They made a movie about mass deporting the Mexicans a while back.
intercst
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We old phartz remember Moshe Safdieâs âHabitatâ. prefab modules that were stacked with a crane. More land efficient that mobile homes.
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Yes, thatâs one of the issues with manufactured housing. It can lower construction costs, but it is generally not used for multi-family housing. Mobile home parks can have moderate population density, but youâre not going to get much above 10 units per acre. So they eat more land than MF apartments, so theyâre not as useful for addressing affordability problems in areas where land costs are comparatively high. And since affordability problems are most acute in areas where land availability is constrained and land prices are high, lowering construction costs by using manufactured housing isnât often going to materially address that affordability hurdle.
TIG sure looks âMexicanâ to me. GAY Mexican, at that.
In Princeton Jct NJ people commute to the train station parking lot. Two or three year wait for a parking space. Yes, near train station prices are high but a 20 min commute gives many choices.
Multifamily low income housing has been a disaster. In St Louis it was known as Pruit Igoe. They were unable to control crime. Or maintain elevators faster than someone stole the parts. They tore them down.
Duplexes and town houses might work. But no way on multistory.
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The general idea here is that the best way to make housing more affordable, even for low income people, is to build more moderately priced homes.
That view thinks of housing much like cars. Poor people who need a car generally donât buy new cars. They buy used cars. Because even the most bottom-of-the-line new car goes for a decent price, because itâs new: itâs got the most up-to-date version of whatever goes into the bottom-of-the-line car, and none of it is worn or weathered or stained or what have you. The same is true of housing - cheap housing is old housing, and you literally canât build new housing thatâs cheap enough to take its place.
In this telling, a major part of the reason we have an affordability crisis today is because we didnât build much new housing in desirable locations 15-20 years ago, starting after the housing crisis. Which you can see here:
Itâs really hard to build new houses for low-income people. Itâs just too expensive. So you can try to flood the market with new homes that wonât be purchased/rented by low-income people, but by moderate-income people. Some of whom are currently in the older houses and apartments that would normally have shifted down to lower income folks. That does two things. It takes some of the market pressure off the older and less desirable unit stock, and it helps make sure that in 10-15 years thereâs adequate ânewâ old housing to keep this from happening again.
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Of course for the past 2 years corporations like Black Rock have been buying up single family homes turning them into rentals. Sometimes they buy whole neighborhoods. A LOT MORE stock will be needed until corporate buying reaches a saturation point.
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Most cities have old abandoned houses. Updating those to make them livable should be an easy solution. But by the time you so plumbing, electrical, hvac, roof, windows, kitchen, bathroom it might be cheaper to tear it down and start over. Plus often in high crime, poor schools location. Land is cheap for a reason.
Habitat for Humanity seems the best we have. We should do more of these.
New home may be up scale but they begin a string of moves as previous home is vacant and someone moves in. That string continues until someone moves from rental space.
Why would corporate buying increase or decrease the need for housing?
DB2
They are buying up the stock and rising rents and pricing for those that want to own a house.Rents & House pricing wonât decrease until there is much more supply of housing.
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Nomination for conspicuous housing consumption.
It was on a Trulia real estate site in a New England town not to be named. I cannot be more specific, to avoid legal hassles. Itâs 10,000 square feet on 6 acres, 9 BRs, 9 baths. Priced at $3,670,600. (What could that final $600 possibly signify?)
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Thatâs to be expected, once we changed the tax code in 2017. The mortgage interest deduction used to be an enormous incentive to have owner-occupied, rather than rented, housing. It used to be that more than a third of taxpayers would itemize their deductions - and nearly all of them had mortgage interest deductions. Now, after the changes to the standard deduction, only about 9.5% of taxpayers itemize. If youâre not itemizing, thereâs vastly less tax incentive for SFD homes to be owner-occupied rather than rented.
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Time to change tax law to make it less tax efficient to own a rental and more tax efficient to sell those rentals to someone buying as a primary residence. If a time limited capital gains tax waiver were instituted for sale of property to someone buying a primary residence, you would see a flood of investors selling. Large influx of inventory hitting the market in a short time frame would lower prices. Couple this with double property taxes on non-primary residences, as WV imposes, and the market would reset to favor primary home purchases. There are a lot of mom and pop landlords out there who would love this escape.
This of course assumes that the HGTV focus on must have the perfect house isnât too entrenched in those that canât afford one. Itâs still very hard to sell a less than HGTV end of show presentation house, even in my very pricy market. They tend to stay on the market until a flipper slaps some lipstick on that cosmetically challenged pig, at which point people trip all over themselves to buy it and jump up the price. Most buyers are simply not willing to put the work in.
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Exactly. Back in the 70âs to the 90âs putting some very thoughtful investment (my strategy was to do a lot more than mere lipstick) into very carefully chosen challenged tired worn homes that had âgood bonesâ was a major source of income for gay guys. Flipping was quicker and less risky, but the payoffs were not as big.
People are very short sighted, short time horizoned, impatient, and ignorant of underlying realities. They desperately WANT what they WANT (soap opera fantasy homes) with insufficient reflection.
No different from most forms of investment, except the distracting âI want to LOVE my home at first sightâ that haunts the housing market of all but homeless people.
d fb
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I have found real estate to be one of the forms of investing over which I can have the most control. Thatâs not to say I havenât made mistakes, but the ability to live in the property I am rehabbing, (even with a toddler strapped to my back as I worked,) stretched my investment dollar greatly. I take real pride in realizing the untapped potential of properties, and am thrilled to take top dollar from those buyers who agree with my choices. It has admittedly been work, but I have been paid well. One of the reasons we are considering selling our current property is because in less than 5 years we have seen almost $500K in unrealized capital gains. That makes the fall back option of turning it into a rental a very expensive option taxwise. It may be time for my next project, or frankly time to hop from furnished rental to furnished rental.
IP
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Re: Mortgage interest deduction.
Theres a proposal to double the exemption cap from $10k to $20k. Will that be enough to make a difference?
The raised standard deduction helps the little guy but not upper middle class. Helps with the wealth gap. Is it worth keeping?
It will certainly affect some taxpayers. Being able to take $20K instead of $10K on a capped deduction will certainly allow some people to newly have more deductions if they itemize than take the standard deduction. I just donât know if it would materially affect the tax incentive structure for housing ownership.
With such a high standard deduction, if it were raised to a high limit, it could only incentivize wealthy people with very large mortgages. Thatâs because the only true benefit you get is the amount above and beyond the standard deduction. So if you are a typical middle class person in a relatively high cost of living area with perhaps mortgage interest of $30k, property+sales taxes of $10k, and charitable contributions of $5k, you could deduct $45k on schedule A. But the only real benefit to you is $15k of that because the standard deduction (MFJ) is $30k. So the net monetary benefit to you would be your tax rate times the additional $15k, or about $3,600 (at the typical 24% marginal tax bracket).
Most people donât understand this at all, and real estate agents and mortgage brokers make ZERO effort to educate people about it because they would rather talk about âthe big tax deduction of a mortgageâ.
It might have a different impact than just the wealthiest people, at least in states that have a high state income tax. It takes a weird set of circumstances for the change to be relevant to the itemizing decision - one where you have enough SALT deductions and mortgage interest to be affected by the change, but not enough for it to be a no brainer to itemize (which is most wealthy people).
If youâre earning between $80K-200K in New York (for example), youâre in the 6% bracket for state income tax. Someone earning $100K, with a $350K mortgage @5% on a $480K home, would pay about $7K in property taxes, $6K in state income taxes, and $17.5K in mortgage interest. Thatâs not a wealthy person with a huge mortgage, but it turns out that because they have a modest mortgage and a modest amount of state income and property taxes, that combo is enough that they take the standard deduction with a $10K cap but itemize with a $20K cap. MFJ.