Wouldn't building more houses solve the problem without having to increase taxes and create programs?
A house wouldn't be at these incredible prices of $500,000 or $1 million if there were more of them available (supply/demand), real estate investing would in general be less incentivized, where today it's a major channel for loans and investment.
It's fine that it is - of course investors should be able to trade housing and properties like anything else - but it's wrong and cruel to stop building them, as the population continues to increase. They're making people homeless so a much smaller group can make millions of dollars off the scarcity.
It's not a great future if the average person can't afford to own a shelter, and if the price to rent one continues to be thousands of dollars every 30 days in relation to these wages - nobody can realistically pull away when the house price and the rent rate both are rising so fast. My Sacramento midtown apartment in 2010 was $660/mo, my first place in SF was $900/mo the next year. The same places are both over $3k/mo now, yet I made less money in 2023 than I did back in 2010, doing the same job and working more hours.
Meanwhile those who inherited a house for free, or bought it for a lot less money than they cost today can make hundreds of thousands from refinancing (doing nothing) or millions from selling it. That so-called value was created out of intentional scarcity and nothing else - out of depriving other people of homes.
Even the average homeowner can make out like a rockstar investor year-after-year without even having to try because houses are just increasing in value as supply diminishes, there's a problem - it's a real estate bubble that will burst the moment people start building houses and neighborhoods again.
I agree we have to cut down real estate investors, I just think you can solve it in a productive way rather than battling them in politics.
Which real estate investors? Because it’s a spectrum. From the mom and pop trying to supplement their income to the investment firms that bought tens of thousands of properties. The latter being a bigger problem here.
What I’ve seen lately is mega apartment complexes being built and funded by private equity. That’s not good either. Things will end up like Europe where no one owns their flat they just rent in perpetuity.
Almost all low income earners rent from an investment firm. Any tax on investment firms will be passed down to the renters. Taxing those investment firms is a tax on the poor.
Which would harm the development of multi-family housing and increase the cost of living. Remember that "real workers" do not build and own 100+-unit dwellings
This is utterly false. Unless those developers are selling their units they are part of the problem. Ban renting and force the sale of units in those multi new builds and it eliminates the problem .
Doubly so once you've forced the sale of multi unit owners, now you have a gkut of available properties on the market and reduced demand which lowers the price.
The fact that this farce keeps getting perpetuated is why the problem will never go away.
It's time to cut down real estate investors by restricting ownership to real people and heavily taxing multiple property ownership.
Yes, building more helps but until the landed gentry is removed as a demand pressure then affordability will not get better.