Re:The U.S. Housing Market vs. the Canadian Housing Market
by dukeyukey on Sunday September 10, 2023 @05:41AM
(#37454308)
A home is all those that things, but it's also a scarce resource that costs a lot to build and that we don't have enough of. So for every market inefficiency we accept on the basis that a home is special (which isn't wrong!) we accept some level of people dying in the streets, or young people being pushed out of their hometowns, or families never being started.
Re:The U.S. Housing Market vs. the Canadian Housing Market
by tourmalinetaco on Sunday September 10, 2023 @12:12PM
(#37457206)
We don’t have to accept it to this degree though. We have options available to limit who can participate in local markets, and to what extant. A foreign billionaire with loose ties at best to the locations in question should not be eligible to buy houses as they please as “investments”, in fact I find it a strenuous ask to allow local billionaires to do the same. I certainly wasn’t happy to hear a Silicon Valley billionaire moved back to my area and started buying up land in a vain attempt to “revitalize” the area, only to sit on it for the last 5 years.
The problem is that enforcing any sort of restrictions would be warped to disproportionately affect the 99% while the 1% would use loopholes to continue doing as they please. So it would probably be more pragmatic to eat the rich and their lackeys before anything else.
The above statement assumes that a home is nothing but a cold investment decision.
A home is a place to live and a neighborhood to grow older in. It is not an "allocation of resources".
People hold on to their home because they like it there, they like the neighbors, their kids like their friends in the area and so on. It is not a financial decision. It's a home. This is often lost in these discussions.