May I ask what your recommendations would be for this? What's broken and how would you fix it?
1 - Build more housing.
2 - Eliminate weird NIMBYisms in a lot of places.
3 - Rent controls
4 - Eliminate corporate ownership of SFH
5 - Progressive property taxing
Instead, we've done absolutely nothing, and that unfortunately didn't seem to work.
On the other hand if property taxes get high enough, they basically act like rent, and the purchase price drops because it's no longer a good investment.
What you are proposing is expropriation and state ownership of residential property.
How would your scheme deal with larger multi-occupancy dwellings? Would they need to be demolished, or would they be appropriated by the state?
Yes, that's exactly the goal.
Corporate ownership of SFHs is so small to not matter. The house you live in shouldn't be an investment.
People keep saying this and quoting total ownership figures, which is probably what Blackrock and co wanted. Look at actual purchases in the last 2 years instead. Blackrock has bought nearly 50% of all SFH sales in my area in the last year.
It's no coincidence that corporate buying percentages shot up with the prices.
Feds policies led to artificially low interest rates which juices prices. But the prices become sticky when rates rise again, which they are now.
All locales should allow for greater density, and YIMBY attitude needs to prevail over NIMBY. Plenty of people would love to live in small place in a great neighborhood. It's exclusionary and increases wealth disparity to prevent construction in desirable areas. Though denser zoning can actually be lucrative to homeowners (landowners).
Government could also easily curb investor activity in residential by limiting the amount of leverage investors can use for buy and hold rentals. E.g. investors need to put 50% down if it's a buy and hold, and not just a flip. This would clearly kill large amounts of speculation in the SFH market.
Of course this alone doesn't completely solve the problem, but at least the duplexes are cheaper than the SFH.
E.g. In the northwest hills neighborhood, lots of smaller homes that are noticeably cheaper than the SFH equivalents.
(My real point in asking these questions is that housing issues in say, the Bay Area, are different from those in other parts of the country such that it's really hard to make blanket statements about housing. There are some themes, but I posit there are different answers for different locales.)
Single family housing uses more water and energy per capita, generally one will be fine. And overtime one can slowly upgrade infrastructure -- as is done around the world or what happens in American neighborhoods that are upzoned. It really is a red herring of a problem that is brought up.
> As we saw a good example of in Pittsburgh, how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
As long as one is building the new housing nearby jobs you'll be decreasing the average miles traveled. Also it is usually the other way around you need a minimum level of density to make transit more viable and useful.
Expand service?
>how do we maintain the transportation and muni services to these new houses?
Use the tax money they pay to pay for infrastructure maintenance.
>are different from those in other parts of the country such that it's really hard to make blanket statements about housing
But the general issues is the same isn't it: there's more demand than available supply or else prices wouldn't be going up