It either is an asset or it’s a commodity as far as the market goes. If you want generational housing and for housing to be generally affordable something has to give. Kill it as an asset class and you get what you’re looking for.
10 years is a long time in the housing market. Assets sitting for 10 years under utilized is another way to think about it.
These two ideas - that housing is an investment and that people shouldn’t be incurring tax burdens on them like this - do not square
I personally do not think 10 years is that long in housing. Sure a lot can change in housing over that time but at any given moment, If I'm in need of housing and supply doesn't exist, I can build a custom home in less than 2 years. I can buy in a development basically immediately. This might not be a global truth but it's the state of things in Texas specifically, and has been for a long time. Affordability is the limiting factor, not time.
I think the property taxes in Texas make sense if RE grows at rate of inflation. For a long time, we had affordable housing and now that's not necessarily the case. So the rules/laws need to change to protect people from getting priced out due to taxes is all. It's an issue that didn't bother anyone before because they were assuming their raise in income would cover the raise in taxes. But wages don't increase 10% annually like our taxes do (whole other topic LOL!) so they get put in a hole. Anyone coming into the market now knows the prices, it's all available information, and they can decided if they want to move here or not. It could all be a bubble that pops and corrects one day, but not until inbound population growth slows down.
I don’t propose what you’re saying either. A land value tax is more than sufficient, by any research I’ve seen on this topic. It doesn’t in any sense mean what you’re saying here. Only that under utilized land (usually classified as unbuilt or vacant) is taxed more heavily. Thats one facet. The other is that it shifts the property tax off of building values and onto land values can make both buildings and land less expensive. This has a knock off affect of reducing the value of real estate holdings to varying degrees in terms of value in the short term but stabilizes in the medium and long term.
That would be better in my view but as it exists today, we instead have to rely on building more housing or putting more existing supply in the market, neither of which in broad strokes are happening in a way that keeps pace with demand unfortunately
Also: not everyone who can afford to buy a home can buy a home built from scratch. There are different classes of home buyers and the vast majority aren’t moving into custom homes like that. Its unreasonable to think that it’s common place in aggregate
No, housing is a cost, not an productive investment.
What we actually want, as a society, is for housing prices to go down so people can live places.
Removal of sub class zoning for housing would also be beneficial. Its one thing to zone an area for industrial vs housing but it should not be permitted that when land is zoned for housing they can zone specifically for single occupancy homes for example.
Fact is, everyone needs that to happen right now.
If we change the latter, expectations related to the former will change too.
Quite the opposite, regulation of the housing market rarely ends well. There's quite a few countries that can speak to the horrible deadlocks that occur when regulation suffocates the housing market.
There's nothing particularly wrong with investment per se, now if you make the market so regulated such that there's no competition, you're destroying any kind of forces that push the price down, or if you make the investment so costly the prices go up to compensante.
Heck, there's even countries where the regulation was so insane it was far better to hold an empty home than to actually rent it out.
True but if you're turning 65 after you're tax bill has grown 10% for over a decade as your transitioning to your fixed income years; it's not a good thing just to freeze the tax bill. You might not have time to earn and save enough to cover the value it gets frozen at. It does help soften the blow for many though.
> But honestly it might be better for them to downsize into something more appropriate and perhaps free up the larger houses for families.
I wholeheartedly despise this line of thought, unless it's coming from their individual decision to downsize. You're basically treating the house like a commodity. It's a Home this person lived in, raised family in, hopes to continue hosting holidays in, where grandchildren can go to visit, etc. They should be able to use it until they decide to leave. On average, they only have another decade or so of life left anyway after their taxes get frozen at 65, let them enjoy their home.