Write laws that:
- Prevent non-humans entities (trusts, shell-companies, foundations etc. from buying houses for the next 10 years)
- Ban airbnb
- Increase property taxes on vacant properties.
Increase supply (build more), keep demand steady (sane interest rates, sane immigration rates, speaking as an immigrant), and housing costs simply must fall. Yes, even if a single corporation buys every last house in the UK.
Fight supply and demand at your peril.
Define everywhere. Japan and Greece have seen population declines in the last few years, for example.
The globalization of the real estate market has always been a setup for a scam and everybody knows it, yet keeps doing it, and the whole west is now stuck in this catch-22.
Supply can be vastly increased by punishing large owners severely for letting their properties stay empty.
Every year they’re losing a big chunk of money to inflation and opportunity cost.
Yes, and in some circumstances that might have been enough. But the fact that we got to where we are now proves that we are not in thise circumstances, because it isn't enough.
Canada is the same way except massive immigration, temporary foreign worker program, and foreign students allowed to work 40 hours a week (in case you were wondering if the student visas are legit) have driven up the price of housing beyond any reason. Probably multiple generations of canadians whose financial future was sacrificed so the current government can run their seemingly ideological immigration program.
Good. Let them.
It turns out that if the demand is effectively infinite thanks to immigration, you can't reduce prices by increasing supply.
Edit: Patrick Condon (who wrote that biv.com article) seems terrible. Here he is opposing connecting UBC to Vancouver’s SkyTrain: https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2019/01/29/Last-Voice-Against-Sky...
My point exactly. Meanwhile Canada has had sub-replacement fertility since 1973:
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/fertility-r...
The destruction of the provision of social housing has been a disaster.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/may/08/over-1m-home...
The reality is that they can often make far more profit by building the expensive houses first, drip feeding them onto the market, and possibly never finishing the whole estate as originally approved. It's no accident that many homes are approved but never built. It's just a small group of wily giant building firms playing the system and getting away with it.
In theory local authorities who administer the planning system should call them on it. In reality it's a David and Goliath situation. Attempting enforcement actions can result in years of expensive legal battles ultimately funded by local taxpayers with no guarantee of success even in what appear to be cut-and-dried cases.
Social housing used to be famous for the government simply not following building codes (whether that meant maximum land occupancy or isolation/material standards), and disclaimed responsibility when it lead to accidents. But it made a lot of people home owners.
For what it's worth, the tax system is aggressively punitive towards companies that want to buy real estate. Landlords with mortgages can't offset the interest against profit any more so a bunch of those are no longer viable concerns and sold up.
Some conquence to vacant property might be good, beyond the already punitive stamp duty when you go beyond the first one. I think you get hit for capital gains when selling non-primary residence as well.
Good living conditions are like a magnet for economic migrants, and the wholesale arrival of migrants will start a race to the bottom which will destroy any quality of life.
Countries with fertility rates of 1.5 shouldn't be throwing stones at immigration.
Yes, they should be working to encourage more native women to have children. You can't immigrate your way out of a population decline.
And that's by design. Every human coming into the planet should start from a reasonably same starting point. By not taxing inheritance, the super wealthy's children start much further than the children born to non-wealthy families.
The tax on inheritance is the best way to ensure that there is "some" inheritance but not enough that the children start at a starting point that is insanely ahead of others.
Looking at the last three decades I see wealth just accumulate in mega corporations who now seem to operate at levels above that of many nation states. Large banks that can demand bailouts and demand “quantitive easing” which simply aggregates wealth in these banks and corporations. Literally transferring wealth from the bottom to the top by government decree.