this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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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.
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.
They could have easily solved that by pegging unit ownership to income.
Or, better yet, we could just build more units.
Or both. There is no reason to offer discounts to wealthy people just because they're first in line.
we could just build more high-density units
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?
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.
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.
Nowhere. But it should.
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.
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.
I'm not suggest that, I'm pointing out that was seems "simple" often isn't and also often leads to unintended consequences.
How many net new housing units did they build from 2011 to 2021?
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.
This is literally not how renting works. Get a clue.