It comes down to that line about residential property has to be good for residents or good for investors, you can't have both.
Any other home? 12% real estate transaction tax.
That's roughly how it works in the Flanders region of Belgium from 2022.
They do tightly manage where each type of residence is built, from what I hear the goal is to avoid the creation of exclusively wealthy or poor neighborhoods as their existence damages society.
There are zoning codes everywhere, environmental review, city permits, etc, that the small amount of successful projects will of course be the minimal low hanging fruit. Literally all of this problem is "the state."
Let people build buildings on their own land. It will supply far more housing than any state backed affordable housing and will break the housing-as-investment pitfall by breaking the supply-constraint that causes people to treat it that way.
All land is owned subject to the laws that govern its potential uses. Land that is open to more uses is more valuable than land that is not. Land that can be subdivided is worth more than land that cannot. Allowing people to build more houses on "their own land" is a wonderful gift to land owners. It increases the value of their property. But that exacerbates the problem. A trend towards greater freedom to develop real estate means it is, yet again, only a more attractive investment vehicle.
Rather than "let them build", perhaps we should consider "thou shalt build" or "thou shalt rent". Laws that demand certain real estate owners do X or Y could not only increase the number of rental units but also diminish the attractiveness of unoccupied or unused real estate as an investment vehicle.
what kind of internet is available in the area? How close are you to grocery stores? Is there a HOA that you have to pay dues to? What's the weather like? Is the home up to date or is the wiring and plumbing likely to need a lot of work? How big is the lot? How walkable is the neighbourhood? Is it near a smelly dump? What's the crime rate like? What are the schools in the area like, how close are they? How much access is there to transit?
It's not as simple as just "Build more housing" society also has to adequately service the people who want to live in that housing. If our lower income housing is all just bare minimum roof over your head and no access to anything then no one will want to live there, which also means that supply will not affect the demand on housing that has better access to amenities.
We can also be quite certain that providing the bare minimum housing pulls in demand from those more luxurious options (wants) to the more economically practical option (needs), because the bare minimum option was never available. We'd be giving people more choices and at least some would take it.
Then if you have so many people that "demand" a certain standard of luxury housing, then they will have to compete and pay the premiums for the actual limited resources like lakefront property or great schools (living near other like-minded wealthier people). That's the realities of scarce resources, and is fine, since there's not much we can improve there. But the major gap is providing the bare minimum of housing which we are currently not doing.
You'd have to increase density, and most places it will be difficult to displace people from their homes to tear them down and redevelop them.
Only to the extent that existing regulation favors the advantaged more than the market naturally does, which tends to make that approach quite limited in potential.
Well, we could start with the fact that there are roughly 25 empty housing units in the U.S. for every homeless person.
Housing a very basic human need.
Every time they come up with a new way to help people buy houses they just further drive up the price.
1. Step one: Prevent market from functioning through excessive regulation
2. Step two: Blame the market
Step 3: Downvote and run away
These have never worked and are full of pervert effects. It's at best a band aid.
> I think the market has shown quite clearly it's ill-equipped to deal with the problem.
> I think the market has shown quite clearly it's ill-equipped to deal with the problem. Housing needs to be built for the purpose of housing people rather than the purpose of making profit.
That's a cool political slogan, however nobody will build a housing without a profit and nobody is entitled to other people's labor.
Making sure that houses are not left empty and sane zoning rules are more likely to result in viable changes. Absurdly low interest rates are also to blame.
You do end with a couple ideas of your own, but overall I find this comment more disingenuous than not.
Taken literally the government is engaged in class warfare by forcing the public to engage in labor for private enterprise to prosper.
America is effectively a caste system, abstracting a persons value into a net worth, focused on gossip, and gaming semantics, very similarly to religious tribes.
Murder rates have come down generally speaking, over the centuries.
The cycle we need to break is letting millions starve and go homeless. We refuse to see it as equivalent to other human atrocities political capture by selfish, bitter men and women.
We need a pivot to new core values entirely. My preference would be along the lines of prioritizing biological/medical health of individuals and setting aside superfluous economic activity. But good luck passing laws favored by the public (polling has shown a majority support universal healthcare for years now).
Work stoppages will force austerity on aristocrats. History is pretty clear that’s what it takes to move the needle politically.
Gaming house prices is, to borrow Greers area/perimeter metaphor for programming, hacking the area of the established perimeter.
Futurists have been predicting collapse of nation states and a re-emergence of the city-state by 2050 for a while now. Often leaning on environmental concern and the lack of Federal exigency to tackle the problem. Perhaps they’re onto something.
Yearly rent is generally going to be about 1/20th the total value of the property. So if the owner plans on doing anything to improve the value of the property by more than 5% in a given year, that improvement process is worth more than having a tenant. In a market like Vancouver, where rent-to-cost ratios are even lower, a tenant paying rent is almost irrelevant in the equation.
Government regulation (again) exacerbates this problem. In Seattle, landlords have to give 6 months notice for rent increases. They also are obliged to pay the tenant's relocation costs when the tenant leaves. They can't evict tenants who don't pay rent. Seattle will provide free lawyers to tenants who want to sue their landlords.
So, yeah, if the real estate market is rising fast enough, it's best to not rent it.
Their rights are what is mutually agreed upon in the rental agreement.
> without laws to prevent it, landlords could arbitrarily raise rents whenever they felt like it.
Many rental contracts have clauses specifying when and how much the rent can change.
Landlords can demand whatever they want, but a tenant would have to agree to it. Tenants can also demand whatever they want, but the landlord would have to agree. That's supply & demand at work.
It says right in the SEC filings that places that build enough housing are a threat to the investments of companies like Blackrock.
https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/22524829/wall-street-housin...
It's a good investment because we don't build enough homes.
Of course it does. I know that some people buy homes and let them sit vacant, but that's a transitory state. A home has no value if it is not being used. To realize its value, it must be sold to someone who will live in it.
They don't have to live in it either, just sell it to somebody else who will buy it
A price doubling in 10 years is only a 7% rate of return, which is below what the stock market in the US averages.
(Prices may double, but you've got inflation, taxes, insurance, vandalism, theft, maintenance expenses, and non-trivial amounts of your time in the meantime. None of this is free.)
It's the same pool of buyers and the same pool of houses, so no one's really getting forced out. If they were all so close, prices would jump as soon as they start buying. It's only interesting if the increase brings a lot more investors to the market.
He's been saving for 6 years to finally buy a house on a 45k a year salary in what was a LCOL area, and now he's forced out. Living with our mom, and basically gave up.
The buyers are all the haves, and corporations. The have-nots got forced out.
I make enough, and can afford things. But I'm not blind to the problems of the everyman, and none of us should be. They outnumber us 4 or more to 1.
These are very important, probably more than anything else, if you actually work in these jobs. They make your life miserable.
Inflation / stagflation are the result of supply&demand forces just like everything else in an economy. Inflation happens when the supply of money increases faster than the value it represents.
Guess what has been happening with the supply of money when the government prints trillions of dollars to rain down on the economy. All that cash sloshing around just devalues the dollar, and hence prices rise.
Labor in the US has been losing ground for decades, I always wondered how long the situation was tenable.
I would __much__ rather the market were satisfied with more houses, apartments, everything such that people could afford to live places and thus inflation / stagflation weren't the natural result of everyone trying to get ahead and increasing just their own wage.
All of the other aspects of the jobs, such as safety conditions and work assignments are also important; but the cost of living, healthcare, everything, is also an underlying factor.