On 1/17/2020 3:20 PM, news18 wrote:
On Fri, 17 Jan 2020 16:58:43 -0500, Frank Krygowski wrote:


And we have other friends - the guy's a former cyclist, used to tour the
Alps - who recently moved out of our village into another big old house
inside the city. They're optimistic about the city's future, and are
betting on gentrification.

Most people forget that when you buy a "house', they are actualy buying
house and land. In urban areas, the land can be worth more than the
building siting upon it. The real fools are the ones who then spend money
"improving" that house over the combined value. As very few tend to stay
for a long term, they'll probably never recover their money.

If their goal is to recover the money on improvements when they sell
then indeed they are fools. But if they make improvements because they
want to enjoy living in a house with those improvements, then they are
not fools.

In California, most people do stay for the long term because of way the
property tax system works. It's actually a big problem because of the
extremely low turnover of the limited supply of single family homes.

There was an attempt in 2018 to address this issue and it failed big
time. Anti-affordable housing forces and real estate developers were
able to defeat this bill. A big part of the problem was that it was the
California Association of Realtors that put it on the ballot because it
would cause a huge increase in the sale of existing homes and hence
increases in income for real estate brokers and agents.