To see what that looks like on steroids, China's economy is at real risk of recession due to property developers running out of cash and failing to build promised developments. (Most apartments in China are purchased before construction starts, so you can buy a house and not end up with one in the end.)
You'd prefer to create excess misery to satisfy a sense of vengeance? Versus just solving the problem?
Having the option to rent is a good thing, being forced to rent when you don't want to is a bad thing. Hopefully we can accommodate both.
I rent out one single family home that I couldn't sell when I moved and a 4 unit building where I currently live in one of the units. I never understand these comments. The 4 unit building could be torn down and made a SFH or I could build 14 units which my city desperately needs. If you keep adding rent control and payment vacations and eviction moratoriums and taxes it will be a SFH.
I think your dream is every property is tenancy in commons, but that is legal now and not popular. The reason is zoning. Rich people can compete with two families easily and by limiting the number of units that is all they need to compete with. Much more difficult to compete with 10 families if the lot is zoned for 10.
Anyway, these policy suggestions are maniacal. Go buy and build housing and you'll see how much work it is. Make a startup that makes TiC and construction easier. Go change zoning laws.
I do think his idea about high taxes on a 2nd+ home makes sense. The only problem with it is that it doesn't apply globally, only nationally. You'll have rich people have a palace in the US, Spain, and Australia instead of 3 in the US.
For my own life and approach to this, I moved around a lot and lived in austerity saving up money for a home. I don't want zoning laws to change at all because there's already too many multi-tenant buildings. Pull up the sex and gun offender maps, it's disproportionately those people. And I'm currently a tenant myself (while obeying the laws and having a clean record).
I'd rather see taxes on 2nd+ homes than zoning change. We already built 'out' with suburbs and have plenty of land available for developers to build on and make money. With the internet we no longer have to all live in a city either. It seems to me like his idea, minus the global snag, is generally on the right track.
But I am not a fan of multi-tenant housing near whatever home I purchase, just because of the sort of short-sighted people that often make up renters. They should be in homes anyway, not renting, in an ideal scenario.
I'm my county there are 65k people. It's also the largest county by size in Utah Iirc, in my city which is the biggest city in the county there's around 40k.
When we had to move it was horrifying and scary trying to find a place. There seemed to be no vacancies. Someone posted a listing on Facebook marketplace and there were 20 replies in under 5 minutes.
However, the are 400 apartments that used to presumably be college(we're a college town) or regular residential homes.
So the irksome thing is the fear of being homeless is very real even if you have money to move to another place, there aren't any. But there's 400 places that could be available which would raise supply if short term rentals were banned or taxed steeply enough that revenue for short term might only be 500 more per month instead of 3000 more.
This is happening everywhere not just my part of fantasia.
Although in my experience people are convinced there's "vacant houses" absolutely everywhere based on not seeing the lights on at night. It's not true and this is not a major contribution to the housing crisis.
Scroll down to price and tax history.
This house has been on the market for at least 15 months and has had its price slashed by over 3 million dollars and nobody is nibbling.
It's become a bit of a running joke around here, trying to guess if it's still the most expensive listing in the local paper each week.
As an aside, the local papers are really just pages and pages of real estate ads with a few paragraphs of news sprinkled here and there. Can literally rip out half the pages and not lose a single line of news.