171–180 of 312 posts
Ban corporate ownership of residences. Only individuals, Coops or condominiums. Cap how many rentals an individual can own. The government should also build massive amounts of housing. Everywhere of all types - apartments, townhouses, single family. After built transferred to the residents as coops.
Lots of ideas in here that fail to properly identify and address the root cause, which is disappointing given how many of us are programmers. Trace the problem back. Where does it start? Why is PE investing in homes? Because they can make money. Why does buying a home make money? Because the value appreciates. Why does the value appreciate on an asset that literally deteriorates over time? Because of restricted suppl…
One should ask why it is that housing / land is more profitable than those investments in which banks and private equity previously invested. And then when you follow that line of reasoning (too much capital and credit -- thanks quantitative easing! -- poor performance on bonds due to low interest rates and restrictions on the quality of investment vehicles) and you'll see that the root cause is probably more financial rather than _just_ too little housing.
Debts need to be cleared, losses need to be accepted, and leverage unwound. Building more housing just gives banks and private equity more stuff to buy.
Ban corporate ownership of residences. Only individuals, Coops or condominiums. Cap how many rentals an individual can own. The government should also build massive amounts of housing. Everywhere of all types - apartments, townhouses, single family. After built transferred to the residents as coops.
A fun knock-on effect of this policy proposal: it would effectively halt all new development of dense multifamily.
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And what about if rent into the next 10 years fully servicing the debt, and the maintenance with a margin on top? If I am blackrock? If I am smaller PE deploying 10 million a year?
And ...? Not sure what you're asking. As the report points out, institutional investors purchase only 3% of homes nationwide (but much higher in some cities). Regular smaller investors likely buy more homes than the institutional ones.
This is crucial. People are in cities - in the day and age of corporate consolidation, less and less jobs are available, and they are increasingly in-office, and increasingly in only a select few metro areas.
Nobody would give a damn if a glut of housing was built in the middle of South Dakota or Maine or Wyoming. That's because there's very little to no jobs growth in those regions.
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It's wild when you think about it: a family scrapes together a down payment and pays full freight on property taxes, while a corporate landlord can roll one property's paper losses into the next deal and keep building their portfolio, tax-deferred
Afaik, property taxes are due no matter what, at least in Texas.
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> Okay, tax me on my unrealized gains then - but then 2008 repeats itself, stock goes down 40%, do I get a refund? Of course not, I only pay when stock goes up and never down, which is not exactly a fair incentive. We already do this for property taxes.
That's a very strange way of looking at property taxes.
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Homeownership rates are not materially lower than before. Page 5 for the data, page 13 for the formula. https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/files/currenthvspress.pdf I would bet most, if not almost all homes, are sold to buyers who will occupy them. This graph goes further back: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeownership_in_the_United_St...
Median age of ownership? Skews older now I'm guessing. I was talking about the younger crowd trying to get a start.
First-time homebuyer (FTB) "average and median age stood at 36.3 and 33 years for the period Q3:24-Q2:25, and there has been minimal FTB average age change since either 2001 or 2021" [1].
[1] https://www.aei.org/articles/nar-says-the-typical-first-time...
Corporations shouldn't be allowed to own residential properties. Period.
Congratulations, you just ensured zero new housing creation in our cities. (Co-ops are corporations.)
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You think that a minimum of 35% of demand being artificial isn't a factor that can be seen to increase overall demand? edit: I say "minimum 35%" because that is just the percentage of immigrant-demand that managed to secure housing. Hard to say exactly how many more immigrants are bidding on SF & LA-County housing but 35% is the absolute floor.
Framing foreign-born residents as "artificial demand" is definitely a thing you can do, but it doesn't align with reality. Some portion of the foreign-born population are naturalized or are family members of US citizens, so it's not like waving your magic racist wand would actually solve the problem.
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There are now no "starter homes". There are starter _locations_. And dense cities ain't them no more.
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Starting from this:
> The United States is short 4 million housing units
It's a lie. The US has more than one housing unit (1.1) per family.
We don't have a housing problem. We really really don't.
We have an urbanism problem, that made the dense hellscapes the only viable housing location.