Heavily taxing the third piece of realeste one adult buys. (A guy buys a home, and a getaway pad, fine. Tax the third property a lot to avoid homes being being accumulated.)
Put a unoccupied tax on vacant realestate too.
These suggestions seem unlikely to accomplish much, and they seem driven by a assumption that inequality and greed of the wealthy is the problem rather than local government red tape and NIMBYs holding back construction.
More supply reduces prices. Econ 101. It is strange how many people seem to think Econ 101 somehow doesn't apply to housing.
Speculative hoarding of the scarce resource of housing can lead to houses sitting empty, but speculation would be pointless if the resource weren't artificially constrained to be scarce.
I just don't believe this. I'm sorry. The difference between texas (which part, for one thing) and vancouver isn't down to real estate regulation. There are plenty of places in BC where you can buy a home for texas prices, and real estate regulation isn't that different city to city.
If developers are getting rich off building more, that means housing is crazy scarce, so scarce that people will fill the pockets of anyone who builds it. That means you need to build
Way
More
Housing.
Econ 101.
If you give a starving person a carrot and they were still starving after eating it, would you say that feeding has failed? Quantity matters! A lot!
A. Build more houses (and cross your fingers that the corporation doesn’t snatch those up too)
B. Criminalize renting to some degree
Except... they will beg the government to do something, tell some heart-rending narrative about those nasty rich developers, the government will do something, and they'll get to stay rich.
I may see a different villain here than you do.
It is not the case that, because an oil monopoly happened in 1900, we need to be hypervigilant to hypothetical monopolies in other industries where nothing remotely like that has ever happened.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_antitrust_law#Ri...
Meanwhile the American citizenry with humble dreams of one day owning a house feels their dreams drift farther and farther out because some people won’t acknowledge that there’s even a problem. Others want to reward these corporations by building more inventory.
Mine’s an environmental concern. NIMBYs are just trying to protect their housing investments.
Your concern is actually pretty common among the affluent homeowners who prevent development. Probably the second most common concern behind "neighborhood character", which is really just another type of environmental concern (city environment). Very few NIMBYs are purely after money.
"Housing defies economic laws and is terrible for the natural and/or city environment" is the prevailing opinion of NIMBYs today, based on the discussions I've been in.
It seems like you’re on the side of the upper-class trying to trade the environment to prop up their investments. This is just like BTC scammers trying to trade the environment for their investments.
So no, if one side of this is more like BTC scammers, it isn't mine. It is the guarantee of scarcity that underwrites the entire BTC enterprise, even for the miners who are today wasting electricity on generating more of them.
Renting has absolutely nothing with our housing problems. There are majority-renter housing markets that have nowhere near the affordability problems we have. Supply is far more important than who has the deed.
If you want rich developers to make less money, unleashing supply is the way to do that. Automakers and grocery stores have relatively low profit margins because there are no government-imposed supply constraints on them.
Frankly, though, I think it's more admirable to help the poor than merely make a doomed attempt to punish the rich.
Would you at least agree in a hypothetical US in which it is not possible to build further supply that banning renters would be the next logical step? Again, this is not to say or not say that supply should not be further built.
Owning means saving a lot of money and accepting a lot of price risk and transaction costs. I own a house and like it, but I know for a fact that it's not for everyone.
If there was one monopolist landlord who charged through the nose, that could be a problem, but I don't know of any housing markets like that. Landlords keep raising their prices because demand outpaces supply and they can get away with it.
If a single corporation owns all homes, they can artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty.
If multiple companies own all homes, then they can try to artificially limit supply by buying up any new properties and leaving them empty, but there's huge incentive for each one not to: if it rents out every property it buys, it makes even more money than if it left any of them empty. It's the prisoner's dilemma - if all companies collude and limit supply they maximize total profit, but if any individual company "cheats" it stands to gain even more for itself.
It is possible for cartels to collude and pull this off (OPEC etc), but it's not possible when there are thousands and thousands of companies and many of them are too small to "take one for the team" and leave a property empty, or too disinterested in any collusion.
You mean anti monopoly laws? Let them pay monopoly taxes if their market share is bigger than 50% in any given city.
The 16k units you’re citing won’t stay empty for long, but other units in the system will go temporarily unfilled. This is necessary for a functional housing market. In order for prices to decline you need a vacancy rate of more than 5%. Prices will continue to rise even at 4% vacancy.
The economics here are well studied and well established. Housing economists broadly agree.
If there’s anything that markers are great at doing, it’s producing lots of stuff at decreasing marginal cost. Housing is no different.
Not only is said assumption pretty dang reasonable, but the former is outright the cause of the latter (specifically: rich landowners lobbying local and state governments to hinder development and shift tax burdens onto literally anything other than the land value they're hoarding).
Or is it possible that the YIMBY progressives who actually watch this issue in their local communities are right, and the biggest problem is NIMBYs vetoing everything to protect their "neighborhood character" and "the environment"?
NIMBYs hold a lot of power in local governments. They may be almost the only ones to turn out in many local elections and referendums.
> Huge transaction fees and risks related to owning
When houses cost millions, yes this is true. But if we got house prices down to an actually affordable level, this would not be such a concern. If I decided today to move to winnipeg for a couple years, houses are so cheap (at least compared to what I'm used to) that I'd strongly consider just buying a house or a condo for the time I was there.
Root causes: - zoning restrictions - parking minimums (also perhaps a subcategory of zoning)
A large percentage of landlords own a very small number of units each. Many get into this to finance retirement, etc. Taxing this way of life would likely just make less units available for rent, and reduce the number of people in the market for properties, which would reduce the effective demand for housing.
Banning corporations? The smart thing to do when buying a house is to set up a corporation to own the property. The very wealthy will always be able to achieve the sorts of protections this provides - why keep others from it?
What does that mean? That no apartment complexes can ever be built? Just checking I'm understanding you're suggestion.
Can only buy if they are going to knock down and build bigger. Application needs to be approved.