> People need houses to live in

I'm sure very few owners of multiples houses let them empty and not rent them out so that people can live in them.

Houses are expensive, even outside their speculative value, in terms of raw materials, workmanship etc. So expensive that few people can afford to buy houses with cash.

If someone is paying that cash to build a house, then offering it for an affordable rent so that other people can live in them, they are providing a valuable service.

as I posted somewhere else as well: https://www.fastcompany.com/90305242/taxing-empty-apartments...

There are lots of vacant homes. Foreign buyers are pushing their wealth to the west to protect it from their own governments.

So yes, another strategy to lower housing costs is to reign in foreign ownership.

This is an example of ridiculous government overreach. Should fit right in for California.

Exactly my thought. This isn't about needs, it's about economic rights. If I can afford two homes and choose to buy them, I'm within my rights to do so. Attempting to limit the rights of people isn't going to go very well.

I think access to shelter is a human right. I think access to an empty house is not a human right.

If your family sits down for dinner and one person gobbles up all the food before anyone else eats, were they within their rights? Will the rest of the family ever invite that person to dinner again?

No. We implement these controls on consumption in all areas of life. "Limit 2" when there's a coupon, for example. "All you can eat" restaurants don't allow take home and sometimes charge you for what you do not actually eat.

We must limit the wealthy's ability to consume all the goods so there are goods left over for people who need to live in them.

How does this not make sense? Why do you think it's better that someone owns 2 houses leaving 1 without a home, than two families owning 2 homes (one each).

Isn't that a better world?

No, because there's nothing requiring people to live in the Bay Area. They can live in other, cheaper locales. You do realize there's an entire continent out there, don't you?

If lesser-paid people would just leave the area, leaving that area without service workers (or having to pay ridiculous wages for them, driving prices way up for the wealthy homeowners there), the problem will solve itself.

That's not actually what happens though. Ask someone trying to staff a restaurant how easy it is to find employees.

Basically the service industry just ... evaporates. I've seen it happen in areas with a lot of foreign ownership.

What are you getting at? Are you saying that restaurants won't pay their staff very high wages to entice them to commute for several hours, and that the restaurant will go out of business?

How exactly is this a problem?

Too bad for the restaurant owner, but he can re-open in a place where he can hire staff more easily.

Why does the Bay Area need restaurants? If the wealthy homeowners there don't want any lowly restaurant staff living around them, then why should they have any restaurants?

> I think access to shelter is a human right.

Products and services can't be human rights.

This is truly one of the most Hacker News comments I have ever seen, calling a home a product and service.

I guess I'm flattered, but you understand the point, right? If you have 'rights' to a product or service (i.e. something that requires another person to work for you in order to satisfy) then you effectively have 'rights' to their labor and goods, also known as slavery.

Not sure why you would be flattered. Hacker News comments are just YouTube comments with right-libertarianism and a thesaurus in the mix.

That's simply not true.

It's drastic. I'm not taking a position either way because I don't know enough about the tradeoffs. But it's really bad out there, particularly here in SF; maybe worse than you realize.

When mobs of zombies start shuffling out of the Pacific and swarming coastal cities, you call the National Guard and impose martial law, "government overreach" be damned. And when things reach this level of dysfunction in the housing market, it is appropriate to start rationally examining practices we've always taken for granted in the past like unfettered real estate investment.

It's my opinion that if the proposed resolution is to strip people of their rights, then the resolution isn't worth the brain power used to discuss it.

I don't really want to get drawn into this because – again – I don't have an opinion one way or the other, but I have to point out that just because you're able to do something today doesn't mean it's automatically a "right" that needs to be "stripped" from you. We adopt reasonable legislation all of the time which restricts legal activity in various ways. When the SEC issues guidance on some little-known regulation that affects the way that hedge funds are allowed to account for certain trading costs, nobody worries that important rights are being eroded. Their investment activities will be a little bit more restricted, but they have tons of money anyway and they have plenty of other options. Maybe you can see by analogy why I wouldn't be terribly impressed by owners of multiple California properties crying about their rights if some reasonable light-touch restrictions were added that slightly threatened their future revenues.

Yes I've noticed that many times people don't feel the need to defend other people's rights because it wouldn't also affect them directly.

I would be forced to sell many pieces of property I do not want to sell if my ideas were implemented.

I don't think it's my right to own all that. I don't need it. Someone else does. Unfortunately, they can't afford it and I can. Doesn't make it right.

You definitely have rights to your property, it's one of the most important ideas established in the Constitution.

It's also your right to give that property away if you like.

You need to consider the difference between something being right and something being a right.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_property

Article 23 of the declaration states: “Every Person has the right to own such private property as meets the essential needs of decent living and helps to maintain the dignity of the individual and of the home.[10]”

-- This is not the case with real estate in America. It isn't dignified.

Buying something is not a right. It's a privilege. You can't buy drugs. You can't buy lots of things. It's not "life, liberty, and the right to buy stuff." It's "the pursuit of happiness" which clearly is an inalienable right that is being taken from people.

It's no different than a bully on the playground taking the ball from a weaker kid. They both have a right to play with that ball, right? The bullying force just comes from a bank account -- that's all.

No, we shouldn't allow financial bullies to run rampant either.

Property rights are the foundation of the US. Calling it a privilege is a complete misunderstanding of history. We are not serfs subordinate to a lord. We are not comrades subordinate to a politburo. We are citizens. As it was written in its early form, we believe in life, liberty and property.

You're fine then with one person owning all the property?

If they acquire it legally, then who are any of us to object?

If one person onws everything, he is de facto the government.

I don't see why it's the government's job (at state/federal levels) to fix a local problem like this.

If anything, I think if the state government is going to do anything, it should help service workers relocate to more affordable places and find good work there. Let the Bay Area real estate market collapse.

It's a chicken/egg problem. The jobs are in the cities. The population density in other areas makes it even harder. People move to the cities for jobs because there aren't any where they are from.f

Incorrect. Yes, the jobs are in the cities, but there are many other cities besides the Bay Area. In most other cities, lower-paid people (e.g. service workers) are able to find places to live. What we're talking about here is a problem mostly unique to the Bay Area.

I'm simply advocating that all the service workers relocate to other cities. I live in the DC area; there's tons of restaurants and other businesses here where service people work, and while housing is relatively expensive, we don't seem to have the problems with it for lower-paid people that the Bay Area has.

I don't think multiple-home-ownership is the driver of the housing crisis. In my neighborhood in San Francisco, most homes are either owner-occupied or being rented out by the owner that owns one other house. So are you suggesting that the problem is solved in my neighborhood?

Yes, I'm suggesting my proposal would solve the problem in your neighborhood. If you reduce the demand for something, the price falls. My suggestion clearly reduces demand for something, thus due to the laws of economics, prices will drop.

The thing is, my observation is true about the broader housing market in the Bay Area. Most homes are not homes owned by individuals with multiple homes. And at worst, they're homes on the rental market, and so still help to meet housing demand. Vacant houses are such a small fraction of the housing stock, that even if all of them were full of resident owners, the price problem would still exist.

The data suggest otherwise: https://www.fastcompany.com/90305242/taxing-empty-apartments...

To expand further why I think you haven't made a good argument: if high vacancy rates are the problem, and the Bay Area has especially low vacancy rates, why is the Bay Area the least affordable region in the US? High vacancy rates are obviously not the cause of the housing crisis. Maybe you can make the argument that high vacancy rates _coupled with something else_ is the problem, but you don't seem to be making that argument -- and the "something else" is probably the more important factor anyway, since SF doesn't have high vacancy rates.

The bay area has a high concentration of wealth where average salaries are almost twice the rest of the country. Programmers there make $300,000 or more. That's a doctor or lawyer in other areas of the nation.

I don't think high vacancy rates are the problem, I think they are a symptom.

Most of the people in this thread are only looking at the bay area from the past dozen years or so. In 2002, the picture was much different. In 1999, it was the opposite of 2002.

When you've lived in an area for decades, you can pick and choose where and when you buy. If you just moved there for a job, you're stuck without that time diversification and leverage ladder used by the folks who have lived there for a long time and accumulated many properties.

No, the data does not suggest otherwise. I won't be surprised if Vancouver is very different from San Francisco, which has extremely low vacancy rates.

https://sf.curbed.com/2019/3/21/18276227/vacancy-rate-san-jo...

The subtitle of that article is "But that still leaves more than 100,000 Bay Area homes empty"

So, yes -- it does.

This is a lower rate than elsewhere in the US.

There are fewer than 10,000 homes for sale in the SF Metro area. That means, there are 10x as many homes vacant as are for sale.

If there were 10x as many homes for sale as are currently for sale, what do you think that'd do to the price of homes in the area?

Source: https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/02/14/the-bay-area-has-more...

> limiting the number of houses a person can own

So your plan is to outlaw ..... renting??

Why?

No. It's to outlaw the purchase of more than 2 pieces of real property. Renting is fine by me.

In order to rent, you need to rent from someone. If everyone can own at most two pieces of real property, that means that at most only half the population can rent, because the property owners will live in one home, and will rent out the other (well, sure, some will rent out rooms in their primary residence).

In reality, half of the population will not want to (or be able to) own two properties (and many will not even be able to own one), so you end up with a nominal amount of home ownership, a very tiny rental market, and a bunch of people who both can't afford homes and have nowhere to rent because of the aforementioned very tiny rental market.

SO... the only way someone can rent a "house" is to rent a room in one that is currently occupied? There would be not SFR rentals if you limit ownership to 1.

May I suggest you think this through a bit more carefully?

My ideas are well thought out. What is confusing you?

I personally own many pieces of real property. This law would affect me too. I'm actually one of the wealthy who think what we are allowing to happen is wrong.

Not just limiting but banning people that don't live in the country more than 70% of the time from living here. We n2eed to ban foreign investment.

If a real estate agent in Australia helps a foreign buyer buy a house in Australia, it's a $400,000 fine, iirc. We are talking about stiff penalties.