Making it easier to evict people will in no way help this problem. The tax benefits of owning property far exceed any other asset. Once the local market has be

Making it easier to evict people will in no way help this problem. The tax benefits of owning property far exceed any other asset. Once the local market has been consolidated into a small group, anytime that happens you get price fixing through collusion even if they don't plan it all ahead of time as some conspiracy. Its done just by looking at the prices others are charging and charging the same or higher. With loans that cost almost nothing to service, and extra tax benefits that they can offset other losses. There is nothing preventing this sector from being driven exponentially higher by bad actors. They can just hold onto the properties and let them go fallow with no incentive to rent. This effect is worsened because new housing is so hard to build (or has been made hard). If you want to fix this, legislatures need to taper or remove some tax benefits, as you assume positions in ever larger portions of the market. Further incentivize cash flow over price fixing by setting, and set ever higher tax brackets and windfall taxes on profits and further limitations on REIT vehicles. When the RE crash hit 2008, banks simply held onto assets instead of full foreclosure sales in many cases (other then OneWest which had guarantees of value from Fed but only if they had above a certain amount in losses which incentivized foreclosures for their own extreme profit). Many properties at that time from other banks were simply being abandoned (and accruing damage as a result, water leaks, mold, no remediation since no one reports it). Instead of foreclosure sales and offering the properties for what they were worth at the time on the market those held onto those abandoned properties for years. Pre-foreclosure RE inspections to determine if winterization was needed or document other damage so it could be covered by insurance were not uncommon and boomed during that time, but a very small percentage of those properties were actually fully foreclosed on until prices recovered towards late 2013, with one exception, OneWest bank. Week-to-week those foreclosure inspection requests were often repeat properties in every area, when you stop getting the requests its usually foreclosed on and that rarely happened until 2012-2013 and by rare I mean single digit changes in the percentages of the total inspections for the area each week. It was not uncommon to have 150 or more inspections for an area each day. I worked in that industry for a time. It was pretty despicable, and a dangerous job because people were crazy even though we had a legal right to take pictures of the property. I was shot at once, drug related squatters were a big problem. One place was swarmed by squatters, and one of the inspectors car was lifted and put on its side with him inside it and PD being dispatched, one of those properties we had to call the local PD and have them send out the bomb squad as the previous owner had left what we found out later turned out 'thankfully' to be just an empty pipe. It was capped off on both ends with wires running from the house electric (which was off) through a hole drilled into it and was attached to the inside of the garage door. Just absolutely crazy stuff, and I'm glad I don't work in that sector anymore. No line of work is potentially worth your life, and we were not paid hazard pay. Only slightly above minimum wage for the time.