This story is being repeated across countries and cities.
It really is high time there is some serious regulation around home ownership, especially as an investment vehicle.
I would even say this is an existential issue for our current civilizational model - the unaffordability of housing is contributing to demographic decline globally.
Too bad most people forgot about this book. It was a bestseller and all the famous economists knew about it and praised it. Even Leo Tolstoy 3000 miles away.
> It really is high time there is some serious regulation around home ownership, especially as an investment vehicle.
Occupancy taxes would be a very good start--especially if applied aggressively to investment holders (resident owners aren't really the problem) who can't demonstrate that they live in a space.
It's a lot harder calculation to hold a space unoccupied in the hope of getting better rent if you're staring down a nice big bill for a place being unfilled. It would also cut down on the whole AirBnB idiocy if you don't automatically classify that as occupied.
Suddenly, you will have housing owners aggressively hunting for residents.
I don’t get the impression that there are tons of residential housing units sitting empty in high demand areas (excluding seasonal vacation areas, trophy properties of the rich, and stuff caught in rebt control purgatory)
AirBnB "investment properties", for example, are still clogging up a lot of areas that have tourist flows.
Some of the residential apartment units, for example, are playing pricing games with rental prices vs occupancy because they can blame it on "pricing software" right now.
Ehh, take San Francisco there are like ~6,000 Airbnb listings (let’s assume they’re all dedicated spec properties) if you put those all on the market, that’d be like be like 1.5 months of inventory, you might make a dent that month, but you’re not moving the needle…
I think in the case of property, multiple supply/demand equilibriums are possible.
Land is a finite resource and rents way exceed mortgage repayments. I think there is a way to encourage the supply of rental in a scenario where they hold less quantities of land.
Small city resident checking in here, 1br apartments are going for $1500/mo on average here, and we're considered an extremely affordable place to live. The average person I know carrying a mortgage has a payment below that for much more living space.
What I would say we're missing is condominiums in the city center. Lots of apartments, fewer places to own in the inventory of downtown housing.
Great. So now I will have to pay higher rent to cover this ridiculous tax. "Then you can buy a house" you will say. But I don't want to. I just want to rent, and I don't want to be forced into buying just because other people are consumed by envy whenever they see a landlord making money.
People usually own multiple properties (outside of main home/vacation home, at least) to rent them to others. So they will just pass that cost to their renters, and make rent more expensive.
Although I guess there could be some number of properties where that becomes untenable as well.
If they could simply "pass that cost to their renters" why wouldn't they just raise rents to that level now, absent any tax increase?
The point of this progressively increasing tax would be to raise the landlord's costs to the point where the market actually cannot bear a rent increase--which would disincentivize using the property as an investment.
Presumably it's a coordination problem. If everyone raises rent you can too. If your rent is abnormally high you'll either have a hard time finding tenants or get abnormal tenants.
But in this scheme, not every landlord will have the increased tax and thus need to raise rent--only the ones with many properties. So that behavior becomes disincentivized.
It encourages supply and liquidity in the market. Individuals will see an opportunity to undercut the large investors if they're hoarding property, so will build new property if they can't get their hands on existing properties. And if it is no longer feasible they're likely to sell rather than hoard for property appreciation.
Quantity and value of properties. Which also means a wealth tax. To be clear I'm 100% in favour of this.
The current economic trickle-up system is starting to cause serious problems. Large sections of populations everywhere are increasingly shut out of the capitalist system because they do not have ANY access to capital.
But does it matter? The way housing problems were always fixed was very simple and without any kind of tax: with the government building social housing, allocated according to social principles (you pay the same, but the size of the apartment is determined by the number of kids you have). A LOT of non-luxury housing. This has nearly stopped. These buildings were famously bad. First, they tended to be unfair and violate building codes, they were government projects (ie. cost a lot more than a luxury housing development despite being much worse), and since houses got allocated by the government to vulnerable groups, they tended to have safety issues in the first few years they existed.
But they fixed housing. A decade or so after they were built and things became somewhat stable around them.
The problem with tax, and any kind of economic system is very simple. Capitalism and communism, and the more creative options like mercantilism or militarism, we can argue about them for a long time, but fundamentally they divide up existing properties. Nothing more. We can use these systems to choose WHO is homeless, but they cannot lower the number of homeless.
I agree. Its not a problem free solution but its the only one that seems to be effective at reducing homelessness and increasing affordability.
Post WW2 in the UK the gov't built a lot of social housing that was successful. Sure there were some failures too (eg tower blocks), but I believe those were built much later.
I thought the vacant homes were in the "thousands", let's say 10k, for a city like New York. Most of these are uninhabitable. I mean, it's sad and public and horrible, but it certainly isn't going to solve homelessness. They're a drop on a hot plate.
Who wants to rent? I imagine most would opt to own instead. Rent is certainly far higher than a mortgage would be, which makes little sense if you're trying to encourage ownership (as often is the story about the american dream)
- deal with selling my investment every time I move
And that includes me. I want to rent. I want the landlord to take care of all that crap for me. And I'm tired of all these people complaining about it.
Yes, a nonprofit group running/developing a housing area and renting to its members is much nicer than having to own at least a condo and then dealing with a bunch of bank/lawyer/realtor nonsense every time you want to move.
I don't want to be a member of a non profit housing group. Sounds like an HOA but made worse by the sanctimony and lack of incentives of people who work for non profits. I just want to hand over my money to a landlord and not think about it. My only considerations are what I pay and what I get in return. How much the landlord is making isn't at all relevant to me.
That won't fix anything. Many rentals are apartment buildings and are built/owned by large companies. You would effectively make the situation worse because individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing if they're only allowed one unit.
Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide. They also have different tax treatment.
> individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing
Who exactly has (a) enough money to build an apartment block and (b) not enough to put it in a corporate wrapper? (Admittedly the wrapper problem is a serious issue for any kind of rationing!)
> Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide
Best of both worlds: cooperative rental companies. Renters control everything collectively as a non-profit. They employ the custodian(s) and vote on what to invest any excess capital into. With this it means you're only paying as much as needed to maintain the buildings, your utilities, and saving up for larger renovations.
I've lived in multiple apartments organized like that, and frankly it beats every corporate/individual landlord I've been attached to.
The world has survived most of its existence without needing holiday lets.
Because it has hotels.
Hotels that do not take up residential properties and pay appropriate taxes, etc. and prevent overtourism whixh has become one of the biggest issues in most tourist places.
You can eliminate holiday let’s and the world will do just fine. Any legitimate loss will be minor.
Exactly. There are some places in the world that only rich people able to purchase multi million dollar houses should be allowed to be. We'll allow a few proles in to work for us and put them in subsided housing away from us so they know their place.
The only problem is these pesky single digit millionaires thinking they can somehow come here to our neighborhood for a month. I paid good money to live here so I wouldn't have to be around those upjumped peasants, but now airbnb rentals are letting them in by the thousands and ruining it. If you can't pay $1000 a night for a hotel, you're not the sort that belongs here. We'll call it "overtourism" to make it seem like they're the problem and not our own insufferable snobbery.
I do think we still need to build more (correctly sized) housing, counteract urbanization, provide social housing, and I'm in favor of rent control in general. So don't get me wrong, I don't think progressive tax will solve the problem on its own. That being said:
Higher taxes could lead to higher rents, but that stops working once the supply of people willing to pay said higher rent is exhausted. At some point landlords won't be able to rent out their place with a profit, at which point you have 2 options: Leave it empty (which should also be illegal, IMO) or sell it (to people who would otherwise have to rent).
It could be that there is a potential never-ending supply of rich people wanting to pay rent to live in a place with ever-increasing rent and the gentrification that comes with it, but it seems unlikely to me.
In the Netherlands there were recently a set of tax changes increasing taxes on house ownership, which caused companies to sell apartments en mass. Housing prices dipped for a little bit, rent (in the private market) went up, but more people own their own place now. This is the direction you want to go, I think.
...or just build enough housing, that whoever wants to buy it, can buy it at some normal percentage above construction costs, and enough rental properties exist, that landlords have to lower the prices of rent to get someone to live there.
If you're stuck at a "pay way too much for rent" or "commute for 3 hours every day" choice, and if you don't take the too expensive apartment, there are 10 other people interested in it, it's a pretty shitty situation to be in... and here in Ljubljana Slovenia this is happening just now (college starting soon, students looking for apartments).
Leaving apartments empty is not worth it, since you still have to pay for monthly costs (power, water, heating, even if empty), and the only way to be worth it is, if the price of the apartment rises higher than the monthly costs.. and that is only true if (almost) no new apartments are being built. If we built enough new apartments the prices of used one would go down, making apartments a bad investments for speculators.
Yes let's trap people in apartments they can never move from and force newcomers to pay excessive rents to cover it. Also let's give landlords an incentive to try to make it as unpleasant for those long term tenants as possible.
And of course we will need an expensive and unaccountable bureaucracy to manage all the inevitable conflicts of interest. But it's a small price to pay to avoid the horror of building enough housing units to match population growth.
If you have enough realestate, there's no need for rent control, because landlords will have to lower prices to get anyone to stay in their apartments, and empty apartments are still a huge cost to the owner. High costs of rent and (buying) houses is because there's not enough supply in the first place.
That policy has been tried for 50 years and all we've seen (and the topic of this thread) is prices gone higher and higher, and properties become more and more consolidated under megacorporations.
50 years ago, this place where I live was a socialist country and we built HUGE apartment building neighbourhoods (literally thousands of apartments) + all the infrastructure needed (schools, kindergardens, stores, parks,...).
After 1991 all of this has stoped.
I don't know where you are from, but when was the last time you guys built a new neighbourhood for 10, 20 thousand people to live in? Because i've been all over both always-capitalist and former-socialist countries (mostly europe), and most of them are old with just a few newer buildings, mostly replacing the demolished old ones. It really doesn't matter, slovenia (my home), or germany... you see a bunch of large apartment blocks built in the same style, for many many people to live in, and you just know it was built somewhere between 1960s and late 1980s, and not after.
it should be noted that until the 1990s the population of vienna has actually been slowly declining (from 2 million more than 100 years ago to 1.5-1.6 million) and most projects before then were more likely needed because a lot was damaged in the world wars. but in the last few decades vienna has seen unprecedented growth, now reaching almost 2 million inhabitants again. consequently in the last 20 years several new building projects have been initiated. the ones i linked are just a few examples. i keep finding out about more as i search.
You're assuming the market will bear the higher rents. If that is true, why aren't rents already at that higher level? Not all costs can simply be "passed on to customers" if they won't bear the increase.
Single-payer. One government agency is permitted to purchase construction of additional units, and also manage the long-term rental (pricing set at auction) of those units in a rent-to-own model, where "own" means the right to live in that unit rent-free until you die, at which point control reverts to the government agency, combined with laws that forbid owning/renting multiple residences. Add in some allowances like giving neighbors right-of-first-rent so that rich people can combine units, some carveouts like keeping short-term hotels private, but basically, yeah, single-payer.
This is sort of how social housing used to work in the UK ("council houses"), but with additional restrictions on private ownership that are politically very hard.
> right to live in that unit rent-free until you die
This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees.
> This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees.
This is unfortunately a political requirement for passage. There are very, very few people 60+ who have lived in the same place for 20+ years who are willing to leave their houses, and most who do are dragged into nursing homes only because they are no longer physically capable of taking care of themselves.
The rent-to-own period can and should be quite long, like 30-40 years, similar to a mortgage. But the quality of "nobody can take my property away from me" is quite strongly felt, and not one that you can really take away from people. Any radical housing reform must respect that.
Wow! That's worse than the CCP. I thought that all these other ideas on this thread to basically make everybody buy instead of rent were bad. But to force everybody to rent from the government is literally the worst housing arrangement idea I have ever heard.
Taxation and regulation. Not very hard to limit who can buy property (forbidding large funds and overseas buyers, for instance), and how much taxes they pay on non-primary residences.
While I agree that landlords are vampires, that here is wrong:
> But there is a stack of research a mile high that shows that the number one thing we need is a lot more housing supply
There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2]. The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete.
The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid, no public transport, basic infrastructure from grocery stores over schools to basic healthcare has closed down, no high-speed Internet which is a necessity for modern life - and particularly the latter is a major contributor in rural flight, as employers move towards more urban areas, which sets off a vicious cycle as the people follow the jobs, and the remaining infrastructure becomes too expensive to maintain. That this neglect is a direct cause of people losing trust in democracy is just the icing on the cake (and again, this also contributes to rural flight as LGBT and women flee far-right areas in droves).
>The last thing the world needs is more housing construction, especially with the insane CO2 footprint of anything involving concrete.
That self imposed limit is exactly what keeps prices high. Every city has some run down areas that serve no purpose but are wasted space and could be turned into housing.
Also, as some others already said it, living in urban areas reduces your footprint versus living far away in the countryside so the CO2 released from dense urban building makes up for it from the scale of people living together compared to low density rural areas which cost more in maintenance, transportation, etc.
>There are millions of units vacant everywhere, be it the US [1] or Germany [2].
It doesn't help anyone if those vacant units are not where the jobs and education is, especially that 100% WFH is not even remotely(ha!) mainstream, but return to office has being normalized again in Germany, at best into hybrid arrangements so everyone still needs to live close to the office anyway. I can't carry that cheap rural house with me into the city where my job is.
>We need to invest into rural areas again.
Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids.
It could also cause a surge in birthrates and formation of new families. Instead we normalized living with roomates in your 30's, to work for some corporation who needs you in an expensive city with scarce real-estate, just to do stuff you can do from your laptop from anywhere.
We had a good thing going for a while in the pandemic(not the virus, deaths, social distancing, and all that) but the lack of car trips, lack of air and noise pollution, people taking their remote jobs back to live with their families, reduced immigration causing rents to plummet, touristic areas finally livable again, etc. But our dear leaders and their business overlords saw that and said "this is affecting our profits and GDP, we can't have that, we must go back to the way it was before!".
I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible. Some left it for a reason and not to get better internet.
And, at least in germany, many rural areas are not so unattractive. I know plenty rural villages with great internet. Especially in BW public transport is solid, the next bigger population center is close by and there are many jobs. It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.
Nobody said all rural areas are attractive places to live.
And yes, part of the problem nobody wants to go back isn't jus the "vibe" and lack of "hip culture, art scene and hipster cafes", but that basic infrastructure like good schools, teachers, hospitals, doctors offices and specialists, have been left to rot and they also moved out of the city(the younger generation) or just retired and died along with the town, so bringing all that back to life is nearly impossible as now it's a catch-22, nobody wants to move there because there are no good doctors and teachers, and there are no good doctors and teachers because there's nothing there.
>It's just conservative, culturally boring, inflexible and really set in their old ways.
But then we can't complain that the hip and open minded urban areas are too expensive when everyone runs away from the rural areas to the same handful of hip cities.
Maybe it's our duty as well to try and push for the change we want in those places, instead of always packing our bags and leaving for the cities that are livable on paper because they already share our mentality but in the process crowding them to the point where the stress around housing makes them unlivable in practice unless you're super wealthy.
this is not true across the bank. Of course if you're really deep into depopulated rural areas then there is really a lack of basic social services. But it's not that there's only high-density cities and deserted landscapes, there are still rural areas with schools and doctors. Rural areas that are doing comparatively well, somewhat maintain their population. Also, many cities with a lot of population growth also struggle to provide those services as there are not enough doctors or teachers for all, so you might be able find comparatively better schooling in the right rural areas.
In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of.
Rural is also more isolated and there's just strictly less to do. Fine if you want to spend most of your time inside your family circle or the same two people you grew up with. But some just can't cope with that.
>In some rural areas there's a really conservative, tight-knit mindset. A deep resentment for somebody different and a very specific world-view really dominating the area. This is not about hipster-cafes, but about some basic progress in society some parts just try to not be part of.
Boomers are like that almost everywhere. They vehemently reject the current status of realty and want only to live in their own version.
I told some Bavarian boomers a while ago that housing is unaffordable and they were insisting that's nonsense that we're all lazy that back then they could buy a house if they worked hard and saved, so I pulled out a ballpen and the beer coaster on the table, pulled out my phone with the property price numbers, the average wage numbers and the bank loan calculators to prove it to them with the napkin math on the beer coaster, and they were like "huh, I didn't know it was that bad, it expected it would be better today".
They just live in their own bubble refusing to do the basic research on how the world currently is, but instead try to strongarm everyone into their warped reality without caring that they might be wrong.
> I wouldn't return to more rural areas if 100% WFH is possible.
.....Then this isn't about you?
Not every solution has to be 100% perfect for every person. What FirmwareBurner suggests is a very good idea, and would unquestionably be helpful and attractive to many.
If you don't want to take advantage of it, then just...don't?
Cities also have vacant office space. It's likely more economical and greener to convert the existing building vs building new construction in the "wasted space".
I like the idea of what you describe for remote work. I'm not sure how effective that would be in the US. It seems many people want very specific amenities or locations. Or like one friend, they wouldn't move back just because of "all the druggies". I think at best, it would just slow the population decline in those areas. It would be better if the old rust belt cities had business and industry return physically. Not everyone can be a knowledge worker on a laptop - there needs to be some physical jobs too.
Office space is not good for apartments, because the floor plans are usually huge. WTC towers were (iirc) 63x63 meters large, if the rooms are 5x5 meters, you can only build usable rooms in the outer strip of the building, while the internal 53x53 square is usable only for storage, toilets and hallways, which don't require windows... and that's a huge waste of space
Well, what else are you going to do with the vacant building? Seems like it's a bigger waste not to. I guess we'll see how it turns out in NYC since they're proposing it right now.
This weeks 99% Invisible podcast is on this exact topic. The bottom line is that while it is technically possible, it is really expensive and only makes financial sense if you create luxury apartments that can charge the very highest levels of rent. Also the legal and regulation red tape is a massive problem making many projects impossible to do, even if on paper they might be viable. In most cases the most practical solution, after taking financial and regulatory considerations into account, is simply to leave the building empty and hope for a future upswing in commercial real estate.
Use it as commercial realestate, even if at cheaper price per square meter? I've seen enough louis rossmann videos to see the prices there, and bringing them down wouldn't be that bad.
While we could have more housing, construction is a problem, as, and especially in the US lately, it takes the form of faceless suburbs with an extensive sprawl destroying natural and agricultural lands.
It also promotes a car-centric and consumerist lifestyle, where shopping happens in malls, taking even more space. A better use of the current space would be much better than throwing more supply at the problem.
It's a catch-22. Companies move where the existing skilled labor pool already is.
I've seen cases where international companies invested in small collage towns here in Europe with big dreams of expansion, but it didn't work their way because they had trouble recruiting enough candidates to move there, as all the skilled candidates wanted to live in big metro areas with multiple competing companies in the same domain, not limit themselves to a single employer in the area.
Then the company tried training a lot of their staff by taking in skilled people willing to do a career change, and guess what, after 1-2 years, those trained employees left to the big city to work for a competing company for more money. So the company just packed its bags and left because if it has to pay big-city money anyway, it might as well just move directly to the big city in the first palce and not bother with the hassle of expanding in small towns.
Our present day capitalist system doesn't reward investments in small towns and small players because the big players and big cities end up skimming the cream off the smaller ones so it's all go big or go home, so all the investments booth from the private sector and the public sector are happening in the capital city which is now causing the masiv housing issue.
Build a university in a village with 20 inhabitants? Build a factory in a municipality with 360 inhabitants, where only ~30 are of working age (we have one of those in my country).
And even if you built it, all 6 empty houses would get rented out, there wouldn't be any more places for people to stay and housing prices would go up a lot.
> Germany and other countries could bring life back to rural areas if it mandated employers allow 100% WFH whoever possible as that would get a lot of people moving back to their hometown closer to their family especially if their family could help out with raising kids.
tl;dr: Germany needs to heavily improve its rural/suburbs/general internet connectivity to encourage WFH. It can be insanely frustrating getting anything resembling modern internet in some places.
Speaking on the German situation as I recently experienced that (100% WFH moving out of the city center). I was looking for a flat in a radius of 100km around a city and was very flexible with where I ended up. I had two must-haves: dedicated office (as in, a spare room) plus reasonably fast and stable internet. For (my) remote work anything >= 50Mbit VDSL (roughly 50 down/10 up) is workable. 250/40 was my minimum when searching. I narrowed it down to two solid choices I wanted to check out: 1) rural village of about 20-50 houses and 2) suburbs/300m from city border of a smallish (~50k people) city.
It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."). This combined with some other less than ideal things led me to discard 1).
When checking out 2) I found out they didn't connect the cable internet marked as available online ("It sits somewhere in the garden, we don't want to drill the house walls." Drilling the walls for the PV they put up before I moved in was fine...). But they had 250/40 VDSL available and I confirmed then and there that you get at least 100Mbit download.
I signed for 2) based on 100MBit+ VDSL plus liking the overall package (location, neighbors, landlord, flat). I could order 250/40, but two weeks later got a call that they could only offer me 16/1 (not a typo) due to "no available lines". I took that offer, because mobile network is either very expensive (Telekom 5G unlimited is 85€) or very unreliable (Telefonica 4G unlimited is 30€, but went down to 2MBit/s in some areas with full reception) and I needed at least some fallback connectivity. As a data point: Google meet can manage about 1 or 2 incoming video streams and spotty outgoing video at 16/1. I setup a multipath setup to combine Telefonica and the 16/1 land line.
It took me a better part of a month to finally convince support to send a technician out to address the problem that I was marked as offline in their system despite being connected. It turned out someone is blocking "my" line since about 3 years after moving out so I somehow can get a slow speed fallback, but nothing more. The technician belled out the line to the DSLAM, overrode the assignment and assigned the line "officially" to me. When we got talking he mentioned that he had to do the same "fix" the last time someone moved in and that he just expanded the DSLAM VDSL capacity. I had to wait about 30min for him to document that in the system and then order a faster connection before someone else snatches up that line. Which surprisingly worked out to a 250/40 landline finally.
In conclusion: it took me, a quite technical person who depends on the connection for work, about 2 months to get a workable landline after doing all possible due diligence before signing my lease. If I had not haunted support or got a less motivated technician, I would still be sitting here with blurry Google Meets. This is not how you motivate people to move back to rural areas. Based on my experience with 1) there are also problems the state can not tackle. If the landlords don't see the value in even letting a fiber provider lay a dark fiber in the basement, there is nothing the billions of digital infrastructure funding can do.
P.S. Beaming internet down from frigging space via Starlink costs less than Telekom 5G unlimited...
P.P.S. I know this is just a single data point, but the amount of locations I had to reject because of not even theoretical fast landlines was insane
EDIT to add: I am not even talking about 1GBit everywhere, just a floor of maybe 50/10 or even 100/20 (reliable!) so you can realistically WFH.
>It turned out 1) did not connect the fiber connection they could get (quite literally "I don't understand this and never needed it."
Older German rural people just don't care about anything resembling fast internet so the ISPs exploit that by gouging you. Especially since they do a lot of stuff by cash and snail-mail anyway.
Rural Switzerland or Scandinavia is way better digitized.
I get the sentiment "I don't need it", but I do not understand the lack of consideration when you are landlord. The whole Corona WFH rush has demonstrated that digital infrastructure is an asset. If you have decent internet, you can either WFH yourself or attract people in roles allowing for WFH to your rental property. While tech workers (higher chance of WFH) in Germany are paid nowhere close to US salaries, they tend to be above average earners. Not sure why landlords do not see this simple (to me at least) connection between future rent opportunities and digital infrastructure.
Also, it does not even need to be something the individual landlord needs to figure out. As GP stated, rural areas can benefit of WFH. So a clever local official can figure out they need to build out infrastructure and(!) convince local landlords and developers to take part in this transformation.
>but I do not understand the lack of consideration when you are landlord.
Because the landlord only thinks in RoI. He most likely thinks the cost and hassle of adding faster internet on his property will not reflect in an increased rent price he could charge, so why bother?
>attract people in roles allowing for WFH to your rental property
The pool of workers in Germany with 100% remote work allowance is much smaller than you think. Most companie went back to 100% in office or at best hybrid meaning you still need to live close to work anyway, and those few workers that do have 100% WFH are a rare pool of mostly SW devs that use remote work to travel or visit family, not live in some boring German village.
Until 100% WFH becomes normalized for all office workers, your landlord has nothing to worry about.
Yes, very few roles offer 100% WFH here, but if you only need to show up once a week tops in your office, you can tolerate a longer commute. So it might not make the most rural areas that much more attractive, but it widens the area around a city you can consider commuter area. For reference, this is mostly the model my mom works with, she is employed in the public sector. Of course, she commuted before WFH every day, so the location was fine for that already.
> those few workers that do have 100% WFH are a rare pool of mostly SW devs that use remote work to travel or visit family, not live in some boring German village.
Careful with generalizations, this was more or less my plan until I ran into the problems I posted above :)
>but if you only need to show up once a week tops in your office, you can tolerate a longer commute
Depends on your family situation. Sounds fine for couple with kids but most single and childless people still want to live in the big city close to their friends and support network.
Moving to the countryside could mean you get to live for cheap in a big house all by yourself, but it could also mean a crushing lonely depression if your closest friend is over 1h away and need to schedule meetings ahead of time instead of spontaneously meeting for a coffee in the neighborhood on the way back from work/gym.
actually with kids i want to live near the school. because while i could tolerate the occasional 1-hour commute to work, having kids needing to travel that far every day to get to middle or highschool is even worse. (primary schools and kindergarten are more likely to be local, so that's less of an issue)
because austria has a sparsely populated countryside with mountains, so while accepted i think it only affects a small number of people. i am pretty sure that not many more would want to do that.
No mate, I'm not talking about pupils living in remote villages in the mountains but those living outside of big cities. They usually have a 30 minute bus/train ride to the city plus another 30 minutes is the overhead time for the trip from home to the bus/train stop and then from the destination stop to the school means about 1h in total or sometimes more is absolutely normal here for pupils to commute via public transport per journey.
Which I guess explains the country's and employer's skepticism on remote work, everyone is so used to long commuting times their whole lives, they're desensitized to it and accept it for work as being the norm as well.
i understand that, and it would actually support my argument which implies that in less mountainous areas more people could be living away from the city.
The population is still growing, however you want to slice it.
> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid, no public transport, basic infrastructure from grocery stores over schools to basic healthcare has closed down
This narrative also works in the UK, but where the abandoned areas are mostly coastal. Seaside towns with no tourists and no fish. Ex-mining areas. And the same problem of people becoming more rightist as they become more resource-starved, preferring the solution of demonizing people they think shouldn't get resources rather than anything else.
Depends on the area. Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees. With adequate internet connectivity they can be perfect for remote workers.
>Lots of countryside areas have high unemployment statistically, but are actually very chill because there are so few people, and most of them are retirees.
Not true. Unemployment numbers don't account for retirees or children of school age or involved in education/trainings programs.
If an area has high unemployment it means only adults of working age not involved in any schooling, trainings or apprenticeship, who are able bodied to work but don't.
> And the same problem of people becoming more rightist as they become more resource-starved, preferring the solution of demonizing people they think shouldn't get resources rather than anything else.
Ironic, the post was about how people are starved for the resource of shelter. I didn't see you call anyone here out for "demonizing" corporations or individual landlords with many real estate investment properties.
I guess this criticism only applies to conservatives in rural areas with barely anything.
> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot
The problem is that rural areas don't pay their way. Rural areas only exist at the charity of the cities funding them.
If you want rural areas to thrive, you need to figure out how to make them economically viable. That means you need local production to be more cost effective than global production.
A good start would be having universal healthcare so hospitals in rural areas would stop closing. Another good start would be to start increasing taxes on imports and subsidizing some exports in order to balance the fact that the US has hollowed out labor by sending it overseas.
Alas, the same people who fight against universal healthcare and import excise taxes are also those who live in rural areas.
This is a chicken and egg problem. Reduce public services in rural areas, get population outflow, reduce public services even more.
You can stop the vicious circle by increasing the services back to make it attractive and at the same time densify rural cities to make them less costly to cater to.
This does not work. People live in rural areas because they don't want density. That is the whole point. (Alternatively, it might be because they are too poor to move. However, densifying/gentrifying an area does not fix that--it just boots people to a different poor rural area.)
You are trying to make rural areas viable by making them a city. You might as well just improve the situation in an already existing city.
People live in rural areas for a multitude or reasons. Not all rural towns are like in the US, some have streets, some are dense.
In Europe, a lot of the small towns are pretty dense, due to the historical need to preserve agricultural land and have a community to rely on[0]. In ex-soviet countries, you will often see in the countryside condominiums, as it was then seen as much more efficient and better community-wise.
So yes, if you densify rural towns to reduce sprawl, it becomes much easier to provide good services like doctors, groceries and schools.
> One of those things that sounds great until other countries apply it symmetrically and tax US exports.
This is fine. Really.
There is nothing wrong with every country being able to support themselves with their local economy.
I'm not saying to jack things up to 500%, but a general 5%-10% to make shipping cheap crap around the world have a bit more friction would be a good thing.
The goal is to make it economically viable to produce things closer to where they are consumed. And to only produce those things non-locally that have a genuine reason for being produced non-locally.
If what you care about is climate change, you should be in favor of cramming people into the smallest possible spaces in urban areas, not putting them in rural areas where they have to drive 20 minutes to get to the grocery store.
The carbon footprint of your average city dweller is far lower.
It's not only about climate change, most of the effects are to be seen on the biodiversity, the beauty of the countryside (yes, it's important), agricultural production and water supply, as concrete reduces a lot water absorbtion.
Lyme disease outbreaks can be attributed in part to the increase in rodents population, which is due to the urban sprawl and the increased difficulty for predators to hunt in suburban areas.
Public transport is only more environmentally friendly if people actually use it. Out where my parents live it was not uncommon to see busses driving for miles with 0-2 passengers. The problem was that providing good enough public transport that you didn't need a car at all is basically impossible. And since everybody had a car, the number of people that wanted to spend 60+ minutes taking a buss that went 3-4 times a day into town, instead of driving 30 minutes, was basically zero. They eventually cancelled the bus line since it was just too expensive and inefficient to run. The alternative of trying to provide a truly useful public transport service (say 2 buss lines running every 30 mintues) would have been extremely expensive and would have meant even more empty busses.
> The problem is that rural areas ("flyover states") have been left to rot: no reliable electricity grid,
I live in a flyover state in the US. Quality electricity is not a problem, save for areas that are Amish and simply don't use it. Even there, electricity is at the curb, it's just never been run to a home. On the telecom front, most rural areas have WISPs, mobile carriers (5g home internet isn't bad) or local telecom companies (DSL & Fiber) that have also solved this problem. It did take almost 20 years to solve the internet issue, and there are some rural homes that are located geographically where wireless won't work well, but on the whole things are a lot better than you are saying. The real issue in a lot of small towns is that the homes are old and often expensive to maintain, there's little entertainment and most importantly, jobs are still a problem. Between remote workers moving out of the city and the trend towards more onshoring of manufacturing, small towns in my state are starting to show signs of life, finally.
> that this neglect is a direct cause of people losing trust in democracy is just the icing on the cake
Not sure if you meant to say "icing on the cake" here because it comes across that you are celebrating people losing trust in democracy.
> Vermont, Maine, and Alaska have the highest vacancy rates—between 22% and 20%, according to the study.
So not really highly desirable metropolises. Places where most people actually want to live have low vacancy rates and not enough housing.
> We need to invest into rural areas again.
No argument from me there, even though it is less bang for the buck to invest in rural facilities. But doing that doesn’t preclude simultaneously relaxing zoning laws and whatnot that cause housing crises in cities.
It isn't just housing, it is also the medical system and education.
These things that basically everyone needs are not getting cheaper over time but are getting more expensive so that they vacuum up as much money as possible.
(And it looks like vehicles/transportation is going to go this way as well, with companies licensing all the software in the vehicles to customers on a yearly subscription basis)
Of course, if everyone's wages would rise X%, it will increase rents and real-estate prices accordingly, as those are always prices as high as the market would bear and the more disposable income the market has, the more it can bear price increases.
Housing is a fixed cost that everyone is required to pay. I can stop buying chicken. I can't stop paying for housing. There are peculiarities about housing as a "product" that make it nonsensical to compare to other products or markets. The housing market can easily increase prices as much as it wants without losing out on revenue or potential gains, and in many markets it has done so to the degree that millions of people are priced out or relegated to spending all their discretionary funds on it, as well as forcing them to reduce their food, heating and/or transport budgets.
There is no standard unit of housing. I currently rent a 2 bedroom apartment to myself. But if it got too expensive I could switch to a 1 bedroom or get a roommate. If it got even more expensive I could move in with my parents. If it got much cheaper, I might switch to a 3 bedroom.
We're not talking about some poor African country suffering form famine. Food affordability is not as big of an issue in the west compared to the cost of housing.
We have mastered agriculture, supply chain and economies of scale to have cheap mas produced food that can keep even the poor from starving(and even affording them enough calories to get fat if they wish), but we did the exact opposite for housing so we can monetize it.
By design, western housing doesn't have the same political and market dynamics that drive cheap food to also drive cheap houses.
Yes, food is more important for survival, but food is also much more abundant and much cheaper than housing, making it less of a concern. (in the west)
Food is much, much cheaper than housing. If push comes to shove, you can easily survive on <$50/month. You simply cannot scale back on housing as easy as that.
The problem isn't land owners it's landlords. Renting should be illegal and anyone caught accepting rent should lose his property to the renter.
Owning a lot of land/houses isn't really the problem. It's when you're not using them that's the problem. You should just sell and not leech on society by renting.
This opinion is out of some kind of fantasy land. What if I want to live in a place for 1 year, or even 6 months, then go somewhere else? What am I supposed to do, buy a place (paying 6% in fees), and then sell it again after 6 months, paying 6% again? How idiotic.
There's a reason people rent, and it's not because they can't afford a house.
I think this needs a bit more nuance. Renting because you can't afford to own is obviously a scam. Financially literate people don't tolerate this sort of thing with cars/furniture, but are put in a position with housing where we don't have a choice.
We don't tolerate it for cars and furniture because you can take them with you when you move. If I had to sell my car and buy a new one every time I moved, you can be damn sure I would rather rent one. And buying/selling cars is a lot easier than houses.
Another thing to consider is that houses come with a 6% commission to pay the agents. If I have to move a few years later, and can't sell the house for 6% more than I bought it, I have to take a capital loss.
Not to mention the people that choose to rent. We can argue over how much landlords deserve, but they should generally be providing a service as well - maintaining the property and shielding the tenant from some of the risk.
I wonder if in this hypothetical "no renting" scenario we'd see complete home maintenance service companies take their place. It would be an improvement - you can fire them without moving, but I don't think we could expect them to be any less exploitative than landlords are now.
Public/social housing. Vienna already does this.[1] Another example: in 2021 the city of Berlin acquired 15k units from corporate landlords bringing the total publicly-owned units to about 20% the total of rental units in the city.[2]
>Experts refer to Vienna’s Gemeindebauten as “social housing,” a phrase that captures how the city’s public housing and other limited-profit housing are a widely shared social benefit: The Gemeindebauten welcome the middle class, not just the poor. In Vienna, a whopping 80 percent of residents qualify for public housing, and once you have a contract, it never expires, even if you get richer. Housing experts believe that this approach leads to greater economic diversity within public housing — and better outcomes for the people living in it.
If I'm moving to a new city/country for a job (or university), I don't want to buy a place on day 1. I want to rent for a year or so to see if this is a place I actually want to live. This is even more true if I'm moving there on a shorter term contract.
It really is high time there is some serious regulation around home ownership, especially as an investment vehicle.
I would even say this is an existential issue for our current civilizational model - the unaffordability of housing is contributing to demographic decline globally.