Resident of Amsterdam here, any policy the city is going to come up with is realistically speaking only re-arranging the deck chairs on the Titanic at this point. Some systemic issues:
1) Building new & building up is mostly politically impossible. A large part of the city is effectively a historic open-air museum. Supply is always going to be squeezed.
2) The rent controlled market is huge in The Netherlands and disproportionately big in Amsterdam compared to the rest of the country.
This puts off #1 because low-income people have an out, but squeezes prices on the middle and upper-end, and creates generational special-interests groups (there's decade-long waiting periods, people pass off such properties to immediate family etc.).
Most of the profit construction companies make on (highly regulated) new construction is reportedly on the relatively small proportion of apartments they're allowed to sell for a high price on the free market. The rest is on the mandatory public housing market from day one.
3) A further squeeze on non-rent controlled properties is created because some of those only escape that "market" by having a bunch of "points" that are calculated as a function of size, amenities etc.: [A] & [B].
This creates all sorts of absurd situations. E.g. having a sink on some random wall in the middle of a bedroom purely because it (along with other crazy point hacking) brought the property just over the point limit.
4) (Re-)zoning of properties that do exist is relatively restricted and centrally micro-managed.
5) Interest rates have been dropping for years, leading to inflated property prices. It's relatively easy to get sub-2% loans, even as low as 1.5%.
Is housing in Amsterdam that problematic? A friend recently moved there and would send me photos of places he was looking at for him and his family. He had plenty of really nice options at costs they could afford. It seemed vastly more affordable than NYC or the Bay Area.
Wouldn't this drive up demand for public transportation and construction in neighboring cities?
I live in Dublin (the one in Ireland) and my commute is about half an hour by tram. Prices are ridiculous in the center, but where I live they are much more reasonable.
Like most selective political actions in a market, I suspect this has good intent but will produce predictably counter-productive outcomes. The intent is obviously to "make housing more affordable", but they're only restricting one part of the market, and that part is "newly built" homes. What about the real estate market that is simply "homes"? So if newly built houses cannot be rented out anymore, and a large driver of building homes is this customer base of "landlords", what will happen to the rate of building, and the price of older homes?
It doesn't seem like a stretch to assume that the building rate will go down, and prices on older estates not affected by the law will go up. Unless the law is applied broadly across any and all estates, the end result will simply be, best case, that the market adjusts: worst case, that you end up with very unwanted and negative economical effects that no-one predicted.
The article states that "It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out" -- in my opinion the problem here is not where you draw the line, the problem is the drawing of the line. It will only create synthetic movements in the market and I don't think it will help in achieving the stated goal at all.
If one were inclined to be cynical, one could even assume that like with most political proposals, there are those who stand to gain from this, and they may be sponsoring it. Namely: whoever owns "old" real estate in Amsterdam. Is it also cynical to believe that politicians may know that this will not help, but are more interested in looking like they are "doing something about it", rather than resolving the issue, causing economical loss for property owners? The stated beneficiaries of this proposal are those weak in buying power claiming the "right" to live in a certain place without being priced out -- normally not a group with huge political leverage.
The key problem is the rich buying property for literal rent-seeking to become even richer.
This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.
There may be downsides to the measures proposed, but the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt. Because you write the rules, you can change and you can use this ability to create a better living environment for people, which is the ultimate end goal.
I agree that most such policies are naive or populist and won't achieve their actual objectives, but...
The default supply-demand dynamic doesn't generally apply to urban real estate. Supply is very slow to react to market changes, and is limited by all sorts of things that aren't price. In a lot of cities, prices (within reason) don't really affect supply at all.
First, building takes time and houses last a long time, so supply is unlikely to grow by more thana couple of % pa. Second, most of the space is taken and/or limited by planning, not price. Changing planning policies and improving transport is what actually gets a city with 250k houses to 300k.
Often, you'll find that people don't actually want the city to change/grow much and prevent it politically
The upshot is that is a supply-insensitive-to-demand market (the opposite of the cocaine market, economics teachers like for examples). If demand goes up, prices go up. Supply stays about the same. The inverse is that if price is held artificially low, this doesn't really dampen supply much.
Imagine manhatten house prices doubled tomorrow. How much extra housing do you think this would lead to?
All that said, this sounds like cheap politics. Developers complaining? That's probably a political point in amsterdam. It tick the do something box. Upper middle class people will get their new house a little cheaper (less competition). The new neighborhoods will be more middle class (and ethincally dutch), because owner occupiers tend to be these things. The rental market will be marginally tighter, as this grows the own/rent ratio a little.
This is already something well-known in the Dutch housing market though. It is known as "zelfbewoningsplicht" (self-occupation.. duty?, e.g. the contract you signed when buying the house stipulates that you, or your direct family have to live in it yourself/themselves). It is usually enforced by "woningcorporaties" (social housing corporations?) with a social mandate and does result in lower prices for the houses/appartements that have it. The odd thing here is that it's now municipalities that are enforcing it on _all_ housing, rather than just on designated social housing. It will be interesting to see the effects though.
Economic mumbo jumbo isn’t the only consideration for policy like this.
Economic policy has left so much capital sitting around doing nothing that even marginal developments that are ultimately money losers are getting built everywhere.
Local governments ultimately are accountable to the people, and it’s appropriate for them to think about the impact on the civic space of these developments, that are often ultimately bad for the community.
Real estate is among the sketchiest of industries, and in the US at least almost all commercial projects are implicitly subsidized by the government. IMO anything that extracts value from developers is a good thing.
While not perfect it's absolutely commendable, compare this to the borderline criminal state of real estate market in places like the UK or Vancouver where foreign investors and corrupted politics destroyed and alienated the middle class population...Imho real estate should be absolutely outside the possibility of speculation and 'investment', a house is for a family/person to own and live in not some mega conglomerate side business of rip off rental and overinflated selling prices.
Good time to be a landlord in Amsterdam. This looks like it’s designed to penalize poor/young/foreign people, who will not be able to benefit from a decrease in new housing prices, but will be hit by the rent increase once new supply of rentals dries out. Most benefit will accrue to current owners (the market will be segmented into places you can rent out — current stock — and places you can’t, with current stock being more expensive).
Disincentivising a predatory rental market only lowers the cost of housing prices because it excludes buy-to-rent commercial landlording. Properties don't disappear from the market just because there's no landlord able to buy them. Granted this needs to be coupled with further disincentivising of the current stock being rented.
But there have been long (decade+) stretches when I actively did not want to own. I was single, or I knew my family size would change and didn't want to buy a huge house, or I knew I would only be in the market for a few years.
The transaction costs of buying and selling each time would have been probably 5-10% of the total price of the house (broker fee, mortgage fees, inspections, etc). It simply would not have made sense to buy and sell a house every time I moved.
Having plenty of rentals available made it easy to move to where I needed to be, in a house size that made sense (neither too big nor small), in a cost-effective way.
The answer of "don't move so much" cuts income mobility. I moved to the SF Bay Area because it offered higher salaries. And it wouldn't solve the issue of family size changing.
(I haven't yet done the reverse -- which is to rent out the house I now own, but if I get a job offer somewhere else it'd be silly to force a sale to make it impossible for me to come back.)
Interesting to read this, it seems like there are already some rules that make renting a bit more difficult and less attractive.
I'd like to share a few points about what makes buying a house in Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) interesting:
- Amsterdam is growing and becoming the de fact European capital (english, tech jobs, etc) so it's growing a lot, and real estate prices are up
- Interest rates are very low (~2% on 30years fixed, if interests go down we can refinance after 5 years). So no risk of going up, and no risk of missing out when going down.
- 0 cash down necessary
- low cost of buying. We bought a "first time buyer package" for ~3000 euros which included real estate agent, notary, building inspection and financial evaluation. Only other expense we had was 500 euro fee for our mortgage.
- Practically no real estate tax (0.03789% of the official listed value)
- Prices are ~200-300k for a nice 1bedroom, 300-500 for nice 2 bedrooms. Prices seem reasonable compared to salaries.
So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).
To note, the buying market is pretty competitive (similar to SF) where people often over-big 10-20% on the asking price. I've gone to multiple open house, and helped ~5 other friends buy a place, and most buyers you see are young professionals / young families, and doesn't look like the market is saturated by landlords / investors.
Now, we looked into moving and renting our place in case we decide not to sell it:
- Can't rent on our mortgage
- We need to take a commercial mortgage, ~doubling the interest rate to 5%. This increase makes the monthly cost above what we would rent the place for
Those 2 last points to me make it clear that it's already pretty hard to just exploit the cheapness of buying/investing in properties and renting them (I looked myself to buy more properties and rent).
So this rule surprises me a little because the current housing market is already pretty regulated against renting and very supportive to buying. We definitely see much more owners, and much younger, than what we've seen on average in other cities we've lives (SF, NYC, Paris, Montreal).
I guess you are in a high-income bubble. The average per-citizen income in Amsterdam is € 28,700. That gives you a max mortgage of 130k. I was able to find a 29 square meter studio for that amount, just outside the A10 ring.
So, an average income in Amsterdam gives you access to one single property currently on the market of 29 square meter.
So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).
As someone who owns in SF, this is definitely not the case here.
For a $1.5M home in SF, the total monthly outlay includes mortgage ($5,557 @ 3.75% with 20% down), property taxes ($1,454), property insurance ($2,250) for a grand total of $9,262 per month. You could rent the same house for $6,000 per month. And that doesn't even include expected maintenance ($625 per month) and opportunity cost of your $300,000 down payment ($1,250 @ 5%). So grand total, you're spending over $11,000 per month or $5,000 more than the cost of renting.
The reason for this is appreciation. If you're house goes up in value by 5% per year, that $75,000 that more than covers the extra $60,000 you're paying over renting. Question is - will it keep going up that much?
I'm happy for you to have embarked on the journey of owning your home, but 0% downpayments and what sounds like an increasingly heating up market (people overbidding the asking price) should be a sign to be careful. Make sure to keep the 15-20% cash that is usual for downpayments in a liquid form in case there is a downturn. The people worst hit by real estate crises are those who take advantage of these "easy" ownership offers and then neglect to keep a cash buffer in case their mortgage goes into negative equity.
What you say is all true, but nothing of what you said is enough to displace the investors walking in and paying 20% over asking price in cash. And there are plenty.
I’ve recently learned that a whole building next to North Line terminal was taken off the market and sold wholesale to investors.
The problem is not the petty burgeois pulling a little speculative profit (oh well, there’s also that, see Airbnb) but the mega funds buying off whole block at a time because they can
Vienna, a city that regularly tops the list of the world's most livable cities [1], has 80% rental rate [2]. Most German cities are dominated by rental, e.g. Berlin.
I am beyond skeptical on this point. The young and dynamic people responsible for a city’s soul generally can’t afford to buy (I would guess, I have no data)
Evidence to support this? I have never found this to be true - heavily owner-occupied towns tend to be sleepy suburbs whereas the economic powerhouses of city centers are almost always very renter-heavy.
This is nonsense. I've rented for 10 years now and I love my city just as much as anyone. Buying doesn't really make a ton of sense at these prices so I don't, but I don't see how I am less engaged than an owner. Hell, I actually go to city hall and write my council regularly…
I think it can work fine so long as there are sufficient protections for renters. Rent control, long term contracts etc. I understand that this is the case in Germany.
Unfortunately this works by making property less attractive to investors, who are the people with a large amount of capital, who typically are those people who have influence over the political classes...
In France, a lot of cities propose "accessible housing" which can be brought with a zero interest, or nearly zero interest, loan.
The condition usually is, if you buy it, you cannot rent it for 5 to 10 years. It does allow for more housing that are owned and not rented and avoid excessive investment.
One of the drawbacks though is, since it only apply to building that have been build with help from the city (has far as I know), it can sometimes, if done poorly, create slum with huge bloc of social housing. Nowadays, they usually try to spread the construction more through out the city and make more diverse building to avoid this.
As someone who has just bought in another European city with high demand for housing , this sounds great on the surface level, but again the devil is in the details.
> It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out.
My GF has had offers of a years work in Melbourne and we have talked about it saying, it would be nice to do. Right now it would be easy to rent our place out, but it would be impossible if the rule stated that you must live in the place for 5 years.
I can understand the dilemma if you intend to go to Melbourne and "test the waters" and potentially want to move back again. But if you move to Melbourne permanently, I would expect you to sell your house in the EU.
At best this will do nothing, at worst the unintended consequence is a spike in rental prices. The root of the problem is supply and demand, and they're not willing to look at that. Increasing supply means highrises and more building permits, and reducing demand means restricting immigration, both highly toxic subjects.
It looks mostly like the proponents of the law want to limit the growth of the city, and prevent it from becoming dense(r).
Building an apartment house and not renting it out makes about zero sense. This means that only small, 1-2 family homes would be built, financed by family home loans.
This definitely is not going to help against foreign rich people buying "investment houses" and leaving them vacant. They could not rent them out even if they wanted to! But maybe it;s not a problem in Amsterdam.
This law may work for it's intended purpose, but it's an unconscionable violation of property rights. I worry that our statistician's approach to legislation is hastening our times' abandonment of principle, and that we're sacrificing any particular individual's good to the good of faceless society.
Two main thoughts here. First I love that municipalities are thinking creatively about the housing crisis. Second, I’m curious to see how policies like this end up playing out in practice. I can think of a bunch of negative outcomes such as rental properties degenerating and home builders getting less work.
In the end we can’t know what’s going to work until the experiment plays out which to my first point is why it’s very encouraging to see so many places trying different policies.
Making sure that building enough affordable housing is possible for developers to begin with is of course not something that a NIMBY backed city council would ever do.
I have no comment on if this is good or bad, I am just curious how laws like this get passed in the first place. You would assume that most home owners would not be in favor of something like this, as it obviously would seek to decrease the value of their property by reducing the potential acquirers. The only thing that would make sense is if in Amsterdam, most voters rent vs own.
I'm glad this was posted here because it echoes the philosophy of a late (18th?) century philosopher who i cannot remember the name of. Perhaps some of the other well-read minds of hacker news can remind me what his name is.
Basically he's an ehticist, an economist, and a philosopher and he also promotes a "value system" in his philosophy that states that buying a home for any othe reason than to live in it yourself is ethically/morally wrong.
I have been looking for his name for ages since i found it first, should've bookmarked it, never did. Now i desperately want to find him and re-read some of his works as well as his wiki page.
Edit: His name might be Henry George and his philosophy Georgism. Does that sound right to any of yall? Or is it someone else I'm thinking of?
>...households that would have formerly expected to buy, however, are increasingly finding themselves priced out of the market, substantially by investors who then place the property on the rental market...
This is exactly the core of the problem: without aggressive intervention, it is always more profitable to buy a property and rent it than to live in it. Potential owner occupiers will eventually always be out bid by investors in an uncontrolled market.
There were abundant measures to prevent this installed during the 20th century. They have been eliminated over the last decades and without them the market will naturally come to look like it did before the 20th century.
What I don't understand is, why aren't secondary dwellings taxed extremely heavily? Optimally, nobody should ever have to rent their residence for a prolonged amount of time, which means you need to disincentivize sitting on a property you don't live in. Making it hard to profit over time from such an investment is the only solution I see.
We have something similar here in Singapore. You cannot rent or sell a new HDB for 5 years. And you cannot rent to non-citizen / non-pr till it’s 10 years old. I would say it works but that’s only because the market is entirely different here.
[+] [-] avar|7 years ago|reply
1) Building new & building up is mostly politically impossible. A large part of the city is effectively a historic open-air museum. Supply is always going to be squeezed.
2) The rent controlled market is huge in The Netherlands and disproportionately big in Amsterdam compared to the rest of the country.
This puts off #1 because low-income people have an out, but squeezes prices on the middle and upper-end, and creates generational special-interests groups (there's decade-long waiting periods, people pass off such properties to immediate family etc.).
Most of the profit construction companies make on (highly regulated) new construction is reportedly on the relatively small proportion of apartments they're allowed to sell for a high price on the free market. The rest is on the mandatory public housing market from day one.
3) A further squeeze on non-rent controlled properties is created because some of those only escape that "market" by having a bunch of "points" that are calculated as a function of size, amenities etc.: [A] & [B].
This creates all sorts of absurd situations. E.g. having a sink on some random wall in the middle of a bedroom purely because it (along with other crazy point hacking) brought the property just over the point limit.
4) (Re-)zoning of properties that do exist is relatively restricted and centrally micro-managed.
5) Interest rates have been dropping for years, leading to inflated property prices. It's relatively easy to get sub-2% loans, even as low as 1.5%.
A. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woningwaarderingsstelsel#Punte...
B. https://www.huurcommissie.nl/fileadmin/afbeeldingen/Download...
[+] [-] standardUser|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rbanffy|7 years ago|reply
I live in Dublin (the one in Ireland) and my commute is about half an hour by tram. Prices are ridiculous in the center, but where I live they are much more reasonable.
[+] [-] hnarn|7 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem like a stretch to assume that the building rate will go down, and prices on older estates not affected by the law will go up. Unless the law is applied broadly across any and all estates, the end result will simply be, best case, that the market adjusts: worst case, that you end up with very unwanted and negative economical effects that no-one predicted.
The article states that "It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out" -- in my opinion the problem here is not where you draw the line, the problem is the drawing of the line. It will only create synthetic movements in the market and I don't think it will help in achieving the stated goal at all.
If one were inclined to be cynical, one could even assume that like with most political proposals, there are those who stand to gain from this, and they may be sponsoring it. Namely: whoever owns "old" real estate in Amsterdam. Is it also cynical to believe that politicians may know that this will not help, but are more interested in looking like they are "doing something about it", rather than resolving the issue, causing economical loss for property owners? The stated beneficiaries of this proposal are those weak in buying power claiming the "right" to live in a certain place without being priced out -- normally not a group with huge political leverage.
[+] [-] gekkeboom|7 years ago|reply
This drives prices up for homes in the city to a point that only if you are in a relationship and over 30 you might be able to buy your first 'home'.
There may be downsides to the measures proposed, but the fun part of government is that you can learn, change and adapt. Because you write the rules, you can change and you can use this ability to create a better living environment for people, which is the ultimate end goal.
[+] [-] dalbasal|7 years ago|reply
The default supply-demand dynamic doesn't generally apply to urban real estate. Supply is very slow to react to market changes, and is limited by all sorts of things that aren't price. In a lot of cities, prices (within reason) don't really affect supply at all.
First, building takes time and houses last a long time, so supply is unlikely to grow by more thana couple of % pa. Second, most of the space is taken and/or limited by planning, not price. Changing planning policies and improving transport is what actually gets a city with 250k houses to 300k.
Often, you'll find that people don't actually want the city to change/grow much and prevent it politically
The upshot is that is a supply-insensitive-to-demand market (the opposite of the cocaine market, economics teachers like for examples). If demand goes up, prices go up. Supply stays about the same. The inverse is that if price is held artificially low, this doesn't really dampen supply much.
Imagine manhatten house prices doubled tomorrow. How much extra housing do you think this would lead to?
All that said, this sounds like cheap politics. Developers complaining? That's probably a political point in amsterdam. It tick the do something box. Upper middle class people will get their new house a little cheaper (less competition). The new neighborhoods will be more middle class (and ethincally dutch), because owner occupiers tend to be these things. The rental market will be marginally tighter, as this grows the own/rent ratio a little.
[+] [-] Phemist|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Spooky23|7 years ago|reply
Economic policy has left so much capital sitting around doing nothing that even marginal developments that are ultimately money losers are getting built everywhere.
Local governments ultimately are accountable to the people, and it’s appropriate for them to think about the impact on the civic space of these developments, that are often ultimately bad for the community.
Real estate is among the sketchiest of industries, and in the US at least almost all commercial projects are implicitly subsidized by the government. IMO anything that extracts value from developers is a good thing.
[+] [-] Vinnl|7 years ago|reply
An interesting sidenote is this comment from one of the municipal administrators:
> It would be even better if we could also apply this rule to existing housing, but we think that requires the law to be changed.
Dutch source: https://nos.nl/artikel/2275897-amsterdam-wil-verbod-op-verhu...
[+] [-] gerbilly|7 years ago|reply
The status quo seems like a given, but it's maintained by actions too.
We choose everyday not to change it, and this choice often produces outcomes that are counter productive.
To not change things is literally a conservative programme, and this usually serves the interests of the wealthy.
[+] [-] siliconunit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akho|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MickerNews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bolaft|7 years ago|reply
Right, I'm sure impoverished young immigrants buying newly built houses only to rent them out is a very common thing in Amsterdam.
[+] [-] slapshot|7 years ago|reply
But there have been long (decade+) stretches when I actively did not want to own. I was single, or I knew my family size would change and didn't want to buy a huge house, or I knew I would only be in the market for a few years.
The transaction costs of buying and selling each time would have been probably 5-10% of the total price of the house (broker fee, mortgage fees, inspections, etc). It simply would not have made sense to buy and sell a house every time I moved.
Having plenty of rentals available made it easy to move to where I needed to be, in a house size that made sense (neither too big nor small), in a cost-effective way.
The answer of "don't move so much" cuts income mobility. I moved to the SF Bay Area because it offered higher salaries. And it wouldn't solve the issue of family size changing.
(I haven't yet done the reverse -- which is to rent out the house I now own, but if I get a job offer somewhere else it'd be silly to force a sale to make it impossible for me to come back.)
[+] [-] ck425|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jypepin|7 years ago|reply
I'd like to share a few points about what makes buying a house in Amsterdam (and the Netherlands in general) interesting:
- Amsterdam is growing and becoming the de fact European capital (english, tech jobs, etc) so it's growing a lot, and real estate prices are up - Interest rates are very low (~2% on 30years fixed, if interests go down we can refinance after 5 years). So no risk of going up, and no risk of missing out when going down. - 0 cash down necessary - low cost of buying. We bought a "first time buyer package" for ~3000 euros which included real estate agent, notary, building inspection and financial evaluation. Only other expense we had was 500 euro fee for our mortgage. - Practically no real estate tax (0.03789% of the official listed value) - Prices are ~200-300k for a nice 1bedroom, 300-500 for nice 2 bedrooms. Prices seem reasonable compared to salaries.
So, in most cases, going from renting to buying a similar property is definitely worth it. You'll pay about the same monthly (all included).
To note, the buying market is pretty competitive (similar to SF) where people often over-big 10-20% on the asking price. I've gone to multiple open house, and helped ~5 other friends buy a place, and most buyers you see are young professionals / young families, and doesn't look like the market is saturated by landlords / investors.
Now, we looked into moving and renting our place in case we decide not to sell it: - Can't rent on our mortgage - We need to take a commercial mortgage, ~doubling the interest rate to 5%. This increase makes the monthly cost above what we would rent the place for
Those 2 last points to me make it clear that it's already pretty hard to just exploit the cheapness of buying/investing in properties and renting them (I looked myself to buy more properties and rent).
So this rule surprises me a little because the current housing market is already pretty regulated against renting and very supportive to buying. We definitely see much more owners, and much younger, than what we've seen on average in other cities we've lives (SF, NYC, Paris, Montreal).
[+] [-] systemtest|7 years ago|reply
So, an average income in Amsterdam gives you access to one single property currently on the market of 29 square meter.
[+] [-] refurb|7 years ago|reply
As someone who owns in SF, this is definitely not the case here.
For a $1.5M home in SF, the total monthly outlay includes mortgage ($5,557 @ 3.75% with 20% down), property taxes ($1,454), property insurance ($2,250) for a grand total of $9,262 per month. You could rent the same house for $6,000 per month. And that doesn't even include expected maintenance ($625 per month) and opportunity cost of your $300,000 down payment ($1,250 @ 5%). So grand total, you're spending over $11,000 per month or $5,000 more than the cost of renting.
The reason for this is appreciation. If you're house goes up in value by 5% per year, that $75,000 that more than covers the extra $60,000 you're paying over renting. Question is - will it keep going up that much?
Edit: updated with actual numbers.
[+] [-] short_sells_poo|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eecc|7 years ago|reply
I’ve recently learned that a whole building next to North Line terminal was taken off the market and sold wholesale to investors.
The problem is not the petty burgeois pulling a little speculative profit (oh well, there’s also that, see Airbnb) but the mega funds buying off whole block at a time because they can
[+] [-] iagooar|7 years ago|reply
I would argue this is more true for Berlin, since it has English, tech jobs and the government of the biggest European national economy.
[+] [-] apexalpha|7 years ago|reply
A city of renters is a soulless city; less people are long-term invested and no one really buys into the community they live in.
[+] [-] YorkshireSeason|7 years ago|reply
[1] https://mobilityexchange.mercer.com/Insights/quality-of-livi...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/dec/12/vienna-housi...
[+] [-] peteretep|7 years ago|reply
I am beyond skeptical on this point. The young and dynamic people responsible for a city’s soul generally can’t afford to buy (I would guess, I have no data)
[+] [-] silverstrike|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffbax|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] VBprogrammer|7 years ago|reply
Unfortunately this works by making property less attractive to investors, who are the people with a large amount of capital, who typically are those people who have influence over the political classes...
[+] [-] tathougies|7 years ago|reply
A city of renters is a city of dynamic ideas, young people, and social movement.
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] maeln|7 years ago|reply
One of the drawbacks though is, since it only apply to building that have been build with help from the city (has far as I know), it can sometimes, if done poorly, create slum with huge bloc of social housing. Nowadays, they usually try to spread the construction more through out the city and make more diverse building to avoid this.
[+] [-] collyw|7 years ago|reply
> It’s not yet been clarified, for example, how long an owner would have to occupy their home before being able to rent it out.
My GF has had offers of a years work in Melbourne and we have talked about it saying, it would be nice to do. Right now it would be easy to rent our place out, but it would be impossible if the rule stated that you must live in the place for 5 years.
[+] [-] doppel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ucosty|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] jules|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nine_k|7 years ago|reply
Building an apartment house and not renting it out makes about zero sense. This means that only small, 1-2 family homes would be built, financed by family home loans.
This definitely is not going to help against foreign rich people buying "investment houses" and leaving them vacant. They could not rent them out even if they wanted to! But maybe it;s not a problem in Amsterdam.
[+] [-] JasonFruit|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikeash|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hannasanarion|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bognition|7 years ago|reply
In the end we can’t know what’s going to work until the experiment plays out which to my first point is why it’s very encouraging to see so many places trying different policies.
[+] [-] dep_b|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ds|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greyfox|7 years ago|reply
Basically he's an ehticist, an economist, and a philosopher and he also promotes a "value system" in his philosophy that states that buying a home for any othe reason than to live in it yourself is ethically/morally wrong.
I have been looking for his name for ages since i found it first, should've bookmarked it, never did. Now i desperately want to find him and re-read some of his works as well as his wiki page.
Edit: His name might be Henry George and his philosophy Georgism. Does that sound right to any of yall? Or is it someone else I'm thinking of?
[+] [-] gok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomMckenny|7 years ago|reply
This is exactly the core of the problem: without aggressive intervention, it is always more profitable to buy a property and rent it than to live in it. Potential owner occupiers will eventually always be out bid by investors in an uncontrolled market.
There were abundant measures to prevent this installed during the 20th century. They have been eliminated over the last decades and without them the market will naturally come to look like it did before the 20th century.
[+] [-] hhjinks|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] philliphaydon|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tikkabhuna|7 years ago|reply