• morrowind@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I mean it’s a free market, it’s not reasonable nor desirable to proactively prohibit all possible bad scenarios

      edit: to anyone downvoting, read carefully

      • Garbanzo@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        That’s a really good point. I should be able to buy some people since it’s a free market and it’s just impossible to curb exploitation.

        • distantsounds@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Now are downvoting because: What they said isn’t true… Disagree with what was said… Missed that they are pointing out a free market does not give a fuck about you; unless you are profits…

      • paddirn@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I was just saying that as I was about to send my 6-year old out to the corner store to go buy some cigarettes for me, since our free market hasn’t imposed any restrictions on that transaction.

        Or if you look at the housing market specifically, in my area at least, I can’t buy a second home in the same area as an individual. I can buy investment properties that I’d need to rent out, but I’m forbidden from owning a second residence for myself.

        State, Local, and Federal lawmakers are constantly proactively prohibiting bad scenarios. And in this case, it wouldn’t even be proactive, it’s literally something that’s going on right now that needs corrected.

        Homes are for people.

      • shalafi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Gods yes. We can’t predict every sort of bad behavior in the market, only react. Bunch of arm-chair quarterbacks in here, “We should have seen this coming!” Watch 10 people tell me exactly how we could have.

        And on this issue, it’s high time to react. Doubt it will happen. :(

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY’RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.

    • Bonskreeskreeskree@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Remember that Blackstone and the other institutions are only financing it. These companies have names; like American Homes/AMH, invitation, opendoor and so on. There are a lot of them and they are all given billions to go buy as many houses as they can get their hands on… essentially bottomless pockets. And those are just the large ones. There’s plenty of people churning 100s of homes and letting property management companies do all the work, financing new deals with existing rentals as leverage.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?

      Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that’s been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There’s no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you’ll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.

      So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you’re going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.

      • Wutangforemer@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        The solution is to make hoarding rental properties an unattractive investment. Put an escalating tax on owning multiple residences. If the 5th property is at 40% tax every year it’s no longer a money maker in a competitive market. Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest. Now you have buyers back in the market and landlords looking to sell.

        • calypsopub@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Excellent suggestion. I don’t mind people having a second home or a couple of rentals, but more than that is just greed.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest.

          Or just use it to construct new multi-family units that are sold at cost of construction.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          One big monopoly looks no different to the consumer than a cartel of mid-sized dealerships. You’re not fixing the underlying speculative demand issue, just changing the number of participants in the speculative racket.

      • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yes it would be better. Monopolies are bad. Near monopolies are bad. The more market power a company gains the more they can charge for no reason at all except “fuck you pay me”.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Monopolies are bad.

          Cartels are equally bad. Unless you change the economic incentives in home building and real estate speculation, you are - at best - changing the discrete number of people who get to participate in the profiteering. I don’t particularly care if one national guy or fifty state guys get to ratchet up my housing prices. Big Number Goes Up all the same.

      • DrMango@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        There WOULD be more suburbs to develop if we were allowed to work remotely. I would gladly move to the developing suburb of bumfuck-nowheresville if I could go there and keep my job, but I have to stay within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest metropolis.

      • postmateDumbass@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        So preying on the victims of the growing wealth innequality and income gap. That will surely accelerate the decline of civilization.

      • Arbiter@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Well said, people think that making certain companies go poof will suddenly resolve issues for a long time, without thinking about resource availability, the circumstances which led to the sutuation and the customers who enable them.

        • Maggoty@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Which is the exact reason the government is supposed to step in when there’s this kind of excess in the sector. Especially regarding a need like housing.

  • penquin@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Capitalism and its endless profit motive should never be near the things that have direct effect on people’s well-being and livelihood. All the human basic necessities should be capitalism free, housing, healthcare, education… etc… If you want to built a better and healthier nation of course, but no one cares about the nation, money is above everything to these sick fucks.

  • Mobiuthuselah@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    How does this limit a corporation from doing the same thing?

    So a hedge fund doesn’t do it, but a specific company does the same thing and that’s fine. What am I missing?

  • 👁️👄👁️@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    If we actually had a democracy, there would be a total of 0 people against this. It’s so incredibly unfavorable to want corporations to buy houses for profit.

    • n3m37h@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      They’re trying to get it passed, I doubt people sitting in on that vote would shoot themselves in the wallet?

    • girlfreddy@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Because they saw an opportunity to fuck America again after imploding Wall St in 2007-08.

      Rampant unfettered capitalism only cares about the money they can make, never about the people’s lives they destroy.

  • SCB@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is, according to David Howard, the chief executive of the National Rental Home Council, a trade association. The country needs anywhere from 2 million to 6.5 million units of new housing, according to various estimates.

    “Policies really need to be shaped and crafted so that they support the production, investment and development of new housing,” Mr. Howard said. “I think bills that work against that ultimately are just going to perpetuate the challenges we’re already facing.”

    While I certainly disagree with this person on some of their specifics, and don’t necessarily agree with the “teeth” of this bill (10k per home owned isn’t that much in the grand scheme of things, and can just be priced in to an already out-of-control market), seeing a trade organization argue for the actual long-term solution bodes really well for the future of solving the housing crisis.

    • RaoulDook@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      That’s crazy that they say we need more housing when there are so many empty houses sitting on the market from corporate real estate investing and other house flippers. “Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is” really sounds like the guy with gasoline and matches in hand saying “it wasn’t me” at the scene of an arson fire.

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        A lack of housing is very explicitly our problem. Houses that are empty are not unowned.

        Until housing is no longer seen as an investment, which can only happen if we are allowed to build sufficient housing, housing will continue to go up in value, and thus more people will invest

        Anyone who sees their home as their “nest egg” is part of the problem.

        • prole@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Until housing is no longer seen as an investment, which can only happen if we are allowed to build sufficient housing

          It can happen through legislation.

        • HandBreadedTools@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          So you build 500,000 new homes and blackstone or other companies buy 450,000, meaning you only actually generated 50,000 new homes. No, corporate interests are the vast majority of the problem with housing. Your neighbor renting out their house after buying a 2nd isn’t the issue.

          • SCB@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Assuming some large capital group buys all those homes, they’re going to do it to try to make money off of it.

            More supply means lower prices

            • Katana314@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              Constraining supply, either by not building, or by buying everything available, means higher prices, so they don’t have to sell as many houses to make the same revenue.

              • SCB@lemmy.world
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                1 year ago

                Gonna go ahead and throw out that people whose job it is to make said revenue saying that selling more makes them more revenue makes this not track

    • Billiam@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      The head of an organization that represents landlords is advocating for building more houses. Now why do you think that is?

      • SCB@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Because they want to build more to make more money.

        Please explain how this is a bad thing? This is rental org explicitly stating that the lack of supply is hurting their growth and profit.

        That means they believe that the supply/demand curve is so out of whack that cheaper housing will make them more money.

        This is absolutely and 100% a win-win.

        • Billiam@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Because I believe, in general, landlords are a bad thing.

          This guy is getting priced out of the market by big money hedge funds the same way he prices out families looking to buy their single homes. Making housing “affordable” by increasing the supply of new houses disproportionately benefits the wealthy. After all, if you have $100 million you want to spend on property ownership, would you rather buy one hundred $1 million properties, or one thousand $100,000 properties of the same size?

          You want to make housing affordable? Stop letting parasites like these buy dozens of houses.

          • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
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            1 year ago

            Making housing “affordable” by increasing the supply of new houses disproportionately benefits the wealthy.

            • Arbiter@lemm.ee
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              1 year ago

              Some people need to imagine how they can get cheap thingies while the people who they bought from still make a profit. Does this matter? With cheap houses they will have many children which will push for more houses until either the earth becomes just houses or their demands are squashed and they become sardines.