Housing is such a big problem. And a collective thing.

The key to solving it is to make sure everyone is focused on affordable housing.

Once you got a impactful part of society focused on something else, for example extracting rent - you've lost.

That's why Germany managed to create a working, affordable housing system after ww2.

And that's why Israel, in it's early years, managed to do the same, and offer affordable housing to everyone,while working under dire economic situation.

I think the solution is clear. Legalize tall buildings. Requiring someone to own or rent thousands of square feet of land to get access to hundreds of square feet of housing is guaranteed to lead to shortages.

And abolish prop 13 in California and other tax pyramid schemes ? Especially for entities that are not people.

I wonder why even with a super majority, Dems still haven’t raised split-roll for removing prop13 for corporations.

A very good question!

Land value taxes. What's better than legalizing tall buildings, is incentivizing tall buildings.

correct me if I'm wrong but I heard it's very difficult to find any short term transitory housing in Germany, I had heard that short leases / rentals were 2 year terms. This makes it a lot harder to move into an area and decide where you want to live which in turn makes mobility more difficult.

However this info may be out of date / incorrect.

we need housing to be affordable (for everyone), not affordable housing.

So I pay a few thousand a month; it's cheaper than the few thousand the owner paid back when that was the price (it's only a notional "million" in capital because they bought it decades ago for a few low thousands.)

In exchange for my illusory benefit of paying "only" a few thousand every month, I get:

- To keep the remaining 30% of my salary (as ever rising rents creep past 70% of take-home).

- Enjoy the 10% yearly rent raise.

- No security, can be kicked out any time (it happens every few years, sometimes a week before Christmas).

- No permission to paint anything.

- Forbidden to have pets of any kind. Could move, but can't find anywhere within commuting distance that allows pets and is in the same price bracket.

- Can't change anything structural, like a window for a nicer one.

- Can't change the locks to something I'd like.

- Can't try out the fancy new home control tech (Nest etc)

- Can't fit solar panels, even if subsidised by a power company, as the offer is only to homeowners.

- Forbidden to "run a business" from home (it says in the contract), and forbidden to register a company at my home address.

- No guests allowed to stay over longer than X days.

- When I hit retirement age and soon after that run out of money, I'll be evicted and homeless, because pension isn't enough to pay the rent, and rent is rising faster than inflation anyway. State benefits exist for pensioners, but the housing component intended to cover rent is widely known to be less than real rents.

So fair enough, I avoid buying somewhere with a million in capital.

Instead I spend more than a million in rent over a working lifetime. Sure would have been nice to live in a stable home during it, to enjoy the freedom to do what I want in the home, and to stay there at the end.

this all depends on the countrys laws. in germany you can't be evicted even if you fail to pay your rent. the landlord has to go through a lot of effort before they can kick you out.

also, the landlord has NO right to enter the property unless there is an emergency, and even then they may have to break the lock to do it because the lock may be changed, and the landlord may not have any keys.

we also did replace windows in one place we lived, and completely rewired the electricity (which included putting new pipes into the walls to hold the wires). it was an old building, and the change was made in consultation with the landlord, but there is no reason it can't be done.

apart from that any change that doesn't change the structure and stability of the house is possible, and any change that an easily be reversed in most cases doesn't even need permission of the landlord.

in another apartment we added a hardwood floor on top of the floor that was there. a sheet of foam and the hardwood on top. for the first room we paid a contractor, for the others we did it ourselves.

if my pension is not enough the government will chip in with housing allowance to make sure i can pay my rent. at worst they will ask me to move into a smaller home if i happen to occupy a place large enough for all my kids who have long moved out and no longer need the space.

i won't be living on the street and i enjoy the freedom to move whenever i like without being tied to a particular location.

also, being a landlord and renting out your property in germany is so onerous that it's not worth it unless you are doing it as a full time business.

that adds a further point in favor of renting because you can't just buy a property and rent it out without putting a major effort into maintenance and paying for upkeep.

finally, as long as you own property you generally don't qualify for financial support, should you ever need it

it's all a matter of perspective.

I guess the question is are you willing to concede that you owning a home is incompatible with you living in SV?

I personally don't live in SV and don't expect to.

My experiences are in various places, all outside the US, and some of them in "ordinary" towns that don't have unusually high prices.

Besides, where I am, renting is often more expensive than buying, at current mortgage rates. (It was the other way around when I looked into it about 17 years ago).

House prices are going up for buying and renting in tandem, with some lag either way depending on area. Do renters get a better deal as a result of those rising prices? I don't think so.

Why not buy then, you say? The gatekeeper for most people is limited access to mortgages, not the cost, because perversely they pay more in rent than they would on a mortgage for the same place, and to rub salt in the wound, the money they pay in rent consistently for years is ignored for the purpose of assessing their creditworthiness and affordability.

Not that opening that gate would help for long, because prices would adjust upwards if more people obtained access to mortgages, but it is still perverse when we describe buying as an unreasonable aspiration in an area, when people are paying more in rent than the cost of buying.

That's odd, because I know many (including myself) that own property in SV and other high-expense cities on the West Coast.

So I don't think that's true.

My post was directed at the long-winded rant that seemed to boil down to "I can't afford a home in SV," not everyone in general.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking may help you understand the parent comments train of thought

In steeply appreciating markets, those people didn't tie up a million dollars. Just five or so years ago, a million dollar house sold for $500,000 (in some markets).

A steeply appreciating market is either an indication of a bubble or that the previous valuation of assets was highly inaccurate. They're market inefficiencies that, sure, people will try and arbitrage, but they're not the norm... except that the housing market is really weird due to the incredible illiquidity and non-divisibility of assets.

And maybe only put $25,000 down....

I think GP meant letting (although that would have the same effect).

It his gateway to having the Government own all property and no private ownership of land.

Having the option to rent is a gateway to having the government own all property? You're going to have to explain your logic a bit, because so far your position sounds ridiculously wrong.

I think they were talking about the GP's hypothetical scenario, where renting would be llegal.

So the claim is that verisimilitude's suggestion, that renting would be illegal, is a gateway the government owning all property and private ownership being illegal? I don't see how it's reasonable to suppose that would be the result. I also don't see how MagicPropmaker thinks that's what verisimilitude was thinking.

Am I missing something?

[Edit: I mean, I can see that renting being illegal is a restriction on use of property. That's a long distance from private property itself being illegal, though, and I don't see any reason to suppose that would be the end result - either the desired end result or the actual one.]