market. The problem is when people who want to own houses can't afford them, even when they contribute meaningfully to society. The root cause of this is not landlords existing. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system, to a point that the additional wealth gives them no real benefit, but serves only to remove that wealth from the vast majority of otherwise middle class people. If you want to fix this problem return the top tax tiers to what they were 50, 75, 100 years ago and the problem will be severely reduced. It's not sufficient to solve it, but its low hanging fruit.
- orangecat 8mo ago
  Landlords owning property is not a problem. Correct. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.
  - idiotsecant 8mo ago
    You're inspecting entirely the wrong end of this spectrum. The problem isn't that the average person is being outbid by a trillionare on their two bedroom. It's that an corpuscular capital class has so much money that all assets are being wildly inflated, housing included, while simultaneously depriving more than half of the population of anything close to the capital to buy even the cheapest house. There is no 'being outbid' for the average American who makes a hair over 45k. It's a laughable impossibility to even be in the game. The system is broken and the average user of this site is way too comfortable to recognize it but it's a daily reality for almost everyone else, particularly the young generation.
woah 8mo ago
That's a surefire way to make sure that all rental properties are controlled by people who are able to de facto own a lot of properties with family members (or "family" members) on the paperwork, and who are able to enforce their ownership with extrajudicial means.
- potato3732842 8mo ago
  Ironically, supply would probably increase for no other reason than those are the kind of people who just add cash only units without giving a crap about expensive permission and permits.
hopelite 8mo ago
That would not be useful. A far better solution would be to drive up rates to make/force landlords unload properties they could only afford at lower rates and also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. It’s basic supply and demand, but ironically the immigrant supporters are allied with the billionaires and generally wealthy who profit from piling in ever more people into the same supply of housing and amenities and resources.
- PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
  > also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. Nothing like middle school economics to help a debate along ... have you checked on the level of economic activity that is due to those 30M foreign nationals, and considered if there might be any downsides to them no longer being here (and presumably not being replaced by other foreign nationals) ?
  - hopelite 8mo ago
    Speaking of middle school mindsets; so by your logic, you should take in how many strangers into your home against your will? …and if your infantile logic has any value, why don’t we just cram every single human on earth into the USA, at your expense of course, right? What immature peasant-logic people as yourself don’t understand is that no, there is negative net benefit to the common person, while the common American is deprived of that benefit which goes primarily to the richest, and of course the freeloading foreign nationals. Nothing about America has gotten on any controlled measure better without the increase in foreign nationals that have been imposed on the citizens of America against their will. Is it really as simple as that you have no dignity and are just a self-interested person that enjoys living off the theft of Americans? And again, your infantile mind cannot seem to grasp that removing a squatter from your home is in fact justified, regardless of how much negative economic impact it would have by depriving that squatter of your assets and living in your home. Why do you types not understand these basic things? Is it really as basic as that you’re vile? Depraved? Narcissistically callous towards the people you harm? Is it really just because you enjoy making others pay the cost of your decisions while you benefit? How about we just make you pay for all, every single cost of the foreign nationals that are squatting in America at the profit of the ruling class? Of course not, you would prefer others pay the cost with the misery you cause them.
Aurornis 8mo ago
> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals Price controls and limits like this rarely work out in history. Around here, many landlords renovate or build new high density construction. Put a cap on how many properties they can own and they'll switch from building/renting as many units as possible to maximizing the rent on the limited number of properties they can own. Restricting the market in one dimension rarely has the desire effect.
john-h-k 8mo ago
> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals Many people wish to rent, not buy. If we make it so each landlord can own fewer homes, but renting demand stays similar we just incentivise more people becoming landlords
JumpCrisscross 8mo ago
> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals India still has this in some states [1]. You wind up with everyone in the family owning a house. After that, other people own it and pass on most of the rent. Better: progressive capital-gains taxes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regulation)_Act,_1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regula...
magicalhippo 8mo ago
> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. Here in Norway the solution, as with so many other things, is taxing. Your home is evaluated at some "market rate", but if it's your primary residence the effective tax value is just 25% up to $1 million (70% on value above $1 million). For reference, a typical 3-room apartment in Oslo, the capital, is around $400-500k. However, if it's not your primary residence, then you pay tax on 100% of the "market rate". The tax rate is 1%, so not insignificant. Until a few years ago, tax on non-primary residences was much lower, and hence we had a lot more people buying to rent if they inherited money or similar. Some even had a dozen or more properties. These have now exited, so policy is working as intended. One thing of course politicians for some reason didn't think of is that if most of the landlords suddenly sell, rental market will shrink. So now it's super-expensive to rent, and those who rent usually do so because they can't buy for one reason or another (no stable income to support a loan for example).
- magicalhippo 8mo ago
  > So now it's super-expensive to rent And as if it was ordered, a news story[1] on exactly that this morning. Last year alone the average price for a rental unit went up 6.3%, and simultaneously a record number of apartments were sold. So very unlikely to come down. [1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner-i-maneden-for-oslo-leilighet-1.17717532 https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner...
- pembrook 8mo ago
  So you created a policy that takes money from the lower/working classes and those on welfare (restricting rental supply for those who rent) and transfers it as a tax subsidy to the middle class (who own) and are offering this up as "good" policy? You've also encouraged your middle class to massively over-leverage themselves to a single house/apartment by creating a huge tax subsidy for them (from 30-75%), which will no doubt continue placing upward pressure on house prices and also create risks if interest rates increase. Why would you not take the biggest loan the bank will offer, given interest rates are quite low in Europe and you will not be taxed on most of the value of that property you can acquire with leverage? Crazy thought, did your politicians ever think about the idea of NOT subsidizing the demand side at all? If the issue is the price of housing, subsidizing demand for it in any way is going to make that problem worse!
34679 8mo ago
I'm in favor of a property tax multiplier that increases with the number of properties owned.
15155 8mo ago
Corporations are people and states aren't legally entitled to know the composition of a foreign corporation's membership.
anon291 8mo ago
The purpose of people putting money into stocks or real estate is to allow for a simple, fairly 'hands-off' way to make money (real estate is not totally hands off, but is pretty close to a set-it-and-forget-it business). Real estate works for this because you can really put in as much as you want into it. Other business activities do not work because the entrance cost for non-rent-seeking business is extremely high and the risk is way too high compared to real estate. This is due to American regulation and labor laws. This is a 'first-world problem', but now that I have capital, the question is 'what to do with it'?. Yeah, you could throw it in the stock market, but that's also rent-seeking in a sense because you're not really able to invest in primary rounds (I mean you can, but it's hard to find deals), so basically you're just providing liquidity to people, which is rent-seeking of a different kind. So then the question becomes what else to do with it? I've given a ton away, but that's useless for the most part since it barely creates any economic value. In my ideal world, I'd start a factory and hire a manager, but the capital cost of that is high, not because of the material or the rental cost, but because of the labor cost. So then, what's the option? I could easily outsource it all to China or India, but that's completely useless for the United States. Then the question becomes, why start your own, when you could invest in others. Great! I would love to do that. It would be even better if I could simply invest in a local enterprise... Except, that's not easy either. Regulation over investments means that even investing in this is fraught with difficulty unless you want to establish some sort of 'fund'. So basically, there's nothing to do with the money, which is sad, since I end up giving most of the money I make away anyway, and would prefer to have more of it to give away. Until America figures out what it wants to be, it's going to be real estate for me... consistent incomes, fairly uncorrelated with equities (which I have a lot of too), etc. There's really not many other options here. There's barely any 'productive' activities taking place in the United States.

lbarrow 8mo ago

Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.

baq 8mo ago
but it'll lower mortgages, which will lower rents.
AstroBen 8mo ago
Would it not also lower house prices, causing would-be renters to buy instead, reducing demand for rentals?
- jazzyjackson 8mo ago
  This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Yes mortgage is often cheaper than rental, but the whole tradeoff is the commitment, just like all kinds of services, if you pay 40 years up front you can get a good deal, but do you really want to take out a loan to do that? Limiting landlords ability to buy property is reducing demand for construction, you want to increase demand for housing, not decrease it. As I said in a sibling thread, it does suck that property owners are incentivized to raise their property values, preventing supply from reacting to demand.
  - AstroBen 8mo ago
    I don't think this is a purely financial decision - my position on that is it's not a good investment if you're buying a single home. Taking on 5x leverage on a hugely concentrated asset is insane to me if it's a large % of your net worth The bigger thing, though, is so many people are currently priced out from owning something for themselves. Your home is such a fundamental part of your life and for a lot of people renting fucking sucks. They can't live their lives the way they want to. To have that be the case because others are buying it up to profit? Ehh..
  - caditinpiscinam 8mo ago
    That "less commitment" argument assumes that renters are content to be paying higher-than-mortgage costs for a property they'll never own. If they are, then it's true that the rental system is benefiting them. If they'd rather own their homes and be paying a mortgage, then the rental system is a hindrance. My intuition is that the majority of renters would rather be owners paying mortgages. This is less true of certain demographics (young people, students) and more true of others (older people, families). I also wouldn't characterize being a renter as low-commitment. Say you're renting a place for 1.2k a month. When you sign a year lease, you're committing to pay 1.2k x 12 in rent, plus (at least) a month of security deposit, for a total of 15.6k. That may not be a down payment, but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there.
    - tpmoney 8mo ago
      > but it's still a huge commitment, especially given how hard it is to assess potential problems with a living space before you've actually lived there. Now imagine trying to asses the potential problems with a living space before committing the next 30 years of those payments, plus locking yourself into that single living space and taking on the single and sole responsibility for repairing or addressing all of those problems yourself. Look, I really like owning my own home, but when I signed a rental agreement, for the duration of the agreement that was the most money I would ever spend on my housing. And I never once worried about replacing a roof, or replacing an HVAC unit, or replacing a water main. I've owned my own home now for over a decade and my monthly housing expenditure is nearly 2x what it was when I started between tax increases, insurance increases and loans to pay for the various major repairs, and that's with a fixed rate primary mortgage. And that's my cost increases AFTER the insurance payouts. The townhome I first rented when I moved to the area currently rents for about $100 LESS than I pay each month. Granted when I bought the place, it was renting for about $200 more per month than I was paying but that basically means renting vs buying was a wash as far as costs go. Yes, to a degree I got unlucky, but that's also the point, I couldn't know if I was going to be unlucky or not before agreeing to the mortgage. As a renter I could get reviews and recommendations or warnings from prior tenants and at least have a chance of knowing what I was getting into.
  - rascul 8mo ago
    > This kinda reminds me of student loans, why not get as many people as possible into 6 figure debt? Didn't we already try that with housing?
- dghlsakjg 8mo ago
  Renting and purchasing are not perfect substitutes. There are many situations where a rental is a far better solution.
- heartbreak 8mo ago
  Lowering prices would also disincentivize anyone to sell their house, sort of like the recent, relatively high interest rates. Those undesirable rates have not applied significant downward pressure on prices because they’re simultaneously exerting downward pressure on the volume of houses available for sale. No one wants to sell their low rate house for a higher one.
lawlessone 8mo ago
>that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals As someone that's renting because buying is impossible i think this would be fantastic. They should do it with Airbnb too. Not American or in the US, this is problem everywhere now. People thinking they're entrepreneurs for gouging. People will come up with all kinds of reasoning, its the property tax, it's migrants, its minimum wage, it's millennials, it's inflation ,when ultimately it's just that landlords will charge whatever they think they can get away. and sometimes they'll try to charge in other ways... https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/19/alarming-incidence-of-sex-for-rent-advertisements-survey-of-international-students-finds/ https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/housing-planning/2025/02/...
KptMarchewa 8mo ago
This will release homes on the market, which will lower the prices, causing the rents to drop.

jazzyjackson 8mo ago

This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society. IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing. Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction! North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.

mikepurvis 8mo ago
I'm not sure if this is what you mean by secret society, but I could well imagine that these kind of limits would be hard to enforce. Like a person creates shell corporations to own their properties on their behalf, or buys them in the name of their kids, or employs randos to "own" pieces of their portfolio.
- tadfisher 8mo ago
  They already do these things to take advantage of "primary residence" or "first-time home buyer" incentives; see the big hullabaloo over Letitia James doing it by accident.
  - sokoloff 8mo ago
    I feel like a lot of politicians get exposed making these “accidents” that just fortunately happen to be beneficial to them. Perhaps they ought to be more careful when filling out paperwork. Or perhaps they’re not accidents.
- jazzyjackson 8mo ago
  Check out the origin of freemasons, a originally a secret society of stone masons whose labor was in such high demand after the black plague rolled through Europe and England that London set a maximum wage. I forget exactly what the meetings were for but it was something like a union / underground political resistance / price-fixing agreement club that worked in all the Pythagorean and Egyptian ritual later on .

kiba 8mo ago

Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country. IF you want affordability? Tax land. Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wall street.

estearum 8mo ago
> Landlord, or property management, This is literally not true. A landlord owns the property. Property managers operate the property. Sometimes these are the same people (in mom and pop scenarios), but typically and at scale they certainly are not. Property management is a job. Landlording is not. It is simply owning an asset. +1 on taxing land though.
- derangedHorse 8mo ago
  Landlords have to allocate capital to fixing and improving the house, as well as taking care of insurance and taxes. Also, assuming that they're not living in the house and the value of the home goes up, they're taxes will rise whenever an appraiser reassesses their home value.
  - estearum 8mo ago
    All improvements are excluded from a land value tax, which actually means improvements are even more incentivized. Yes that is correct if you occupy land while your community makes it more and more valuable, you should not get wealthier and wealthier for no reason. All of that should be taxed away.
    - svieira 8mo ago
      So when you build a sewage farm on your back 40 you should get wealthier (while your neighbors thank you because their land tax went down), but if someone snaps a photo of your area that goes viral on {THE PLATFORM DU JOUR} thus making your county more popular and driving up a bidding war for postage stamp sized lots of land (leading to the land being valued at a higher rate than it was a year before) you suddenly have a massive tax bill because "we noticed you are living in a popular county" and the benefits of living in a popular place should be taxed away? Or do we need some kind of a standard for "more valuable" that deals only with tangible things? And if so, which tangibles?

AznHisoka 8mo ago

Should this apply to multi-family homes or just single family?

imgabe 8mo ago

For affordability reasons, just build more housing. It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.

orangecat 8mo ago
This is obviously correct. Somehow people just can't accept the pigeonhole principle that if X people are trying to buy Y houses and X>>Y, a lot of them are going to be disappointed regardless of what laws you pass.
- brailsafe 8mo ago
  It's obviously incorrect. If X people are trying to buy Y houses, and 1 of them can always buy Y/2 houses, then you'll need to build a hell of a lot more than Y houses if Y is only equal to X. Right now in most places, Y < X, and a certain percentage of people can still buy many more than 1, so it seems like that's a real problem shouldn't continue during times of scarcity.
  - ben_w 8mo ago
    That is an additional problem, but does not contradict what you replied to. N_dissatisfied > max(0, N_for_sale - N_individuals_and_couples_buying) When N_for_sale > N_individuals_and_couples_buying, it is still possible for N_dissatisfied to be > 0 for the reason you give. But N_dissatisfied must be > 0 whenever N_for_sale < N_individuals_and_couples_buying, even if everyone is limited to having at most one.
    - brailsafe 8mo ago
      Agreed, but I wasn't disagreeing with their whole sentiment, just their assertion that the GP was obviously correct, namely that it doesn't matter how many homes people can buy. Less supply couldn't possibly be helpful for those disappointed, but also there's less supply than there would be if access to it as a commodity was limited, supposing that all other artificial restrictions and funding models could rely on less concentrated investments, which I think they could

cloverich 8mo ago

This would certainly drive down prices - how much is an open question. But I think its a fair compromise, UNTIL we actually do have enough homes for everyone. Until then something has to give - right now its people who can't own a single home that are yielding, but IMO it would be much more fair to ask people who already own a home to yield (not buy more than one). Ultimately that's the tradeoff to discuss.

idiotsecant 8mo ago

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause. Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market. The problem is when people who want to own houses can't afford them, even when they contribute meaningfully to society. The root cause of this is not landlords existing. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system, to a point that the additional wealth gives them no real benefit, but serves only to remove that wealth from the vast majority of otherwise middle class people. If you want to fix this problem return the top tax tiers to what they were 50, 75, 100 years ago and the problem will be severely reduced. It's not sufficient to solve it, but its low hanging fruit.

orangecat 8mo ago
Landlords owning property is not a problem. Correct. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system To the extent that this is true, it's not why housing is unaffordable. Even if Larry Ellison buys a dozen mansions and keeps them empty most of the time, that's not going to noticeably affect the market for normal people. Houses are expensive because they're scarce; you're far more likely to be outbid by the guy who makes $10k more than you than by an evil billionaire.
- idiotsecant 8mo ago
  You're inspecting entirely the wrong end of this spectrum. The problem isn't that the average person is being outbid by a trillionare on their two bedroom. It's that an corpuscular capital class has so much money that all assets are being wildly inflated, housing included, while simultaneously depriving more than half of the population of anything close to the capital to buy even the cheapest house. There is no 'being outbid' for the average American who makes a hair over 45k. It's a laughable impossibility to even be in the game. The system is broken and the average user of this site is way too comfortable to recognize it but it's a daily reality for almost everyone else, particularly the young generation.

woah 8mo ago

That's a surefire way to make sure that all rental properties are controlled by people who are able to de facto own a lot of properties with family members (or "family" members) on the paperwork, and who are able to enforce their ownership with extrajudicial means.

potato3732842 8mo ago
Ironically, supply would probably increase for no other reason than those are the kind of people who just add cash only units without giving a crap about expensive permission and permits.

hopelite 8mo ago

That would not be useful. A far better solution would be to drive up rates to make/force landlords unload properties they could only afford at lower rates and also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. It’s basic supply and demand, but ironically the immigrant supporters are allied with the billionaires and generally wealthy who profit from piling in ever more people into the same supply of housing and amenities and resources.

PaulDavisThe1st 8mo ago
> also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. Nothing like middle school economics to help a debate along ... have you checked on the level of economic activity that is due to those 30M foreign nationals, and considered if there might be any downsides to them no longer being here (and presumably not being replaced by other foreign nationals) ?
- hopelite 8mo ago
  Speaking of middle school mindsets; so by your logic, you should take in how many strangers into your home against your will? …and if your infantile logic has any value, why don’t we just cram every single human on earth into the USA, at your expense of course, right? What immature peasant-logic people as yourself don’t understand is that no, there is negative net benefit to the common person, while the common American is deprived of that benefit which goes primarily to the richest, and of course the freeloading foreign nationals. Nothing about America has gotten on any controlled measure better without the increase in foreign nationals that have been imposed on the citizens of America against their will. Is it really as simple as that you have no dignity and are just a self-interested person that enjoys living off the theft of Americans? And again, your infantile mind cannot seem to grasp that removing a squatter from your home is in fact justified, regardless of how much negative economic impact it would have by depriving that squatter of your assets and living in your home. Why do you types not understand these basic things? Is it really as basic as that you’re vile? Depraved? Narcissistically callous towards the people you harm? Is it really just because you enjoy making others pay the cost of your decisions while you benefit? How about we just make you pay for all, every single cost of the foreign nationals that are squatting in America at the profit of the ruling class? Of course not, you would prefer others pay the cost with the misery you cause them.

Aurornis 8mo ago

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals Price controls and limits like this rarely work out in history. Around here, many landlords renovate or build new high density construction. Put a cap on how many properties they can own and they'll switch from building/renting as many units as possible to maximizing the rent on the limited number of properties they can own. Restricting the market in one dimension rarely has the desire effect.

john-h-k 8mo ago

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals Many people wish to rent, not buy. If we make it so each landlord can own fewer homes, but renting demand stays similar we just incentivise more people becoming landlords

JumpCrisscross 8mo ago

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals India still has this in some states [1]. You wind up with everyone in the family owning a house. After that, other people own it and pass on most of the rent. Better: progressive capital-gains taxes. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regulation)_Act,_1976 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regula...

magicalhippo 8mo ago

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals. Here in Norway the solution, as with so many other things, is taxing. Your home is evaluated at some "market rate", but if it's your primary residence the effective tax value is just 25% up to $1 million (70% on value above $1 million). For reference, a typical 3-room apartment in Oslo, the capital, is around $400-500k. However, if it's not your primary residence, then you pay tax on 100% of the "market rate". The tax rate is 1%, so not insignificant. Until a few years ago, tax on non-primary residences was much lower, and hence we had a lot more people buying to rent if they inherited money or similar. Some even had a dozen or more properties. These have now exited, so policy is working as intended. One thing of course politicians for some reason didn't think of is that if most of the landlords suddenly sell, rental market will shrink. So now it's super-expensive to rent, and those who rent usually do so because they can't buy for one reason or another (no stable income to support a loan for example).

magicalhippo 8mo ago
> So now it's super-expensive to rent And as if it was ordered, a news story[1] on exactly that this morning. Last year alone the average price for a rental unit went up 6.3%, and simultaneously a record number of apartments were sold. So very unlikely to come down. [1]: https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner-i-maneden-for-oslo-leilighet-1.17717532 https://www.nrk.no/norge/leieprissjokk_-nesten-20.000-kroner...
pembrook 8mo ago
So you created a policy that takes money from the lower/working classes and those on welfare (restricting rental supply for those who rent) and transfers it as a tax subsidy to the middle class (who own) and are offering this up as "good" policy? You've also encouraged your middle class to massively over-leverage themselves to a single house/apartment by creating a huge tax subsidy for them (from 30-75%), which will no doubt continue placing upward pressure on house prices and also create risks if interest rates increase. Why would you not take the biggest loan the bank will offer, given interest rates are quite low in Europe and you will not be taxed on most of the value of that property you can acquire with leverage? Crazy thought, did your politicians ever think about the idea of NOT subsidizing the demand side at all? If the issue is the price of housing, subsidizing demand for it in any way is going to make that problem worse!

34679 8mo ago

I'm in favor of a property tax multiplier that increases with the number of properties owned.

15155 8mo ago

Corporations are people and states aren't legally entitled to know the composition of a foreign corporation's membership.

anon291 8mo ago

The purpose of people putting money into stocks or real estate is to allow for a simple, fairly 'hands-off' way to make money (real estate is not totally hands off, but is pretty close to a set-it-and-forget-it business). Real estate works for this because you can really put in as much as you want into it. Other business activities do not work because the entrance cost for non-rent-seeking business is extremely high and the risk is way too high compared to real estate. This is due to American regulation and labor laws. This is a 'first-world problem', but now that I have capital, the question is 'what to do with it'?. Yeah, you could throw it in the stock market, but that's also rent-seeking in a sense because you're not really able to invest in primary rounds (I mean you can, but it's hard to find deals), so basically you're just providing liquidity to people, which is rent-seeking of a different kind. So then the question becomes what else to do with it? I've given a ton away, but that's useless for the most part since it barely creates any economic value. In my ideal world, I'd start a factory and hire a manager, but the capital cost of that is high, not because of the material or the rental cost, but because of the labor cost. So then, what's the option? I could easily outsource it all to China or India, but that's completely useless for the United States. Then the question becomes, why start your own, when you could invest in others. Great! I would love to do that. It would be even better if I could simply invest in a local enterprise... Except, that's not easy either. Regulation over investments means that even investing in this is fraught with difficulty unless you want to establish some sort of 'fund'. So basically, there's nothing to do with the money, which is sad, since I end up giving most of the money I make away anyway, and would prefer to have more of it to give away. Until America figures out what it wants to be, it's going to be real estate for me... consistent incomes, fairly uncorrelated with equities (which I have a lot of too), etc. There's really not many other options here. There's barely any 'productive' activities taking place in the United States.