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Another area that gets too little focus (imo) is that the transaction costs for real estate are so high that people feel that rapid appreciation is needed in order to be able to trade houses later in life (up or down). Cutting into high realtor fees, title fees, loan origination fees, transaction taxes, etc is severely needed.

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Yes, I agree with this, but all this stuff has been weirdly impervious to disruption. For example -- title insurance almost never pays out. So why don't any of the mortgage lenders self-insure for title issues, and then upcharge the borrower on the origination fee by some amount less than what title insurance would have cost?

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Yeah I’ve been similarly confused that realtors haven’t been disrupted more from online sales and outfits like Redfin.

Also I guess if we’re really talking about housing being consumption like cars we’d potentially be talking about sales taxes being applied (state dependent).

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My understanding is they do this in Canada (on new homes only). But since homes are subject to annual value-based taxes in a way other consumption goods are not, it's not clear to me putting sales tax on them would correct a distortion rather than creating one.

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Ideal state is probably something like a land value tax for the land and a sales tax for the improvements, but that’s too much change to try at once. Still, some state should try this!

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In my experience in Seattle, our realtor works and earns that commission. We bought 2 homes and sold 1 with our realtor. She also helped my brother buy 2 and sell 1. She found properties that Redfin and Zillow couldn’t find and it was due to her diligence in chasing and calling other realtors. She just works hard, knows the market, and has the instincts and knowledge to find deals.

In general, it would be good for everyone if the fees were less, but in particular practice it was very worth it for us.

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I'm sure that's true many times, but the fact that fees are percentage-based regardless of effort strikes me as likely rent-seeking rather than "all agents are similarly awesome".

That said, in my own personal experience I found title and loan origination fees more egregious.

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Agreed. They are just filing paperwork. It’s work but just taking orders.

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Two points that I think bear making:

1. Saying that housing is a poor investment by comparing housing returns to the S&P 500 (for instance) doesn't account for the fact that house buyers are extremely leveraged, often paying only 10% to 20% down. Most stock investors are not similarly leveraged and wouldn't even be permitted by their brokers to be so leveraged. Once the leverage is taken into account, the "return on investment" for the housing down payment becomes much more attractive (and housing prices seem much less volatile than the S&P 500, which makes the leverage even more attractive).

2. I think that house buyers *do* benefit from rising house prices (and see this benefit) in that the ultimate end-game is to sell one's big house and down-size later in life, taking a much bigger profit.

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I'm not even in a top 50 (by population) city, but the rising home prices in every area has become unbearable. I feel like I'm constantly teetering on the edge of affordability. Renting did me some real good when I was unstable and got hit with a layoff. But now I would really enjoy owning a home of my own. There's something to be said about building your own nest. Some level of security as well as the ability to modify the space as you see fit. As a renter, it's hard to care about improving the place, because at the end of the day, it would just benefit the landlord.

It's frustrating to enter this rat race of ever increasing home values. Real estate agents in my area have had it on easy mode for 10 years and they provide negative value to the whole experience. Low interest rates got me bidding against people who saw these places as secondary income, not as a place to live. I spoke with a homeowner who really worked to sell me on his place. He talked about how similar our situations were when he first bought the place. Single guy in his 30s looking to end the rent trap. But he needed to buy another house fast and so he went for a 100% cash offer instead.

The higher interest rates has helped a bit. Houses are no longer listed for 7 days with deferred negotiation. They stay on the market for a month or so and get negotiated down in price. I hate to be mean, but I know of some real estate agents who I will be happy to see lose their shirts. It will be nice to see them have to try to make a sale for once.

As much as I support YIMBYism, my biggest fear is that with declining birth rates and a general sourness on immigration, we will enter a period of oversupply in a few decades. I don't know what that will mean in practicality. You already see less economically robust areas of the country that are just filled with abandoned or decrepit housing. It's not good for the neighborhood, or the environment, or the market. But in today's hot markets, we could benefit from a more consumption oriented housing market and build build build.

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We lived in the Bay Area for 20 years and saw a lot of what you describe. When the housing market was hot, longtime residents who might’ve been interested in selling had nowhere to go. So we stayed in our house for 18 years when we decided to sell in 2015, we wanted to stay in the Bay Area. We couldn’t find anything that we could afford even with our windfall after the sale of our house. We moved in Philadelphia.

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Agree with much of this, but need to add a few points:

1) While I think it’s fine to try to get people to conceptualize housing as consumption rather than investment, the main reason homeownership is broadly beneficial to society is that it’s a mechanism for forced savings, subsidized by the government through tax policy. Even if there was no real appreciation in house prices, homeowners build wealth through the equity in their homes. While in theory renters can do the same by just keeping in a bank the amount that would go to principal repayment if they were homeowners, in practice that is not typical consumer behavior, leaving long-term renters worse off on average (and society with more consumption, less investment).

2) I see another commenter beat me to the point about housing being a leveraged investment. Downstream of this important fact is being a mortgage holder is very helpful for the establishment of good credit.

3) All well and good to analogize a house to a car -- though a house has such a longer useful life the comparison is more tenuous than it seems -- but homeowners are also landowners, and land cannot be consumed. As such, even if your logic around reducing the price of housing being broadly beneficial is convincing to the public, homeowners will always benefit from raising the price of land they own. This doesn’t necessarily cut in strictly NIMBY directions, and can be addressed through tax policy in theory, but complicates your argument.

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On point (3), restrictions on new construction don't push the value of land up. They push it down -- the land is more valuable if you can build more units on it. Restrictions push up the value of the structure -- because zoning is a limit on the amount of structures that can exist, it makes the more scarce structures more valuable. If you own a single-family house in the flats of Beverly Hills, and your lot is rezoned so it's possible to build a condo tower, you can make a pretty penny by selling your lot to a developer.

That owner-occupiers oppose upzoning anyway is why I think most of this politics is not really about financial self-interest -- people like their neighborhoods as they are and don't want them to change, they don't want traffic, etc.

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Agree with your second point for sure. This is not primarily an economic point of view for most homeowners.

However I think the impact of restrictions on land prices are much more ambiguous on a parcel-by-parcel basis. Surely not every lot in every community will be suitable for condo redevelopment, and if yours is not then suddenly having a high rise next door and attendant noise and traffic would reduce the value of your single-family lot. Or if you are in a further out suburb, redevelopment of inner ring lots to higher density will likely reduce the value of your land. Regardless, it is rational for homeowners to consider this, as it is truly an investment they have made, rather than simply thinking “my house is depreciating like my car so more housing is always better full stop.”

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I've always found it interesting that co-op apartments in NYC are generally cheaper than condos. The rationale that's cited is that condos are more valuable because there are fewer restrictions on their use. But a co-op can choose to regulate their units as minimally as a condo. Presumably co-ops choose not to do this because it benefits the owners. But then shouldn't this make a co-op MORE valuable?

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What I've been told is that if a co-op converts to condo, it creates a tax event where all the co-op owners effectively have to realize a gain based on how their properties have risen in value, and so it's usually impractical to convert even if it would add value. New buildings are generally built as condos.

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My point is more that a co-op board (without doing a conversion) could choose to allow owners to rent out their apartments at will or to do renovations without interference - as in a condo. They choose not to do this because they think this benefits owners. If it benefits owners, one would think this adds value rather than subtracting it.

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Irrespective of all the government tipping of the scale towards homeownership, Demsas overlooks the actual, not artificial, supply constraints in high density places that people want to live. You can't zone Santa Monica to have more Santa Monica. There's only so much room for the single family homes in places that people want to live/own in. It is an inherent constraint that winners and losers will exist. More people want SFH's than exist room to put them in places people want to be.

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People "want" all sorts of things. It'd be pretty cool to have a detached single-family home in Manhattan, but to get that you have to be elected mayor. You can have more homes in Santa Monica by letting people put more dwelling units on a given amount of land. Generally, that will mean apartments and condominiums -- lots of people are interested in living in apartments in Santa Monica, you can check the apartment rents and they are quite high. In any case, as someone who lives in Manhattan, I can assure you that Santa Monica is not "full" and neither are most municipalities that claim they've hit their physical buildout constraint. What people mean when they say this is simply that they like the place as it is and they don't want it to change.

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People do want all sorts of things -- and then they shift their gaze to the political realm. They want it to be sunshine at 6am and 6pm 12 months a year and it isn't going to happen. No one legitimately wants a detached home in Manhattan because there is obviously not room for one, but there's lot of room in lots of places for single family homes already, and people want the Golden Tickets. I agree lots are interested in condos and apts, and I agree zoning to let those things happen is great and would alleviate prices for both rentals and home ownership -- despite humans being such change-averse creatures. I just think an analysis that discounts the desire for a detached single family home to raise your family in (which I personally do not even have I would caveat) as the epicenter of many Americans' aspirations is not complete. I am sure Ezra Klein is not raising his family in an ADU in Oakland.

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They might not be detached but the prices of single family homes in Manhattan are quite high!

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It can definitely be alleviated with housing density/apartments. In my area, there's plenty of neighborhoods where it is cheaper to rent a SFH with some roommates. But there's no reason why a few more apartment buildings packed with single and 2 bedroom apartments couldn't lower prices enough to start competing. Sure, there will still be some SFH renters.

I'm not super familiar with Santa Monica, but it's really not uncommon to see single family or duplex homes rental prices reaching parity with apartment buildings, which makes no sense unless there is a supply constraint.

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This really depends on the market. Places like the bay area where the value is in the land and not the house, most of the costs of the transaction is noise. Even realtor costs are a smaller percentage than the rest of the country.

I agree rent stabilization is a short term solution with long term negative consequences. Mountain View passed rent stabilization a number of years ago and now all their low income apartments have been torn down and replaced with town houses (reducing the housing density).

In the bay area there is a huge discrepency between what it costs to rent versus what it costs to own. Owning confers stability in your costs (your mortgage doesn't increase, and your taxes increase in a slow predictable way), but it cost much more to buy than rent (and not just in the fixed down payment). While rents of $4000/month sounds high for a home, buying that home means carrying a million+ mortgage, which it 10s of thousands of dollars. If home appreciation even just slowed, these numbers would naturally get closer (though would rents go up, or would housing prices come down?).

bob

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Regarding the city leaders who don’t want housing prices to decline, doesn’t that likely reflect the current reality that a decline in housing correlated to other negative outcomes, like population decline, that city leaders hope to avoid?

I think this is related to concern people have about changes that will come from yimby policies. Is there an example of a city that grew quickly that successfully accommodated that growth in a way that broadly satisfied people? My understanding from Seattle as an example is that it’s lead to discontent, but that may just be from people I know as a tech worker.

I live in an expensive area and support more housing, but YIMBYism would benefit from some examples to point to as a model to be emulated.

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The idea that if housing prices don't go up means something bad happened to a neighborhood or city is tied to not allowing enough housing to be built to meet demand.

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I think there is a benefit to homeowners of rising prices that is overlooked here. When you sell, sure, you need a new place to live, but you can often get the new place with only a little bit down and the rest as a loan. Your net wealth may not increase by much in this transaction, it may even go down, but you now have a pile of cash while your monthly housing expenses have only modestly changed.

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You can also cash-out refi without moving. But either way that's just borrowing more -- your carrying cost for the house goes up (because the mortgage balance is greater) and that's an even more explicit reflection of the fact that you're having to finance the cost of owning a more expensive home than you once did. For a long time, interest rates were very low and it was attractive for people to borrow a lot of money (this is a reason the effects of price increases on affordability was somewhat overstated). But now rates are high and this isn't even very attractive as an option for most people.

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Yes, higher interest rates make this (and any other borrowing) less attractive, for sure.

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Let's not get mad at homeowners.

Yes, I am one.

It's a choice we made.

Why can't we have both?

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Buying a house is "an investment in living"--consumption indeed, but one that provides stability of place; you don't have to worry whether the rent is going up or the building is going to be sold. But the mantra is that the most important things are "location, location, location" but after that, "terms." If the cost comes down and supply goes up there will be more people buying and that will be a good thing, a further opportunity to have a store of value. All that said, it's a relatively illiquid investment--it's hard to take profits on a primary residence, you still need somewhere to live, and moving is a pain.

Dan Walters (now independent, formerly reporter for the Sacramento Bee) recently wrote that attempts to get more housing built in CA get hamstrung by the requirements for union contracts, as if every private development is a public works program. I am no expert but am skeptical that we will see much building of affordable housing in CA. The solution is reminiscent of the advice of George Carlin's Hippy Dippy Weather Man: "If you don't like the weather--move." If you're in CA and want a starter house--move.

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Why not LA Josh? Weathers better, and you already have a home on FI? You, do seem to travel there frequently. Just curious……

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I tried to move to California in my 20s, but professional circumstances repeatedly kept me here on the east coast, I built a deep and rewarding social network here, I married a man who also has deep ties here and doesn't want to live on the west coast, and as you note we now own a beach house that would be very impractical to visit from LA, so I think we're here for good.

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Merry Christmas 🎁 to you and your husband Josh.

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