this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (34 children)

Some of them might've not been able to (or wanted to) pay for the home ownership. But if this assumes someone not making profit was renting it out then yeah

[–] [email protected] 32 points 7 months ago (3 children)

The reason they're not able to pay for home ownership is because people buy homes to rent for profit. If poor people only had to compete on price with other poor people instead of with investors, house prices would go back to 20th century levels where you could buy one for 3x your salary.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 7 months ago (3 children)

They tried banning landlords in specific neighborhoods in Rotterdam.

It lead to gentrification.

The people who bought the units, on average, were more wealthy than existing renters, but less wealthy than existing owner-occupiers. Basically, it forced poor people out of that neighborhood, and replaced them with middle class people.

There's a lot of reasons why buying a house is expensive. In many places, it's less because of corporate landlords, and more due to population growth outpacing housing growth.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 months ago (2 children)

They could have easily solved that by pegging unit ownership to income.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (2 children)

Or, better yet, we could just build more units.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago

Or both. There is no reason to offer discounts to wealthy people just because they're first in line.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago

we could just build more high-density units

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Im sure they also thought the lack of poor people owning houses was "easily solved" by banning landlords.

But how does pegging the unit ownership to income even work?

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Very simply- you have to be under a certain income threshold to qualify for these homes. The same way it's done for lower-income housing everywhere else.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Where does this happen? I was under the impression that low income housing was owned by the state, or maybe someone else but under strict control by the state, and you had to fall under a certain income to rent there, not purchase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Okay, do now we're back to my original point:

Im sure they also thought the lack of poor people owning houses was “easily solved” by banning landlords.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Yes, again, because they didn't do anything about rich people taking advantage of it. I'm not sure why you're suggesting that "don't let rich people have the homes" would still make it impossible to house the poor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I'm not suggest that, I'm pointing out that was seems "simple" often isn't and also often leads to unintended consequences.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

They had renting back then too and way before that, and it was really large scale too. It's not really a new phenomenon. And obviously buying a house is still a lot (and I mean a lot) more expensive than renting. Not everyone can save off from their paycheck so that they'd be able to pay for even these cheaper houses.

But in this case I'm not sure if we are talking about situation where the original post's house was on sale (which would just make it a regular house you have to buy) or a situation where there isn't any renting at all (or profiting from it), in which case it'd still be more expensive but less so than renting.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

I bought my first apartment because my monthly costs would be like 30% less than rent. Like with many things, it's expensive to be poor.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

Absolutely. It's the same even in very small scale in buying groceries. You can save a lot by buying bigger sized packages but not everyone can afford to since they don't have such money on hand. So they're wasting money (or being less efficient about it) because they can't afford to not do anything else. Shitty situation.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 months ago

This is literally not how renting works. Get a clue.

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