Citizenship requirements to own property, like Mexico has, would be fantastically appropriate.
Running the property market as an export market is not a long term sustainable solution.
What is really galling is that from what I hear, a lot of the cash leaving China to buy property are often illicit fund. In a way, US housing is being used as a money laundering scheme. Not just from China but Russia and other places.
This is not going to get any better for awhile.
This article is a kind of index summary of their very comprehensive multi-part series. It's worth reading if you are interested in how opaque this stuff is:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/nyregion/the-hidden-money-...
It happens that a close friend of a close friend owns quite a lot of high end NYC real estate. He offered me a job back in the day, but I didn't want to leave Santa Cruz.
I expect he's a busy guy but perhaps if I asked the right way he might have some interesting things to say.
I may be busted flat and out of work, but in part that's because I generally don't care to find work through personal connections. That is I won't ask a friend for a job, I'm cool with getting work through professional colleagues. Another friend of a friend is the governor of california, another friend is a top hollywood animator.
You'd think this guy would own a lot of stuff but really he didn't. I had quite a hard time figuring out what he found rewarding from all that money. He wanted more of it, but I don't have the first clue as to why.
He drove a very modest car, his office was a complete shithole. I never visited his home but expect it was modest at best.
This fellow was, in the strictest sense of the word, "honest", I mean he didn't steal his money at gunpoint, or sell drugs.
There are a lot of people like him. I expect he would come to regard long-term investments as - for whatever reason - preferable to the commodities he usually traded.
Also, what I heard is that it's not easy to take out cash out of China into a foreign country, unless you have connections. That makes you think a bit.
> Taking away citizens' right to sell to whomever they wish is not a moral solution.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_R...
We do regulate to whom we sell specific things (real estate is obviouly not exactly the same) but allowing international kleptocrats to launder / hide their money in western cities is hardly the most moral choice one could propose.
edit: I'm not opposed to such legislation on moral terms but I don't think I can trust the state with enforcing legislation like that - finding a good way of treating real estate investment funds or long chains of shell companies seems extraordinarily difficult (it already is pretty hard to trace who owns what internationally).
> but allowing international kleptocrats to launder / hide their money in western cities is hardly the most moral choice one could propose.
This would be a political decision which should be treated as such.
The real estate market needs slightly different analysis from normal free market dogma because it's subject to the constraints of physical space: you can't just make more of it. If high prices increased the availability of plots in downtown Portland then the problem could solve itself.