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This. This. This. This. This. Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis": Property can be purchased and held on

This. This. This. This. This. Absent from the vast majority of these threads is the critical component in this "crisis": Property can be purchased and held onto for purely speculative purposes, thereby draining the inventory pool, and raising the cost of housing for residents of the city. This has been happening in the bay area for a very long time. Wealthy Chinese investors who do not LIVE in the bay area, have purchased an incredible amount of inventory over the last decade and it has remained vacant / unused. Of course we need more building, that's obvious. But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation. I have yet to hear a constructive argument for why that shouldn't be banned at a constitutional level. Housing may not be a "right" per se, but it's certainly in the communities best interest to use available housing for that communities interest, not the interest of wealthy foreign investors.

boreas 9y ago
You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.
- coccinelle 9y ago
  I’ve been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?
zkms 9y ago
> But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation. Why limit that to just foreign entities? Also that's trivially bypassable, just get someone to live in the house; it's used for habitation now. But frankly ending CEQA and capricious zoning boards (and all the other legal authorities/mechanisms that NIMBYs use to delay/obstruct housing) is a far more robust method of killing off this sort of speculative purchasing, since the only reason all this speculative purchasing happens is because there's a gross undersupply of housing and thus prices are guaranteed to increase at staggering rates.

boreas 9y ago

You need to provide statistics for extraordinary claims about housing being purchased by foreign investors and not used. Common sense says it should be a very marginal phenomenon. After all, renting out property should almost always be worth it with the high housing prices in the area.

coccinelle 9y ago
I’ve been wondering about that when it comes to rent-controlled places like SF. It seems « tenant occupied » properties sell for less than equivalent empty places. Then is it worth it to let a tenant in who might just drive down the price of the place if you decide to sell a couple of years later?

zkms 9y ago

> But what we also need is to immediately disallow the purchase of land by foreign entities that is not used for habitation. Why limit that to just foreign entities? Also that's trivially bypassable, just get someone to live in the house; it's used for habitation now. But frankly ending CEQA and capricious zoning boards (and all the other legal authorities/mechanisms that NIMBYs use to delay/obstruct housing) is a far more robust method of killing off this sort of speculative purchasing, since the only reason all this speculative purchasing happens is because there's a gross undersupply of housing and thus prices are guaranteed to increase at staggering rates.