Right, you could of course file bankruptcy if your business becomes unprofitable on account of rentiers not paying their rent...but that's not a solution to the housing problem at all and strongly disincentivizes investment in housing.
It would strongly support homeownership.
If “owners” couldn’t buy up multiple properties and become landlords but could only own 1 homestead...then property values would drop and renters would be capable of affording to own in mass.
Unfortunately, we are about to see in short order what happens when renters stop paying rent in mass and landlords stop paying mortgage in mass.
Hint: the renters and owners (collectively “taxpayers“) will both be robbed by their representatives again, and congress will bail out banks (again) so the banks can foreclose (on owners) and evict (renters).
Great! Housing shouldn't be an investment anyway. There's no reason it has to be; there are plenty of places -- like Japan -- where houses are depreciating assets that expected to be torn down when the owners leave.
Do you have any additional info?
Japan has a declining population, which means that rural housing actually can have zero buyers for it, where the population is lower than the number of houses. One in seven buildings in Japan is actually vacant [0].
If their population was increasing faster than housing construction, then housing would actually increase in cost.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-29/japan-s-s...
The reason prices aren't high is that nobody wants to live in an old house. "Old" being 15 years old or more. Even with renting apartments, if it's older than 7-8 years old, agents will almost warn you that the property isn't exactly fresh and sparkling, but it's still not bad. If it's a pre-90s house, it's considered basically unwanted and they'll all but try to give it away. Meanwhile, 90s homes in the US are still marketed as pretty new, and demand seems to be higher for older homes than newer ones. America also has loads of empty houses. It also has loads of property owners who refuse to lower prices because their ego is worth more than their property. Apparently about 1/8 American homes are currently vacant, and the population isn't declining. Price and desirability are the problems.
Japan, is also no stranger to real estate bubbles, having experienced perhaps the worst real estate bubble in modern history in the 90s:
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/economics/08/japan-199...
"At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California."
http://www.indianapolisrecorder.com/news/article_b27a7cf6-1d...
https://www.reddit.com/r/UrbanHell/comments/5gx86v/russian_a...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petare_Slums_in_Cara...
Authenticity of the reddit post aside, do you have the slightest knowledge of urban development in the Soviet Union, or like, anywhere, or do you just regurgitate links?
A lotta shit got built 'cause you need to house a lot of people after your country's major urban centers got basically raized to the ground, the surrounding countryside along with it, alongside continuing rural->urban migration. Ain't particularly easy to do that well while also trying to recover your economy from a massive fucking brutal invasion.
Yes, Khrushchevkas aren't exactly marvels of architectural longevity; they were never intended to be. They were supposed to last maybe 30-40 years at best, and they're still standing. Sure, they're shoddy and they look like shit now, the countries that built them lacked the capital to replace them as intended--that's another history lesson, but whatever. You mock them for carrying on shambling well past their intended use? They should be lauded for lasting as long as they have, with what limited resources and tight constraints under which they were originally built.
Point is, you want the government to cheap housing and fund it as such, it does so, and the output sometimes ends up surpassing your original goals! You put funding into producing good housing and government can do that too! You ever been to Singapore? You ever hear about the sprawling abject rotten slums of Singapore, that dominate the whole of the nation? No? Curious that.
Would be really fucking strange to hear that a government could build a lot of good housing for its populace and still succeed economically, I suppose, but hey, they did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing_in_Singapore
Renters are locked out because they don't have down payments. They can't save down payments because rent takes all the extra money.
The sort of instability that renting creates, contributes heavily to the poor performance of children in school.