What Happened When This City Banned Housing Investors
Why Hacker News recommends it
Cited as a real-world experiment showing that banning investors did not lower purchase prices and may have raised rents.
What it is
Oh The Urbanity! tests the theory that banning housing investors would fix affordability, using Rotterdam's ban as a case study. The video finds mixed results.
Recommended by 0 HN commenters across 0 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Cites ryukafalz · 2023-09 · on “Baby boomers are becoming homeless at a rate not seen since the Great Depression”
> But other than zoning it seems it would help more if the government would step in to disallow large leasing companies buying up giant swathes of the housing stock just to flip into rentals. There was a timely video about this yesterday from Oh the Urbanity: [this video] Summary is that Rotterdam did just this, and the effect was that the price to purchase a house did not measurably decrease, and that rents rose. The neighborhoods regulated in this way had fewer immigrants and skewed wealthier than those that were not. So, not the effect we're looking for.
Cites throw0101c · 2023-10 · on “2023 Nobel Prize in economics awarded to Claudia Goldin”
What was the controllable with Eddington? * [LINK] Einstein's models made a prediction, people 'tested' that prediction in Nature, and it turned out accurate. General theory has made other predictions, and empirical observations have found them to be accurate as well. Plenty of "real" science is/was done outside of controlled experiments in a lab. A phenomena was going to happen (e.g., tax law changes): some economic models predicted X would happen, and some predicted Y would. We can see which were more accurate and which were falsified: * [LINK] Rotterdam is running an experiment right now with regards to real estate markets and regulation: * [this video] * [LINK] Every time the Federal Reserve
Cites throw0101d · 2024-12 · on “Amid cuts to basic research, New Zealand scraps all support for social sciences”
> Economics is the worst social science, an economist is never considered wrong, only of a different “school of economics”. Economists speak as if they have authority and as if their field is objective, but at the same time have those “schools”. Is there such a thing as an unideological economist? Economics is falsifiable. For example, a bunch of folks made a prediction ("currency debasement and inflation") when the US Federal reserve started QE: > We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purc