That’s always been my attitude. Yet the property taxes on the house I’ve lived in for 35 years keep going up based on what somebody else would pay for it if I sold it. Paying tax on the money I make if I ever do sell the house would make sense to me, but until that ever happens I’m being taxed on a number determined by real estate speculators. So what the actual fuck?
China does many things wrong but housing isn’t one of them.
Americans will decry the American housing crisis and simultaneously mock China for over production of housing which caused a housing price crash.
“I can’t afford a house!” “China is so stupid, they have empty cities.”
I don’t knock them for over production, but build quality is a more common problem that I saw. Also not a fan of not being able to own the apartment, but their availability is dope. Their public transit is also dope, both inter and intra city transit.
The joke of the “China is building empty cities” mythology is in how quickly they filled up with people. So you had this echoing “New City is empty!” scandal that reverberated all the way from Fujian to Qinghai.
There was a problem of housing speculation, as investors tried to get out ahead of the building frenzy. But the state government intervened to curb that practice. There was a problem of shady contractors and construction crews shaving quality for profit, even leading to a couple of high profile building collapses. But the state government sent out investigators, prosecuted delinquents, and provided restitution to the injured and defrauded. There was a problem of matching the housing stock to the available employment, particularly during the economic slowdown in the wake of SARS in the early '00s and then COVID in '19. But the state government intervened to quarantine, vaccinate, and restabilize the local economies.
Curiously, the US loves to report on the crises. We never like to talk about the recoveries. Instead, you get this doggedly fixation on pivotal moments in the past that endure long after they are relevant. It would be like reading newspapers and hearing radio about Florida, where everyone brought up the '08 Housing Crash at every opportunity. They dogmatically insisted that real estate prices can’t recover, even in the middle of a construction boom and new speculation bubble a decade later.
This misinformation that persists in any kind of conversation is deafening. It’s gotten to the point that some random guy can do a livestream YouTube vacation blog in Chengdu and western critics lose their fucking minds in disbelief. Like, the very idea that everyone in the country isn’t still living in 1980s levels of rural poverty is entirely unimaginable.
The current Chinese housing crisis was not caused by building homes for people to live in, it was caused by developers selling homes that didn’t exist with the empty promise that the would totally, definitely be built. Then the homes were never built for humans to actually live in.
That quote gave me whiplash as soon as I read who and when it was from.
Let’s not ignore that to get to this point, they had to kill most of the landlords, and then keep the rest of the industry under the heavy boot of the state.
Not to say it was the wrong thing to do, but it wasn’t policy alone that made China a cheap place to live.
I hate to say this, but there are many things that China is doing right.
I dunno why you have to hate saying that; China and the Chinese govt are doing freaking awesome things that the world should envy, and they deserves lavish praise. Period. And I’m speaking as a red blooded Texan.
They’re into some shit, too. And have problems, including major ones conflated with the real estate crisis.
It can be both. Westerners don’t have to be walking stereotypes that ponder ‘China evil’ with every other thought, like Lemmygrad seems to think. I mean, what leg to I have to stand on?
It doesn’t mean we have to just accept the human rights violations or papered over crises or whatever either.
Upvote for reasonableness.
This is the central issue to Australia’s housing affordability and availability crisis
Yup, and with more than two decades of rat-box quality appartments sold primarily as investment vehicles have pushed first-home further and further out - placing a massive burden on infrastructure to keep up.
The problem is, the vast majority of our politicians are heavily invested into the property market and are therefore disincentivised to do anything substantial to fix it.
Even those with only one property to their name, wouldn’t want to do anything substantial to cause property values to decline. They are in the unenviable position of trying to freeze property prices where they currently are for the next ~50 years or so and let society catch up in terms of buying power.
It’s definitely doable, but the risks of fucking it up greatly out-weigh the potential successes, so no one really seems willing to pick up the mantle.
Slow and phased changes to tax legislation to remove incentives with suitable grace and transition periods for people to offload assets would see a dramatic improvement to property prices for buyers. The impact on sellers would be determined by the market but we could expect lower prices due to an influx of volume.
The other issue is that Australia’s economy is held up by big banks which are in turn propped up by their mortgage debts. A reduction to property values will see a downturn on the ASX. All the more reason for Australia to reinvigorate its manufacturing footprint and diversify its economics.
Getting rich off of a property portfolio is lazy and unproductive. Try operating a business that is useful to someone or pushing the boundary of innovation. Instead we have all those boomers out there filing away their monthly statements from their property manager saying “YoU JuSt GoTtA WoRk hArDeR!” What a joke.
The problem is that any dramatic fall in house prices risks an absolute calamity economically as innocent people who are only working to pay off the roof over their heads find themselves underwater on their mortgage.
Bankruptcies are painful not just economically, but also socially and mentally - which is why we really need to ‘thread the needle’ in such a way that housing costs stagnate for multiple generations, rather than drastically fall backwards.
One other option would be to allow home owners to somehow claim primary/residential losses against their income tax - but that could likely be an imperfect solution that would probably face too many headwinds politically to ever pass.
But the most obvious, low hanging fruit would be to roll-back Howard-era changes to Negative Gearing and Capital Gains benefits, as well as imposing restrictions on who can buy residential properties in Australia (eg. require a PR to be able to purchase a primary place of residence, citizenship to purchase additional properties).
The problem though is that whichever political party would ever be brave enough to pass this legislation (let’s be honest, it would only ever be Labor and not the LNP), risks being absolutely slaughtered in the media, losing the subsequent election, only to have the incoming government undo said changes.
