Congress Clears Housing Bill, Cementing a Rare Bipartisan Feat
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Archives having issues scraping nytimes lately. 381 page bill too.
“The measure prohibits corporate entities from owning more than 350 existing single-family homes, although it does not require them to sell homes purchased before the measure became law.”
They don’t mention anything about foreign investments but China is trying to rein in their own overseas spending to boost national investment.
Carve outs: - Investors may purchase homes owned by other investors.
- There are additional exceptions related to previous contracts and legal obligations, or if the purchase is part of a loss-mitigation strategy.
https://nlihc.org/sites/default/files/21ST_Century_ROAD_Expl...
What's to stop people from just making multiple corporate entities? Or investors below the cap buying properties and flipping them to institutional investors above the cap bypassing the cap entirely?
I need an LLM to start stripping out everything to do with this type of stupefying horse race discussion.
Partly because the federal governments leverage on local politics is very little but majorly because currently the interest rate and the labor/material costs is just too high especially on the coasts and none of that is regulatory burden. The Atlantic had a great breakdown [1].
Congress and/or state governments should work on a preferable interest rates for construction loans scheme and engineers need to bust through Moravecs paradox to get some productivity boosts in construction going, everything else is window dressing.
The ball has moved!
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2026/03/california-housi...
It's like banning holding cell phones while driving. Talking on a cell phone while driving significantly increases the likelihood of getting in an accident, but it also makes people much more productive. There's no way to keep that productivity while driving, without hurting safety, and most people want to keep that productivity. The solution is to ban holding a cellphone while driving, while still allowing talking on a cell phone, which statistically makes no difference whatsoever. This allows politicians to do nothing, which lets people keep the productivity they desire, while also giving the appearance that they are doing something to increase safety. This kind of not-really-a-tradeoff security theater also exists in things like airport security, pandemic responses, banking identification standards, and forensics.
That works here in Switzerland sort of - prices are still super high but more because of local wealth, not Russians and Chinese buying everything. There are underdeveloped places where foreigners are allowed to buy - Andermatt for example is filled with rich Americans.
Eliminating Fannie mae/Freddie Mac would've done a whole lot more to lower house prices.
Until about 20 years ago, both were great and valuable institutions. Long story.
Shutting them down would be a catastrophic disaster to housing affordability.
Wouldn't less mortgage money available for homes make the prices of homes drop?