What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
Based on comments I’ve seen at city council meetings about this stuff, there’s also some aspect of feeling like infrastructure is already overstressed, traffic is already bad, etc, which is largely an artifact of car-centric development patterns being incredibly wasteful/inefficient, and capping out at relatively low densities. But the existing development pattern is usually not a good fit for mass transit - the utilization is usually too low.
I think the California approach of aggressively upzoning near public transit is pretty good, except that it might cause resistance to public transit expansion.
This kind of thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all the poor people get crammed into one place.
Singapore does it right by having high quality housing which happens to have a certain amount subsidized for lower income people. You get a mix of incomes and not a slum.
A lot of California's housing development also incentivizes this type of arrangement: permitting can be fast-tracked and local NIMBYs can be steamrolled if a development allocates some, but not all, of the development to be designated as affordable.
Most states (and other countries) do tax the homeowners proportional to their homes’ market value. California with its tax proportional to value at purchase is the outlier.
Be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good (abundant, cheaper housing in this case) rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing (existing house value, amongst many other things, in this case).
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)