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Comment by empath75 | Hacker News Reader

People want to exempt housing from the laws of supply and demand. The reason real estate is expensive is that there is not enough housing available for everyone to own a house that wants a house. If we want inexpensive housing, we need a massive project in this country to build housing. There is no other way to fix it. There is no way to shuffle around ownership of existing housing stock that is going to magically make more houses available. There are not a bunch of houses sitting empty that people want to buy or move into.

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Pretty sure there are plenty of houses sitting empty or as holiday rentals. Second homes, airbnbs, etc. Those could be simply banned or highly taxed and the shuffling of ownership would happen naturally.

You're "pretty sure"?

All data would indicate otherwise, and why shouldn't short term rental or vacation properties exist?

I know there is data that if you compare short term rentals to houses on sale, the rentals are a very large percentage, like more than 30%, in big cities. More than enough to significantly influence house prices (to be higher). Which is why short term rentals and vacation properties should be relegated to commercial properties only.

That's an argument about land usage and not land ownership. There are plenty of short term rentals run by individuals, and if you banned corporate ownership of short term rentals and kept the other incentives the same, more individuals would just play in that space.

The other problem is this, if you banned short term rentals _entirely_, which NYC basically did, you have not changed the fundamental supply vs demand structure. You still have X people who want units and Y units. Rents did not go down _at all_. House prices did not go down _at all_. The primary change was that hotel prices went up because of lack of competition.

By banning short term rentals of residential properties, you move short term rental demand from residential to commercial market. Which does change the supply and demand for each market.

Seems like for NYC, it worked as expected with the increasing hotel prices. And didn’t work as expected for rentals. The next step now would be to ask why it didn’t work as expected for rentals while it worked as expected for hotels, not just concluding that the ban wouldn’t work.

Houston added something like 500,000 people to its population and housing prizes went DOWN because they built more housing and their ratio of housing to people went up. Supply and demand.

The point is when you have cartel-like behavior from homeowners in a democracy, then you aren't "exempting housing from the laws of supply and demand."

No, these homeowners know exactly what they are doing and they're intentionally creating a shortage to increase the value of their properties. The problem with the housing crisis is that it's entirely rational behavior. It's just that there should be some sort of human right that prevents this type of exploitation.

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