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Comment by throwitaway222 | Hacker News Reader

If that happens, just raise prop taxes to 100k per year (for rental units).

For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.

I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments.

https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/housing-starts

Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more.

Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.

Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town.

A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)

I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs.

He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house.

People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.

Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce).

Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize.

In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas

I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins.

All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.

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