I agree but I feel Karat is good/helpful IF we're all still stuck in the leetcode/algorithm world because at least it's friendly/consistent.

From your comments it seems you're at Google. Isn't Google mostly algorithm/leetcode problems? I thought Karat was mostly that as well. Wouldn't Karat be a good screen for that sort of thing so as not to waste Google Engineer time?

I feel like if we just limited the number of homes any one person or company can own (to like 4 max), it would solve a lot of issues. Also no foreign investors. Also make building easier. If developers get rich so be it.

NZ banned foreign investors and average home prices are up about 50% in the couple of years since that happened.

Foreign buyers just don't make up enough of the market, and neither do people with 5+ residences.

The lack of any capital gains tax plays a big role in this case

The only reason people bother owning multiple dwelling units is because they're a "good investment" because there's more demand than supply.

Let supply outstrip demand and suddenly they're not a good investment anymore, so people go back to owning them for living in.

My parents own three, none of which they keep as an investment. One is their primary home, a second is their winter escape, and a third was supposed to be a place for my grandmother. But she died shortly after my parents bought it, and they can't be bothered to sell or rent it to anybody. So it's a storage unit now.

Not that this is a good use of a perfectly fine basic housing unit, but it isn't an investment.

So your parents are preventing two young families from starting their lives.

Seriously, a "winter escape"? Literally noone needs that. Literally noone should have that until everybody's basic needs are met.

Which won't happen with all these "storage unit" houses there are.

I don't necessarily agree that "nobody should have X until everyone has Y" is a workable general rule; no family should have two cars until everyone has one; no family should have two jobs until everyone has one.

The second home is already slightly tax disadvantaged compared to the primary residence, perhaps it should be "punished" more.

Which is why I assume the parent post mentioned 4, I would have said two or three myself (as your example shows).

If that third house had some form of tax penalty associated with it being unused/empty they might bother to sell it.

But the housing crisis isn't perpetuated by empty homes in general; empty homes exist because there's an investment aspect of it. If the grandma house was losing at IRS depreciation rates, it'd likely be sold (though a storage unit might cost a similar amount).

I keep trying to convince my parents to sell it. They're spending a lot of money on it for property taxes and HOA fees (it's a condo unit) but they simply don't care enough. On the bright side, it's in a town that hasn't yet been swept up by the housing crisis. Only a matter of time though.

What about renters? People who own multiple residences usually don't let them sit empty; they rent them out, and a robust rental stock is important in any city. Look at Montreal, for example. Most people rent, but someone has to own the buildings.

People don't rent for the fun of it, they rent because they can't afford a house. Pretty much anybody would be glad to swap paying rent for morgage payments. As it is, you often have the messed up situation of your rent going to pay somebody else's mortgage interest

Renting is not always just an intermediate step to being too poor to buy a home, it can be a freeing experience to not have the hassle of a home.

With WFH especially now you can work in various parts of the city or move all over the world and at most be tied down to a place for about a year.

Homeowners also never talk about things like paying tens of thousands of dollars when a pipe burst or the roof needs repairing.

That's not true. Owning a home is a hassle and ties you down. Like I said, most people in Montreal rent, and Montreal has some of the cheapest housing in Canada.

By “homes” do you mean buildings here or housing units? Because if it’s the latter, doesn’t that preclude most apartment buildings?

I hope you get shown similar sympathy when your house value crashes

I don't view housing as an investment. I look at it as I need a place to live. If I make money on it after I'm done living there then that's great.

If that's the case, why not just rent?

Some non-investment reasons: stability, locking in your cost of living for many years, the ability to remodel your home to make it look the way you want it to, and no risk of being forced to move because the home you live in gets sold and the buyer wants to live in it themselves.

In Japan, houses generally depreciate over time, yet the home ownership rate is still 60% because the other benefits of home ownership are so attractive.

If you know you want to live in a particular area for a long time, and you can afford it, home ownership is usually an attractive move.

You'll never finish paying rent, but you will finish paying your mortgage eventually. Also, your mortgage payment won't increase much while you own your house (just the part for property taxes), while rents will often go up (and sometimes down) with the market. So if you are in it for the long term, a house will provide stability after 10 or so years. And that isn't even considering the fact that it is your place to make for your needs vs. your landlord's.

You’ll never stop paying. Pick rent or property taxes. Obviously property taxes are less than rent in your typical case. But it’s not even an order of magnitude difference

No, it is around...a third where I live maybe? Or maybe a 4th of what rent would be like. But I can always sell/downsize and retire to somewhere with cheaper property taxes, which is something I couldn't do renting. Rents don't do that.

But watch the rent to home price ratio. There is definitely a point where renting just makes more sense, like when I was paying $1000/month on something that the landlord was trying to sell for a $1 million. Ya, buying in that case would be purely for speculation.

Because after 30 years of paying rent... you own nothing. After 30 years of paying a mortgage... you own land and a building.

OP said that they don't view housing as an investment thus owning the "land" should absolutely not matter. They might as well rent if its cheaper.

AFAIK an investment is when you put money into something expecting it to increase in value.

Buying a house just so that at the end you own it is not an investment, that's just a purchase with a loan.

And he should leave the US if he thinks taxes are too high

totally. no woman over 32 cares about this anymore

It's really quite simple a lot of men just want to be able to experiment sexually before they settle down. A lot of women do too. The difference is for women this is easily available in the dating world.. for men.. especially short men.. it's a distant fantasy. If these needs were met they would harbor no resentment towards women.

I’m not sure what to say to this. It’s a perspective that I find difficult to understand. The closest I’ve managed to get is “sometimes people struggle to cope with disappointment and not getting what they want”. The resulting resentment and anger at an entire group… that’s still alien to me. It’s sad to hear about, though, because it seems like the kind of feeling that tears apart a person inside.

I honestly think a lot of men just don't like women, or at least don't respect them.

Maybe it's because I was exposed to a lot of sexism in my CS undergrad (and even some jobs I've had), but it really does seem like some men think of women as inferior.

Maybe because it's a male dominated field, you'd probably find the same bias against men in the field of child care for example.

I have a male friend who's a nurse. Definitely no where near the same level of sexism.

This is not really a response to what I said but I will agree sexism is a huge problem

I mean, you're basically stating that women are objects to fulfill the needs of men so it's pretty clearly a response to what you're saying.

Sure, and if Elon Musk gave me all his money, it would alleviate my resentment toward him. But he doesn't owe me anything, and my demand is not reasonable.

move to an east coast city, wait a few years (older women care less about this stuff), get in good shape, start drinking and going to bars/meetups/events, especially related to your hobbies

All of this changes with age I find it hard to believe women over 35 having hard 6' and over filters. So best advice I would say to short guys is move to an east coast city and wait a few years.