891–900 of 1001 posts
Pure populism. If you believe that banning investors from buying SFHs will decrease the price of SFHs, why not also ban investors from buying apartments/condos?
You mean like apartments/condos in Trump Tower? Ha. I wonder if banning them from buying SFHs actually decreases the supply of SFHs and shifts people to build more, guess what, apartments/condos that Trump can put his name on and sell to institutional investors.
So there are (at least) six important aspects to the housing crisis. 1. Politically, this issue is a winner and it's crazy that the Democratic Party has refused to bang the drum on this, basically because it potentially upsets corporate donors. They have instead ceded this poopulist political ground to the Republican Party. The Democratic Party does not want to win elections and this should never have been more obvio…
> There are people who bought a house for $100k in 1990 where that house is now worth $2M. Are you $1.9M richer? No. This is often repeated but not 100% correct. You are in fact richer, and you can leverage this $2m in equity to take on debt and buy more houses . This is what has been happening here in Australia, and it's a major factor in the continued rise in prices. When you've done this, hung on a handful of year…
Also, if you're taking the equity out of your $2M house, how are you servicing that debt?
My point is that it's an awful lot easier to buy 6 $100k houses than it is to buy 6 $2M houses and if houses weren't speculative assets, maybe we wouldn't get those buyers driving up prices.
If I were renting a house, I would much rather deal with a business than an individual landlord. On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed.
> On another note, it’s amazing that in only a year, we accept a dictatorship where we are okay with the President setting policy that should require a law to be passed. Did you read the article? The impetus was a tweet where he called on congress to write and pass a law to this effect.
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I propose two changes to (try) and broadly solve this: - Additional property tax if you do not live in your home fulltime. This includes vacation homes. - First time, US Citizen, non-corporate homebuyers can get a loan at the federal interest rate. If I were to try and buy the condo I rent, due to interest rates, taxes, and HOA's I would be paying $1000 more per month. At the end of my mortgage I would given the enti…
Additional property tax? Do you have any idea what property taxes are like in places like NJ, NY? It's 2-3% of the value, sometimes assessed at sales value. People buy despite this because they like an area or a school system. If you raise it more, rest assured that only the rich will have the right to buy. It's as regressive as it gets, your proposal.
That being said, it sounds like a land value tax might be a better approach to my first suggestion. Regardless, this would not effect people that truly "own and live in their only house"
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That is a good point, and this tax would need to be well thought out. I specifically would increase the tax rate the more properties an entity owns (Not a lawyer so IDK how to treat one guy owning 10 companies as 1 entity the right way). That way smaller local landlord's can still exist (and keep rental prices competitive), but massive orgs will be forced to sell properties. The idea is to create a disincentive for h…
The problem is not owning multiple properties, but untaxed land ownership. There's a prexisting solution for what you want to solve. It's called the Land Value Tax, which imposes a tax on land, but not on buildings and other improvement. Property tax has a known problem of taxing improvement in addition to land, which constrict urban development. Plus, imposing additional property tax means improvements are further p…
This thread is interesting, as we are all naturally biased towards problems in our own area, and I'm learning some interesting nuances affecting other parts of the country. I live in Chicago / Midwest that has more land and residential high-rises, but our tax problem is a nightmare.
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The actual value of landlording is offloading financial risk. The tenant pays a stable rent including a premium in exchange for maintenance, repairs, and not having to sell a home in order to move to a new one. I just can't bring myself to agree with the hard-line socialists who think landlording is fundamentally a bad thing. There are a lot of problems with it, but it does have a legitimate place in the world.
I don’t think it’s fundamentally a bad thing. It has its place. But it’s an industry that’s easily exploited - I rented over a dozen places and like 80% would try to do things that the tenant handbook would not allow. I sued one of them, and settled out of court for another. And surprise surprise a lot of them don’t want to rent in areas that are pro-tenant rights.
How about we stop companies from buying up properties to turn into airbnb/short term rentals, unless its a company that flips homes. Those we need.
"Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025" https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/07/home-sales-investors-make-up... As long as we have this focus on using homes as investment and rent prices are kept high through collusion, the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units, and regulation hurdles stopping new entra…
> the industry refusing to build "non-luxury" units This is a government policy failure. Because no one is allowed to build fast enough, there is always a demand for luxury (higher profit) and thus that is what gets built.
Even if this goes through without a mountain of loopholes and exceptions, I doubt it will have a significant impact. "Wall Street Investors" implies they're targeting large institutional ownership, which is only around 0.5% of housing ownership as cited in the article. That number is also flat-ish or maybe decreasing depending on the chart you look at, from what I recall. Outside of a few metro areas where institutio…
This is pretty far down in the list of consequences we should be thinking about but building more housing in desirable, coastal areas of the US will only serve to exacerbate the political and cultural divide between the two Americas. I know we all hate on the electoral college, but it exists and it isn't going away anytime soon. I'm not saying the answer is to force folks to move to "flyover country", but that's what…