My bullshit detector went off right here. Housing isn't complicated. It's only complicated by investment money being involved. Having a roof over ones head is a basic human right.
In Australia, the market is so hot, very few young people can afford anything, if you're living in a nice place, you can easily be kicked out after your rent doubles. I know of good, professional people who migrated to Australia and went back to their home country of this behavior.
It's complicated because we've made it complicated. I also think it's why we're living in a world with a lot less creativity. Who can make nice things when all we're doing is racing to the bottom to make ends meet ?
>We are headed for a massive population crash almost everywhere
We're not. Many countries predict stable populations at worst for several decades still. Some continue to predict population growths. Politicians are all too eager to use immigration as a way to band-aid low birthrates, and many are already subsidizing children more.
Your last line gives it away too. Japan is primarily crashing in the countryside. Tokyo is lagging behind by almost two decades, only just starting to drop. The high housing prices globally are primarily in urban and suburban areas. Many of those areas are still growing tremendously at the expense of rural areas. People don't want to live in rural areas because there are no jobs. Even if there was a crash, it hardly matters if populations continue to rise or remain stable in areas where housing is getting too expensive for the jobs provided.
One thing I find interesting though is that at least in Australia, it's speculated that a lot of the property pressure is from foreign investment, especially from China.
So if China's population starts to crash or their economy goes bad at some stage what effect will this then have on the Australian market (for example)?
I'm guessing not much because the inflationary property price damage has been done. It's a curious thought.
Also in the case for "steady populations with little growth", wouldn't this mean that property prices will also stabilize and eventually drop? This stabilized property market will be interesting because people won't be able to make the huge capital gains and returns they were used too? A lot of property investors are also probably pretty heavily indebted and so any type of economic trouble might put many in a precarious position.
Too many variables to say. In theory, you would say a stable population all other things equal would keep the housing prices equal (or drop a little initially since predictions aren't green anymore). In practice, even without foreign money, there are still many ways with which the value of housing can go up. And as long as the majority of voters want housing to go up, it likely will.
Practice can be seen by the many cultural shifts we had which had zero to do with population growth / housing shortages, but still increased prices tremendously. Higher loans, longer mortgages and lower interest rates, for one. Increased dual incomes is another.
However, unless there is another population boom on the horizon (which really seems unlikely at present). Property speculators must have their doubts.
This combined with climate change and it's ability to change the landscape (literally) makes it getting harder to predict where people might actually want to live.
For example, I visited Scottsdale, Arizona not long ago which is going through it's own mini-boom at the moment. Will that be a nice place to live in ten years with rising temps? One would have to ask the question? Would people still pay huge money to live in Tahoe with poor snow quality and lots of bush fires in summer?
What I saw is fewer kids in almost all countries. The urbanisation push this even further as adult living in dense cities have even fewer kids.
Yes, it will take some time, but the aging of population is already there. And old people consume very little.
I agree that the speculative nature of housing is a problem, from what I see it is caused mainly by the devaluation of currencies.
You by a house at 100k$ with 90k$ of mortgage, your government print money making your mortgage worth less, bam you got a 200k$ house with 90k$ mortgage. Your 10k$ gave you 110k$ While your currency is worth half of its previous value.
It was the easiest way to get rich for a long time, it work as long as the currency keep debasing (you can count on that) and the housing market is good.
I, and most people, don't have $10,000 to spend, and even that wouldn't be nearly enough to build a house, let alone buy a cheap lot of land, let alone install a septic system and a well, post for gas and maintenance for my car, all while incurring the time cost of living farther from work.
> But you need someone else to provide your ’basic human right’
For many people, this isn't true.
A lot of people would easily be able to afford to buy or build in a nicer area if there wasn't so much competition for land or housing due to investment. I think if there was much much higher cost of non-owner-occupied housing, you'd just see people move into nicer areas with less financial pressure to do so. This sounds like a nice thing.
Interesting new problem Japan is facing is that even in the areas where they're giving houses away, they're starting to have trouble servicing the surrounding infrastructure, roads etc which I guess is from not enough taxes, administration and construction workers left to keep these areas a float.
Populations are expected to keep rising until 2100 at least. India and China may see a big drop but everywhere else will continue to grow albeit slower than before
> It's complicated because we've made it complicated.
And thus, it is complicated. Also worth taking into consideration: we may not be able to do otherwise. Currently, for sure (hence the commonality of conversations on this topic), and perhaps never if we don't/can't change the way we think.
Some of us can change how we think, but big corporations and investment firms (and banks with investment divisions) are not going to adopt our way of thinking.
They are thinking of what to do with their piles of cash, and how to make their piles grow. They are absolutely not concerned about the wellbeing of individuals outside their own organizations/families.
This is basically the housing ownership version of the monopoly concept (and I don't specifically mean the game). There are, or were, laws to prevent companies from becoming monopolies. People (and governments) realized that once a company grows and consumes or blocks out all its competition, things eventually get very bad for the consumers/public.
There seem to be quite a few people on HN in the "regulation is bad" camp, but there are a lot of regulations such as the ones related to prevention of monopolies which are critically important. And now we see that there need to be similar regulations to prevent the equivalent in housing.
For this to naturally correct itself (and laws to become demanded by the people and written by the government) will take decades and likely some level of revolt. Maybe it will happen sooner than I think. It will be ironic if the camp that has been promoting gun ownership while simultaneously screwing its supporters becomes subject to forceful demands of its angry former followers. (Actually we see this right now in US politics when someone from "the good team" finally speaks out loud negatively about their great leader. The "good team" followers become immediately vicious and threatening. Perhaps once enough of those armed good old boys finally put their puzzles together and realize they've been fooled on a grand scale, we'll start to see some change.)
> Some of us can change how we think, but big corporations and investment firms (and banks with investment divisions) are not going to adopt our way of thinking.
I wonder: can you overcome this way of thinking?
> People (and governments) realized that once a company grows and consumes or blocks out all its competition, things eventually get very bad for the consumers/public.
Realized to some degree.
> And now we see that there need to be similar regulations to prevent the equivalent in housing.
Some see this, some see other things (sometimes the opposite). Whose visions are correct?
> It will be ironic if the camp that has been promoting gun ownership while simultaneously screwing its supporters becomes subject to forceful demands of its angry former followers.
It would be even more ironic if all followers began to question the stories their leaders tell them, and the stories they tell themselves.
> Perhaps once enough of those armed good old boys finally put their puzzles together and realize they've been fooled on a grand scale, we'll start to see some change.
Surely, to some degree. But even more powerful would be if all people could do this simultaneously...or even a critical mass of people, especially if they managed to do it according to a non-partisan methodology. Perhaps someone will create something like that some day. Or, perhaps not, and we will remain at this local optimum indefinitely, content in the knowledge that it is all someone else's fault.
"We" as evolved social animals have pretty universally come to the agreement that humans should have a few basic necessities, such as food, water, shelter, (and less agreed but equally important) personal safety.
I could ask if you continuing to live is your human right.
I'm not sure there's any absolute decree that everyone can agree on that says you deserve to live. However, we evolved people tend to assume that every human deserves to continue living (at least until our differences become too great, at which time we sometimes just kill each other).
Therefore, your demand for proof that having shelter is a human right is bunk.
OK, and here I was thinking that human rights were premised on a philosophical basis. Thank you for clarifying that they are merely a political matter.
Just because he said it in this way doesn't mean you can't think for yourself and realize that it also has a philosophical basis. You are a human. You are capable of your own independent thoughts and conclusions which are as valid as other people's. If you can yourself find ethical reasons to give humans a place to live by default, and I'm sure you can, (because suffering = bad, no home = suffering, true for every human) you just created a philosophical reason for why it might be valid to consider it a human right.
Among those the UN counts as members are the Taliban (by way of Afghanistan) and Putin’s Russia, which makes it arguable that the UN as a body is in a deciding position on fundamental human rights, let alone a coherent position.
How does one 'prove' that other than by appealing to a list of 'human rights', upon which you and the other commenter surely disagree? There is no fundamental philosophical principle beneath human rights in which it will rigorously generate a list of rights. It's a null question, and I suspect you know that.
The stellman of 'housing is a human right' is 'everyone should have adequate shelter', and that's a far more productive starting point. The 'right' angle adds nothing.
I agree! That's why I take issue with calling X or Y human rights. It misleads the average person person into thinking that there is actually is such a thing as a human right, rather than the term just meaning "thing we really like".
With that being said, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that assertions about human rights by organizations such as the UN be internally consistent. The UN claims that human rights are universal. Human rights such as to food, shelter, medicine, etc. fail this universality. To provide them requires taking resources from others and reallocating them. Therefore, they are conditional upon the ability of a society to reallocate these resources. Therefore, they cannot be human rights, and assertions to the contrary should be identified as being politically motivated.
I don't think universality is a prerequisite for validity
For that matter I guess I would disagree with the UN. Someone who forfeits their basic human rights, for example, would not be entitled to them. So in that sense they're not universal.
That logic doesn't follow. There are plenty of things that, in some cases, lack of them causes death; but are not human rights. There are people that cannot survive without a liver transplant; not everyone gets a liver transplant; some people die because they cannot get a liver transplant. A live transplant is not a basic human right.
There are many things that, as a society, we should do our best to make sure everyone has access to; housing, food, medical care, etc. The more people that have access to them, the better off we, as a society, are. Whether or not those things are a "basic human right" is debatable; but they fact that you need them to survive doesn't define them as such.
This is a normative fallacy. If people die because they didn't get healthcare, that doesn't mean they didn't deserve healthcare. I'd argue that everyone who needs a liver (which is not the same as a liver transplant) has the right to one.
> but they fact that you need them to survive doesn't define them as such
Isn't that basically saying that surviving needn't be in a definition of 'human right'?
> Isn't that basically saying that surviving needn't be in a definition of 'human right'?
Yes, because "surviving" isn't a human right. It's something we, as a society, should do our best to make sure everyone is able to do, but that's not the same as saying it's a human right. If it was, then "not having a heart attack" would be a human right, which is clearly ridiculous.
Not so clear to me. If some company flooded a river with heart attack inducing chemicals, would you say that's fine because not having heart attacks isn't a human right?
I'll put it to you like this. If you believe there is a human right, then someone can't pursue it if they're dead. So if, in order to pursue that right, they need to pursue being alive, the pursuit of being alive falls within that right, no?
My bullshit detector went off right here. Housing isn't complicated. It's only complicated by investment money being involved. Having a roof over ones head is a basic human right.
In Australia, the market is so hot, very few young people can afford anything, if you're living in a nice place, you can easily be kicked out after your rent doubles. I know of good, professional people who migrated to Australia and went back to their home country of this behavior.
It's complicated because we've made it complicated. I also think it's why we're living in a world with a lot less creativity. Who can make nice things when all we're doing is racing to the bottom to make ends meet ?