Stop allowing people to buy multiple homes. Stop allowing landlords to "collaborate" on prices.
If housing is an investment, then remove all protections and open up the supply. No height regulations, no minum parking regulations, no mandatory HOAs. No moratoriams or legal protections when loans default.
If housing is a need, then regulate it like a limited resource. Ration it on the lower end. Ban hoarding (vacancies, empty plots). Limited access to repeat consumers.
When the powerful talk about "finding balance", they usually mean having their cake (earn like an investment) and eat it too (protected like a need).
IMO, Georgism strikes the best opinionated middleground of housing as an investment vs housing as a need. Grounding taxation in land's economic value regulates hoarding. Grounding the value of land in its economic outcomes makes it a transparent investment, rather than the cartelized asset that it is today.
I'm personally opposed to too-much-regulation. It always ends up being a tool for the powerful. Rent control, Prop 13, affordable housing, stacks-of-paperwork and similar regulations always do more harm than good.
Why is there not more funding for those departments to make approval/revisions a breeze and make building lower risk and cheaper for construction companies? Welp - home owners (and big construction/investment companies) are the ones who vote. I expect politicians know exactly what they're doing, keeping things a complicated swamp.
But without some sort of governing regulation, I fail to see how anyone benefits in the long run with the tragedy of the commons that would ensue.
Agreed on all the rest, especially Georgism.
Yes it can, and it was for large chunks of the 20th century. Imputed rent can have high yields and therefore imply good "investment" income for households with long term stable housing demand.
There are some signs that this trend is reversing, but I think that was entirely a pandemic phenomenon. Big numbers of Americans regret their pandemic moves [regrets], so I think the environment hasn't actually changed.
It's hard to see where this goes. Most other places solve this by becoming very very dense (Hong Kong) or building great mass transit (Tokyo). It really seems like the US won't do either of those things--maaaaaaybe NYC will but that would be all. I tentatively predict that we have to wait for most of the Boomers to die and leave their wealth/houses to Millennials before we know if this is a bona-fide societal crisis or not: if enough Millennials get what they want this way it'll take the oomph out of any kind of policy change (probably reverse the momentum actually--if anyone thinks Millennials will be any better than Boomers they're super mistaken).
But, neither outcome is really good. On the one hand you have the daunting prospect of a dramatic economic reorganization of the most powerful nation on Earth. On the other you have the calcification of the most powerful nation on Earth into something fundamentally unequal, illiberal and corrupt.
[move]: https://www.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/de...
[econ]: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/six-charts-illustrate-di...
[schools]: https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/education-g...
[health care]: https://www.gao.gov/blog/why-health-care-harder-access-rural...
[homeownership]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
[urban homeownership]: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2016/...
[regrets]:
What part of Georgism is Anarcho-capitalism ? It is merely a way to reason about land and taxation.
For a country with near-zero historic buildings, the US has some of the most suffocating housing regulations. Making the regulations easier to navigate does not make it anarcho-capitalism.
The US housing crisis is an urban problem. Take California for example. Prop 13 handles land-taxation, which lets you pay pennies on prime real eastate. The Bay-area is the world's tech capital and has the world's most expensive real-estate. Yet you'd struggle to see an 5-floor+ building outside of a small pocket in down-town SF & SJ. Nimbys have practically outlawed any building by exploiting environmental regulations. The troubles associated with the new Apple Campus and the SJ downtown transit extension are recent examples among many.
In the above examples, housing of those who have it, is being protected by the laws as if it is a need. However, it explicitly prices-out those without housing through the same means. The individuals who protect their housing, do so to protect an investment. To me, taking away the ability of NIMBYs to project power outside their own walls limits exclusionary regulation. And standardizing taxation by land value generates the kind of fair-market pressure that keeps supply coming.
Now yes, it fully embraces housings as an investment, and it will inevtiably comes with it's fair share of problems. But first, investments come with well-understood regulations to avoid abuse (cartelization, hoarding). And second, I can't imagine how it would be anywhere close to how bad things are now.
If you have a better solution, then I'm all ears. But, at least don't be condescending if you aren't willing to engage.
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> Housing can't both be an investment and a basic need.
Housing as investment is a beautiful solution to how many people fail to properly save for retirement. For many people entering retirement, their home is a huge part of the investment portfolio, because they always made sure to make that payment.
If properties didn't appreciate, old people would not have the assets to retire on, then what?
The younger generations will find that out.
U.S. construction of homes has actually kept up with population growth and moves, by every conceivable metric.
What IS happening though is that landlords (private and corporate) "warehouse" units constantly to artificially restrict supply and demand, and they do it in collaboration with each other.
Every single city and state in the U.S. has a vacancy problem. We DO have both houses and apartments that are ready and able to be rented and owned.
The problem is simply the price, and the prices aren't being driven by legitimate supply and demand.
You can see this effect happen where prices increase NOT to match population (and often in SPITE of it), but they increase to match the upper bounds of regional income.
You need a place to live more than landlords need a few months of rent. This strategy to prevent downward price pressure from the market allows them to justify the current prices while setting up a "baseline" for the next few years.
Some free reading:
* https://www.construction-physics.com/p/is-there-a-housing-sh...
* https://reventureconsulting.com/the-myth-of-the-us-housing-s...
* https://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2023/08/the-problem-is...
The last reference indeed argues in favor of too much financialization of housing units but that blog is also tripping a lot of my crackpot alarms.
Can you succinctly explain why you believe the low vacancy rates in major metros (which I think we agree is the cause of high rents / purchase costs) are caused primarily by units which are intentionally held empty despite demand?
In partial defense of your assertion, the FRED data does show that 1/4 to 1/3 of vacant units are for sale or rent at any given time.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1oeIe
Total vacancy rate seems to hover around 10%? Rentable and buyable unit rates are an order of magnitude lower.
I’m not convinced that the Fed owning a bunch of mortgages is evidence that private companies bought homes and aren’t renting them. Wasn’t that a bail out to prevent people from losing their homes (because the companies owning the homes weren’t solvent and I guess if the company fails maybe you get foreclosed? I’m not sure why we did things the way we did in 08)
Could not the explanation also be that a lot of homes are in places that lack demand and therefore the owners don’t bother putting them up for sale or rent?
> "Bullshit. It's not population that matters it's household formation. Millennials are the biggest generation and they are at the age now where they are forming their own households and there isn't any housing for them near jobs. Vacancies are all in dying rust belt towns no one wants to live in. California absolutely does not have a vacancy problem. That's just a lie."
This aligns with my (admittedly less-informed) knowledge as well.
Your assertion that "every city" has a vacancy problem is particularly mystifying to me. I live in Seattle, and there does not seem to be a residential vacancy problem of any kind. Some quick Googling shows "a homeowner vacancy rate of 1.0% and a rental vacancy rate of 2.5%." That does not sound like a vacancy problem to me. Quite the opposite. Very, very, very few homes are available for sale, even as the city's population explodes.
I also did a quick and unbiased Google search of "population growth vs housing supply." Here's what came up immediately: "In 2023, the U.S. saw 1.67 million household formations, resulting in 17.2 million household formations between 2012 and 2023. In this time period, 14.7 million housing units were started, and 13.4 million were completed." So again, household formation is outpacing housing supply, which results in more competition and thus higher prices.
Both your comment and the links you included (which I perused) seem less like they're concerned with fixing housing affordability, and more like they have an axe to grind against landlords and the wealthy in general.
https://oregoneconomicanalysis.com/2023/10/26/household-form...
lol. Yes, I remember at the 2022 landlords meeting we all decided to raise rents… because we never thought of that before!!
Surely it has nothing to do with taxes and inflation, no, as a renter you should be shielded from that and we should pay it without passing it on!
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...
Let’s use simple reason here…
If there isn’t enough supply, rates will go up, coordination or not.
If there is no supply issue, landlords who conspire to raise rents will be immediately undercut by those that do not.
Article makes allegations, and nothing came of them. It’s not illegal to call and ask prices. Prices that they’re “agreeing on” were all what people were paying.
[0]: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2024/03/price-fix...
https://www.businessinsider.com/apartment-rent-increases-lan...
https://homelessness.ucsf.edu/blog/vacancies-are-red-herring
The poors need to hold themselves accountable and stop working for unsustainable wages that can't get them even a small, run-down home. They continue to drive their own wages further and further down and make it that much harder for those that come after them.
It's ridiculous that they expect other people to sacrifice when they won't sacrifice (unionize, strike, or just opt out) to make the world a better, more equal place.
The wealthy will always try to squeeze everything out of the lower classes. If you accept unsustainable wages for your labor, you are part of the problem in devaluing labor (ie you are traffic). The working classes need to hold themselves accountable for the exploitation of their labor.
They're working on it!
See 'Figure 1' https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide
Housing location is really important, not just the total number of vacant properties.
All the people and companies with some money in this country are buying those flats to rent them to tourists, and it's the most lucrative business someone can have as the expenses are minimum in comparison to the earnings.
If they taxed heavily having more than 10 homes they weren't whole neighbourhoods of tourists in our cities, and those who born there would have some opportunity to rent or buy something there, instead of having to having really far and losing most direct social relations they had
