I’d be super okay with it getting a bit bigger so smaller communities can flourish and then not getting any bigger after that. Reddit is so big it’s a dreary and dead place in the comments and posts
Have you ever heard of a religion (actually a group of religions) called Christianity? They call their god simply God, and they’re pretty far spread along the world.
My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.
I use a standardization library for phone numbers. It makes parsing any user input dead easy, storing it as a standard string (can’t think of the standard name) and then outputting in the country’s respective format. I don’t have to inject a bunch of JavaScript crap that’s like “wrong format” and harass users; the backend sorts it all out.
Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.
Meant it to be more of an all out brawl of the different groups, but realized it looks like people are cheering on the libertarian after it was too late. Oh well, at the very least I think it also shows Lemmy’s general disdain for tankies.
They were economically socialists, politically authoritarians - and, for better or worse, communism and the Leninist concept of the vanguard party are inextricably linked. At the end of the day, the question is: can a state democratically become socialist? The answer is clearly no, hence the vanguard party, hence Lenin, hence Ho Chi Minh, hence Mao. I’m not talking about a mixed economy, I’m talking about socualism.
Uhh… I might be wrong, and do correct me because I’m not good at politics or geography or stuff, but isn’t The Republic of Ireland a democratic socialist country?
The ROI is I think a social democracy rather democratic socialist. It is economically capitalist though with state intervention.
When we are talking political science ‘state’ is political entity that exerts legal power over a territory. They may be federalised like in the USA or they may be independant (or a few other things.) It can also refer to the systems of this power, like government, legal system, and civil service including entities like police and military forces.
By their own admission, the economy of the Soviet Union was “state capitalism”. Means of production were not owned by private individuals and companies (as in capitalism) but also not by the people or workers (as in socialism). They were owned by the state, and since the state was not democratic, this does not count as shared or public ownership. This may have been meant or justified as temporary at the start, but it did not change.
How do you define “democratic?” Because the “soviet” of “soviet union” is a type of council which was directly elected by citizens. The USSR was a democratic republic in that each soviet usually voted for a higher level soviet. Not that unusual, especially back then.
Now, I’m not suggesting that the books were never cooked. We know that Stalin rigged at least some higher level elections at the very least.
But “democratic” does not mean multi-party. It can also be “no party” or “three parties” or anything. In the USSR you could run for your local soviet or petition them to vote for you. Yes, you’d have to be a party member. But that doesn’t mean blind allegiance and no differing thought. I’ve brought it up before, but you had severe infighting in the party because of the diversity of opinions and thought, not lack of it. Sure, they were all communists or some flavor thereof at least superficially. But there’s a hell of a difference between Stalin and Kruschev and Gorbachev as examples.
And, Stalin aside given his prominence in the early years of the nation, the other prominent leaders were very dependant on entities like the Supreme Soviet which was elected by your elected representatives.
Yea, no, elections were a joke in the soviet union. Pretty much everyone knew your vote counted for nothing and they started offering people food so they would show up to vote to give it some legitimacy. Unlike current Russia the soviet propaganda was mostly a laughing stock at the time.
Also the party members were basically picked by nepotism alone. Sure, you could have internal elections but the winner was always the one with most friends in the party. That’s kinda like saying north Korea is democratic because there are some internal elections while in practise it’s pretty much a monarchy.
Wether or not the SU handed the means of production to the workers or just transferred them to a different previleged class is debatable. But it surely did not abolish the commodity form.
From a theory standpoint, Russia didnt really fullfill the prerequisites for a transition to communism. The social structures were still too aligned with serfdom. In such an environment it is difficult to actually transition from state capitalism to socialism in a functional way, and most critiques of the Soviet Union seem to stem from this problem.
SU wasn’t fascist per se. It was a militaristic authoritarian dictatorship that overlapped with fascism on a lot of issues, but technically fascism means a different thing, yes.
Militaristic might be not technically correct, it was more of a police state than a military state, after the WWII Stalin put a lot of effort to make sure that military will remain a tool and not have agency on itself. All the police-adjacent organisations though were so powerful that they didn’t have to be militaristic to exert all the power.
Everything else is absolutely correct though, complete, absolute power was in the hand of an unelected individual and the people he empowererd, as much as power was concentrated. So as much as authocracy and dictatorship could overlap, USSR was an embodiment of that.
That’s the main issue. But their approach to the economy was awful as well. Unions just collected money and did nothing, plants and factories produced either copies of goods created in the capitalist world, or things that looked bad. People who wanted to wear good-looking clothes were waiting for the end of the month because shops to gain the desired number of purchases were selling western goods for a day or two. Jeans weren’t officially imported and sold. People were buying jeans for two monthly salaries, and it was ok because anyway it was hard to spend the earned money. For a worker, it wasn’t beneficial to improve something in the factory, and nobody wanted to suggest such improvements. There was no market and because of this, nobody wanted to make better goods or make the production process more effective. There was no need in economy of resources, and because of this, production was ineffective. The Soviets admitted it, but weren’t able to change it. Goods made in the USSR and briefly in the ex-USSR countries after the USSR collapsed, were ugly, outdated and expensive. They just couldn’t compete in the market. And there are many people telling capitalism is bad. Capitalism is more effective in providing cheaper good-looking goods because companies have to make profit and compete for customers.
I’ve been thinking if we could just make all companies employee owned by law. You’d still get the benefits of capitalism but instead of vampiric investors getting all the benefits it would be the employees that reap the rewards of their own hard work. There are already employee owned businesses that compete just fine against investor owned businesses so I feel like it’s already proven out.
Investors are not bad. They cover early-stage expanses, and of course, they want to return that money and get profit. Having investors is better than having nothing. As an alternative, workers can work for free until the company becomes profitable, or even invest some money in it. But I don’t think most workers will agree with such a scheme.
There are other ways of securing early capital that don’t require you to give a percent of your company to investors. I don’t think anything needs to be black and white, but the situation where the only people profiting off the success of a company is outside share holders creates a very anti worker incentive.
Lot of folks from Eastern Europe will agree on that.
I believe current social issues need fixing - maybe even adopting some radical changes. E.g. I still can’t get over the fact that capitalism allows for existence of something as ridiculous as billionaires - real life wealth ‘black holes’. And that’s just the start. On the other hand, there are some things that capitalism does extremely well, e.g. competitive markets are very good at producing cheap goods and can drive innovation (when disallowing monopolies). So maybe the right path for us is somewhere between the two extremes?
Anyways, while I understand the distaste for capitalism for some folks and the feeling that it failed them and working people below CEO level in general, I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them (sounds somewhat familiar, doesn’t it?). IMO anybody trying to base their political views on communist ideology should cut off entirely from the USSR and simply deem it as a failed state (that was only communist by name) with too much blood on their hands. Definitely not something that we want to go back to.
I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them
Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?
Capitalists need to remember that last point. They have a shared and reoccuring thread throughout their history of thinking they can treat people in a similar way and that a break will never come. Except they know it does, which is why they were literally murdering communists, socialists, and union folk in both the Americas and Europe (and likely elsewhere, but I’m not well versed enough to speak on other regions of the world).
The USSR, as a model, worked. Capitalists don’t want to accept it publicly because it threatens their monopoly on state and enterprise power. A young government, forged through raw power, is going to be a bit different than what we expect. But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points. People like Yeltsin. I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.
We know the USSR worked because the entire region went from nothing to world superpower in a single generation. It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading. They dirtied the word for a couple generations such that people wouldn’t and still won’t consider what the ideology means. And that, just maybe, a period of time under an autocrat doesn’t define the entire nation.
I still can’t get over the fact that lots of neo-communists use USSR as a role model. The only people in that country who benefited from that system were the people at the top and those with connections to them
Demonstrably false. For example, are you suggesting that the 23 million serfs–dirt farmers–of the imperial Russian empire were better off not knowing how to read, having no education, no healthcare, no subsidized food supplies, no industry tools, and no ability to break free from being born into a rigid inherited socioeconomic class from which there was no escape?
You’re indeed right that Imperial Russia wasn’t better for average lower-class folk. And certainly Bolshevik revolution didn’t came from nothing. For those people it was indeed an improvement. Maybe even substantial. Won’t argue, don’t know that much about that time. The thing that I know, being born in USSR satellite state is how much it sent us back into the middle ages after WWII. Huge lines for food, shit currency, no free speech, not being able to leave the country, political cleansing, gulags, exiles to Syberia, man-made famine. The list goes on and on. It definitely wasn’t as good here as it was in Western Europe for the ordinary people. And we are still seen as ‘worse’ compared to the West. You make it sound like it was some utopian state destroyed by filthy capitalists, while for some of us it was a living hell. And any attempt to change that was bloodily thwarted (e.g. Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia)
The USSR, as a model, worked.
Yes, especially in creating genocides (e.g. Katyn massacre), artificial famines (e.g. Holodomor) and causing large shortages of basic necessities even though their 5 year plans were so perfect. While most people in the West see Hitler as the personification of evil, I often hear that Stalin was much much worse.
Even not counting those issues, if it worked so well then we are not living in a glorious World SSR? USSR had almost twice natural resources the US has and they still didn’t make it work.
But the USSR was trending toward what we understand as liberalization which is why it dissolved the moment some ethno-nationalist capitalists were allowed to seize control of newly free media outlets and get people on their side with talking points.
Yep, it definitely didn’t have anything to do with people living in poverty, working for money worth shit, being prosecuted (or even executed) for just mentioning something bad about the ruling party. Those people were just corrupted by the free media to fight the state which gave them everything they needed. Also it didn’t collapse economically at all. (Hope at this point I don’t need to add /s)
It spooked the Americans and a lot of Europeans such that they adopted a practice of containment after WW2 in order to prevent a rival system from spreading.
I’ll just say that Berlin wall wasn’t created to keep Germans from the West from running away to East Germany.
I’d like to remind you that Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, didn’t react when people like (but not exclusively) Yeltsin used ethnonationalism to whip up mass riots and protests. He didn’t roll out the tanks,something tankies really hate. He didn’t refuse to recognize the results of elections and votes.
This system was simply not sustainable in the long run. With world’s second military they could prolong the inevitable. The fact that they didn’t roll out those tanks says that even people ruling that country knew it wasn’t working. They simply couldn’t keep up the race with the West. You can even see it in terms of GDP:
Sorry, got a bit angry. Idk, as much as I like to keep an open mind, USSR and it’s proxies created so much pain and suffering for me, my parents and grandparents, that it makes my blood boiling when I see somebody defending that monster of a country. Hope I wasn’t offensive much.
Yeah, fascism includes authoritarianism but not the other way around. You can be authoritarian and not a fascist. Which doesn’t make you good, just different flavour of bad
All governments and all societies as of today are authoritarian by nature, no matter how small or big. Even those “direct democracy” villages have hierarchy, and are thus authoritarian. Stop claiming authoritarian = bad.
Your issue with the soviets is that you’re utterly illiterate on the subject of the soviets and should educate yourself instead of posting nonsensical comments in a public forum.
Go ask some Polish people how well the Russians treated them. You can have two bad parties, just because one is worse doesn’t make the other not bad. I mean it’s such a simple concept.
Turn the question back, actually. Do the DDOSers even think they’re achieving anything relevant, beyond being a bit annoying? .world is down from time to time, wow, how terrible. It’s not like I can’t log onto any other server and interact with world’s channels and threads from there, only to have my posts and upvotes become globally available as soon as world is back- Oh, wait, that’s exactly how it works.
No, you make an alt-account on a non-world instance and interact with world communities from there. The only issue is that you aren’t carrying over your subscriptions and blocks unless you use a special tool, about which I don’t know much.
I tried figuring out how to use the Lemmy API to subscribe to all my subscriptions from my kbin account a week or two ago
I remember getting stuck and giving up, so I think I’m going to do it semi-manually or something later on, unless some kind wizard blesses me with the name of such a tool
No. It’s basically like signing in at another e-mail provider. Instead of [email protected] you now have [email protected] and can from then on e-mail the same contacts. Just with posts, threads and comments instead of e-mail of course.
Each instance keeps a local copy of the communities they’re federated with. Users of that instance interact with the local copy, and instances communicate with each other to tell what’s going on.
This means that, if .world crashes at 5PM, and you have an account on lemm.ee, you can go to lemm.ee’s local copy of world->worldnews, find a thread started at 4PM, comment on it, and other lemm.ee users will see and upvote/downvote your comment.
When .world is back on at 7PM, lemm.ee will tell it: “Hey, Cold_Brew_Enema said [Thanks a lot for the gold kind stranger] and got 6 downvotes”, and .world will update the thread with your comment and downvotes for users of all instances to see.
This is my understanding of how it works, and I’m not familiar with the actual code, but it seems to be close to reality.
There may be some things that don’t get synced if the instance holding the pending federation messages also goes down or restarts because AFAIK they are stored in memory, not in persistent storage.
From the recent update shared, it seems like the ddos is coming from inside the hoose (ie the ddos attacker might be another lemmy instance). In other words the point of the ddos appear to be to cause people to move off of lemmy.world. so in a way it is working. A lot of people are telling people to move off lemmy.world.
The ironic part is that unless they have access to a botnet or are operating their own colo facility, they are probably paying more to run the attack than the target is.
I’d pay 3 times the amount of a regular ticket to watch the scene where Terry Crews, in a gorgeous ball gown, is dancing with Prince Charming, and when realizing it’s almost midnight, flexes his pecs, and yells goodbye before disappearing into the night.
Prince Charming then goes around trying to find the perfect pec flex. Alternatively, bicep circumference would also be acceptable as a glass slipper alternative.
For Snow White, we need Danny Devito, Warwick Davis, Bridget Powers, Daniel Radcliffe, Elijah Wood, Gary Oldman, and Nicolas Cage for the roles of the dwarves. For the Wicked Queen, Andy Samberg, and the mirror is Margot Robbie using the Harley Quinn voice. If Margot is unavailable, we have Tom Cruise as Les Grossman as the mirror.
Elijah really needs to start leaning into how fucking weird he has allowed himself to become since LotR. And I know he has a little, but clearly it’s not enough.
Cinderella would be the prince going around with barbells trying to find the princess (Terry) who can lift them. Only he can carry the prince down the aisle.
I’d watch that. But there should be a really good musical number called “Everything is rape without consent” or something… It probably wouldn’t be appropriate for the target audience, but yes I agree with the point you’re making: Snow White & Cinderella are way fucked.
I added that line because they got downvoted, assumed it was because someone thought it was just a statement rather than starting that train of thought
Posted in a Canadian channel before, because I am Canadian:
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
That’s not to say foreigners are to blame - at less than 2% of the market, they don’t have any real impact. British Columbia’s laws against foreign home ownership is nothing more than a red herring, a bullshit move designed to flame racism and bigotry. Yes, some of them are just looking to build anchors in a prosperous first-world country, but most are honest buyers.
A better move has been the “speculation tax”. By taxing more heavily any home that remains empty, it encourages property holders to actually rent these units out, instead of holding out for people desperate enough to pay their nosebleed-high rents.
But all of this misses the real mark: housing used purely as investment.
Now, to be absolutely clear, I am not talking about landlords who have a “mortgage helper” suite, or who have held on to a home or two that they previously lived in. These are typically the good landlords that we need - those with just two or three rental units, and that aren’t landlording as a business, just as a small top-up to their day job or as an extra plump-up to the retirement funds they are living off of. By having many thousands of separate landlords instead of one monolith, healthy competition is preserved.
No, there are two types of “investors” that I would directly target:
Flippers
Landlords-as-a-business.
1) Flippers
The first group, flippers, also come in two distinct types:
Those that buy up homes “on spec” before ground has even been turned, and then re-sell those same homes for much more than they bought shortly before these homes are completed. Sometimes for twice as much as they paid.
Those that buy up an older, tired home, slap on a coat of paint, spackle over holes in the walls, paper over the major flaws in hopes that inspectors don’t catch them, and shove in an ultra-cheap but shiny Ikea kitchen that will barely last a decade, then re-sell it for much more than they paid for it.
Both of these groups have contributed to the massive rise in housing purchase prices over the last thirty years. For a family that could afford a 3Bdrm home in 2000, their wages have only increased by half again, while home values have gone up by five times by 2023.
And this all comes down to speculation driving up the cost of homes.
So how do we combat this? Simple: to make it more attractive for owner-occupiers to buy a home than investors.
A family lives in a home that they own for an average of 8 years. Some less, most a lot more. We start by taxing any home sale at 100% for any owner who hasn’t lived in said home as their primary residence for at least two years (730 contiguous days). We then do a straight line depreciation from the end of the second year down to 0% taxation at the end of the eighth year. Or maybe we be kind and use a sigmoid curve to tax the last two years very minimally.
Exceptions can exist, of course, for those who have been widowed, or deployed overseas, or in the RCMP and deployed elsewhere in Canada, or where the house has been ordered to be sold by the court for divorce proceedings, and so forth. But simple bankruptcy would not be eligible, because it would be abused as a loophole.
But the point here is that homes will then become available to those working-class people who have been desperate to get off of the rental merry-go-round, but who have been unable to because home prices have been rising much faster than their down payment ever could.
This tax would absolutely cut investors off at the knees. Flippers would have to live in a home much, much longer, and spec flippers would be put entirely out of business, because they can’t even live in that house until it is fully completed in the first place.
2) Landlords-as-a-business
The second group is much simpler. It involves anyone who has ever bought a home purely to rent it back out, seeking to become a parasite on the backs of working-class Canadians in order to generate a labour-free revenue stream that would replace their day job. Some of these are individuals, but some of these are also businesses. To which there would be two simple laws created:
It would become illegal for any business to hold any residential property whatsoever that was in a legally habitable state. This wouldn’t prevent businesses from building homes, but it would prevent a business from buying up entire neighbourhoods just to monopolize that area and jack up the rent to the maximum that the market could bear.
Any individual owning more than 5 (or so) rental units (not just homes!) would be re-classified as operating as a business, and therefore become ineligible to own any of them - they would have to immediately sell all of them.
As for № 2, a lot of loopholes can exist that a sharp reader would immediately identify. So we close them, too.
Children under 24 “operate as a business” automatically with any rental unit. They are allowed ZERO. Because who TF under the age of 25 is wealthy enough to own rental units? No-one, unless these units were “gifted” to them from their parents, in an attempt to skirt the law. So that is one loophole closed.
Additional immediate family members are reduced by half in the number of rental units they can own. So if a husband has the (arbitrary, for the sake of argument) maximum limit of five, the wife can only have two herself. Any other family member who wants to own a rental unit, and who does not live in the same household, must provide full disclosure to where their money is coming from, and demonstrate that it is not coming from other family members who already own rental units.
By severely constraining the number of investors in the market, more housing becomes available to those who actually want to stop being renters. Actual working-class people can exit the rental market, reducing demand for rental units, and therefore reducing rental prices. These lower rental prices then make landlording less attractive, reducing the investor demand for homes and reducing bidding wars by deep-pocketed investors, eventually reducing overall home values for those who actually want to buy a home to live in it.
Plus, landlords will also become aware of the tax laid out in the first section that targets flippers. If they own rental units that they have never lived in as their primary residence, they will also be unable to sell these units for anything other than a steep loss. They will then try to exit the market before such a tax comes into effect, flooding the market with homes and causing prices to crash. They know that they are staring down two massive problems:
Being stuck with a high-cost asset (purchase price) that only produces a low-revenue stream because renters have exited the market by buying affordable homes, allowing plenty of stock that is pincered by the spec tax that heavily taxes empty rental units, thereby lowering rental prices well beneath the cost of the mortgage on the unit.
By putting these two tools into effect at the same time, we force a massive exodus of landlords out of the marketplace, crashing home values to where they become affordable to working-class people, thereby massively draining the numbers of renters looking for places to rent. Those places still being rented out - by owners who have previously lived in them, or by investors who couldn’t sell in time - would significantly outnumber renters looking for a place to rent, thereby crashing rental prices as renters could then dictate rents by being able to walk away from unattractive units or abusive landlords.
Full disclosure: I own, I don’t rent. But I have vanishingly little sympathy for greed-obsessed parasites that suck the future out of hard-working Canadians who must pay 60% or more of their wages for shitbox rentals to abusive landlords in today’s marketplace. Most people (and pretty much anyone under the age of 30) who don’t already own no longer have any hope of ever owning a house, as their ability to build a down payment shrinks every year, while home values accelerate into the stratosphere.
I can’t find the video, but the YouTube channel Oh the Urbanity! Did a pretty well explanation to why housing is so costly on Canada and the main problem is actually zoning laws. Like in 99% in Canada you can’t built anything but single family detached houses.
Creating massive penalties equal to the whole cost of a house for anyone that sells after less than 6-8 years would have devastating unintended consequences. It might make flipping impractical, but it would also hurt a lot of people who find themselves in a position where they need to sell, and would increase the risks associated with buying a house for lower income buyers.
It would help if you targeted the profit from the sale instead of the whole price. Flipping is about buying low, minimizing the cost of improvements, and then selling for a massively inflated amount. Without that profit it’s not worth it. For a normal person, being able to make money on the deal is nice, but at least recouping your costs can keep you economically stable and allow you to move on with your life.
I also think that you would want to combine this with some plan for helping low income buyers with the restoration of neglected properties that would normally be snatched up by flippers.
I also think the arbitrary age restriction on owning a rental property needs an exemption for inherited properties if nothing else. A 20ish year old who inherits a home or rental property when their parent(s) die is not abusing a loophole, and immediately hitting them with additional legal problems and forcing them to sell a house that has a tenant already in there is just unnecessary chaos for everyone involved.
I’m also curious how large apartment complexes fit into this plan. Are they also banned? Do you just need an owner to occupy a (potentially much nicer) apartment in the building? If you can still operate a huge apartment complex, I would expect the market to shift heavily towards those. If you can’t well, that raises it’s own issues around urban housing and population density.
In Switzerland we have a tax when selling a house on the value it gained since you bought it. So if you buy a house for price X and you sell it for more than that, you will be taxed on the price difference. Even if the price difference is just because of market fluctuations.
This is probably a better solution against flippers, since only those making money by increasing house values are taxed. The tax can then be made more or less aggressive as needed.
Love this write up! Thank you for posting, I really like your ideas. Out of curiosity how would apartment buildings work in your plan. There are many cities where you probably don’t want to encourage single family homes to reduce urban sprawl. How would you encourage high density housing in your plan?
Apartments can either be owned by families that upgraded to a house, and are now renting it out, or it can go full social housing where it follows the same model as Vienna, for example.
You need administration to manage an apartment or any physically combined housing, but nothing says that the building itself or the underlying land needs to be owned by a corporation. In fact, true social housing is “owned” by the people, the rent you pay is just for upkeep and to pay off a very long term cost-of-construction bill. Some families in Vienna’s social housing pay less than 20% of their income on rent. You get in young enough, and you’re paying a pittance by the time you retire.
Strong public housing would put most of the ratfuck kinds of landlords out of business by itself, if an affordable non-profit apartment is basically available to anyone who wants one, the private companies jacking up prices for pure profit now have to compete with that, and we solve the inelastic demand issue
I’m okay with house flippers because they’ll buy undervalued run down houses nobody wants and turn them into desirable homes.
House flippers are arguably responsible for a housing-quality crisis. Flippers often fewer lower code requirements than new builders. You end up with a lot of houses with nothing but cosmetic remediation and fairly substantial issues otherwise.
I don’t want to paint with too broad a brush, but I think those are still the shitty flippers, but maybe the flippers I’m imagining don’t exist in appreciable number.
The problem is the lack of business-reason to spend money on things that do not raise the property value. Unfortunately “fixing things” usually carries a negative value return.
The common things flippers do (and I know this from some friends who did real-estate for flippers) is buy houses that mostly need the most efficient changes - new tile, paint, etc, with minimal inexpensive fixes to make the house saleable. And honestly, that’s obvious when you say it. The extension of that is that if you can cover up an issue or the issue is not outside margins of being saleable (old septic, safe-but-near-EOL electrical, less ideal insulation, intentionally avoiding discovering asbestos where it probably exists, etc), you should.
Then, depending on local laws, flippers have more limited disclosure requirements than builders. Which means anything that isn’t “gross negligence” that cannot show up on a home inspection… you. just. don’t. do.
This would get messy with inheritances. So if you own and a family member passes away, you’d have to either move into that home for two years or it would be worthless to sell? That’s going to create some perverse incentives regarding old folks and housing.
Related to why someone under 25 might own a rental unit.
Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
So make this an exception, on the condition that the child can be classified as an adult by the courts.
And if it’s someone under 25, there is a high likelihood that they’re still living at home and have already occupied the home for some time already. The passing of the parents would have triggered an insurance payout on the home (which is standard in Canada) so there wouldn’t be any kind of mortgage to continue paying, only property taxes. Remaining in the house would be achievable even with a minimum-wage job.
Also, would this apply to non residential rental properties?
My proposal targets only residential properties. Why would it have any effect on non-residential rentals? The entire purpose of that proposal is to deal with parasitism in the rental market, not anything else.
I did not read all of this yet. But I always agreed with you on that housing as an investment was the crux of the problem, I just never knew exactly how to tackle it. Your write-up is great, and even if there are many issues that could arise from some of the implementation ideas, it’s an amazing beginning to a conversation we should have been having for at least decades.
Thank you very much! I will save this comment to come back to often.
The housing crisis arises out of one problem, and one problem only:
Housing as an investment.
My city has a rental vacancy rate of <4%, and a homeowner vacancy rate of <1%. Flippers leave a house empty while under the process of flipping it, and that’s not what the numbers show. Landlords do increase the cost compared to ownership (they have to cover all normal costs of ownership, plus have profit for themselves), but they don’t reduce the number of shelters being occupied. Not when vacancy rates are this low.
In other words, my particular city may have costs driven up by flippers and landlords, but the number of dwelling units would be short even without them. Getting rid of them would be an insufficient solution, even if there are some benefits on costs. It does not address the problem that we need more dwelling units.
Housing units, July 1, 2022, (V2022) USA 143,786,655 Owner-occupied housing unit rate, 2018-2022 64.8% If only 2% is foreign owned that is 2,875,733. Which is a hell of a lot of units
That’s a big problem in makeup too! Companies want to put out “clean” and “natural” makeup but makeup isn’t typically used very quickly. Makeup with no preservatives going bad is common.
Yes, ich_iel mostly just takes English words and translates them 1:1. Doesn’t actually make sense in German, but that’s part of the joke. If you translate it back to English 1:1 again you should understand it perfectly.
As a native German speaker I often had to translate ich_iel memes 1:1 to English first to understand them myself. Its basically English but in German.
memes
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