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.
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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.