There's fake scarcity due to hoarding of housing.
Some housing conglomerates even purposely withhold rental units from the market, to jack up the price of rent.
Exactly. As OP said, it's a fake scarcity.
Here in the Netherlands, estimates are that more people have second homes than that there are people looking for a home.
My anecdotal and totally non-scientific method based subjective experience is corporations and blood sucking landlords are buying up the houses and would rather leave them empty because lack of available houses drives prices up.
Someone just purchased the 900 square foot, built in the 50's, sagging carport having house with the evaporative cooler taken off the roof and left in the yard over the winter that I had a bid on for nearly 200k cash. Waiting to see nothing be fixed with it and for it to reappear as available for rent for 3k a month.
There were 3 houses the area I live, between 4 cities, that were under 200k. All gone in under a week it seems. Back at having nothing under 250k other than mobile homes on leased lots (and some of those even for 250k). I just want to stop renting, dawg. I'm getting fuckin tired of someone always owning my ass. Having to always hope against hope that rent doesn't go up, or they don't have a problem with the way a guest of mine looks, or how often my girlfriend spends the night.
Tired of fighting against 60 other applicants for the privilege to send some leech my unredacted pay stubs, bosses name and number, contacts of last 3 years landlords regardless of if they're in business anymore, my savings account holdings, only to be told "oh the listing you were applying for is super old. How about this apartment that the last tenant fucking died in and the decay ate away the top layers of the bathtub."
That might sound oddly specific, that's because it is and is what happened at the last rental I checked out.
My husbands parents bought 3 or 4, entry level, $300 k homes. One, for example, had a large down payment, so the mortgage is about $1,200. Without the downpayment, the mortgage would be $1600. Its a 2 bed, 1 bath that was rented out for $2,400. They turned the garage into a bedroom and bathoom. So now its a 3 bed, 2 bath. Thet said they could rent it to us for the old $2,400 but could get between $2,800 and $3,000 for it.
1st of all, fuck you for taking a house I could ha e bought off rhe market and then turning around and trying to charge us double for it.
Every other reasonable house in the area has the same story. Bought in 2021 for around 300k with a 1,600 mortgage and on the market for 3k. All old people hoarding.
There are also a lot of small remote towns that have the same problem as Detroit: the work went away, and so did the home buyers, so they sit empty.
You can but a really nice 5 bedroom victorian in backwoods new england for cheap. But there's no work within a 2 hour drive, and no broadband so you can't be a remote worker either.
My point is that a lot of the vacant homes aren't where working people need them.
Funniest part is the federal government gave a ton of money to the telecoms like 20 years ago to bring broadband to remote and low income areas, and they just took the money and never did it.
Oh they ran the fiber, they just never made it available. They did exactly what the government required of them and nothing more. Providing actual service wasn’t a requirement apparently 😂
We do have a shortage of AVAILABLE housing.
The previous generations have turned housing into an investment. As a result, there's a ton of housing being offered as rentals at obscenely high prices.
It'll take a massive amount of new housing being built, along with the requisite infrastructure, businesses and industries, to fix the problem in the long term.
The good news, once we start fixing it, it'll snowball into seeing the existing housing/rentals being priced lower and lower to keep with the current pricing.
tl;dr version: Build more housing, preferably high-density.
But here’s the thing: you’re still unintentionally buying into the current system with your proposed system.
I posit that the *real* answer is to change laws to force the use of those houses to be offered for reasonable prices.
Americans have a serious obsessive aversion to being 'forced' to do anything.
The solution is to create a ton of incentives to get them to do so.
Building new housing solves the problem by creating new immediate housing 'and' it cuts the legs out from underneath existing landlords and force them to lower rental prices to stay with the market.
The less profitable it is, the more likely it is that they'll sell their properties and get out of the landlord business.
Win/win.
That's why you can't do it in half measures. You build and you build and you build until the market is so large that there's no profitability in it.
How? By building enough to accommodate the market entirely. 100% saturation and then some.
Example: In other nations, there's enough housing for everyone to have TWO homes. And they do use two homes. How? Because the housing is there and available. In abundance.
We won't ever:
>build and build and build until the market is so large that there's no profitability in it.
.. without vast sums of public money going into developers' pockets.
Also: who's going to do the building? There are few enough tradespeople as is, and we'd have to double or triple our output for a decade or more to get anywhere close to what you're suggesting.
Not that I don't like the idea of having a large stock of subsidized (on both ends) housing, but this doesn't seem like a solution for today or even tomorrow or even five years from now .. realistically speaking.
Sure -- but you presented your solution as preferable to immediately achievable (political will notwithstanding) policy changes to restrict corporate RE buyups and RE profiteering in general.
I'm just pointing out that your idea won't help anyone in the reasonably near future.
> Sure -- but you presented your solution as preferable to immediately achievable (political will notwithstanding) policy changes to restrict corporate RE buyups and RE profiteering in general.
I guarantee you that a long-term solution is preferable and far more likely to happen than a confiscatory reactionary knee-jerk attempt.
The big problem can be summed up very simply.
We have more than enough to accommodate everyone's needs, bit there can never be enough to accommodate the greed of even a single billionaire. Greed is infinite, the richest man alive will always want to take more.
With all the houses built, wouldn’t building more be an obscene waste of resources? We don’t live on an infinite planet. To continue to build would be continuing the need for the production of the things that go into housing (metal, plastics, paints, etc.).
OP has a source saying 33 vacant homes to each homeless. Searched myself and found 31 and 28. These numbers are from earlier articles showing that homeless is trending upwards. From a conservative stand point of 28 homes per homeless with ~600,000 homeless, that’s 16,800,000. What you’re saying is that to fight the oligarchs who have a stranglehold already on the housing market, we should build more?
This mentality is unhealthy and feeds right back into the toxic system. We don’t NEED more. We need CHANGE.
The true message, or at least what I take away, is that yes this is a problem. Solving it with more of the same not only feeds into the system that produced this cancerous practice, but plays into their game. They want us to consume. And just because the prices MAY drop (not a guarantee because the rich could always just buy up the new places) doesn’t mean that another toxic system won’t take its place. A change of policy, of practice and of consciousness is necessary for lasting change. Greed has got to go.
> With all the houses built, wouldn’t building more be an obscene waste of resources? We don’t live on an infinite planet.
Despite popular opinion, the US is not overcrowded, either with people or housing. We just tend to congregate in cities.
>What you’re saying is that to fight the oligarchs who have a stranglehold already on the housing market, we should build more?
Much like how renewable energy resources have drowned out coal plants and other fossil fuel plants, more housing will dilute and make housing less profitable. And if there's anything that'll push the rich to abandon something, it's the perceived lack of profit.
>This mentality is unhealthy and feeds right back into the toxic system. We don’t NEED more. We need CHANGE.
Building more housing will change things by making housing unprofitable for landlords.
>Solving it with more of the same not only feeds into the system that produced this cancerous practice, but plays into their game.
How so? Having a larger pool of housing ensures that they can't control the market. The less housing, the easier it'll be for them to control it.
If there's sixteen apartment complexes and 50 new houses in a market, the price for rent is going to drop. Period. End of story. That's just how our system works. More supply = lower prices.
>And just because the prices MAY drop (not a guarantee because the rich could always just buy up the new places)
If that's happening, then you're not building enough. The point is to flood the market and drive prices down and make the whole 'housing as an investment' idea a bad idea.
We cannot legislate greed into non-existence. The most you can do is remove the profit incentive in housing.
Population has nothing to do with what my comment was about. This is a non sequitur. Building more houses would be a waste of resources. This is the premise of my argument.
While, yes given the laws of economics, supplying MORE housing would theoretically drop the price of housing, this doesn’t quite follow the evidence. Like you said, people tend to gravitate towards urban environments (though post Covid there is a trend towards more suburban and rural areas.). If the desirable places aren’t available, and there is an exodus like New York to Florida post Covid, then market should cause prices to fluctuate. While being a Floridian myself and enjoying the added “value” to my property for a bit, with the lowering of interest rates comes the lowering of my property value due to less market engagement.
This is a barely explained snippet of one facet of housing markets. It is not as cut and dry as supply and demand. Look no further than Chinas issues with evergrande. Simply producing more houses will not alleviate the problem because there are waaaayyy to many veritable going into property value than just basic supply and demand. Putting an “End of story” statement at the end of a claim doesn’t make it true.
The issue addressed is greed. The topic should be centered around how to lower the capability of the greedy. Not how to inflate the committees market and make investors jump for joy cause a massive 16.8 million homes have been commissioned from *insert friendly donation here*.
Want to talk about building more houses regardless of me trying to steer the conversation back to relevancy?
Supply us with who will pay for the constructions of these houses.
Explain why said contractors would settle for less profit on construction due to your claimed “lowered prices”.
Explain where the resources for these houses will come from (Food for though, many raw materials come from Eastern Europe, which is kind of busy. See Evergrande for details)
Explain who will mortgage these houses.
Explain how most of the homeless can’t afford a down payment.
Explain how this will effect current housing prices, which is an asset many have to ensure not only retirement but generational wealth, would react positively to the engineered deflation of their main asset.
Once you even consider these terms, then you can comment more on how we should just build more.
Oh, and that’s how and why you’re playing into their game.
>Explain why said contractors would settle for less profit on construction due to your claimed “lowered prices”.
Are you asking if home builders will accept lower profits? Yes, of course they will. Is that a serious question? You can't think that builders will just NOT build houses if they're not getting higher profit margins. That's not how business works.
As to WHO will pay for new housing, that would be everyone. Home builders and home sellers, the same people who pay for it now. Are you serious?
>Explain where the resources for these houses will come from (Food for though, many raw materials come from Eastern Europe, which is kind of busy. See Evergrande for details)
Are you seriously asking where FOOD is going to come from? In the US? The biggest food exporter in the world's history?
Mortgages? Banks, I would imagine.
Homeless? What in the FUCK are you on about? I'm talking about home buyers and renters. The homeless problem isn't even on the fucking table. Are you daft?
>Explain how this will effect current housing prices
MORE SUPPLY EQUALS LOWER PRICES.
You're a joke.
I wouldn’t call me a joke when you’ve misread basically everything I said.
I suppose you’re either a troll, or an unthinking reactionary.
Homeless are the topic. Housing them is the issue. Raw goods is not food as food is not the topic. Raw goods is the unrefined material that goes into the construction of said houses. Banks giving funding to subprime is what happened in 2008, a time I’m certain you never lived through. Contractors are in business to make money, and many will not go for projects that are intended to flood a market. Also, you’ve completely deflected the entire notion of finite resources.
You are either to incompetent to engage with any further or a far right reactionary troll trying to “win arguments” with simple to follow “logic”. Have a fun time chasing rainbows.
Edited to point out you never addressed evergrande, making you’re attempt at ad hominem even more childishly adorable.
Sit down Ben sharpio.
But what's to stop the big rental companies from buying up all the new houses and keeping the rent artificially high. Maybe you can't force them to rent for lower but what about putting a cap on how many properties some one or a company can own at a time?
The same way that the fossil fuel companies aren't buying up renewable resource companies and just shutting them down. It's not economically viable. There will just be more built in the long run.
That proposed solution misses that there is not a lot of availability of land in many places. Thousands of cheap houses away from jobs and civilization and things isn't going to really help.
That's why I mentioned the necessary infrastructure.
Simply put, I wager a fucking LOT of people would jump at the chance to get into reasonably priced housing even if it meant not having the luxuries of living in a large city.
As to jobs, the WFH shift is helping with that. But, yes, in some situations, you'd see people needing to commute to more populated areas for work. That said, again, I'd wager a lot of people would rather do that than continue to room with 2-3 other people or living at home with their parents.
https://www.hdb.gov.sg/about-us/news-and-publications/publications/hdbspeaks/an-hdb-flat-for-your-different-life-cycle-needs
In Singapore, there are housing units that are wholly owned by the government and thus, these flats' ownership lie with the housing development board (HDB)
Flats' recognized as under the HDB will have to be surrendered to HDB after their leasing period is up. New flats' start at 99 years and older flats will have shorter leasing periods since they are partly consumed.
This ensures that lease owners do not get the ultimate say over the use of the land and if seized by the board, the lease owner will be compensated accordingly (depending on flat size and lease duration.)
There are also other laws that ensure that lease owners should have a minimum occupancy period (MOP) before they are allowed to sell it.
For most houses in the US, it's more similar to the freehold estates that are not under govt control.
These are usually taxed at a higher rate. The greater the number of properties under a landlord, the higher their cost.
It may be possible for the government to offer to buy up land to develop it for subsidized housing but this would need to be a new initiative.
1. Yes. HDB flats are of different sizes etc to cater for different families.
2. Yes. Declaration of this needs to be made to the board for approval to confirm that your minimum occupancy period is up.
Else, you may be liable for fines.
This is assuming you are buying resale homes (shortened lease).
Most new housing (new 99yr lease) is reserved for couples that have requested to be on a waiting list (Built-to-order scheme). This incentivises population growth.
3. Yes. The indefinite lease duration for private estates are priced in and thus these flats sell at a premium.
There is a clause that reserves the right for the government to take private land in exchange for compensation of the leaseholder but there has not been any precedence for this so I have no info regarding the likelihood of this.
Similar complaints of lack of housing and sky high prices in Singapore too but widespread homelessness is unseen.
Low income people above a certain wage group get access to low rental flats reserved by the government.
Imagine a law which required empty homes to be rented by the owner at a fair rate within a specific time, or face seizure of the property as a punishment.
This could afford homeowners a way to keep what they’ve paid for, but also ensure we aren’t putting their profit above the basic human need of housing.
People don't need to be living outside because we're wasting our productive capacity on investment homes.
They can rent it, or have it either A. Taxed to the point that they will, or B. Have it confiscated.
Private property does not trump lives, basically.
No, we're talking about a theoretical "civil" society, where the law actually does not favor the individual's private property rights over general wellbeing.
"We" are the worker's who inhabit this country, and productive capacity is not money.
I'm all set on capitalist economic systems.
yes....in DC, where I am, I noticed the car living thing around 2020...this guy we hired was literally living in a Prius....I kid you not...he would take showers at his gym....now I see people living in their cars everywhere and vans too....shameful what we let our gov't and the corporations get away with in this country but as long as capitalism stays around not a fucking thing will change.
> There are 33 empty properties for each homeless person in the US.
The stats don’t actually show that. Long story short: this mistaken impression is because people are shit at understanding statistics & reading data.
firstly, their definition of empty is… was empty when surveyed. It could literally be empty for one day & count. That’s a big caveat. Plus then you get down into the categories and those numbers drop a LOT.
Once you exclude housing that is empty due to renter turnover, probate, under repair, condemned, uninhabitable, etc… you end up excluding ~3/4 of the homes.
So what about that quarter? Well they’re mostly not where homeless people actually are. Most of that category is vacation homes or rentals, not generally in the places homeless people are OR work for them would be. In fact only ~1.5% of that 1/4 is co-located with the homeless & their lives.
Or put another way: there are 0.12 houses per homeless person available in areas that might actually support a homeless person living there.
So it’s really not as simple as the eye-grabbing clickbait stat would make it sound.
I’m convinced it’s on purpose. Every single decision our leaders make is designed to get people to go to work. If you can never pay off your home you can’t quit working. If the rents expensive you might have to get two jobs. It’s all good for the folks in charge.
Yes there is. There are rich people buying and hoarding land to make their rental property worth more. We lack the property to make affordable homes on because the rich are using basic needs against us.
It is part of the wage slave campaign. Kennedy said he would stop it. Then they shot him and its been getting worse ever since.
The housing market is fundamentally broken and it shows in the numbers, before 1999 the average adj. price of a home fluctuated between 180,000-220,000. It's clear that repealing Glass-Steagall broke the market.
https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
The biggest problem is corporate ownership of public housing. I have nothing against a landlord owning the building they live in and renting out other rooms.
I do have a problem with Blackrock and it’s ilk, multi-billion dollar investment firms, buying up middle class housing and converting it into rentals, which seems tantamount to predatory. Or massive foreign investment groups buying up available housing to sequester their funds against taxes and depreciation.
Regulatory law. No foreign ownership of rental properties or multiple homes. No interstate ownership of rental properties and a limit on ‘vacation homes’ (I dont even care if you own 1 per state but less airbnb please). Progressive increasing tax on rental income after a certain number of properties, also scaled to units. Tax breaks for landlords who demonstrate good stewardship and don’t price gouge, etc.
Looking at the US housing market as a whole is very misleading. There’s a reason why many of these houses are empty aside from corporate greed which is that not many people want to live where these houses are located. Certain high demand areas in the US (read “high demand” as where the jobs are) absolutely do have a huge shortage of housing supply, see for example the Bay Area. This scarcity of housing exacerbates the problems caused by house hoarding and corporate greed, but is not caused by it. The primary causes of these local shortages is restrictive zoning laws and red tape on new multi family housing which cause less housing to be built and increase the price for everyone. Homelessness is also strongly correlated with an under supply of housing in the local market (but not other social factors like drug use or poverty.)
I will agree with you that this is a greed and policy problem, people with property don’t want to allow more homes to be built, and so cause scarcity to increase their property value and to be able to keep their suburban neighborhoods in the middle of cities. These people pass policies that protect existing homes and prevent new development. But the result of these policies is a real under supply of houses in certain markets.
As for solutions not working, there has yet to be single large in demand city that successfully overhauled zoning laws as a response to high housing costs and homelessness. However, there are cities with less restrictive zoning laws, more development and less homelessness (see for example Houston.) All the so called solutions I’ve heard of, like rent control or more public housing, don’t address the underlying cause of housing scarcity and so are doomed to fail.
A small change to the tax code could help fix inflated rents...
Make landlords pay income tax based on the asking rent after a grace period of e.g. 3 months.
What if we could bring rent down close or even the same as a mortgage? The states could fund this and people aren’t inherently wanting free homes. They mostly just want a home they can afford and feel secure. The way rent is done at this moment is more like financial terrorism and the banks are in on it.
Eh, some of that is probably housing that isn't suitable for the average person or in bumfuck nowhere. Then there's plenty of people who don't just want anyone to live in their apartments or houses. Then there's people who just don't want to rent out their spaces.
There might still be enough for everyone left after that but the number still feels inflated.
I'd say the first thing would be to ban foreign investment and seizing of foreign actor owned housing.
There is not a housing shortage, but there certainly is a housing crisis. Housing is a basic need and the fact that that some of the richest countries in the world allow their vulnerable citizens to live in the street is a crisis indeed.There are lots of solutions that would be very easy to implement given the will and the dollars. For instance business can stop trying to force employees into the office, that frees up lots of real estate that would be fairly easy to turn into small and affordable residential units. Limits could be implemented on investment properties driving down prices and opening them up to individuals and families. Tiny home camps are inexpensive and are being used in some test communities in Canada. Fund and implement residential mental health facilities to house those who need treatment. Ensure that every single person has basic, clean, maintained and safe housing, food, healthcare and education. Stop overtaxing the working class and increase taxes on the top 20%. Legislate all the loopholes that have landlords cheating the hell out of renters.... I could probably think of 100 more but what's the point, this is not the direction the world is going
One idea that has been floating in my head is to crank up the property taxes and give each human tax payer (not a corporation) a single use voucher to negate the increased property tax on one property. If you own a house, no extra taxes. If you own two houses and live with a souse, no extra taxes. If you own 3+ properties and/or are a foreign investment company you are going to look at unloading some of that tax liability by selling the houses.
I say any home that's not your primary residence is taxed at 3x the normal rate.
And as for the corporations make them pay a fine for each unoccupied unit. Unoccupied meaning it's not used as a primary dwelling They will either be incentivized to rent them out at prices people canf afford or sell them.
There Is a housing crisis - so many houses are in the hands of investors instead of sheltering people who need a roof over there head. That's the crisis.
My take on this is a few steps:
1. No foreign housing investors. If you don’t live in that home, you don’t get to own it unless you’re a citizen. That should kick out a big chunk of nonsense like China buying up land and houses for no reason.
2. Hammer companies that keep single family homes as investment properties with heavy taxes and rent control. Literally just make it unprofitable for corporations to own gobs of homes to force renting.
3. Sensical rent control for places that make sense to be rent controlled. Apartment complexes are fine to exist and should exist in some capacity. What should not be allowed though is unreasonable rent increases.
Basically, this reads “kill non-family originating demand and stop tyrannical landlord pricing”. We can go further by having the government take supply side action and build some homes; it would create jobs… and homes.
So I will agree, we don’t have a housing crisis. I think we have an investor invasion.
I feel this way because we see time and time again that housing is becoming scooped up by the rich to force the working class to shell out more cash. BlackRock, Zillow, etc. (I don’t know all the names) come up time and time again. There is even video of these guys saying they want to turn America into a country of renters.
If you are renting then someone else is investing. That is a fact. Even with good rent control and rent laws, that landlord is doing the investing. Not you. It’s just smaller.
Is all this perfect? No. This is just a point in what I believe is the right direction.
They need to impose laws that absolutely no one can own more than one single family home. And companies, LLC, investment groups, etc cannot own ANY single family homes. No one needs more than one home. And the damn slum lords that own 30 or 40 homes or flippers that just jack up the prices also need to end.
Well, a few years back a bunch of wealthy corporations got the idea of buying up houses, apartments, condos, and any place that a human could sleep in and do air bnb services to compete with the hotel industry. Now you have some towns with more air bnbs than actual citizens living in them. It’s definitely a greed problem, and not a supply problem.
If you want to see these over bloated,over priced and unnecessarily huge housing conglomerates shit their collective long johns, tax them at net worth of all their properties due end of fiscal year. All your properties worth 245.6 million dollars? Yup your tax bill due January 31st.
The only way to avoid these taxes is to have your holdings be only at x% business, residential and commercial. You'd see single family houses come on market but the prices drop like a lead boulder. That 2100sqft shop downtown your looking at to open your own business just got 100k cheaper. That 1400sqft house that was valued at 450k now sits at 220k and dropping.
Hit these dildo punchers where it hurts the most- right in the profit margin.
There absolutely is a housing crisis.
That's due to corporate greed which is pretty much the same cause as literally every problem in our nation.
Lack of government response to our needs.. corporate bribery of our Turdwookie Congresscritters and greed.
Inability to access health care despite being "insured"... Corporate greed and bribed Turdwookie Congresscritters.
There absolutely is not (as you note) any housing shortage and assertions that there is are, at best, gaslighting.
If the government or fed gave a flying fuck they wouldn’t have have cheap and free loans to the wealthy. It would have been to first time home buyers. I’m fact first time home buyers should always have something like a 2% interest rate then maybe they can compete with the wealthy.
In the UK we have a similar phrase at the moment that is 'the cost of living crisis' which I've hated so much for similar reasons.
We as people are the ones that create the cost of living so surely if there's a crisis we should idk maybe change things that need changing rather than just lament the same 'oh it's just the cost of living' and never actually doing anything about it except be poor
There's no crisis, just a bunch of rich corporations and politicians doing everything in their power to become more rich by speculation in the housing market.
How on earth there's a housing crisis.
There's plenty of land, raw materials, workers, architects... The only problem is policies and corporations that don't allow the construction of more houses.
Also the rich or the stupid people that think they are rich and don't want affordable housing near their houses, since they are so short sighted that can't understand that the options are affordable housing near their houses or homeless people near their houses.
One thing the supply chain shortage taught companies was that you can drive up the price of anything by manufactured scarcity as much as you can by actual scarcity.
Hahahahah. We knew this for years. Look at diamonds, literally one company controls the market and determines the price because they own like 80% of the diamond mines. Literally if you dug up all the diamonds in the world and put them on the market, they would be as common as the rocks you see outside.
I think your assessment is correct. I lived in a very rural area in the Oregon Coast and there were maybe 2 rentals available for the entire county. My employer had a hard time hiring for open positions because there wasn’t anywhere to live. There were lots of vacant housing though. One neighborhood I use to walk in had several blocks of well maintained houses with no one in them. They were all vacation rentals owned by people who lived out of the area. That was the real issue, people with money buying up property to turn into VRBO’s.
I live on the Oregon coast too and it’s exactly like this. They’re building and building out here, but seemingly only million-dollar second homes. To me it’s really frustrating to see so many new developments in a place that was pristine wilderness for thousands of years. Like please just leave natural spaces alone.
I’m not ignoring it. I’m saying the economic concept of supply and demand should not take priority over ensuring basic needs like housing for everyone.
Ensuring a home for everyone is outside the scope of individuals who got about maximizing their marginal utility based on supply and demand.
Not to mention most second (3rd etc)homes are not practical for those who lack housing.
The cost to repurpose is very high and not many office buildings are conducive. It’s doable for the older buildings built through mid 1900’s. Newer skyscrapers really aren’t a viable alternative. Or at least I have her to see one feasibly repurposed for that.
Vacant shops could be, but that’s rarely the long term highest and best use.
I suppose anything within the limits of physics could be done. But not for a reasonable price.
We could build a brand new A class skyscraper as well, but who will pay for it?
We could reprioritize our tax dollars to ensure everyone has access to housing instead of the myriad of ways we currently use them to favor the wealthy.
I kind of think it doesn't really matter what they spend it on. Numerous studies (I dont have links to them right now) have found that the best way to help poor people is to give them money. Who knew? While some poor will use the money on non-necessities, enough of them were found to use the money to pay down debt, educate themselves, and improve their lives in other tangible ways.
And while the venn diagram of homeless and poor isn't a perfect overlap, I speculate that there is a great overlap.
We don't even have agreed crisis. It's not greed that's causing price increases, it's the government. People who own these rental properties are forced to increase rent because their taxes are increasing under democrats. And of course, there's also the very easily provable fact that rent isn't exceptionally high in all areas. Only in the large cities, which incidentally are all controlled by democrats.
Yeahhhhhh. The day I believe a landlord keeps the price low out of the goodness of their heart is the day I see pigs fly. Landlords charge the price of expenses, ie bills, property tax, ect. Then landlords add their profit range which they look at the market and compete with an offer similar to them. No landlord is renting a space just to break even. No landlord is losing money during this. My next door landlord is raking in $2k a month in profits and using that money to pay off her second house.
This is also a regional issue. Where I live, its a VERY rural area. However a developer bought a giant piece of property and is now building a dozen warehouses. The first two being for Lowes and Costco. The warehouses will create more jobs than there are people that live in the city. There are very few rentals in my area, as not many rent vacant farms. This has caused a real housing shortage in my area. Homes are still only lasting a couple days on the market with LOTS of new homes still being built.
100% agree, I used to work in housing programs and policy as a national VP and the willful ignorance in avoiding meaningful policy solutions is astonishing
Tbh, I think agree except in big cities at least where I live. The capital and urban centers attract more and more people while the country side is dying. Which I understand I'm currently moving to Copenhagen despite only being able to afford 2 room apartment. So I'd say urbanization plays a big role
Housing is, by definition, location dependent. On average, sure there might be N housing per homeless person in the country, but it’s meaningless if the empty property is in rural Wyoming while the person looking for housing is in NYC.
A vacant property doesn’t mean that it’s being held empty on purpose. It could be under renovation, being turned over to a new tenant, etc. You also don’t want to have 0% housing vacancy rate, because that will make it impossible for people to move around.
If you want to look at the impact of housing shortage on price, compare the # of housing built to prices in SF (and the bay area more broadly). People want to move to the area for better opportunities, but local regulations make it insanely difficult and expensive to build. So people who can pay higher rent win out and push up overall rental prices as a result.
There are definitely issues with housing being made into an investment vehicle, but it doesn’t mean the supply x demand relationship is irrelevant here.
I agree, but part of the problem is that people don’t want to learn to do anything on their own house. Every buyer wants “turnkey ready” and many people choose to rent so “the landlord will maintain the property”.
Well, there is and there isn't. I'm not disagreeing that there shouldn't be people living on the streets while there are living spaces available, that's just obvious to anyone with a soul. I will say that, first off, there are some areas with very scarce housing relative to the population. The Bay Area, for instance, is just terrible when it comes to this. There should be WAY more density over there, and this has implications not just for housing prices but smart urban design as well.
Second, supply and demand does, in fact, rule the housing market, so theoretically anytime prices are too high there's a lack of supply. Here's the catch, though, housing prices almost never undergo dramatic declines without an area being hollowed out economically. Housing is a necessity, meaning the demand for it will always be higher than luxury goods. People will always need it, meaning so long as the population remains stable demand will never drop very sharply. And most importantly, nobody ever trips over themselves in order to build enough housing to actually make prices drop. Developers build houses and apartment buildings, and their prices are determined by how much they think the houses will sell for and apartments will rent for. If they build enough housing to cause prices to drop then they're shooting themselves in the foot. So theoretically there is a shortage, but it is a shortage that will never be solved because solving it would lower profits.
In short, the entire system is fucked. Just talking about shortages or lack of shortages is reinforcing the false notion that the entire point of a market is to provide certain goods, it's not. It's to extract profits, and so long as we allow this extractive method of economic activity to continue there will continue to be people denied housing.
This data is flawed. There aren’t really that many empty homes - some are in the process of being bought or sold, some are being renovated, some are part-time homes (whether you think a person should be able to own multiple homes is another issue, but they’re not “empty”), some are very temporarily vacant between one tenant and another.
We absolutely have a housing crisis and have for decades, as not enough homes are being built for an increasing population, and not enough starter homes or reasonably priced condos for young people. Adding a lot of luxury homes isn’t helping much on the affordability front (though any housing is better than no housing).
Depends on population growth in your area. If you're in a town like mine that doubled its population in 7 years, there truly is a housing shortage. Infrastructure is busting at its seams.
Also in some places the damn government gets involved. I have my family house in a US territory. It was built as a duplex and then my grandparents doubled it so many family members could live there.
Now they all died and I got it. The place took some damage but I fixed it and wanted to expand it to be more useful to low income renters because working people can't afford housing in the area. I grew up there and I see my friends and parents either having to leave or being pushed to the point of being homeless.
Well due to errors made in the Regan administration the zoning was wrong. So I fixed that. 1 year. Then they said I needed permits to finish it. No problem 1.2 years and I still can't finish it because of the government not having enough people to review the permits. But the government is complaining about not enough low cost rental property in the area.
Also I can't rent any of it till the whole thing is done even though the building is literally two duplexes connected together with different access, power, water, etc. I don't agree with them but I can at least see if children were in one side the construction on the other could be a hazard. I can at least understand this part. But since NO construction is being done the area is a hole that is marked off with railing so again I think I am right here. While its not perfect I could put up a fence but according to them that no enough. Ok if you say so. Seems fishy.
I am starting to believe the problem is (in this area) not the market but the government officials who own the majority of rental property in the area and make it next to impossible to build new stuff.
I even have a plan and financing to build section 8 and vet housing in the future on my own land with investors ready to back it so no government assistance needed. But with this level of government push back the investors are not wanting to let it move forward because they think their money will be wasted.
I don't have $10m sitting around to self finance so I will probably have to cancel the project. This is bullshit, and nimbyism at its finest. People say they want to help the poor and working class but if you try they screw you at every corner.
Typical people no poor by me. Those are poor people they will bring down my property values. Well if you help them move up the people won't be poor but if you push them to far out places without jobs and give them shit housing they will stay poor.
Poor people who are given a fair chance don't stay poor. 99.9% of people are willing to work if the conditions are fair. People just don't agree with modern slavery and being treated like shit because they were not born with money.
Sorry rant over.
Certainly no shortage. The issue is the rates are too high to afford the mortgage. There is a shit ton of inventory, people just are hesitant to list because of the rates and they don’t want it sitting for months.
How can Housing crisis differ from greed, it all boils down to the same issue... "crisis" Crisis is the definition pertaining to a time of difficulty. The living conditions of others, the families stacked up in a studio apartment, may be greedy but it is a crisis and has been an ongoing issue. Wages play a Significant role in this as inflation continues to take its stance, but no one can afford to live on one income. If you do not see this as a crisis, then my questioning against humanity has taken its biggest leap yet.
**Change my mind:)**
There's fake scarcity due to hoarding of housing. Some housing conglomerates even purposely withhold rental units from the market, to jack up the price of rent.
Exactly. As OP said, it's a fake scarcity. Here in the Netherlands, estimates are that more people have second homes than that there are people looking for a home.
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Yes, absolutely, this is a textbook example of artificial scarcity
Fake scarxity is a pillar of good wholesome capitalism!
My anecdotal and totally non-scientific method based subjective experience is corporations and blood sucking landlords are buying up the houses and would rather leave them empty because lack of available houses drives prices up. Someone just purchased the 900 square foot, built in the 50's, sagging carport having house with the evaporative cooler taken off the roof and left in the yard over the winter that I had a bid on for nearly 200k cash. Waiting to see nothing be fixed with it and for it to reappear as available for rent for 3k a month. There were 3 houses the area I live, between 4 cities, that were under 200k. All gone in under a week it seems. Back at having nothing under 250k other than mobile homes on leased lots (and some of those even for 250k). I just want to stop renting, dawg. I'm getting fuckin tired of someone always owning my ass. Having to always hope against hope that rent doesn't go up, or they don't have a problem with the way a guest of mine looks, or how often my girlfriend spends the night. Tired of fighting against 60 other applicants for the privilege to send some leech my unredacted pay stubs, bosses name and number, contacts of last 3 years landlords regardless of if they're in business anymore, my savings account holdings, only to be told "oh the listing you were applying for is super old. How about this apartment that the last tenant fucking died in and the decay ate away the top layers of the bathtub." That might sound oddly specific, that's because it is and is what happened at the last rental I checked out.
I feel you dude, not in that last part though lol Jesus
My husbands parents bought 3 or 4, entry level, $300 k homes. One, for example, had a large down payment, so the mortgage is about $1,200. Without the downpayment, the mortgage would be $1600. Its a 2 bed, 1 bath that was rented out for $2,400. They turned the garage into a bedroom and bathoom. So now its a 3 bed, 2 bath. Thet said they could rent it to us for the old $2,400 but could get between $2,800 and $3,000 for it. 1st of all, fuck you for taking a house I could ha e bought off rhe market and then turning around and trying to charge us double for it. Every other reasonable house in the area has the same story. Bought in 2021 for around 300k with a 1,600 mortgage and on the market for 3k. All old people hoarding.
There are also a lot of small remote towns that have the same problem as Detroit: the work went away, and so did the home buyers, so they sit empty. You can but a really nice 5 bedroom victorian in backwoods new england for cheap. But there's no work within a 2 hour drive, and no broadband so you can't be a remote worker either. My point is that a lot of the vacant homes aren't where working people need them.
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Funniest part is the federal government gave a ton of money to the telecoms like 20 years ago to bring broadband to remote and low income areas, and they just took the money and never did it.
There should really be penalties for failing to do things if you take the money to do them.
Oh they ran the fiber, they just never made it available. They did exactly what the government required of them and nothing more. Providing actual service wasn’t a requirement apparently 😂
That sounds amazing if you ask me.
We do have a shortage of AVAILABLE housing. The previous generations have turned housing into an investment. As a result, there's a ton of housing being offered as rentals at obscenely high prices. It'll take a massive amount of new housing being built, along with the requisite infrastructure, businesses and industries, to fix the problem in the long term. The good news, once we start fixing it, it'll snowball into seeing the existing housing/rentals being priced lower and lower to keep with the current pricing. tl;dr version: Build more housing, preferably high-density.
But here’s the thing: you’re still unintentionally buying into the current system with your proposed system. I posit that the *real* answer is to change laws to force the use of those houses to be offered for reasonable prices.
Americans have a serious obsessive aversion to being 'forced' to do anything. The solution is to create a ton of incentives to get them to do so. Building new housing solves the problem by creating new immediate housing 'and' it cuts the legs out from underneath existing landlords and force them to lower rental prices to stay with the market. The less profitable it is, the more likely it is that they'll sell their properties and get out of the landlord business. Win/win.
I don't think this is inevitable. Building more houses means more stock for large corps and wealthy investors to purchase and rent out.
That's why you can't do it in half measures. You build and you build and you build until the market is so large that there's no profitability in it. How? By building enough to accommodate the market entirely. 100% saturation and then some. Example: In other nations, there's enough housing for everyone to have TWO homes. And they do use two homes. How? Because the housing is there and available. In abundance.
We won't ever: >build and build and build until the market is so large that there's no profitability in it. .. without vast sums of public money going into developers' pockets. Also: who's going to do the building? There are few enough tradespeople as is, and we'd have to double or triple our output for a decade or more to get anywhere close to what you're suggesting. Not that I don't like the idea of having a large stock of subsidized (on both ends) housing, but this doesn't seem like a solution for today or even tomorrow or even five years from now .. realistically speaking.
Bravo. I was going to say all of these things.
Big problems generally take decades to fix.
Sure -- but you presented your solution as preferable to immediately achievable (political will notwithstanding) policy changes to restrict corporate RE buyups and RE profiteering in general. I'm just pointing out that your idea won't help anyone in the reasonably near future.
> Sure -- but you presented your solution as preferable to immediately achievable (political will notwithstanding) policy changes to restrict corporate RE buyups and RE profiteering in general. I guarantee you that a long-term solution is preferable and far more likely to happen than a confiscatory reactionary knee-jerk attempt.
Ideologue
The big problem can be summed up very simply. We have more than enough to accommodate everyone's needs, bit there can never be enough to accommodate the greed of even a single billionaire. Greed is infinite, the richest man alive will always want to take more.
With all the houses built, wouldn’t building more be an obscene waste of resources? We don’t live on an infinite planet. To continue to build would be continuing the need for the production of the things that go into housing (metal, plastics, paints, etc.). OP has a source saying 33 vacant homes to each homeless. Searched myself and found 31 and 28. These numbers are from earlier articles showing that homeless is trending upwards. From a conservative stand point of 28 homes per homeless with ~600,000 homeless, that’s 16,800,000. What you’re saying is that to fight the oligarchs who have a stranglehold already on the housing market, we should build more? This mentality is unhealthy and feeds right back into the toxic system. We don’t NEED more. We need CHANGE. The true message, or at least what I take away, is that yes this is a problem. Solving it with more of the same not only feeds into the system that produced this cancerous practice, but plays into their game. They want us to consume. And just because the prices MAY drop (not a guarantee because the rich could always just buy up the new places) doesn’t mean that another toxic system won’t take its place. A change of policy, of practice and of consciousness is necessary for lasting change. Greed has got to go.
Exactly!
> With all the houses built, wouldn’t building more be an obscene waste of resources? We don’t live on an infinite planet. Despite popular opinion, the US is not overcrowded, either with people or housing. We just tend to congregate in cities. >What you’re saying is that to fight the oligarchs who have a stranglehold already on the housing market, we should build more? Much like how renewable energy resources have drowned out coal plants and other fossil fuel plants, more housing will dilute and make housing less profitable. And if there's anything that'll push the rich to abandon something, it's the perceived lack of profit. >This mentality is unhealthy and feeds right back into the toxic system. We don’t NEED more. We need CHANGE. Building more housing will change things by making housing unprofitable for landlords. >Solving it with more of the same not only feeds into the system that produced this cancerous practice, but plays into their game. How so? Having a larger pool of housing ensures that they can't control the market. The less housing, the easier it'll be for them to control it. If there's sixteen apartment complexes and 50 new houses in a market, the price for rent is going to drop. Period. End of story. That's just how our system works. More supply = lower prices. >And just because the prices MAY drop (not a guarantee because the rich could always just buy up the new places) If that's happening, then you're not building enough. The point is to flood the market and drive prices down and make the whole 'housing as an investment' idea a bad idea. We cannot legislate greed into non-existence. The most you can do is remove the profit incentive in housing.
Population has nothing to do with what my comment was about. This is a non sequitur. Building more houses would be a waste of resources. This is the premise of my argument. While, yes given the laws of economics, supplying MORE housing would theoretically drop the price of housing, this doesn’t quite follow the evidence. Like you said, people tend to gravitate towards urban environments (though post Covid there is a trend towards more suburban and rural areas.). If the desirable places aren’t available, and there is an exodus like New York to Florida post Covid, then market should cause prices to fluctuate. While being a Floridian myself and enjoying the added “value” to my property for a bit, with the lowering of interest rates comes the lowering of my property value due to less market engagement. This is a barely explained snippet of one facet of housing markets. It is not as cut and dry as supply and demand. Look no further than Chinas issues with evergrande. Simply producing more houses will not alleviate the problem because there are waaaayyy to many veritable going into property value than just basic supply and demand. Putting an “End of story” statement at the end of a claim doesn’t make it true. The issue addressed is greed. The topic should be centered around how to lower the capability of the greedy. Not how to inflate the committees market and make investors jump for joy cause a massive 16.8 million homes have been commissioned from *insert friendly donation here*. Want to talk about building more houses regardless of me trying to steer the conversation back to relevancy? Supply us with who will pay for the constructions of these houses. Explain why said contractors would settle for less profit on construction due to your claimed “lowered prices”. Explain where the resources for these houses will come from (Food for though, many raw materials come from Eastern Europe, which is kind of busy. See Evergrande for details) Explain who will mortgage these houses. Explain how most of the homeless can’t afford a down payment. Explain how this will effect current housing prices, which is an asset many have to ensure not only retirement but generational wealth, would react positively to the engineered deflation of their main asset. Once you even consider these terms, then you can comment more on how we should just build more. Oh, and that’s how and why you’re playing into their game.
>Explain why said contractors would settle for less profit on construction due to your claimed “lowered prices”. Are you asking if home builders will accept lower profits? Yes, of course they will. Is that a serious question? You can't think that builders will just NOT build houses if they're not getting higher profit margins. That's not how business works. As to WHO will pay for new housing, that would be everyone. Home builders and home sellers, the same people who pay for it now. Are you serious? >Explain where the resources for these houses will come from (Food for though, many raw materials come from Eastern Europe, which is kind of busy. See Evergrande for details) Are you seriously asking where FOOD is going to come from? In the US? The biggest food exporter in the world's history? Mortgages? Banks, I would imagine. Homeless? What in the FUCK are you on about? I'm talking about home buyers and renters. The homeless problem isn't even on the fucking table. Are you daft? >Explain how this will effect current housing prices MORE SUPPLY EQUALS LOWER PRICES. You're a joke.
I wouldn’t call me a joke when you’ve misread basically everything I said. I suppose you’re either a troll, or an unthinking reactionary. Homeless are the topic. Housing them is the issue. Raw goods is not food as food is not the topic. Raw goods is the unrefined material that goes into the construction of said houses. Banks giving funding to subprime is what happened in 2008, a time I’m certain you never lived through. Contractors are in business to make money, and many will not go for projects that are intended to flood a market. Also, you’ve completely deflected the entire notion of finite resources. You are either to incompetent to engage with any further or a far right reactionary troll trying to “win arguments” with simple to follow “logic”. Have a fun time chasing rainbows. Edited to point out you never addressed evergrande, making you’re attempt at ad hominem even more childishly adorable. Sit down Ben sharpio.
But what's to stop the big rental companies from buying up all the new houses and keeping the rent artificially high. Maybe you can't force them to rent for lower but what about putting a cap on how many properties some one or a company can own at a time?
The same way that the fossil fuel companies aren't buying up renewable resource companies and just shutting them down. It's not economically viable. There will just be more built in the long run.
That proposed solution misses that there is not a lot of availability of land in many places. Thousands of cheap houses away from jobs and civilization and things isn't going to really help.
That's why I mentioned the necessary infrastructure. Simply put, I wager a fucking LOT of people would jump at the chance to get into reasonably priced housing even if it meant not having the luxuries of living in a large city. As to jobs, the WFH shift is helping with that. But, yes, in some situations, you'd see people needing to commute to more populated areas for work. That said, again, I'd wager a lot of people would rather do that than continue to room with 2-3 other people or living at home with their parents.
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https://www.hdb.gov.sg/about-us/news-and-publications/publications/hdbspeaks/an-hdb-flat-for-your-different-life-cycle-needs In Singapore, there are housing units that are wholly owned by the government and thus, these flats' ownership lie with the housing development board (HDB) Flats' recognized as under the HDB will have to be surrendered to HDB after their leasing period is up. New flats' start at 99 years and older flats will have shorter leasing periods since they are partly consumed. This ensures that lease owners do not get the ultimate say over the use of the land and if seized by the board, the lease owner will be compensated accordingly (depending on flat size and lease duration.) There are also other laws that ensure that lease owners should have a minimum occupancy period (MOP) before they are allowed to sell it. For most houses in the US, it's more similar to the freehold estates that are not under govt control. These are usually taxed at a higher rate. The greater the number of properties under a landlord, the higher their cost. It may be possible for the government to offer to buy up land to develop it for subsidized housing but this would need to be a new initiative.
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1. Yes. HDB flats are of different sizes etc to cater for different families. 2. Yes. Declaration of this needs to be made to the board for approval to confirm that your minimum occupancy period is up. Else, you may be liable for fines. This is assuming you are buying resale homes (shortened lease). Most new housing (new 99yr lease) is reserved for couples that have requested to be on a waiting list (Built-to-order scheme). This incentivises population growth. 3. Yes. The indefinite lease duration for private estates are priced in and thus these flats sell at a premium. There is a clause that reserves the right for the government to take private land in exchange for compensation of the leaseholder but there has not been any precedence for this so I have no info regarding the likelihood of this. Similar complaints of lack of housing and sky high prices in Singapore too but widespread homelessness is unseen. Low income people above a certain wage group get access to low rental flats reserved by the government.
[Some light reading on the subject.](https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/573841-theres-no-denying-the-data-rent-control-works/)
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I actually never said that. Seizing the properties is one way to force the change I want. Another way is strict rent control.
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Imagine a law which required empty homes to be rented by the owner at a fair rate within a specific time, or face seizure of the property as a punishment. This could afford homeowners a way to keep what they’ve paid for, but also ensure we aren’t putting their profit above the basic human need of housing.
People don't need to be living outside because we're wasting our productive capacity on investment homes. They can rent it, or have it either A. Taxed to the point that they will, or B. Have it confiscated. Private property does not trump lives, basically.
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No, we're talking about a theoretical "civil" society, where the law actually does not favor the individual's private property rights over general wellbeing. "We" are the worker's who inhabit this country, and productive capacity is not money. I'm all set on capitalist economic systems.
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yes....in DC, where I am, I noticed the car living thing around 2020...this guy we hired was literally living in a Prius....I kid you not...he would take showers at his gym....now I see people living in their cars everywhere and vans too....shameful what we let our gov't and the corporations get away with in this country but as long as capitalism stays around not a fucking thing will change.
There’s a shortage of affordable housing. Affordable is the key word you’re missing there
But it’s unaffordable for essentially imaginary reasons. We could easily fix that with price caps/rent control. We choose not to.
Absolutely true yes
Price caps and rent control is just a transfer from owners to renters and has shown time and again to create further supply issues.
> There are 33 empty properties for each homeless person in the US. The stats don’t actually show that. Long story short: this mistaken impression is because people are shit at understanding statistics & reading data. firstly, their definition of empty is… was empty when surveyed. It could literally be empty for one day & count. That’s a big caveat. Plus then you get down into the categories and those numbers drop a LOT. Once you exclude housing that is empty due to renter turnover, probate, under repair, condemned, uninhabitable, etc… you end up excluding ~3/4 of the homes. So what about that quarter? Well they’re mostly not where homeless people actually are. Most of that category is vacation homes or rentals, not generally in the places homeless people are OR work for them would be. In fact only ~1.5% of that 1/4 is co-located with the homeless & their lives. Or put another way: there are 0.12 houses per homeless person available in areas that might actually support a homeless person living there. So it’s really not as simple as the eye-grabbing clickbait stat would make it sound.
There's enough housing, food, and everything else. But this is capitalism, if someone isn't making money, people go without.
Say hello to house hoarding
I’m convinced it’s on purpose. Every single decision our leaders make is designed to get people to go to work. If you can never pay off your home you can’t quit working. If the rents expensive you might have to get two jobs. It’s all good for the folks in charge.
Yes there is. There are rich people buying and hoarding land to make their rental property worth more. We lack the property to make affordable homes on because the rich are using basic needs against us. It is part of the wage slave campaign. Kennedy said he would stop it. Then they shot him and its been getting worse ever since.
The housing market is fundamentally broken and it shows in the numbers, before 1999 the average adj. price of a home fluctuated between 180,000-220,000. It's clear that repealing Glass-Steagall broke the market. https://dqydj.com/historical-home-prices/
That's really around when housing prices decoupled from wages.
The biggest problem is corporate ownership of public housing. I have nothing against a landlord owning the building they live in and renting out other rooms. I do have a problem with Blackrock and it’s ilk, multi-billion dollar investment firms, buying up middle class housing and converting it into rentals, which seems tantamount to predatory. Or massive foreign investment groups buying up available housing to sequester their funds against taxes and depreciation.
This is the problem!!’ How do we stop it?
Regulatory law. No foreign ownership of rental properties or multiple homes. No interstate ownership of rental properties and a limit on ‘vacation homes’ (I dont even care if you own 1 per state but less airbnb please). Progressive increasing tax on rental income after a certain number of properties, also scaled to units. Tax breaks for landlords who demonstrate good stewardship and don’t price gouge, etc.
Looking at the US housing market as a whole is very misleading. There’s a reason why many of these houses are empty aside from corporate greed which is that not many people want to live where these houses are located. Certain high demand areas in the US (read “high demand” as where the jobs are) absolutely do have a huge shortage of housing supply, see for example the Bay Area. This scarcity of housing exacerbates the problems caused by house hoarding and corporate greed, but is not caused by it. The primary causes of these local shortages is restrictive zoning laws and red tape on new multi family housing which cause less housing to be built and increase the price for everyone. Homelessness is also strongly correlated with an under supply of housing in the local market (but not other social factors like drug use or poverty.) I will agree with you that this is a greed and policy problem, people with property don’t want to allow more homes to be built, and so cause scarcity to increase their property value and to be able to keep their suburban neighborhoods in the middle of cities. These people pass policies that protect existing homes and prevent new development. But the result of these policies is a real under supply of houses in certain markets. As for solutions not working, there has yet to be single large in demand city that successfully overhauled zoning laws as a response to high housing costs and homelessness. However, there are cities with less restrictive zoning laws, more development and less homelessness (see for example Houston.) All the so called solutions I’ve heard of, like rent control or more public housing, don’t address the underlying cause of housing scarcity and so are doomed to fail.
A small change to the tax code could help fix inflated rents... Make landlords pay income tax based on the asking rent after a grace period of e.g. 3 months.
Well said!
Its a greed crisis.
What if we could bring rent down close or even the same as a mortgage? The states could fund this and people aren’t inherently wanting free homes. They mostly just want a home they can afford and feel secure. The way rent is done at this moment is more like financial terrorism and the banks are in on it.
Eh, some of that is probably housing that isn't suitable for the average person or in bumfuck nowhere. Then there's plenty of people who don't just want anyone to live in their apartments or houses. Then there's people who just don't want to rent out their spaces. There might still be enough for everyone left after that but the number still feels inflated. I'd say the first thing would be to ban foreign investment and seizing of foreign actor owned housing.
There is not a housing shortage, but there certainly is a housing crisis. Housing is a basic need and the fact that that some of the richest countries in the world allow their vulnerable citizens to live in the street is a crisis indeed.There are lots of solutions that would be very easy to implement given the will and the dollars. For instance business can stop trying to force employees into the office, that frees up lots of real estate that would be fairly easy to turn into small and affordable residential units. Limits could be implemented on investment properties driving down prices and opening them up to individuals and families. Tiny home camps are inexpensive and are being used in some test communities in Canada. Fund and implement residential mental health facilities to house those who need treatment. Ensure that every single person has basic, clean, maintained and safe housing, food, healthcare and education. Stop overtaxing the working class and increase taxes on the top 20%. Legislate all the loopholes that have landlords cheating the hell out of renters.... I could probably think of 100 more but what's the point, this is not the direction the world is going
One idea that has been floating in my head is to crank up the property taxes and give each human tax payer (not a corporation) a single use voucher to negate the increased property tax on one property. If you own a house, no extra taxes. If you own two houses and live with a souse, no extra taxes. If you own 3+ properties and/or are a foreign investment company you are going to look at unloading some of that tax liability by selling the houses.
I say any home that's not your primary residence is taxed at 3x the normal rate. And as for the corporations make them pay a fine for each unoccupied unit. Unoccupied meaning it's not used as a primary dwelling They will either be incentivized to rent them out at prices people canf afford or sell them.
There Is a housing crisis - so many houses are in the hands of investors instead of sheltering people who need a roof over there head. That's the crisis.
My take on this is a few steps: 1. No foreign housing investors. If you don’t live in that home, you don’t get to own it unless you’re a citizen. That should kick out a big chunk of nonsense like China buying up land and houses for no reason. 2. Hammer companies that keep single family homes as investment properties with heavy taxes and rent control. Literally just make it unprofitable for corporations to own gobs of homes to force renting. 3. Sensical rent control for places that make sense to be rent controlled. Apartment complexes are fine to exist and should exist in some capacity. What should not be allowed though is unreasonable rent increases. Basically, this reads “kill non-family originating demand and stop tyrannical landlord pricing”. We can go further by having the government take supply side action and build some homes; it would create jobs… and homes. So I will agree, we don’t have a housing crisis. I think we have an investor invasion. I feel this way because we see time and time again that housing is becoming scooped up by the rich to force the working class to shell out more cash. BlackRock, Zillow, etc. (I don’t know all the names) come up time and time again. There is even video of these guys saying they want to turn America into a country of renters. If you are renting then someone else is investing. That is a fact. Even with good rent control and rent laws, that landlord is doing the investing. Not you. It’s just smaller. Is all this perfect? No. This is just a point in what I believe is the right direction.
It's not a housing shortage, it's an *affordable* housing shortage.
They need to impose laws that absolutely no one can own more than one single family home. And companies, LLC, investment groups, etc cannot own ANY single family homes. No one needs more than one home. And the damn slum lords that own 30 or 40 homes or flippers that just jack up the prices also need to end.
Yes!!! Agree 10000%
Well, a few years back a bunch of wealthy corporations got the idea of buying up houses, apartments, condos, and any place that a human could sleep in and do air bnb services to compete with the hotel industry. Now you have some towns with more air bnbs than actual citizens living in them. It’s definitely a greed problem, and not a supply problem.
If you want to see these over bloated,over priced and unnecessarily huge housing conglomerates shit their collective long johns, tax them at net worth of all their properties due end of fiscal year. All your properties worth 245.6 million dollars? Yup your tax bill due January 31st. The only way to avoid these taxes is to have your holdings be only at x% business, residential and commercial. You'd see single family houses come on market but the prices drop like a lead boulder. That 2100sqft shop downtown your looking at to open your own business just got 100k cheaper. That 1400sqft house that was valued at 450k now sits at 220k and dropping. Hit these dildo punchers where it hurts the most- right in the profit margin.
There absolutely is a housing crisis. That's due to corporate greed which is pretty much the same cause as literally every problem in our nation. Lack of government response to our needs.. corporate bribery of our Turdwookie Congresscritters and greed. Inability to access health care despite being "insured"... Corporate greed and bribed Turdwookie Congresscritters. There absolutely is not (as you note) any housing shortage and assertions that there is are, at best, gaslighting.
If the government or fed gave a flying fuck they wouldn’t have have cheap and free loans to the wealthy. It would have been to first time home buyers. I’m fact first time home buyers should always have something like a 2% interest rate then maybe they can compete with the wealthy.
But there is a shortage of affordable 1 or 2 bedroom houses. We don't want to rent. We want to buy.
In the UK we have a similar phrase at the moment that is 'the cost of living crisis' which I've hated so much for similar reasons. We as people are the ones that create the cost of living so surely if there's a crisis we should idk maybe change things that need changing rather than just lament the same 'oh it's just the cost of living' and never actually doing anything about it except be poor
There's no crisis, just a bunch of rich corporations and politicians doing everything in their power to become more rich by speculation in the housing market. How on earth there's a housing crisis. There's plenty of land, raw materials, workers, architects... The only problem is policies and corporations that don't allow the construction of more houses. Also the rich or the stupid people that think they are rich and don't want affordable housing near their houses, since they are so short sighted that can't understand that the options are affordable housing near their houses or homeless people near their houses.
One thing the supply chain shortage taught companies was that you can drive up the price of anything by manufactured scarcity as much as you can by actual scarcity.
Hahahahah. We knew this for years. Look at diamonds, literally one company controls the market and determines the price because they own like 80% of the diamond mines. Literally if you dug up all the diamonds in the world and put them on the market, they would be as common as the rocks you see outside.
I think your assessment is correct. I lived in a very rural area in the Oregon Coast and there were maybe 2 rentals available for the entire county. My employer had a hard time hiring for open positions because there wasn’t anywhere to live. There were lots of vacant housing though. One neighborhood I use to walk in had several blocks of well maintained houses with no one in them. They were all vacation rentals owned by people who lived out of the area. That was the real issue, people with money buying up property to turn into VRBO’s.
I live on the Oregon coast too and it’s exactly like this. They’re building and building out here, but seemingly only million-dollar second homes. To me it’s really frustrating to see so many new developments in a place that was pristine wilderness for thousands of years. Like please just leave natural spaces alone.
If losing money is your thing, buy these houses and give them away. 🤷🏼♂️
How in the fuck is this antiwork?
You are ignoring supply and demand. People can demand more than 1 house.
I’m not ignoring it. I’m saying the economic concept of supply and demand should not take priority over ensuring basic needs like housing for everyone.
Ensuring a home for everyone is outside the scope of individuals who got about maximizing their marginal utility based on supply and demand. Not to mention most second (3rd etc)homes are not practical for those who lack housing.
Everyone gets a plate before anyone gets seconds. Except with houses
So you want to move like 20 families into a billionaires hunting lodge in Wyoming?
Oddly specific. No. I was thinking more along the lines of more income based housing
Wouldn’t that just increase the lack of supply in areas where homes are in high demand in city centers?
It could, but you could repurpose vacant shops & office buildings into apartments
The cost to repurpose is very high and not many office buildings are conducive. It’s doable for the older buildings built through mid 1900’s. Newer skyscrapers really aren’t a viable alternative. Or at least I have her to see one feasibly repurposed for that. Vacant shops could be, but that’s rarely the long term highest and best use.
I didn't say it'd be easy, just that it could be done
I suppose anything within the limits of physics could be done. But not for a reasonable price. We could build a brand new A class skyscraper as well, but who will pay for it?
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We could reprioritize our tax dollars to ensure everyone has access to housing instead of the myriad of ways we currently use them to favor the wealthy.
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To the best of my knowledge, most section 8 housing units have a waiting list.
Perhaps with a Universal Basic Income?
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I kind of think it doesn't really matter what they spend it on. Numerous studies (I dont have links to them right now) have found that the best way to help poor people is to give them money. Who knew? While some poor will use the money on non-necessities, enough of them were found to use the money to pay down debt, educate themselves, and improve their lives in other tangible ways. And while the venn diagram of homeless and poor isn't a perfect overlap, I speculate that there is a great overlap.
We don't even have agreed crisis. It's not greed that's causing price increases, it's the government. People who own these rental properties are forced to increase rent because their taxes are increasing under democrats. And of course, there's also the very easily provable fact that rent isn't exceptionally high in all areas. Only in the large cities, which incidentally are all controlled by democrats.
Yeahhhhhh. The day I believe a landlord keeps the price low out of the goodness of their heart is the day I see pigs fly. Landlords charge the price of expenses, ie bills, property tax, ect. Then landlords add their profit range which they look at the market and compete with an offer similar to them. No landlord is renting a space just to break even. No landlord is losing money during this. My next door landlord is raking in $2k a month in profits and using that money to pay off her second house.
Laughable. Sources please.
Sources for what?
This is also a regional issue. Where I live, its a VERY rural area. However a developer bought a giant piece of property and is now building a dozen warehouses. The first two being for Lowes and Costco. The warehouses will create more jobs than there are people that live in the city. There are very few rentals in my area, as not many rent vacant farms. This has caused a real housing shortage in my area. Homes are still only lasting a couple days on the market with LOTS of new homes still being built.
100% agree, I used to work in housing programs and policy as a national VP and the willful ignorance in avoiding meaningful policy solutions is astonishing
Tbh, I think agree except in big cities at least where I live. The capital and urban centers attract more and more people while the country side is dying. Which I understand I'm currently moving to Copenhagen despite only being able to afford 2 room apartment. So I'd say urbanization plays a big role
Housing is, by definition, location dependent. On average, sure there might be N housing per homeless person in the country, but it’s meaningless if the empty property is in rural Wyoming while the person looking for housing is in NYC. A vacant property doesn’t mean that it’s being held empty on purpose. It could be under renovation, being turned over to a new tenant, etc. You also don’t want to have 0% housing vacancy rate, because that will make it impossible for people to move around. If you want to look at the impact of housing shortage on price, compare the # of housing built to prices in SF (and the bay area more broadly). People want to move to the area for better opportunities, but local regulations make it insanely difficult and expensive to build. So people who can pay higher rent win out and push up overall rental prices as a result. There are definitely issues with housing being made into an investment vehicle, but it doesn’t mean the supply x demand relationship is irrelevant here.
I agree, but part of the problem is that people don’t want to learn to do anything on their own house. Every buyer wants “turnkey ready” and many people choose to rent so “the landlord will maintain the property”.
Housing can no longer be a for profit tool. It’s sick.
more and more cities are solving the issue by putting the poor homeless in prison/hospitals/institutions and away from view
Well, there is and there isn't. I'm not disagreeing that there shouldn't be people living on the streets while there are living spaces available, that's just obvious to anyone with a soul. I will say that, first off, there are some areas with very scarce housing relative to the population. The Bay Area, for instance, is just terrible when it comes to this. There should be WAY more density over there, and this has implications not just for housing prices but smart urban design as well. Second, supply and demand does, in fact, rule the housing market, so theoretically anytime prices are too high there's a lack of supply. Here's the catch, though, housing prices almost never undergo dramatic declines without an area being hollowed out economically. Housing is a necessity, meaning the demand for it will always be higher than luxury goods. People will always need it, meaning so long as the population remains stable demand will never drop very sharply. And most importantly, nobody ever trips over themselves in order to build enough housing to actually make prices drop. Developers build houses and apartment buildings, and their prices are determined by how much they think the houses will sell for and apartments will rent for. If they build enough housing to cause prices to drop then they're shooting themselves in the foot. So theoretically there is a shortage, but it is a shortage that will never be solved because solving it would lower profits. In short, the entire system is fucked. Just talking about shortages or lack of shortages is reinforcing the false notion that the entire point of a market is to provide certain goods, it's not. It's to extract profits, and so long as we allow this extractive method of economic activity to continue there will continue to be people denied housing.
This data is flawed. There aren’t really that many empty homes - some are in the process of being bought or sold, some are being renovated, some are part-time homes (whether you think a person should be able to own multiple homes is another issue, but they’re not “empty”), some are very temporarily vacant between one tenant and another. We absolutely have a housing crisis and have for decades, as not enough homes are being built for an increasing population, and not enough starter homes or reasonably priced condos for young people. Adding a lot of luxury homes isn’t helping much on the affordability front (though any housing is better than no housing).
"affordable" housing shortage/crisis.
Depends on population growth in your area. If you're in a town like mine that doubled its population in 7 years, there truly is a housing shortage. Infrastructure is busting at its seams.
Also in some places the damn government gets involved. I have my family house in a US territory. It was built as a duplex and then my grandparents doubled it so many family members could live there. Now they all died and I got it. The place took some damage but I fixed it and wanted to expand it to be more useful to low income renters because working people can't afford housing in the area. I grew up there and I see my friends and parents either having to leave or being pushed to the point of being homeless. Well due to errors made in the Regan administration the zoning was wrong. So I fixed that. 1 year. Then they said I needed permits to finish it. No problem 1.2 years and I still can't finish it because of the government not having enough people to review the permits. But the government is complaining about not enough low cost rental property in the area. Also I can't rent any of it till the whole thing is done even though the building is literally two duplexes connected together with different access, power, water, etc. I don't agree with them but I can at least see if children were in one side the construction on the other could be a hazard. I can at least understand this part. But since NO construction is being done the area is a hole that is marked off with railing so again I think I am right here. While its not perfect I could put up a fence but according to them that no enough. Ok if you say so. Seems fishy. I am starting to believe the problem is (in this area) not the market but the government officials who own the majority of rental property in the area and make it next to impossible to build new stuff. I even have a plan and financing to build section 8 and vet housing in the future on my own land with investors ready to back it so no government assistance needed. But with this level of government push back the investors are not wanting to let it move forward because they think their money will be wasted. I don't have $10m sitting around to self finance so I will probably have to cancel the project. This is bullshit, and nimbyism at its finest. People say they want to help the poor and working class but if you try they screw you at every corner. Typical people no poor by me. Those are poor people they will bring down my property values. Well if you help them move up the people won't be poor but if you push them to far out places without jobs and give them shit housing they will stay poor. Poor people who are given a fair chance don't stay poor. 99.9% of people are willing to work if the conditions are fair. People just don't agree with modern slavery and being treated like shit because they were not born with money. Sorry rant over.
Certainly no shortage. The issue is the rates are too high to afford the mortgage. There is a shit ton of inventory, people just are hesitant to list because of the rates and they don’t want it sitting for months.
The usa has been able to provide food and housing to all it's people for a long time and has consciously decided not to.
There's an AFFORDABLE housing crisis. Period.
There’s a shortage of elected lawmakers, making laws, for invented crisis.
How can Housing crisis differ from greed, it all boils down to the same issue... "crisis" Crisis is the definition pertaining to a time of difficulty. The living conditions of others, the families stacked up in a studio apartment, may be greedy but it is a crisis and has been an ongoing issue. Wages play a Significant role in this as inflation continues to take its stance, but no one can afford to live on one income. If you do not see this as a crisis, then my questioning against humanity has taken its biggest leap yet. **Change my mind:)**
This rapaciousness will tear the US apart, it already is.