The government should also build massive amounts of housing. Everywhere of all types - apartments, townhouses, single family. After built transferred to the residents as coops.
Many/most corporate owners are individuals (as per the linked report). See my comment here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46208561
> Cap how many rentals an individual can own.
Yes. Cap to 0. Until we get data on the breakdown (what percentage of rental homes are by owners who own 1, 2, 3, etc), we don't really know. It won't be easy to determine because a lot of RE investors create a new LLC for each property they own.
> Yes. Cap to 0.
That is saying let's eliminate rentals entirely. If nobody can own a rental, there can be no rentals.
Some people do prefer to rent. I wouldn't, but I know people who truly prefer that.
It is, of course, an extreme scenario. As I said, this is absent good data. If we get a sense of the impact one would have if we limit it to 1, supported by data, sure - cap it to 1.
Why would you get to decide that?
Some people like to rent single family homes. Some because they have a large family. Some because that's just what they want. It's not ok to tell them they can't do that and must be forced to live in an apartment.
A fun knock-on effect of this policy proposal: it would effectively halt all new development of dense multifamily.
Landlords provide no 'service'; they are merely an existence tax.
The market already does not build dense multifamily; what is there to halt?
What about the fact that most homeowners get the vast majority of the money for said purchase from a (presumably ruthless) corporation?
It's funny that people rarely seem to apply the same reasoning to their dwelling place.
And that's before you get to things like the furnace going, or the roof failing. Two kinds of people with this "landlords provide absolutely no services" perspective: people so comfortable financially that the y-o-y costs of maintaining a property don't even register, and renters who have never owned and been on the hook for an urgent big-ticket maintenance problem.
Landlords have existed since forever, and the market was until recently very happy to build enough supply.
That it's suddenly gone downhill implies a problem well beyond "landlords".
But if it was truly a free market and supply met demand owning housing would be a depreciating asset and renting would be cheaper.
Land ownership is a cultural construct. Their is no natural state.
I think that's why they're buying residential - there aren't any other traditional investments that aren't in a bubble or just have low returns. If you anticipate economic collapse or hyper inflation or whatever, physical assets make sense - when you measure wealth in houses you don't care what the dollar does. Gold people can do without, housing not so much. Whatever happens next, people will need a place to live. OTOH the population collapse is also coming so housing doesn't make much sense beyond 2030 or so.
What is this? Would this just be "putting a little to the side each month" to cover your 12 million dollar loss to Hurricane Micheala ?
Of course it wouldn't happen in isolation, so there are other massive forces to consider.
Maybe wide swathes of formerly-occupied (but now uninsurable) land would sell cheaply enough that middle-income people could build inexpensive semi-disposable vacation cottages, like the old days.
GP's assertion of population collapse in five years is a bit extreme for me!
Check the population pyramid for the US. the baby boomers are moving into the top part (I call the grinder) where they will die out over the next 20 years. At the bottom, we have 20 years of slowly decreasing births, so the bottom AND top are shrinking. Combine that with current policies stopping immigration and I don't know how the US population can be doing anything but decreasing. College admissions people are talking about the cliff (an exaggeration for sure) in enrolment this year and for years to come. People are also getting married closer to 30, and having much less than 2 children per couple.