> Almost every urban development thread on HN is full of comments about how Americans need to abandon the idea of single-family home ownership and move into apartments. How is renting out a SFH any different from a small-time landlord than owns a property with 10 tenants? Either way the inhabitants leave the relationship with no change in their ownership of the underlying physical land.

I never said that the idea of owning a SFH should be abandoned. Owning multiple SFHs for the purpose of turning them into an investment vehicle should be the thing that's abandoned. I also believe that as long as you are renting, you should be gaining equity in the property.

> Middle-class rental property owners aren't even on my Top100 list of Things Making America a Hellhole.

Lets hear them then. 1-100, a numbered list please.

> You've basically just described "Foreign Investment".

You state this as though I am not aware of it. I don't think foreign investment in house-bearing real estate should be allowed.

> So if renting out our family home is apparently immoral, is it also immoral to open a factory and employ American workers, while I live overseas?

If all you do is extract and expatrtiate the wealth gained from said factory, yes, it is immoral in my mind. You should be reinvesting all of the profits into the factory or the workers with some _very_ minimal amount kept for yourself as profit.

> In both cases I am levering my possession of private property, which I am not personally using, to amplify the accrual of wealth to myself.

You should be limited in the ability to accrue wealth. If anything, this is an argument against what you're doing.
And ultimately, if you're not using it personally, you should sell it to someone that would. That's the most benefit to society.

> I'm considering sub-dividing my property and building 1-2 additional houses on the currently-unused land. If zoning weren't an issue, I could tear down the existing home and replace it with a 3-unit apartment building. Would I still be "the exact problem" if I now owned a luxury condo building instead of 3 single-family units?

Again, I have no problem with you using your property as you wish as long as you don't exploit other people. If you subdivide your property, build houses or apartments on it, and then rent them out at cost or very close to, there's no issue with that. But if you subdivide your property, or develop it into a profit-generating vehicle that goes beyond just cover your costs as a landlord, I have a problem with that. I don't really give a crap that you want to generate some profit off your properties. The need for housing overrides your desires for profit, and ultimately if that means you lose your additional properties, that's fine by me as long as society in general benefits. Your feelings on this are 100% irrelevant.

> My US property is severely undervalued because it is in a historically-black neighborhood with a poor-performing school system. I was quoted a sale price of ~$275k....while houses barely 1.5km away in the white neighborhoods, with fewer physical features/amenities than our home, are selling for $450k.

So you made a risky investment that will possibly not pay off in your lifetime? What's your point?

>If I ever sell it at all, it will be after the neighborhood sufficiently gentrifies and home prices normalize with the surrounds.
"I will remove this home from the market and disallow any other potential homeowner to use it as a home until my investment has been recouped. And until I have done so, I will extract wealth from those than cannot compete with me for the purchase of the home."

What you're signaling here is that your property is purely an investment vehicle and that the only thing you intend to do with it is extract rent.

> As for buying a home here (Japan), why would I undergo all the various transaction costs involved (FX risk, agent commissions, etc...) just to physically shift the source of my revenue?

Well, some people see that as away to have a home that they don't need to be worried about getting kicked out of. Pretty sure they mind much less than you going through all that process.

> So if I bought a house here, I would lose on the transaction costs, gain nothing in nominal wealth (break even on house price), lose qualitatively on the physical features (you're not getting a 4-bedroom house with an inground pool for $400k in Japan), and lose on purchasing-power-parity of my rental income.

Once again, and? You state this as though there's some necessity in the world to guarantee your income/profit. If you're going to lose money on buying a house, then don't buy the house. I ain't twisting your arm.

> Yes, because all too frequently, doing something is objectively worse than doing nothing.

When the system is at rock bottom and grinding people into dust, and any motion outside of the current system will result in a more beneficial local minimum, then doing nothing is objectively worse. This isn't like a new officer changing the processes and routines of a well-established unit. This is taking a shitty officer out back after he just joined the unit and suggested they should change tactics to attacking the enemies buck-naked without any weapons. We're well past the point where doing nothing is neutral.

And here's the other thing, as long as the wishes are of the society at large, then it doesn't really matter how mercurial they are. You can either follow them, or be ostracized.

> So when someone suggests that the solution to America's housing problem is "get the central government to seize and redistribute private property", I absolutely consider my position quantifiably better than their suggestion.

But the suggestion isn't to seize private property. It's to tax private property that can serve a public good enough that serving the public good becomes more profitable than not. You're free to own as much property as you want as long as you commensurately compensate society for said property.

But even if the suggestion was to actually seize private property and redistribute it, in certain contexts that would be perfectly acceptable.

The solution to the housing problem in the US is not only building more housing, but shutting down avenues of removing or significantly pricing-up housing supply from the market. It helps no one if new housing is out of the price range of the people that need housing the most. And as such, your approach to housing, is part of the problem.