Building houses to solve the housing crisis implies that the crisis was caused by a lack of homes. Every single one of the 2 million houses would be picked up by a property firm or a Chinese millionaire just the way it has been happening for the last ten years. What you really need is legislation, but what you are getting is more food for the hounds.
Never before have I seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username
OsamaBinLaden is right. Yup. That was weird to type.
We need legislation to prevent REITs and holding companies from purchasing small and medium residential dwellings and properties. The problem that will create when it passes and they relinquish their sizable holdings, is that adjacent properties devalue causing mortgagers to go upside-down. It’s a simple problem to identify, but not an easy one to solve.
Read the username again, it’s much worse than that
Be that as it may, Britain in the 1970s and before actually had a really good answer to this: The government just buys enough property and rents it out to people at reasonable rates, to puncture the bubble and make it unprofitable to be a landlord in the first place as a “job.” People have affordable places to live, we don’t have to have a fight about declaring it “illegal” to own or rent out property, and people with spare cash are motivated to invest it in businesses instead of in properties. Literally everyone wins. Which of course, means America will see it as communism and fight to the death to stop it from happening.
Not saying you’re wrong in your solution either, just saying one other way which has a proven track record.
Oof. That is worse.
My solution isn’t a solution. It’s just a new problem. Your suggestion has merit. Since Republicans would shoot that “anti-free market communist trash” down before it hit paper, we’d first need a Democratic majority in Congress to make it happen.
Supply and demand. Corporate interests will only buy homes when theres a profit incentive. A housing shortage makes great profit opportunities.
If there are too many airbnbs so they don’t get rented, there’s no longer a profit. If there are enough houses that you can’t buy to flip at guaranteed markup, there goes the profit. If there’s enough houses that you’re not guaranteed a quick sale on your investment, there goes the profit. The point is there are limits on those ownership patterns so you can build your way out of it
Aren’t there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don’t expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that’d cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can’t do that. I’m sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.
yes there is currently extra housing but, unfortunately, sites like airbnb have moved large swaths of the housing market to the luxury hotel market leading to a shortage in actual housing as wealthy, investor, and corporate class people pay premiums for short term rentals that most people simply can’t compete with.
Airbnb isnt as big a problem as much as corporate owned housing is.
Companies like Blackstone need to be absorbed by the US Govt.
yeah but before airbnb this was not much of an issue. They do seem to go hand in hand.
A lot of airbnbs are owned by corporations. Also, airbnb came out around the time corporations really started investing in single family homes en masse. Airbnb started in 2008, which was at the same time as the housing bubble collapse that helped investors buy up on the cheap. It’s hard to say which was the chicken and which was the egg.
yeah exactly. Its hard to say which influenced which but they are both a part of it. I mean I remember how the concept for it and the ride thing was more of a social couch surfing thing. we really need to capture these back to things like the federation and get the gross corpo profits out of it.
I disagree that airbnb is the issue here. Corporate ownership of houses that are subsequently rented out would still be an endemic issue that needs to be addressed, even IF airbnb and vrbo apps were to be outright banned (they wont be)
the airbnb’s would have otherwise been rentals. I agree corp ownership is an issue regardless but that does not mean its the sole issue around a problem.
airbnb itself is not the whole problem. But its important to recognize it changed markets worldwide by pitting the luxury hotel market in direct competition with
so the problem is more that the internet has caused a rich market to overflow into housing - you have to also consider people are going on work trips and getting reimbursed for staying at an airbnb etc. Wedding parties as well seem to prefer airbnbs. The result is a worldwide catastrophe for residential housing.
But its very simple: A high demand, luxury market overflows into residential housing. The obvious result is residential prices skyrocket with demand.
Did Airbnb cause this? not entirely, they’re just the best at it. Addressing Blackstone will help by removing some of the cash competing for residential housing, but it won’t solve the problem entirely until like wedding parties and vacationers go back to using hotels and companies are no longer able to reimburse people for airbnb stays. You have to address the excess demand from the market spillover that airbnb has made its profits on. Otherwise you’re just ignoring one of the primary reasons Blackstone entered the market - there are lots of individuals doing the same thing as Blackstone on a smaller scale here
So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.
Also boomers are both buying retirement homes and holding onto their previous homes, rather than letting them go back on the market and alleviate some of the shortage. They have more purchasing power than any of the younger generations because they have decades of equity built up, and they’re trying to keep their previous homes to pass onto their children. Both are contributing to the upward price pressure.
A lot of it is a question of where.
The town I grew up in is a great example: it is n a generally rural area and lost its major employer years ago. The economy never really recovered and the population has dwindled, but that’s also true of the surrounding area. There are many empty homes, even in formerly upscale developments, and I can literally buy one on my credit card.
In my current town, a starter home is like 15x the price, they sell within hours, and there’s no open land left to develop.
The expensive area is where people want to live, but there are all those empty homes selling for very little just a few hours drive away
I believe there’s been a general trend of moving toward cities, that leaves lots of inexpensive empty homes behind
There are some cities that are offering money for people to move there and work remotely. They have the housing but not the jobs? I know Tulsa is one, Somewhere in Kansas, I don’t remember where else.
Vermont has a program for remote workers to move there. I might take them up on it because there’s no amenities in a city that can beat the night sky in a place with little to no light pollution.
Coming from a solid blue city in a solid blue state, that really doesn’t seem tempting. I’m sure it is much cheaper to live there but is it worth it?
Realistically, my company doesn’t want to let people move without adjusting pay and jobs. I’m sure many are like that. I’m privileged to get pay relative to a high cost of living area so I’m sure they’d be happy to cut me back to low pay. Lower pay and regressive/conservative …. No wonder there is extra housing supply
Plus many states just don’t have the money for such programs. Particularly the shitty ones with lots of empty housing.
15 million long term vacant houses to 600,000 homeless.
That doesn’t sound right. I think there are much much more than 600,000 homeless people in the United States. Maybe that’s the number who actually sleep on the street but doesn’t count people who are staying in shelters or groups of people who rent rooms in extended stay motels?
10-15% of household in the US are “housing insecure”… There’s 127m households… So about 15 million housing insecure families. I think we should go with that. You’re probably right that the 600k is street homeless. Many people are “homeless sheltered” meaning they can couch surf, or the state is putting them in a motel, or whatever.
This is also about reducing rentals
What’s your plan to do that?
I didn’t realize I needed to have a formal policy plan before I opener my mouth. I’ll freely admit I don’t fully understand the intricacies of how we handle real estate, but the general belief that real estate prices must be protected and they must generally trend upwards is the unhealthy core of the problem. It prioritizes profits over human needs.
It prioritizes profits over human needs.
Yes.
How we change is somewhat undefined. We’ve many diverse examples from history. Our side is the ideological underdog. Flexibility and diversity are two of our greatest strengths.
The majority always chooses an authoritarian king, to let another decide for them in convenience in a paradigm as old as humanity. Critical to our collective ideological success is development of individual wisdom, that more individuals choose to learn and reason for themselves.
The core goals originated in FDR’s 1944 Second Bill of Economic Rights, a proposed successor to The New Deal. It’s been a third party platform for eighty years, including Sanders.
How to pay for it originated in Eisenhower’s 1961 farewell address, where he defined and warned of the military-industrial complex. His predictions were in late stages (Reagan’s nukes) in twenty five years. In 1990 perhaps the way to pay was to cut defense budget by half by 2000. But, by then the corruption likely ran too deep, as evidenced by the subsequent reckless deregulation of banks by both Democrats and Republicans (partial repeal of Glass-Steagall, Interstate Banking and Branching Efficiency Act).
We’re thirty five years past 1990. Banks own everything. Puppet kings are common. And, the Internet may have fundamentally changed communication and relationships so much that we could be past an “event horizon” of our Great Filter event. Belief in such a death perhaps makes it easier to cope with the fight.
I’ve certainly lost the thread of my purpose. I hope there’s something of value for you here.
So, there actually is a solution, and Britain did it until Thatcher came along, and it worked great: The government buys up a lot of property, and rents it to anyone who wants it at reasonable rates. They’ve got the money to do it, and it brings in income for them anyway, and it pierces the bubble so that private landlords can’t charge “market rates” and send the whole operation into an ever-increasing spiral of both rents and property values.
A lot of British landlords actually wound up selling to the government anyway, since the lack of a bubble means you can’t even make that much from renting out properties as a business venture, so they’d rather just get rid of the properties and invest in some other endeavor that’s an actual profit seeking enterprise. Literally everyone wins except the cockheads.
I am sure in America it would be absurdly unpopular, but it works great.
Sounds like socialism! I love it.
It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. … the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier…
/s
The US had 3.1m houses sitting empty in 2023
property hoarding is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such, imho. Houses are for living in, not speculation.
Where are those houses? I know of plenty of empty houses going for cheap, but they don’t tend to be in areas with many jobs or amenities.
People misunderstand this stat for both single-family homes and apartments. These are not “sitting empty” they are unused and in a transitional state between occupants. This number is also consistent with the gross number historically and is actually below the average in percentage.
Well, some are definitely sitting empty for extended periods. But your point is well taken, there are what, 200m homes in the US? If they are vacated on average every 5 years because of a move, then if those homes are on the market for a month on average you’d have 200m/60 ~ 3.5m homes sitting empty at any given time.
I don’t think the US needs more single family homes, I think we need more, or at least more affordable, multifamily housing. Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. What we need to be doing is bringing down the cost of housing in cities, as well as making cities as pedestrian friendly as possible, with walking and biking infrastructure, and public transportation.
Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment
This is what I’m always saying! Car-centric spaces are also bad socially. They’re dehumanizing. You want people walking around if you want a community, and having a strong community is good in many ways.
For us, the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. We basically have no choice. I have to work in the city but can’t afford to live there with a family. Mainly the rent/mortgage prices, and groceries. It’s all cheaper when I’m willing to drive 30-60 minutes outside of the city.
It’s cheaper for you because suburbia effectively gets subsidized, and because housing in cities gets artificially limited through ridiculous zoning rules. Ideally, suburbs should have to actually bear the costs of the infrastructure necessary to their existence, and we should do away with things like detached single family housing and absurd parking minimums in urban areas.
That’s rapidly changing all over the place. The question is now whether you want the suburb life and a commute or to live in the city with amenities. The prices are very similar now.
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I’ll always wonder what you posted…
Something off topic about not wanting to live in a city. One of the reasons I’m big on urban renewal is maybe it will get more people to move into cities so there’s fewer of them in rural areas where I want to live.
I completely agree, but we need much stronger rent and ownership laws, as well as public housing. Companies are bulldozing low income housing, building shiny new apartment buildings, and using algorithmic rent to empty out most of the apartment complex and keep prices artificially high across a city.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
It’s so terrible, because the end result is a lot of half empty apartments downtown, and normal people effectively getting pushed to suburbs because there’s no way most people could afford an apartment that costs $4k a month. For low income people, it’s even worse.
Even just having some (30%) mandatory $500/mo rent apartments in all new construction over 30 units could help.
I think we need a LOT more of this kind of housing, to make housing as affordable as possible for everyone.
I was gonna say or 200k small apartment/condo buildings or 20k large apartment/condo building or like 2k large highrise buildings.
But whatever will poor Blackrock do with their real estate portfolio??
Are you serious? Who do you think would buy these houses? First-time buyers with cobbled-together financing, or massive corporations offering more than (inflated) asking price?
Legislation banning selling of homes to corporations. That’s the only thing that will solve the housing crisis, and permanently. If we’re asking for it and not getting it, it’s because our legislators are invested in the shell game…
Maybe just redistribute some wealth? The richest nation in the world can afford to home everyone. Homelessness is a policy decision.
Well I mean they’re still going to need to build the houses, which of course would drop the price of the houses, so there’s more to it than just robbing from the rich. Mind you, robbing from the rich is still step one.
Equity firms own 1.6 million homes in the US (both single family and multi family units).
Just saying, that would get us most of the way there.
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes? Won’t that just leave us back where we are now?
Do we think we can build more homes than Equity firms can spend other people’s money on?
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes?
Ideally, Madame Guillotine.
A fine French woman she is.
How many are vacant? Those are the first ones that need to be reallocated.
(Meaning, I’m not pro equity firm, I’m saying an occupied house is a house that is occupied. These 2mil new houses are for new occupants, not shuffled ones.)
I think the key point is ownership. If the house is owned by an equity firm, even if it’s occupied it still counts as a house which could instead be owned by, well, homeowners.
Yeah but also charge less than $200k for a 3b 2b with a 2 car garage.
I thought Americans used sq ft to casually describe houses? Please don’t switch to number of bedrooms. That’s what we do in UK and it’s led to house builders squeezing closet-sized bedrooms into a house so they can sell it as a 4-bed.
Americans use any/all of bedrooms/bathrooms/square footage/lot size
Football fields
Usually, we use both measures.
We also measure them in bulletproof ratings. The average house is a level 6.
And lot size in football fields, a 1500 square foot 3 bed 2 bath on 1/4 of a football field.
Just be thankful we are using soemwhat sane measurements, ive witnessed someone use Humvee’s as a measurement. It was in relation to a pool.
I’ve never used square feet as a primary way to describe a house. The rooms are the main concern.
Look at some UK new builds on Rightmove and you will delete this. 1 decent bedroom turned into 3 shitty bedrooms just to make up numbers. You can’t even fit a bed in them all
There are apparently rules in America that require a minimum size
Although sizes can vary from state to state, 70 to 80 square feet in size is generally the acceptable minimum
A coworker just bought a 1.5 bath, 2 car garage, 3 bed for $500,000+ in Portland, basically no yard/outdoor area.
I’m in that city too. I’m sure it requires a lot of upgrading for that price.
Nope. Just need to force all landlords to sell. Make tax on rent ruinous. Tax additional homes. Make it illegal for corporations to own residential property.
Cool, landlords can buy all of these up too!
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn’t a primary residence of the property owner.
I was going to make a similar comment. Write into law that investors have to pay 4x property taxes to the town, if the town for some reason doesn’t want the taxes then it just goes to the federal government.
There are enough homes to house everyone, supply isn’t the problem, greed is.
It’s also probably a location issue, might not have enough houses where people want to live even though there’s empty ones in buttfuck nowhere.
Or empty ones in Detroit or Florida.
Don’t worry, those florida houses will be filled soon! With water of course, not people
Or maybe billion dollar companies should be forced to sell so the average person can buy them
The volume held by investment firms and the like is large in a sheer numbers sense, but virtually nothing in terms of its percentage of the whole sum of residential real estate.
The fact is that we have been lagging in the supply side for decades and the Great Recession and then the COVID Pandemic cut new builds even more drastically. There simply isn’t supply available to address the demand at a reasonable and accessible price.
Even a small percentage is good. The situation is desperate.
The fewer first time home owners that get out bid by corps the better. Doesn’t matter if it is a drop in the bucket.
And that’s even before considering how it would help stop housing from being an investment vehicle.
Housing is always going to be an investment vehicle.
Right, and trickle down economics works. /s
Do you have the numbers?
New private home starts since 1995: As measured by the Fed
Population of the US since 1995: As measured and estimated by the Census Bureau
Okay, but your assertion was that there are not enough homes currently to support our population if they weren’t traded as a commodity. In NYC alone there are over 3.6 Million Housing Units and a population of 8,258,035, with about half of the units being rental and about 1/20 being vacant.
You haven’t provided any evidence that there aren’t enough housing units in the USA.
A decline in housing project expansion is meaningless without context of how many are actually in use.
There are over 145,000,000 housing units in the United States.
Urban centers should have drastically more rental units than urban, exurban, and rural tracts. An unoccupied rate of 5% is pretty good to cover units in transition.
So if an average of 2-3 people are in a home there are enough. Since our current system puts home ownership just out of reach, selling former rental properties and properties owned by overseas investors would probably be the bump we need.
I’m worried that large developments could be harmful to the environment and a waste of resources.
And how many empty houses are there already?
15 million vacant houses. Around 600,000 homeless people. If only 10% of all vacant homes in the use were liveable we could still give every homeless person two and have some left over.
or better yet, overcome neoliberalism, the cursed legacy of Ronald Reagan
