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Re:What Happens When a Suburb Begins to Die? by rayiner on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @12:36PM (#15451031)
Your argument is well taken, but that reasoning suggests we should stop incentivizing home ownership. Indeed, we should start treating homes like the risky non-diversified investments they are, and require home buyers to purchase insurance against the downside risk.

Spending public funds on these endeavors ends up being something of a middle class bailout. Are folks who were fortunate enough to be able to purchase homes in the first place. 70% of those in the bottom 20% of the income distribution do not own their homes.

Re:What Happens When a Suburb Begins to Die? by zanny on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @01:58PM (#15451719)
Except homes for most people are not investments. They are where they live, and everyone needs one of those. It is one of the greatest flaws in modern economics that the combination of policy and scarcity makes property values such an out of control growth space.

I'd love to see either state or federal buyback programs. Using the same appraisal rates used to calculate a property value when setting property taxes most states could offer to buyback properties at 80% of their assessed market value and then have redevelopment programs to reinvigorate dying neighborhoods like in the OP.

It lets the poor escape dying neighborhoods much easier, and it also creates a pathway to save these dying cities for relatively low investment by creating job opportunities to fix the state possessed properties or put them to auction so they can be competitively worth fixing. Either way the state should not be out the money for very long - you have a depressed area that has terribly low property values because its an impoverished slum, let the residents sell the land off as a means to get out of that hell, and then make a deal with a redevelopment firm or use the civil engineers corps and then sell the resulting revitalized properties, hopefully after some mixed used development.

That last point is probably the strongest reason why the US in particular has these widespreading "dying neighborhood" problems. Zoning for the most part has been an abject failure. It was conceived to segregate the rich from the poor and has failed to recognize that a thriving community needs work and play to intermix and develop organically. It also exists to constrain development to prevent cities from growing up and increasing density to meet population demands, all to prop up the real estate investment bubble making the semi-rich filthy rich.

Re:What Happens When a Suburb Begins to Die? by tptacek on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @09:45PM (#15455077)
Something like 40% of Americans rent --- similar percentages in Europe, and in some major EU countries, like Germany, more people rent than own. Having a home and financing that home are orthogonal concerns.
Re:What Happens When a Suburb Begins to Die? by SilasX on Wednesday October 11, 2017 @02:43PM (#15452164)
I mostly agree, but there is some reasonable logic to encouraging home ownership, as it aligns incentives, albeit imperfectly. When people own property where they live, then a big chunk of their net worth is tied up in something whose value correlates with (capitalized) general quality of life, which will lead them to be better stewards of the area.