patrick.net

Ideally, SFHs should not be "rentals". This is pushing families into feudalism, as the established wealthy rentier class purchase a necessary good that is in limited supply, forcing millions of working families to pay them for the privilege of having a spot to call home on this planet.

But yeah, given the general helplessness of 30-40% of the country, actually rehabbing housing stock, saving housing stock from unnecessary damage is a social good.

But if I were king I'd still tax the s--- out of this business model. I have no moral problem from profiting from the creation of value. Landlording, however, on the whole profits from the creation of value outside of the lot lines, not within them and is thus an economic evil of getting something for nothing.

Renting is evil, as opposed to profiting from the work of the poor working man? Whatever troy, I'm not interested in the Karl Marx philosophy...

Troy says

Ideally, SFHs should not be “rentals”. This is pushing families into feudalism, as the established wealthy rentier class purchase a necessary good that is in limited supply, forcing millions of working families to pay them for the privilege of having a spot to call home on this planet.

I guess I don't see this - someone's got to own the place and either live there, or charge someone else to live there.

I suppose that housing could be free, which sounds fair. But then there's the issue of who gets which house. By that I mean that if we're all given a free house, every house should be comparable in every way. No one gets a mansion, no one gets a studio, it should all be equal. Except for me, because I need more space for my critters (what with being elliemae and all). Would this housing be provided by the state? Or feds? Or local govt? No privateers, for sure. The free market wouldn't apply.

There are a few issues to work out with this model, such as what happens if someone wants to move closer to their work or are transferred. Someone would have to figure out how to punish those people who improve their house, which makes it more desirable to others. Rather than to reward them for working hard, making more money and buying a place where they want, we should punish them for changing the box we gave them...

And I'm not even smoking anything...

elliemae says
I guess I don’t see this - someone’s got to own the place and either live there, or charge someone else to live there.

"Seeing this" requires seeing land as a separate class of wealth than capital. This is easier to do when one defines capital as a product of labor. Nobody made the land -- it was available for use prior to the last ice age -- so the land itself should not be considered capital, or at least not privatizable capital. "To prove a legal title to land one must trace it back to the man who stole it." -- David Lloyd George.

I have not much problem with people profiting from owning fixed assets like houses, apartments and what not. However, profiting from ownership of the land is a different question.

It is true that we all can't own our own homes. But I do think a lot of social problems exist due to the difficulty of home ownership. With all the landlording going on, it's tough for people to actually buy a house to live in. Just look at all the bottomfishing going on now with cash buyers for all the FCs.

Our current land and property markets are horribly inefficient and horribly harmful to our economy. Land is the source, and the sink, of all wealth. The land economy is about 20% of GDP and is full of people trying to avoid creating wealth but rather living off the wealth of others. This is parasitism.

I suppose that housing could be free, which sounds fair. But then there’s the issue of who gets which house. By that I mean that if we’re all given a free house, every house should be comparable in every way. No one gets a mansion, no one gets a studio, it should all be equal. Except for me, because I need more space for my critters (what with being elliemae and all). Would this housing be provided by the state? Or feds? Or local govt? No privateers, for sure. The free market wouldn’t apply.

Houses should not be free, they cost money to create and provide the real service of the housing good. However, their service life is measured in decades if not centuries so recapturing the cost of the fixed improvements is a hundred or two a month plus maintenance and insurance. The general idea is to remove the land component of home prices and rents. Landlords would still be free to charge what the market would bear, but their net return would be proportional to the value of the fixed improvements they own, not the location value of the property.

The location value of any rental or commercial property rightfully belongs to the community that has created that value.

In an ideal world housing -- land value -- taxes would replace income taxes for the most part.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

Yeah, I heard all about this ideal of the land belonging to all the people and it being wrong to own it... My family fled Cuba where idealists with the same thinking as you Troy took all the land out of private ownership. You can see how well that turned out! Grow up comrade!, communism is dead.

Georgists get that a lot. It's an old brush even though the original Georgists of 100+ years ago had no truck with Marxism. Funny thing is both Red China and the communists in Vietnam have undergone horrific land value bubbles right now or recently. Their neoliberal economies are as free-market in land as anyone now, to the expected effects of unaffordability and rentierism as wealth concentrates its ownership in land, the most valuable component of any economy.

Cuba under Batista was a pretty egregious example of neo-feudal private property in land. Castro's answer no doubt swung too much the other way.

In 1990 many leading economists advocated the land value tax to the post-communist Gorbachev government.

Here's their letter, if you're interested in criticizing the actual idea rather than the person or what you think I'm advocating.

Last time I was in Bellingham was the summer of '85, LOL, it was so sunny and so green. My interest is simply a place to retire that has more trees than cars, but some degree of access to civic necessities. If things continue to go right I can hopefully live anywhere so Japan, BC, and the Santa Cruz mountains are also on my list.

Zillow sez Bellingham's prices are hanging in there. Down a bit for the year but encountering resistance at 2005 price levels.

http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/charts/23627984_zpid,5years_chartDuration/

It's certainly still a buyers market. Tactically, I don't know what's going to happen this decade. It'd be better buying when interest rates are high so waiting seems to be in order. If Japan is any model things will continue to souffle for a very long time.

Liquidity traps are very unpleasant things. Anybody making a case for increased buying power on the buy side this decade, I'm all ears. I suppose Chinese and OPEC money will have increased buying power this decade, they could become the RE boogeymen the Japanese were in the 80s (until everything blew up on them in the 90s).

azrob00 says

My family fled Cuba where (people) with the same thinking as you Troy took all the land out of private ownership. You can see how well that turned out!

Azroboo:
I see your point, but not the way that you made it here. I don't know Troy, but haven't found anything about his posts to indicate that he's a bad person. I realize that you have personal experiences that are unique - I lost some family in the holocaust and go ballistic when people say it wasn't that bad or didn't happen.

ellie: point taken, I toned down the previous post.

Thanks. I shall remove the quote as well. Have a good day.