My belief for that issue is that zoning powers need to be removed from towns and done at a state level as travel technology has made it too easy for towns to push off their negative externalities to other towns. Towns have no incentive to add new housing stock as that leads to more people needing to be serviced and new voters who might push to change the way of life that the current citizens enjoy. Businesses on the other hand, don't get to vote and usually pay much more in taxes than they cost in services. Every city appears to have towns that have realized this an effectively become polluters by letting new business come in but making it other towns problems to pay for. If the state controls zoning, and likely the burden of providing services, then that kind of fucking over of your neighbor won't occur at the level of cities other than ones on interstate borders like NYC and the two Kansas Cities.
Just as how parking requirements make it much easier to find parking in high density and otherwise crowded areas, housing requirements will do the same for housing. A lot of folks on the public housing side of the debate want to decomodify housing through public ownership, but it would be far more effective if we just mandated housing be a part of every commercial development project nation wide.
This would be good for so many reasons ranging from better land use to much more abundant housing.
Additionally, zoning codes should be a state or federal system, as this would make it much easier to build economies of scale around housing development. But the placement of those zones/codes should still remain in the hands of local muncipalities, as no municipality should be able to protect their right to certain types of euclidian zoning.
Require that new offices build an equal square footage of housing on top of themselves, and you've immediately build enough housing for at least the initial stage of population growth that comes with that new office.
Housing people on the same ground area than the offices would probably prove to be a huge technical challenge since it would effectively need probably 8 to 10 times the square footage, not to mention I'm not quite sure people really all want to have their colleagues as neighbours.
I'm also not saying that the office needs to match the housing supply of it's office workers in full, as a lot of new office development is hiring from people locally as well. But say, if you looked at the Seattle area, where Microsoft and Amazon have built over 10 million square feet of office space in recent years, an extra 10,000 apartments would go a long way in relieving the pressure on housing prices.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_mortgage_interest_deducti...
"Economists have demonstrated that high-cost high-income areas receive most of the tax benefit. For example, San Francisco, California receives $26,385 per home while El Paso, Texas receives $2,153 per home, a 1,225% difference.[28] The five highest income metros receive 87% of tax inflows, with over half going into California alone.[29]"
If there are people out there "sheltering" themselves from taxes by paying more in mortgage interest, those people are idiots. Any savings you gained on taxes were already wiped out by the fact that you effectively threw away money on your home (i.e. your money did not go into equity; to you, the money just went into a black hole).
I understand that they pay less in taxes as a result of mortgage interest, but if you have an actual choice between (1) spending $1 on mortgage interest and getting a tax deduction or (2) spending $1 on principal and not getting a tax deduction, the choice that leaves you wealthier is #2. Obviously this is not how mortgage payments work and ignores choice (3) of putting money in some other asset, and the time value of money should be considered, but for each equivalent dollar, I would rather get more equity in my home than a tax deduction. The tax deduction is nominally smaller than the equity you would gain on an equivalent amount of money going to principal rather than interest.
This isn't even considering the extra costs of homeownsership, especially property tax and maintenance (and the latter is tax deductible to a much smaller extent than mortgage interest).
> The tax deduction is nominally smaller than the equity you would gain on an equivalent amount of money going to principal rather than interest.
True, but you can't ignore the "choice (3)" that you mention. I'm not in the market for a house right now, but if I were, I would absolutely get a mortgage even though I could pay cash for the whole thing. It's a non-zero risk, but I feel it's a reasonable bet to believe I can make enough in the markets to more than offset the mortgage interest, especially with the MID in play reducing my overall tax.
That doesn't really address the point the parent was making about buying a house being a good tax shelter (I agree with your premise if you restrict thinking to just that), but I don't think it's safe to ignore it in the bigger picture, either.
Henry George would say so: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
The issue at hand will always be that there isn't enough housing for newcomers, if we mandated housing construction to grow in a parallel way with office construction and job growth we wouldn't have nearly the sorts of problems we have today.