this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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I can walk into a bank today with a mortgage cheaper than rent, and I’ll be denied cause I don’t make enough money, explain that logic to me.
Landlords don't care if your rent is sustainable for you in the long term. They have nothing to lose if at one point you can't afford it anymore, someone else will.
Banks on the other hand care very much if you'll be able to pay your loan in full. Even with the house as collateral, it's much better for them if you just paid your loan instead of them having to deal with all that.
"they get the house if you don't pay" really isn't so great after you've look at what they actually get for those houses.
Generally, people don't get foreclosed on when their house looks super fancy and well maintained.
Also debt is an asset for banks. Having people in debt for 30 years is better than having people in debt for 10 years and then selling their house.
They only get to force the sale of the house to recoup their loan, you get to keep the extra from the sale. House sells for $300k, you owed $250k you walk away with $50k and the bank gets their money back.
But on auction, the bid is usually FAR below the normal asking price.
The counter-intuitive solution is probably to make it easier for banks to evict people for not paying their mortgage.
In most of the US, foreclosures are a legal process that requires a court order. The bank has to take the borrower to court, prove the loan is not paid, and then the court has to find in favour of the bank and then issue an order to have the sheriff auction off the property.
In many cases, these auctions will result in the property sold far below market value because the borrower will drag their feet and not co-operate. In many cases, buyers can't do a thorough house inspection and thus the hammer price suffers because they have to account for that risk.
The bootlicker-sounding but actually smart solution, if you consider it beyond the initial knee jerk reaction, is to make it so that when the court enters a foreclosure order, the homeowner is immediately evicted and the house is now in the custody of the State until it is sold. The borrowers can have a reasonable time to leave, but when they do, the sheriff should then open the property to the public for inspection and hire or allow buyers to hire house inspectors, perform title searches, and all the other formalities associated with selling a house in the ordinary manner.
All buyers then submit written offers (bids) to the sheriff like they would for any other house purchase but these bids would be published to avoid accusations of impropriety; the highest bidder gets the house. As with any other auction, the bank bids the amount of the mortgage plus court costs as a baseline. After it is sold, the sheriff takes the traditional 6 per cent estate agent fee for their trouble and then pays off the bank and the remainder goes to the borrower.
As terrible as it sounds for the ordinary borrower, this actually results in a better outcome for them because it would result in a higher sale price for the house, meaning the mortgage is lower risk for the bank by reducing the likelihood that the bank bid is the highest, allowing them to extend those loans to more people, and a defaulted borrower gets more of their money back in the end.
When the underlying problem is insufficient supply in the locations people want to live, anything that gives average person more purchasing power (such as making banks comfortable with larger loans) just drives up the price even higher.
Densifying metro areas (the places people are moving to) is the only real solution. Otherwise the price has to be unaffordable for the average person, to drive them into finding a way to live in a more rural area or to put up with a multiple-roommate living arrangement.
While I agree with this principle generally, and I believe that if my solution were to be implemented it would need to be alongside other schemes like increased public housing projects, relaxing zoning laws to allow densification, and anti-scalping measures like a quadratic property tax.
But even if my suggestion were implemented alone, it wouldn't result in increased prices. That's got to do with the fact that ordinary people, right now in the US, largely do not bid in foreclosure auctions. All that housing supply is actually not going to end consumers at all. The type of people who would bid at foreclosure auctions are not those who want to live in the house but in many cases, those who want to resell it. Making the foreclosure process more similar to normal house-buying and thereby increasing the hammer prices drives out scalpers and flippers because it's not profitable for them any more. Hell, if you've seen the videos these people post, they start pulling back even if the price is tens of thousands of dollars under market.
That was the part I meant about this proposal increasing demand by giving the average person more purchasing power.
Multiple strategies makes sense. Quadratic property tax is a new one to me, and it confused Google. Is it like a progressive tax, where larger valuations are taxed at a higher rate?
It gives the average person more purchasing power but it also opens up new supply by opening the foreclosure auctions to the average person. The increased demand I argue is partially or wholly counteracted by pushing out the house flippers from the foreclosure markets; those people are generally only interested in buying properties at severely under market prices at foreclosure auctions or similar sales. Essentially, I am saying that the entire "flipper" business model should be destroyed as it does not provide sufficient value to the taxpayer to offset its negative effect on the market and this policy could do severe damage to that sector.
Quadratic property tax is a combination of the "quadratic" nature of quadratic voting and, of course, taxation. I made this term up hoping people would know what I was talking about but it turned out to not be as obvious as I initially thought.
Essentially, the taxation scheme takes into account the number of lots owned by a person in addition to the value per lot. Consider the following sample scheme:
The amount of tax due on any given property is calculated according to the following formula: r×(1 + Np)²×V, where N is the number of lots owned by the taxpayer beyond the first and V is the value of the lot. The variables r and p are determined by the local taxing authority which correspond to tax rate (higher = more tax per unit of money) and the penalty for owning excessive numbers of lots (higher = greater penalty for owning multiple lots).
If a local taxing authority selects values r = 0.002 and p = 0.05, the tax due for a lot worth 100 units of money would be as follows:
It is "quadratic" because the tax rate scales with the square of the number of previous lots owned.
Coupled with counting rules that ignore subsidiary corporate entities for the purpose of determining ownership, finely-tuning values of r and p will discourage corporate ownership of housing without punishing individual homeowners or small-time landlords.
While this strategy has not been tried in real life to my knowledge, interestingly, some Minecraft servers have implemented a similar scheme to prevent hoarding of desirable lots in the overworld to varying degrees of success, mostly depending on whether those in charge admit any loopholes for privileged players to exploit.
Ah, I missed part where home flippers left the market. I'm not totally following the chain of logic after that, but I am OK with that.
I am not convinced using regulation (tax incentive or otherwise) to drive larger landlords out of the market would improve the experience of the average renter. Some small landlords are terrible. With proper regulation, some ginormous ones are good (countries that do public housing well - government-run is bigger than any corporate landlord).
Had that happen a few years ago. Banks are in on the landlord scheme and they can go fuck themselves. Unfortunately it's literally impossible to live without a bank today. At least in my country.
If something were to happen, and you couldn't make rent, you might get evicted, which would be inconvenient.
If something were to happen, and you couldn't make the mortgage, the bank might lose money, which is unconscionable.
But the bank can take the house as collateral, what are they even losing?
Probably much easier to have someone reliably pay than to have to go through all the processes of defaulting, repossessing, renovating/repairing, and reselling.
Not sure if you're in America but credit scores are some rigged ass bs. What do you mean paying off a loan made my score lower?? I have more disposable income!
It doesn't, you just don't know how it works.
You're probably seeing that on Credit Karma, which uses a score that stops counting closed loans immediately, whereas the actual credit reporting bureaus' systems have them stay on your credit report for 10 years from the date of closure. While they remain, they do continue to count toward your average age of accounts (AAoA) in most scoring models (including FICO). That means even closed accounts can help keep your average age higher.
And given that your average account age doesn't need to be anywhere close to 10 for you to have 'perfect' (750 and above puts you in the highest tier in the eyes of every lender) credit (hell, account age is only like 15% of the score), this is actually not an issue, at all. My average account age is less than 8 years and my score's over 800. Just make your payments on time and you're good. You don't even need to accrue any interest—using a credit card and paying it completely off every month works just fine, that's what I do.
Having income isn't proof you can be relied on to promptly pay back a loan, having a history of having promptly paid back loans is. A third of people making over $200,000 a year live paycheck to paycheck—just because you're making money doesn't mean you're a responsible borrower.
You know, I don't even get that. Banks make a decent amount of money on those mortgages, it used to be their bread and butter after all. What is the problem, it doesn't make enough money fast enough? Why are there no other banks filling in the obvious financing hole?
You're no longer proving continously that you can keep paying reliably (yes it's dumbass logic)
It's your credit age actually, it gets cumulatively lower because whatever loan it is isn't adding to your credit age, which is absolutely ridiculous.
Ah, yes, "it's taken this dude longer than this other dude to pay off his debt, surely we want to give him MORE credit"
It's designed so that "sweet spot" customers have the best credit scores, those who have enough to reliably pay but not enough to pay it off any time soon.
Bullshit, my score's in the 800s and all I do is use my credit card for everyday purchases, and pay it off every month. I never carry a balance or pay a cent of interest, nor do I have any installment loans (car loan, etc.) at all.
Tons of confident incorrectness in this thread.
Haha number go up
Thats wild, is your credit scored fucked?
Income is a massive part of how they determine if you can repay the loan. I personally have an exceptionally high credit score and about double my home's value in investments. Because of my low reported income, it was a total pain getting a loan.
income is not a massive part of how you can repay the loan. Income can fluctuate over a 10-20 year period. I've had the opposite, I have a good credit score, good spending habits and was able to show that although my income is average I can accommodate the mortgage payments. If you made 90k but had a bad credit score and spent wastefully you would get denied for someone on 55k who has a good credit sore and lives within their means, has savings etc.
Debt to income ratio. Saying income isn't a massive part of loans is just wrong.
Saying it is a massive part of loans is wrong. If you had 150k a year income and your expenses were 150k a year you would never get approved. Income is one thing they look at but i wouldnt say its a massive part of the equation.
....debt to INCOME ratio. Debt is important here, as is the other half of the equation.
In your example, if the individual's income doubled would they likely be able to secure another loan?
I am not going to respond again, it's not my job to educate you.
Have you tried lately? Just curious.