The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Tax the shit out of the businesses that are holding onto these houses. Extra penalties for letting them sit empty. Special tax for companies with more than x% of purchasable inventory within certain regions. A lot of this could be fixed by taking money away from the people hoarding it.
We need to tax holding property as an investment if you aren’t living there or using it for your business. I’m not sure if it’s already taxed as capital gains or not, but it sure as hell should be. There’s nothing wrong with property being an investment – you should think of your house as an investment – but there’s a significant problem in treating property like stocks.
There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.
In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.
There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.
Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.
Is this actually true or just post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It seems like we shouldnt need a tax on millionaires just to pay for lunches. It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunches more than it is inspiring that we are now.
I think you misunderstood my question. I was genuinely asking if it was directly from this tax that the program was expanded. The articles I read on it said that this tax would help, as it’s allocated to public schools and transportation. But they also said part of it would be coming from federal grants.
I am all for taxation, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a failure of our government that this took a millionaires tax to accomplish. And I don’t think this goes far enough in either the taxation or the allocation of funds for our school children.
IMHO it’s not just to pay for lunches (or whatever else); the primary goal is to limit price inflation and housing speculation. The fact that it generates revenue is an added bonus.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it’s NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it’s happening.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability.
In particular, vacant housing is either for sale, for rent, rented or sold, for occasional use, or held off market.
Categories for held off market include forclosure, personal/family reasons (which includes e.g. units where the owner moved into assisted living or is currently living elsewhere with family), legal reasons (e.g. divorce or code violations), preparing to rent/sell, held for storage of household furniture, needs repair, currently under repair, specific use housing (e.g. dorms), extended absence (e.g. prison), abandoned/possibly condemned, and ‘don’t know’.
Their data tables are broken up kinda weirdly, and each table is its own sheet which is unfortunate to look at on mobile. A ton of things are reported as percents or rates, and I kinda wish they had the detailed raw numbers broken out better.
I might not want to put them in buildings under renovation, but those empty mansions could serve as compounds to house hundreds of people safely and securely, while having adequate space to offer necessities for transitioning back to housed life, such as on site therapy and pharmacies, and work aid centers.
Housing-first is a great way to deal with homelessness, because most of the problems homeless people have in rebuilding their lives are compounded by being on the street. I’m not saying we shouldn’t house homeless people.
I’m saying that comparing the vacancy rate to the homeless population is ridiculous, and isn’t evidence that there’s no housing shortage.
Partially, that’s because vacant houses aren’t all habitable, or able to be sold/rented immediately. But also, it’s because having some number of empty units on the market ready to be moved into is a good thing. You don’t want to have to find someone who wants to move out the day you want to move in. That creates a sellers market, causing high prices.
Also don’t forget that people don’t like housing built near them because it “drives down housing prices.” Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
In much of the country, even smaller towns, the problem is that supply and demand is being artificially manipulated by corporations from outside the area coming in, outbidding locals, then putting what we’re owner occupied homes on the market for jacked up rent prices. This encourages other local landlords to charge more, because they can.
Corporations are able to do that because housing is a good investment.
Part of the reason it’s been a good investment is due to things like exclusive mcmansion zoning. Just imagine if it were easy to build net-new houses in those communities. Developers could make a killing building new housing, and extorting corporations into buying it.
There’s only so many people willing and able to pay sky high rents. At some price, people move into their parents basement, double up, become homeless, etc. So corporations have two options: either they continue to outbid average Joes or they don’t. If they don’t, then people won’t be forced to rent from them. If they do, at some point the new housing will just go vacant unless they lower prices.
Owning vacant housing has costs, but little upside. As a larger and larger percentage of their portfolio becomes vacant, housing becomes a worse and worse investment for them. At some point, it’s unsustainable, they have sell, the market collapses, and rent becomes cheap. They literally can’t sit on an unlimited amount of vacant housing and remain solvent.
That’s a fair assessment and I agree with your prediction at the end. I think the problem is that, in the meantime, there massive real-world harm being done to people by these practices that have potentially generation spanning consequences (much like redlining).
The point more is that corporations jacking up rents is more of a symptom of the underlying problem. The problem isn’t corporations. It’s that we’ve normalized NIMBYs artificially inflating their home value.
There are more direct solutions, like building deed-restricted affordable housing, public housing, etc.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Ehhh, you’ve got the right spirit, but that won’t happen lol.
What would be useful is banning, or at least limiting, speculative real estate ownership. A liveable home being unoccupied for no productive reason is a massively arrogant thing for a society to allow.
“prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent” which idk what it even theoretically means, and limiting AirBnBs, are both means of constraining housing.
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
Some estimates put the number of vacant homes upwards of 30% a few months back, and it’s been climbing
It’s not about a lack of supply, it’s about homes being both an investment and a basic need - someone like Black Rock can go into a small town in Georgia, snap up every property that goes on the market, then dictate rental prices while jacking up the house prices by bidding on everything. Even if they greatly overpay, by doing it a few times it drives up the valuation of the entire area, overall making their net profit grow
And it’s not just Black Rock, it’s a bunch of investment companies doing this everywhere. They have the same goal and their interests are aligned - they’re not competing for tenants, they just want to jack up the values and use homes like stock investments
You cannot say it is not about lack of supply in the same sentence you mention housing being an investment and expect to be taken seriously.
Housing is a good investment specifically because of lack of supply.
Most of the problem isn’t even big companies, but existing neighborhoods/local gov being pressured not to change their existing neighborhood, and passing zoning ordinances that prevent building.
I think the point he is trying to make is that basic needs being conflated with investments is bad, which is a fair point. If rentseeking behavior was much more heavily regulated we would see a sudden spike in housing supply as it wouldn’t be an investment in a passive income source anymore.
In my area of the country (mid-south), home prices were pretty low until the last couple of years. I bought a 3000 ft² house in 2020 for <100k in a city. Now, a similar sized house is going for >500k. A lot of homes were bought by individuals and property management companies who did some cosmetic renovations then raised rents sometimes by >200%.
Other properties are bought and left vacant on purpose to make sure the renters don’t have other places to go.
I’m not sure what you’re missing. Speculation only happens when a market is already tight and profit can be basically guaranteed. Build more and this incentive goes away.
No one is keeping houses vacant to turn away paying renters. That’s nonsense.
you forgot that most country which has this house price problem actually build houses and apartment more than enough for all the homeless hence you would see lots of ghost town everywhere, economy now doesnt work as intended, you can build more house but without regulation despite the supply the price would still skyrocket like now
I didn’t forget anything. If we had an excess supply of houses, prices would be trending down, not up. “Ghost towns” aren’t really relevant because houses need to exist in places people want to live or they have no impact on demand.
The housing market isn’t black magic. It’s just a market.
Except everywhere is getting more expensive, not just gentrified neighbourhoods. And a middle aged lawyer should be able to afford a 1 bedroom anywhere in the world, it’s ridiculous what housing costs now.
John Oliver even did a thing on this, people don’t care about “metadata”, but ask them if they should be able to see your dick pics and people care a lot more
The only thing that makes this obviously fake is that it claims she downloaded them from people's phones, rather than from some centralized NSA data store... And the idea an NSA employee would be held accountable publicly and cause bad PR.
Government databases getting misused for personal motives is actually pretty common.
AP did a report on this back in 2016 and while public records on this are fairly limited, they still found about 300 cases of database abuse from 2013 through 2015.
I mean, it’s been well known that the NSA has been intercepting and logging all domestic internet and other telecommunication traffic for like a decade now.
The NSA does have all the pictures from your phone and probably your PC as well, though. And you’d be naive to think they can’t search by object, because I can do that shit on Amazon Photos. They don’t have a “dick” filter but how hard (giggity) would it be to make one? Just buy Chatroulette’s ML model for a start.
Set up NextCloud, sync your photos to your own NextCloud server, and you’re good to go. The crazy thing is it’s becoming trivial for even a non-technical user to set everything up. Tail scale means there is no reason to put forward if you are just using it for personal use, and you literally just have to log into tail scale with your Google account on the server and your phone. You can run next cloud in a virtual machine with virtualBox, and that’s literally it. You don’t have to deal with updating, being stuck in PHP or dependency hell, none of that. Seriously, we are at such a crazy time in history where you can set up your own cloud infrastructure with an hour of work for even an non-technical user, and stop paying for iCloud photos or Google photos storage each month. It saves you money and improves your privacy
lemmyshitpost
Hot
This magazine is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.