Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by tshaddox on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:43PM
(#30726601)
> My perspective is that a necessity of life (land) has started bumping up against the limits of nature. Population has drastically increased, and for various reasons such as increased access to information, economic agglomeration, etc, certain areas of land are in far more demand than others relative to supply.
I think this is another all-too-convenient scapegoat, similar to "we just need more houses." I would again suggest that perhaps the problem really truly is that people are using houses as collectibles rather than as places to live.
Re:How Zillow's homebuying scheme lost $881M
by lotsofpulp on Friday March 18, 2022 @03:49PM
(#30726670)
As an illustration of how different the supply/demand situation is across the US, see this data:
https://www.redfin.com/news/?p=73975
All the data I see does not indicate that people are buying regular houses as collectibles in hot markets. There is simply that much demand and basically no supply, especially in western cities. I do not have hard data on how many of these sales are owner occupied or not, but from personal experience over the past 10+ years, none of these neighborhoods seem empty for part or all of the year.
My perspective is that a necessity of life (land) has started bumping up against the limits of nature. Population has drastically increased, and for various reasons such as increased access to information, economic agglomeration, etc, certain areas of land are in far more demand than others relative to supply.
Allocating scarce resources (sufficient land to have a detached single family home and a driveway) in such a scenario will always lead to some people getting what they want, while others do not.
Some options are (not exclusive to these)
-letting certain classes of people have higher priority than others (such as California’s law that keeps property taxes artificially low for those who were there before others)
-letting the amount of money determine who gets to live where, due to increasing house prices and commensurate increases in property taxes.
-changing zoning laws so that areas are modified from low density to high density housing, increasing the supply. This one causes various knock on effects, hence it is fought against in popular places that have reached its limits under the existing scheme (such as Bay Area and SFH)
There are no options where no one has to sacrifice. The investment vehicle aspect of land is negligible and more of a consequence of the extreme variations in demand of land in different regions.