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> But other than zoning it seems it would help more if the government would step in to disallow large leasing companies buying up giant swathes of the housing s

> But other than zoning it seems it would help more if the government would step in to disallow large leasing companies buying up giant swathes of the housing stock just to flip into rentals. There was a timely video about this yesterday from Oh the Urbanity: https://youtu.be/BRqZBuu_Ers?si=NlavrFpm8sNTUcYp https://youtu.be/BRqZBuu_Ers?si=NlavrFpm8sNTUcYp Summary is that Rotterdam did just this, and the effect was that the price to purchase a house did not measurably decrease, and that rents rose. The neighborhoods regulated in this way had fewer immigrants and skewed wealthier than those that were not. So, not the effect we're looking for.

unethical_ban 3y ago
If more people actually owned, that's a positive.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  If the result of that is excluding lower-income people from living there, I disagree.
- gruez 3y ago
  1. Homeowners being a powerful political bloc and using that power to stop development is part of the problem in the first place 2. Buying a house makes sense if you're a starting a family and/or setting down roots, but that's not everyone's situation. Students or young professionals get utterly shafted by lack of rental housing, because they don't have the income or the credit to buy a house, and they don't intend on staying long they'll get eaten by the transaction fees.
  - unethical_ban 3y ago
    You're not entirely wrong. Housing should be seen as more than just a place to live but less than a moneymaking investment - it should be seen as basic housing security for those who want roots as you said. NIMBYs do screw things over sometimes, I agree. And liquidity in mid-term housing supply is important. But I suggest that it would be better for society in the long term if more people had a stake in where they live.
  - BluePen8 3y ago
    By the time you’re a young professional your credit is honestly pretty decently established, hell I tried to buy a house on an internship and they qualified me for a 250k mortgage with a 48k salary. Hell I know guys that went straight into the workforce after high school, nothing stopped them from financing 6 figure pickup trucks, and those depreciate badly in comparison and are harder to repo and re-sell. Problem is, most places with work that won’t get you a place to live. Houses used to be 3x the median income, nowadays it’s more than 10x. The idea of housing only being for very established people is new, and only due to its staggering costs nowadays. When my father moved to a town to wash dishes at a pub, he bought himself a house. Cost him 3x his salary.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  The point is that the problem of mega corps is greatly overstated, and isn't really the root of the problem anyway. They are just an easy scapegoat. Take them away and private "mom & pop" land lords quickly fill the void, and usually are much more stringent about who they will rent to and what they think a fair rent is.
  - kbelder 3y ago
    Right. It's still the same amount of houses, and the same amount of people wanting a house, so the price is not going to shift much.
  - escapedmoose 3y ago
    While I agree the mom and pop landlords also pose a problem, they don’t have the capital to outbid new buyers by tens of thousands, or to leverage dozens of existing properties. Bidding against them is not a perpetual David vs. Goliath battle.
HelloMcFly 3y ago
I think a tax on vacant properties is potentially a better way to go, though checking and enforcement could be the issue (exempting one's primary and maybe secondary homes); multi-unit housing would also be exempt. This would place more downward pressure on rents and decrease the investment upside on buying. I'm sure this is a bad idea in a number of ways I haven't considered.
- ryukafalz 3y ago
  Don't have sources offhand but my recollection is that vacancy taxes have also been tried before and, while they do have some effect, the vacancy rates in most locales with high costs of living are already low enough that it doesn't help that much. Vacancy rate statistics include things that are pretty natural and you wouldn't really want to penalize, like an apartment being briefly vacant after the previous tenant moves out and before the next tenant moves in. So you can't just look at the rental vacancy rate in a city being (say) 3% and conclude that those 3% of units in the city are being held vacant and off-market. There may be some of those, but it's a far lower percentage. Which is to say, institute a vacancy tax if you like (it won't really hurt if done sanely), but realize that it won't be a silver bullet here.
- ZoomerCretin 3y ago
  This is so difficult to enforce. You're going to have people go door-to-door checking if houses are vacant? What if someone goes on vacation? States require legibility. The simplest way to enforce high land and property utilization is to tax all property. In California, for example, you have reports of people who move and use their old home in the Bay Area for storage because they're paying the same nominal property tax rate from 40 years ago. If they were paying a yearly 1% tax on the value of their property (instead of <0.05%), they'd rent or sell it immediately. Same deal in China, except more extreme. Property _is not taxed_, so there are/were a lot of people building apartments and leaving them vacant, waiting for prices to rise over time. Neither of these situations serve the material needs of people today who need cheap, high-quality, and abundant shelter. Plus, your vacant property tax proposal excludes the (500k+?) many empty bedrooms in occupied homes. If someone's kids have grown and moved out, their old rooms are now vacant. How many people simply leave these rooms vacant for years and decades? A blanket property tax increase would strongly incentivize the renting of these rooms.

unethical_ban 3y ago

If more people actually owned, that's a positive.

ryukafalz 3y ago
If the result of that is excluding lower-income people from living there, I disagree.
gruez 3y ago
1. Homeowners being a powerful political bloc and using that power to stop development is part of the problem in the first place 2. Buying a house makes sense if you're a starting a family and/or setting down roots, but that's not everyone's situation. Students or young professionals get utterly shafted by lack of rental housing, because they don't have the income or the credit to buy a house, and they don't intend on staying long they'll get eaten by the transaction fees.
- unethical_ban 3y ago
  You're not entirely wrong. Housing should be seen as more than just a place to live but less than a moneymaking investment - it should be seen as basic housing security for those who want roots as you said. NIMBYs do screw things over sometimes, I agree. And liquidity in mid-term housing supply is important. But I suggest that it would be better for society in the long term if more people had a stake in where they live.
- BluePen8 3y ago
  By the time you’re a young professional your credit is honestly pretty decently established, hell I tried to buy a house on an internship and they qualified me for a 250k mortgage with a 48k salary. Hell I know guys that went straight into the workforce after high school, nothing stopped them from financing 6 figure pickup trucks, and those depreciate badly in comparison and are harder to repo and re-sell. Problem is, most places with work that won’t get you a place to live. Houses used to be 3x the median income, nowadays it’s more than 10x. The idea of housing only being for very established people is new, and only due to its staggering costs nowadays. When my father moved to a town to wash dishes at a pub, he bought himself a house. Cost him 3x his salary.
Workaccount2 3y ago
The point is that the problem of mega corps is greatly overstated, and isn't really the root of the problem anyway. They are just an easy scapegoat. Take them away and private "mom & pop" land lords quickly fill the void, and usually are much more stringent about who they will rent to and what they think a fair rent is.
- kbelder 3y ago
  Right. It's still the same amount of houses, and the same amount of people wanting a house, so the price is not going to shift much.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  While I agree the mom and pop landlords also pose a problem, they don’t have the capital to outbid new buyers by tens of thousands, or to leverage dozens of existing properties. Bidding against them is not a perpetual David vs. Goliath battle.

HelloMcFly 3y ago

I think a tax on vacant properties is potentially a better way to go, though checking and enforcement could be the issue (exempting one's primary and maybe secondary homes); multi-unit housing would also be exempt. This would place more downward pressure on rents and decrease the investment upside on buying. I'm sure this is a bad idea in a number of ways I haven't considered.

ryukafalz 3y ago
Don't have sources offhand but my recollection is that vacancy taxes have also been tried before and, while they do have some effect, the vacancy rates in most locales with high costs of living are already low enough that it doesn't help that much. Vacancy rate statistics include things that are pretty natural and you wouldn't really want to penalize, like an apartment being briefly vacant after the previous tenant moves out and before the next tenant moves in. So you can't just look at the rental vacancy rate in a city being (say) 3% and conclude that those 3% of units in the city are being held vacant and off-market. There may be some of those, but it's a far lower percentage. Which is to say, institute a vacancy tax if you like (it won't really hurt if done sanely), but realize that it won't be a silver bullet here.
ZoomerCretin 3y ago
This is so difficult to enforce. You're going to have people go door-to-door checking if houses are vacant? What if someone goes on vacation? States require legibility. The simplest way to enforce high land and property utilization is to tax all property. In California, for example, you have reports of people who move and use their old home in the Bay Area for storage because they're paying the same nominal property tax rate from 40 years ago. If they were paying a yearly 1% tax on the value of their property (instead of <0.05%), they'd rent or sell it immediately. Same deal in China, except more extreme. Property _is not taxed_, so there are/were a lot of people building apartments and leaving them vacant, waiting for prices to rise over time. Neither of these situations serve the material needs of people today who need cheap, high-quality, and abundant shelter. Plus, your vacant property tax proposal excludes the (500k+?) many empty bedrooms in occupied homes. If someone's kids have grown and moved out, their old rooms are now vacant. How many people simply leave these rooms vacant for years and decades? A blanket property tax increase would strongly incentivize the renting of these rooms.