The most simple of all - It goes down in price.
I mean yes, of course, tautologically.
But can you at least attempt to explain how something that has a lot of value and can last for centuries, is realistically going to go down in price given inflation?
In general the only scenario where housing can go down in value is if the area/city is decaying. But then you don't want to live there so that's not a useful solution.
This can be done by changing who is even allowed to own them, and what they're allowed to do with them. Make it unbelievably unattractive to have "investment properties" - massive taxes, extremely high interest rates, very restrictive rental laws, and all of them go up by an order of magnitude for each successive residential property owned.
So now suddenly nobody (especially not corporations) want to actually own residential property for the purpose of making money. It won't be a good place to put money, because it doesn't make money in the same way bonds or the stock market will. So now demand has gone WAAAAY down. And then prices come down, because the only people who really do want to buy residential property are people that need a place to live, not people (or companies) looking to make a profit from that property.
We wouldn't let a couple of private companies buy all the drinking water or air and then sell it back to us for the purpose of making a profit. Those are as essential to a good life as a place to live.
Obviously rich people, and people (and companies) making profit from residential property don't like this idea. But we need to provide people a place to live, not companies a way to make profit.
And how would you implement that?
So basically there needs to be a government agency which tracks the inflation adjusted price of your home. Ok that's easy. But this agency now also must have the power to prohibit you from selling your home for any price other than their official inflation-adjusted price. If they don't have this power, then someone could offer you more for your home and thus you made a profit, and your goal fails.
Would you expect to have voter support for such a price fixing scheme from any side of the aisle? Would you even want to live in such a world?
I keep asking because often these threads go into something like "Oh you just stop making homes an investment and problem solved.", but that word "just" is moving some pretty big mountains there. If you drill down on what that really might mean, it never comes out to something realistic to implement.
> So now demand has gone WAAAAY down.
Demand does not go down. Your scheme just favors owners living in their home as opposed to corporations buying them to rent them out (which I fully and enthusiastically support!). But actual number of homes and actual number of families wanting to live in them didn't change, so demand didn't change.
> We wouldn't let a couple of private companies buy all the drinking water
(Off topic to this thread but this is happening, scarily enough.)
