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Comment by yonran | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not that rents are too low and sales prices are too high, which might make it appropriate to punish renting a unit and force landlords to sell. The problem is too few of both rental and ownership units.

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I see this point oft repeated, usually as a shut-down for the above arguments. But i also see people claiming the complete opposite for their localities (that there are many many extra vacant homes being held than people that need them). It seems like the initial wave of arguments cited tons of statistics but over the months we've just stopped doing that for some reason as everyone's opinions have crystallized.

Stating such a strong assertion should still require at least a link

I think the best person who explains housing trends is Kevin Erdmann. This article provides an overview of his conceptual model for why prices fell nationwide in the Great Recession (people with bad credit were prohibited from getting a mortgage), why both prices and rents have been increasing since the Great Recession (when the Fed reduced prices too low, the construction industry collapsed), and why it is a mistake to attack build-to-rent landlords (they are a major source of new supply today). https://www.mercatus.org/research/policy-briefs/getting-corp...

There are plenty of ownership units in my state. They are just owned as second homes by people who don't live here. 80k of them sit vacant most of the year. There's only 6k homeless people in the state.

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