that’s exactly what a monopoly does. one should look into how to apply anti-monopoly laws on the housing market more effectively.

a knot is a nautical mile per hour

i remember reading recently that it was discovered that a lot of studies regarding microplastics are likely wrong. because nitrile gloves used to operate in the laboratory gives off microplastics, so there is basically no uncontaminated samples.

so, always check your presumably “clean” samples too!

Everybody is against borders until it is what they see as their land that is treaded on.

i don’t know who i have to thank that i’m not the dog of a shitty owner

she is but i still like this comic

and i do look at the art more than the artist

well, i can concur. my eyes have trouble adjusting to looking into the distance when i have spent hours in front of the screen. they adapt after a few minutes to hours though.

please do not the duck

i like your art. don’t get discouraged.

thank you for your comment. just to add to it:

If you have a 1 km² (one square kilometer, = 1 million square meters) area. And the law dictates that only single-family houses can be built on it, with a minimum lot size of 500 m² each, then assuming 4 people per house, you can build 2000 houses in that area or house around 8000 people.

If you allow multi-family houses. Such as i live in one in Austria. Close to the city. The house has a lot size of about 1000 m² (with a big park in the middle), and 25 people live in it. If you build houses like that, you can house around 25000 people. More than triple!

Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced,

they will actually decrease long-term (in most areas) as the population is shrinking, meaning less demand for housing.

i think the problem of institutional investors is mostly that they’re unnecessary middle-men, taking a slice of the cake while not actually providing anything of value.

they buy the house, then rent it out to the local population. in the end, they make a profit that way, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. that is money that could have gone into the local community instead.

either you need local middlemen, like the municipality (which i am advocating for!) or people need to buy the houses directly themselves. i remember reading an article that renting is often better for inhabitants since they don’t need to do a down-payment and also they carry less risk that way. also interestingly many can build more wealth by renting+investing instead of house buying. ~~https://www.moneydigest.com/1580083/renting-vs-owning-both-can-help-you-build-wealth-according-to-personal-finance-expert/~~

edit: damn it i can’t find the article anymore

I mean sure we can ban institutional investors from buying up houses in your area, but the question is: will new houses stlil continue to be built? or are houses mostly built because the developers intend to sell them to institutional investors that can pay high prices for it?

in any case, the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can’t only ban one without also pushing the other.

First of all, that would only apply to companies with a build-and-hold business model, not to ones that develop a property and then sell it off to owner-occupants. Clearly, there do exist people who want to be owner-occupants, so the real issue is how to construct the regulations etc. to incentivize the latter business model.

fair point. i had completely not considered that. especially as we were discussing blackrock which is a buy-and-hold business model.

Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this

i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:

and it’s going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks “if i build a house today, there’s a good chance that there won’t be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off”. and municipalities, i’m afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.

after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that’s about 0.5 percent. Source

Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).

yeah the UK is going downhill very quickly and it’s evident in how nervously they respond to that saying.

i indeed only found out about that rn

But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors

hehe thanks, i try to be.

i mean yeah, literally, look at how the Iranian regime is allowed to post its anti-US propaganda lego movies on Twitter.

edit: nvm that was a bad take.