Landed (YC W16) on why teacher home-ownership is central to improving schools

If they focused on home ownership for educators teaching medicine they could achieve the trifecta! Markets in which government has decided &#x27;everyone must have this&#x27; and subsequently interfered&#x2F;distorted until they&#x27;ve created bubbles&#x2F;crashes..<p>I&#x27;m pessimistic that encouraging anyone to take on more debt then they could ordinarily obtain is a helpful thing in the long term.<p>The post talks about how educators find their rents unaffordable - how does getting them out of an unaffordable rental into an unaffordable mortgage make their situation any better? If anything it makes their situation worse. They&#x27;ll be locked into a mortgage for a house bought in a bubble. If they have an opportunity to move for a better position or more salary they&#x27;ll be unable to do so.

[One of the co-founders of Landed]. This post doesn&#x27;t really talk much about what we do. What we do is run down payment assistance programs for private schools and public school districts to help their teachers become financially secure near the communities they serve.<p>That&#x27;s a mouthful! The economic problem here is that if you&#x27;re a median wage household in a city like SF, NY, DC, etc. you will struggle to save enough money to make a conforming down payment while paying rent. Most of our teachers get trapped in a cycle of their wages increasing at the exact rate of their household expenses.<p>Homeownership in cities is not for everybody. But for those community members who are making a very long-term commitment to a place with very predictable salary schedules, locking in your housing payments is an important part of your security. In the absence of rent controls (which we can talk about at length on why they are often misguided), homeownership is the only form of insurance on rising housing costs.<p>As an owner (especially in California thanks to Prop13), you can be protected from the failure of all levels of government to build sufficient housing for rising economic activity in cities.

This post is a bait and switch. The title and first few paragraphs talk about America, but all the analysis is focused solely on the Bay Area. No justification is given for why the results for the Bay Area should be generalizable for America writ large.<p>There&#x27;s nothing wrong with focusing on the Bay Area, that&#x27;s certainly a big enough problem to tackle. But the title, graphics and first few paragraphs should be changed to reflect that.

Be very careful of the word &quot;home ownership&quot;. It means different things to different people.<p>Much like the weasel-word &quot;affordability&quot; (which means better access to credit, and not cheaper prices) &quot;home ownership&quot; means &quot;mortgaged, bank-owned properties&quot;. Both terms mean debt slavery and a preservation of the status quo (ie: property owners stay rich. buyers, mortgagers and prospective buyers remain poor).<p>What is needed is cheaper housing.<p>Not &quot;affordability&quot; or easier-to-access debt.<p>The way to get cheaper housing is to destroy housing as an investment class. And the way you do that is by taxing 2nd and 3rd properties at increasingly higher rates.

I live in the Bay Area and my wife is a teacher. I know a lot of Bay Area teachers. And the ones that live anywhere close to the school they work at are all married to engineers, without exception. That&#x27;s the only way they can afford to live near school.

from a purely capitalistic perspective, i can understand that providing financing of this sort could be of some economic value, but i worry that it simply continues to exacerbate wealth disparity by funneling more money to already wealthy financial institutions under the guise of helping teachers and children.<p>rather than this type of roundabout financing, the economics can be straightforward: school districts in wealthy areas should just pay their teachers more. and it sounds like they are, at least in some districts, according to co-founder jra6 elsewhere on this page: &quot;...educators in Mountain View are paid reasonably well ($80,000 - $130,000)...&quot;.<p>even so, the idea that teacher homeownership is the central problem for schools is quite a stretch. poverty and a dozen similar issues are much more likely the central problems for schools, not teacher homeownership.

I appreciate the effort here, but in general I don&#x27;t think more fine grained mechanisms of offering selling debt to the lower classes is going to help long term.<p>Perhaps if you put upper limits on the assets of the people who can invest, but that seems unlikely.<p>Also, home ownership tends to be one of the &quot;liabilities disguised as assets&quot; that middle &#x2F; upper middle class people love to buy.<p>Since our economy appears to be heading towards a post labor society with a massive divide between rich and poor, what exactly is the utility of educating kids to work in an economy that won&#x27;t exist?<p>Seems to me the core skills we ought to help facilitate are creativity, maintaining an authentic self, emotional and Relational mastery, cooperation &#x2F; democratic citizenry, permaculture, eco-regenerative architecture..<p>Instead of the industrialist model we have now, perhaps we ought to be teaching them how to develop, integrate and share technology into eco-regenerative housing and permaculture farms.<p>Use the education resources to purchase land, kids can help learn to build and work cooperatively along side adults, in a democratically run community.<p>You provide cool tiny-homes to anyone who needs them. And build them together, learning all sorts of great skills as you go along.<p>I am adivising &amp; working on 2 such pilot projects in Costa Rica right now with a group of accomplished intellectuals (some of whom you may know). Costa Rica was chosen for a number of reasons including climate, mental health of population and a lack of a standing military.<p>We aim to develop a globally connected network of such projects in a neo-tribal model that fits with the emergent archaic values as post-modernism gives way to a more holistic and connected world.<p>Happy to invite any of you down to check out the property if you like, anthony+cr at 175g . com<p>Ps, I hope Landed helps some people, at least in the short term, and also that there passion to serve underserved populations with integrity continues no matter the success &#x2F; failure of this particular manifestation.

Homeowner property wealth is a ponzi scheme, enriching early adopters and money lenders at the expense of wealth generators - like teachers. Helping people get on at bottom, while it may help them outbid their compatriots, ultimately benefits the higher ups to the detriment of everybody else.

But what do they actually do, and why do you need a startup to do it? Hanover, NH has a housing price problem, but Dartmouth College offers subsidized housing to its faculty. Why can&#x27;t school districts do the same?

Homeownership is a luxury, not a right. Its still within reach in many locales. If the locals value education as a product they will bid it up.<p>I dont see how this isnt just the market telling educators they should go elsewhere?

When you click on how-it-works on the navbar from the homepage, it navigates to the page as expected. But if you refresh then you get a 404. Looks like there isn&#x27;t a SSL certificate on the first load, but when you refresh or navigate to the link directly there is (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.landed.com&#x2F;how-it-works" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.landed.com&#x2F;how-it-works</a>).

This is kinda like point.com right?

Did you know I can&#x27;t find a single link from this blog article to your website?<p>Even the link at the bottom which says &#x27;landed.com&#x27; actually links to &#x27;blog.landed.com&#x27;! And then there&#x27;s actually text that says &#x27;www.landed.com&#x27;, which isn&#x27;t a link! Why do you do this?!<p>It&#x27;s brought up lots of HN and I can&#x27;t believe people still do it. You&#x27;ve got me reading your blog, but you aren&#x27;t going to link to your website? Presumably the whole point of the blog is to get people interested in what you&#x27;re doing, but you aren&#x27;t going to link to it? It&#x27;s madness!<p>Edit: actually there is just one - in the author&#x27;s profile at the bottom. There isn&#x27;t one in any of the layout of the blog page, or the blog front page.

This argument is so wrong in so many ways it will end being absolute truth because no one can explain its full wrongness in less than 50 hours.

Articles like this are embarrassing. Here&#x27;s how to fix the schools:<p>1. When a parent withdraws their kid from a school that&#x27;s not doing the job, the parent&#x27;s money GOES WITH THEM to whatever other school they ultimately choose.<p>2. If any kid in any class disrupts the class and prevents anyone else from learning, the teacher informs the principal. The principal says &quot;Yes, sir&#x2F;ma&#x27;am, I&#x27;ll take care of it&quot;, removes the kid from the room, places them in a different room, and informs the kid&#x27;s parents.<p>3. If any kid in any classroom verbally threatens or physically assaults a teacher for any reason at all, the kid is immediately expelled. Any lawsuit over this by any parent is dismissed via lack of standing to sue, and the parent pays the school&#x27;s court costs.<p>Problem solved.<p>If you work at a school that can&#x27;t seem to fire incompetent teachers, you&#x27;ll be out of business and good riddance.<p>If you teach at a school, your word is SCRIPTURE when it comes to a disruptive or dangerous student. That means you have the last word about when or whether a student is returned to your class, not the pricipal or the board or some parent who can&#x27;t discipline a kid.<p>If you&#x27;re a parent and your little snowflake can&#x27;t handle the concept of &quot;don&#x27;t hit the teacher and don&#x27;t start screaming in class&quot;, you are free to educate him yourself.