Is it wrong of me to be sad that it's rent and not home prices?
Rents are higher frequency than home prices. Ceteris paribus, prices follow yields.
https://www.pewresearch.org/2023/12/04/the-assets-households...
In fact, I feel everyone should own and anyone with two properties should be taxed heavily.
Building them in random lots in Florida or upstate New York is exactly what builders were doing in the runup to the financial crisis.
Building them in already-dense places is always tricky because of NIMBYism
Further, when I downsize — even in the same real estate market — that too is equity working in my favor independent of appreciation.
Without the appreciation (and leverage multiplying that), buying housing would be nowhere near as good an investment. (As it stands today, it's phenomenal, of course.)
The point is it's difficult and expensive to build in America. The core competency of construction in most cities is knowing how to grease the community boards', planners', affordable-housing advocates' and permitting offices' palms.
There are tons economically depressed towns that would absolutely love to have an infusion of property tax revenue
Go ahead, develop! And sell equity in the property. I've wondered if I would support my city requiring a certain percentage of dense urban lots be flats for sale vs. rental.
It's good for people to be able to own their homes. They should be able to own their homes instead of paying a large fraction of their paycheck to landlords as rent or banks as mortgage payments. But that requires housing costs to get lower rather than higher, which in turn requires some kind of state- or national-level policy to prevent local homeowners from sustaining the opposite.
Yes and: As you know, encouraging home ownership is policy. Meant to reduce elderly poverty. It worked, plus all sorts of adverse effects that now hitting hard.
I'd rather we had pensions, universal healthcare, and maybe ponies.
Source? Why of course?
> Source? Why of course?
Maybe I'm talking past someone, but the concept that was being described is self-evident. So, I'll just say this isn't a controversial take, from an urban planning standpoint. It's been demonstrated for hundreds of years (albeit, slightly different wealth sources).
The pattern of smaller, high density housing, is the most efficient way to build profit in a population center. As density increases, central hubs appear. Land (specifically residential land) skyrockets in value as it's most scarce, within and immediate^1 and surrounding areas. 1 family paying rent on the land is less efficient than 1xN. The investment necessary to risk and realize those N returns are out of the reach of any entity other than a conglomerate. Singular elite investors generally do not engage in that risk, although there have been historic outliers. Cities also find it more expedient to eminent domain aging single family homes, more than taking on the corporate owned high density housing, further entrenching their relative durability. Despite the highly variable timelines, American cities have followed the common pattern of density housing owned by corporations replacing single family homes, in population centers, for a very long time.
^1 For some value of immediate, based on available mass transit and other environmental factors
National corporate landlords haven't been buying up anything for hundreds of years.