this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2024
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[–] [email protected] 188 points 11 months ago (4 children)

No one gets a second home until everyone has their first.

[–] [email protected] 100 points 11 months ago (5 children)

Rental has its place, there have been plenty of occasions in my life where rental suited me better than ownership. Regulation and enforcement of said regulations would do a lot to protect people in this situation.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Rent apartments. Own houses.

*Since some people really need every combination addressed: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (3 children)

How do you handle situations where people want to live temporarily in houses? An example would be a traveling nurse that doesn't want to be in an apartment building.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (7 children)

May people prefer to rent houses over owning one. Many of them I speak to tell me they want nothing to do with house maintenance and upkeep and they prefer to rent so that they don’t have to think or worry about any of the repairs. They like being able to just call the property manager when the hot water stops working or when their kiddo accidentally breaks a window.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 11 months ago (1 children)

When the kids breaks a window, they still have to pay. They just don't have to source it, which means they might not be getting the best deal.

Plus, most landlords leave things till the last minute or make it such hard work for the tenant to report it, they don't bother.

The maintenance is built into the rent, so they're already paying for it, just not getting the best deal and losing the option to do it how they want.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Everything you are saying is true, and even with those facts noted, some people still prefer the convenience of renting and some like the carefree aspect of not having to be responsible for the upkeep.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

I don't see why they can't own the property and pay a property manager of sorts.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well that’s all well and good until every house rental in your area starts requiring you to either do the maintenance anyway, or pay for it. So you get to pay for the house, and you get to maintenance the house, but you don’t get to own the house.

I’ve watched things change in just the last 5 years where renting a house means you have to maintenance everything that isn’t structural, including lawn care, but you don’t own any stake in the house, and you can forget about putting up a shelf or a new coat of paint. And now that you’re paying the mortgage and taxes on this house, you’re paying for all the utilities for the house, and are fixing all the problems that occur with the house, the landlord gets to send people over whenever they want to that get to go inside your house and look around without you being home just to make sure you’re taking care of it the way they want you to. And then when you leave, either because you found a better deal, or the landlord just doesn’t feel like renting it to you anymore, you get the pleasure of walking away with nothing.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 11 months ago

that's significantly less bad of a problem than the current issue of no one being able to afford homes. that nurse might just have to go for the apartment... that's really not that big of a deal.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 11 months ago (1 children)

We can't solve the problem for 99.99% of people because of this 0.0000001% person. /s.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.

As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people's needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Houses are pretty terrible for a multitude of factors:

  • urban sprawl
  • congestion
  • pollution
  • high cost public works
  • low income for public bodies doing those works
  • environmental erosion
  • flood protection

We should be building apartments that everyone can own, live and be happy in. It shouldn’t be reserved for home owners.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

Houses are pretty great for a few factors

  • Not sharing a wall with a neighbor
  • being able to be louder in general
  • Not being woken up by neighbors
  • Not getting your home infested with bugs because of having a nasty neighbor
  • No loud honking at night
  • Not having your door accidentally knocked on to ask if your apartment neighbor is home when they’re not answering their door
  • Parking in your own garage
  • Having a yard for your dog/kids to play in

Apartments fucking suck in so many ways. I get that they’re pretty handy in City Skylines where everyone bases their urban planning experience from but there is a reason people prefer to live in house and it’s because it gives you separation from other people in a way apartments cannot.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

How does a detached single family home prevent honking? Why haven't you explained to my neighbors they have to stop honking? Because they definitely still do, and it is still a nuisance

Detached homes definitely have many benefits, but they're incredibly expensive. If we didn't subsidize them so much, we'd have a whole lot more people living in denser housing. The US has something like 85% single family homes compared to around 40% in Germany

It's not that Germans are just so much better neighbors that they can put up with shared walls/spaces. It's just not worth the cost of a detached home when it isn't as heavily subsidized (they do still subsidize them compared to dense housing options)

TL;DR - Detached homes are fine, but we need to quit giving such massive subsidizes to them

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

It’s nearly as if there’s no single solution. Houses suck and apartments suck for completely different reasons.

(But tbh, nearly all of the reasons you mentioned apartments suck have been maybe an issue once 10+ years of living in apartments)

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Why? A co-op can own an apartment with occupants as co-owners. There's no need for rent.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Sigh: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 11 months ago (8 children)

Rental property should be publicly owned. Landlords shouldn’t be a thing.

I can see there being exceptions if you say own a property but have to move swiftly elsewhere and can’t/don’t wish to sell it, in such a case letting it out makes sense.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Dude from Ukraine was telling me that most people own condos. He was weirded out that the vast majority of people in the US don't have a vested interest into their neighborhood simply because they believe they won't live there for long.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Did he mention that a lot of the real estate that people own in most post-Soviet countries is inherited when (grand)parents die, this being first if not the only step towards the market for most people?

None of the people I know from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus bought their first apartments on their own through hard work or anything: it's mostly apartments where your grandma died, apartments that you're either massively helped with or outright gifted by parents when yuu have a significant other to move in with (so both families join funds, most coming from selling some dead relative's apartment) or on a wedding day (a rarer occasion), or some mix of that.

Without any help or gifts, you're lucky to be able to get a mortgage that you can pay off before you're 60 (at least).

The real estate prices outside the US and the EU may seem nicer, but salaries and expenses sure don't.

Everybody is screwed, everywhere.

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[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago (5 children)

People who own second and third homes aren't even the issue. It's mega corps that literally own tens of thousands of homes each. A better way to go about it is to just progressively tax people more per home. That second home gets taxed at the same rate but any home after is taxed way way way more. If someone can still afford it then that's fine, just more tax money coming in. That and don't let corps own rental properties.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago (9 children)

Nope, I said what I said. No one needs a second home. Lots of people need a first.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago (1 children)

In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don't own more than 1 though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I'm going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

basically tax it so much that anything beyond a third home is impossible to generate income from.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Logarithmic scale of increasing property tax rate

[–] [email protected] 4 points 11 months ago

Not sure if you actually meant logarithmic or exponential. An exponential tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot more in tax, while a logarithmic tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot less in tax. See x^2^ versus log~2~(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x^2^) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.

https://www.desmos.com/calculator/7l1turktmc

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

Yup. Housing is for people to live in, not for speculation.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (7 children)

How would you move? Need to time the buying and selling just right?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago

Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.

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