I can think of the following options:
1. Prohibit sale of real estate -Obviously if you prohibit it forever, anyone who buys it will be stuck with it forever. Nobody wants to be stuck with a piece of property forever. So I'm assuming the next best thing would be to prohibit sale within an arbitrary time period (1 year? 5 years? 10 years?). Whatever that period is, if it's meant to have any effect, it will be long enough to disincentivize people from buying property who do not intend to own it for shorter periods of time. - That means no more fixer-uppers: People won't buy shitty places to make them nice and resell at profit. That will leave us with more shitty places. That will leave us with less non-shitty places on the market, thus driving up prices even more in that area. Seems like the opposite of what people generally want. - It will probably make certain areas of the city way more attractive than they already are. If you're going to be locked in somewhere, it better be good. So rich people have an incentive to spend more money than they usually would. Also, less than rich people will have the same incentive. Some people will make riskier decisions on how much money they should spend on housing and may very well bankrupt themselves in the process. It's difficult to predict what kinds of problems this could create, but it will create problems.
This approach seems to me to just magnify the problems we already have.
2. Tax profits from sale of real estate close to 100%. This will introduce the same issues above with fixer-uppers. The incentive to make unlivable places livable will be gone. Houses that are ruined and that the owners can't afford to fix will not be taken care of, thus reducing the already limited supply. Additionally, anyone buying a house and living in it for an extended period of time will lose his equity to inflation. It becomes an automatic liability to buy a house. People who rent out houses do so, because the renters pay their mortgage while the house appreciates in value. If the appreciation component goes away, less people will be incentivized to buy to rent. Thus, lower income people will have less options to live. Again, lower-income people take the hit in this scenario.
3. Go full-commie.
- Make all real-estate public property, managed by the city. - The city can either do that by just taking property away or if there's any semblance of the rule of law left, they will have to pay the current owners. - This will be a gigantic expense, increasing the tax burden on everyone in the future. - Next, the city will decide who gets what house at what price. There will be waiting lists, income disclosures to decide on who will get what place to live in. Now you'll have bureaucrats processing living arrangements, so everything will take longer. - Waiting lists for some areas will naturally be much longer than for others. - New housing will only be built by an already bankrupt city, which means it will likely not be built at all. - The destruction of the market, the confiscation of property, the waiting lists, processing times and rising taxes will scare away the people that this city has been attracting for so long. - There will be an exodus of tech into more market-oriented areas and San Francisco loses its appeal. - This will lead to shorter waiting lists and more people finding affordable housing, but it will also reduce the tax-base of the city. - So then the city needs to erect a wall around itself to make sure that nobody can leave and stays inside to be skinned to pay for escalating expenses. If people try to escape, there need to be heavy punishments to make sure they really don't leave....Hm...sounds vaguely familiar...
I don't see how this fixes anything. Would you care to elaborate how you would make this work?
