Building houses to solve the housing crisis implies that the crisis was caused by a lack of homes. Every single one of the 2 million houses would be picked up by a property firm or a Chinese millionaire just the way it has been happening for the last ten years. What you really need is legislation, but what you are getting is more food for the hounds.
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Never before have I seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username
OsamaBinLaden is right. Yup. That was weird to type.
We need legislation to prevent REITs and holding companies from purchasing small and medium residential dwellings and properties. The problem that will create when it passes and they relinquish their sizable holdings, is that adjacent properties devalue causing mortgagers to go upside-down. It’s a simple problem to identify, but not an easy one to solve.
Read the username again, it's much worse than that
Be that as it may, Britain in the 1970s and before actually had a really good answer to this: The government just buys enough property and rents it out to people at reasonable rates, to puncture the bubble and make it unprofitable to be a landlord in the first place as a "job." People have affordable places to live, we don't have to have a fight about declaring it "illegal" to own or rent out property, and people with spare cash are motivated to invest it in businesses instead of in properties. Literally everyone wins. Which of course, means America will see it as communism and fight to the death to stop it from happening.
Not saying you're wrong in your solution either, just saying one other way which has a proven track record.
Supply and demand. Corporate interests will only buy homes when theres a profit incentive. A housing shortage makes great profit opportunities.
If there are too many airbnbs so they don’t get rented, there’s no longer a profit. If there are enough houses that you can’t buy to flip at guaranteed markup, there goes the profit. If there’s enough houses that you’re not guaranteed a quick sale on your investment, there goes the profit. The point is there are limits on those ownership patterns so you can build your way out of it
Aren't there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don't expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that'd cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can't do that. I'm sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.
yes there is currently extra housing but, unfortunately, sites like airbnb have moved large swaths of the housing market to the luxury hotel market leading to a shortage in actual housing as wealthy, investor, and corporate class people pay premiums for short term rentals that most people simply can't compete with.
Airbnb isnt as big a problem as much as corporate owned housing is.
Companies like Blackstone need to be absorbed by the US Govt.
So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.
Also boomers are both buying retirement homes and holding onto their previous homes, rather than letting them go back on the market and alleviate some of the shortage. They have more purchasing power than any of the younger generations because they have decades of equity built up, and they're trying to keep their previous homes to pass onto their children. Both are contributing to the upward price pressure.
A lot of it is a question of where.
The town I grew up in is a great example: it is n a generally rural area and lost its major employer years ago. The economy never really recovered and the population has dwindled, but that’s also true of the surrounding area. There are many empty homes, even in formerly upscale developments, and I can literally buy one on my credit card.
In my current town, a starter home is like 15x the price, they sell within hours, and there’s no open land left to develop.
The expensive area is where people want to live, but there are all those empty homes selling for very little just a few hours drive away
I believe there’s been a general trend of moving toward cities, that leaves lots of inexpensive empty homes behind
The US had 3.1m houses sitting empty in 2023
property hoarding is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such, imho. Houses are for living in, not speculation.
I don't think the US needs more single family homes, I think we need more, or at least more affordable, multifamily housing. Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. What we need to be doing is bringing down the cost of housing in cities, as well as making cities as pedestrian friendly as possible, with walking and biking infrastructure, and public transportation.
Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment
This is what I'm always saying! Car-centric spaces are also bad socially. They're dehumanizing. You want people walking around if you want a community, and having a strong community is good in many ways.
For us, the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. We basically have no choice. I have to work in the city but can't afford to live there with a family. Mainly the rent/mortgage prices, and groceries. It's all cheaper when I'm willing to drive 30-60 minutes outside of the city.
It's cheaper for you because suburbia effectively gets subsidized, and because housing in cities gets artificially limited through ridiculous zoning rules. Ideally, suburbs should have to actually bear the costs of the infrastructure necessary to their existence, and we should do away with things like detached single family housing and absurd parking minimums in urban areas.
I completely agree, but we need much stronger rent and ownership laws, as well as public housing. Companies are bulldozing low income housing, building shiny new apartment buildings, and using algorithmic rent to empty out most of the apartment complex and keep prices artificially high across a city.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
It's so terrible, because the end result is a lot of half empty apartments downtown, and normal people effectively getting pushed to suburbs because there's no way most people could afford an apartment that costs $4k a month. For low income people, it's even worse.
Even just having some (30%) mandatory $500/mo rent apartments in all new construction over 30 units could help.
But whatever will poor Blackrock do with their real estate portfolio??
Maybe just redistribute some wealth? The richest nation in the world can afford to home everyone. Homelessness is a policy decision.
Yeah but also charge less than $200k for a 3b 2b with a 2 car garage.
I thought Americans used sq ft to casually describe houses? Please don't switch to number of bedrooms. That's what we do in UK and it's led to house builders squeezing closet-sized bedrooms into a house so they can sell it as a 4-bed.
A coworker just bought a 1.5 bath, 2 car garage, 3 bed for $500,000+ in Portland, basically no yard/outdoor area.
Equity firms own 1.6 million homes in the US (both single family and multi family units).
Just saying, that would get us most of the way there.
What's to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes? Won't that just leave us back where we are now?
Do we think we can build more homes than Equity firms can spend other people's money on?
What's to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes?
Ideally, Madame Guillotine.
Nope. Just need to force all landlords to sell. Make tax on rent ruinous. Tax additional homes. Make it illegal for corporations to own residential property.
Cool, landlords can buy all of these up too!
And how many empty houses are there already?
15 million vacant houses. Around 600,000 homeless people. If only 10% of all vacant homes in the use were liveable we could still give every homeless person two and have some left over.
The systems in place are broken. I work 12hr days, with overtime. Credit score over 750. And there is no chance I can afford a house in my area.
Have you tried uprooting your family and moving to a place no one wants to live? Something something bootstraps.
Or maybe billion dollar companies should be forced to sell so the average person can buy them
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn't a primary residence of the property owner.
There are enough homes to house everyone, supply isn't the problem, greed is.
It's also probably a location issue, might not have enough houses where people want to live even though there's empty ones in buttfuck nowhere.
or better yet, overcome neoliberalism, the cursed legacy of Ronald Reagan
Building those houses means current homeowners would miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars when they eventually sell their homes.
If you were to ask most politicians to describe their constituents, they would said 'married, kids, two cars, and a house with a mortgage'. That's who they are looking after, that's their priority. You are not considered a real person or a focus unless you fall into the above description.
"An influx of immigrants in the country also isn't helping the housing affordability equation as it has in the past."
Go fuck yourself business insider. The ol' "America is full" bit is it? The Great Enemy: the poor immigrant who is going to steal your piss poor paying job, but somehow also "steals" your super fucking overpriced house that even natural born citizens with full time jobs can't afford.
Get fucked.
This bubble will be disastrous beyond imagination once it bursts.
I actually think the best solution would be the government to build a bunch of extra housing and crash the rental market with a two pronged supply approach:
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sell housing to first time home buyers at 50% off under the condition they don't resale for 5 years and the government gets any value gains over the sale price for 10 years.
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triple the existing public housing stock while slashing requirements to get into public housing
"The US needs to reclaim 2 million houses from firms to revive the American dream of homeownership"
Fixed. The housing exists, it's just bought up so you can't have it because they want more profit.
Also fck HOAs and the horse they road in in.
That won't fix shit, that's 2 million homes that corporations will buy up to jack the rent up. Shit should be illegal.