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We had a help to buy scheme in the UK similar to what Harris is proposing. Spoiler warning: it didn't help.
Only thing that will stem the demand is a massive house construction scheme and outright building new cities.
Even this won’t work, because we already have more houses than people. The issue is that corporations bought up all the houses, and are intentionally letting them sit vacant. The end goal is artificially reducing the supply, so they can sell fewer homes at exorbitant rates.
Basically, imagine there are 1000 homes, for 1000 people. Each home goes for an even $100k at fair market value. Big Corporation buys 250 of them, (for a grand total of $25M) and lets 200 sit vacant. Now the remaining vacant homes are going for more than $100k, because the supply has been artificially reduced. Now when they sell those 50 homes, they can do so at $300k each, making a total of $10M (that’s $15M from their 50 sales, minus the $5M they paid for the 50 originally) off of just 50 houses. If they just bought and flipped all the houses, they’d only be making small profits per house. But by sitting on a bunch of them, they’re able to make more per house.
In short, they made absolute bank on those 50 houses, and can now buy more houses to repeat the process. They haven’t made all of their money back (yet) but they don’t care about the short term because they can just repeat the process again and continue driving rates up.
So when they eventually sell those 200 homes they’ve been sitting on, they can do so at those exorbitant prices that the market has come to expect. And when it causes the market to crash (because they’re no longer letting houses sit vacant) it’s the homeowners who are all underwater on their mortgages. So the company is able to get away scot-free by ditching their supply, while the homeowners get fucked.
Landlords are also doing the same thing, where they’ll own 1000 units but only rent 200 of them, so they can charge higher rent on those 200, while the rest sit empty.
What they need to do is implement a scaling tax for vacant homes. The more vacant homes you own, the higher the property tax is on each one. So the upper-middle class people can still own a summer and winter home without getting fucked. But make it unprofitable to buy and sit on hundreds of vacant properties, just to artificially reduce the supply. If a home or apartment is vacant for more than one calendar month in the year, it counts towards your vacant property tax. Incentivize the sale and rental of homes, instead of allowing them to quietly buy up and sit on properties.
I would like to see a tax on third properties and above that sit vacant for more than 6 months a year then 10% of the property value as a fine which would go to a ministry supporting unhoused people.
There would probably have to be some provision that if the property is rented out then for tax purposes the rent must be considered at the market rate -15% at the time the agreement was made. Eg a corpo couldn't rent a bunch of units to a subsidiarity and call them occupied since they are rented arrive they would have to pay income tax on the income.
I'd argue we don't necessarily need more homes. I think what most cities need is really to end zoning.
There is more than enough commercial and industrial vacant properties over the US that could very feasibly be turned into residential housing to house every person ten times over.
Zoning really is the problem because developers are essentially being forced to build unwalkable communities. You're just not allowed in many cities to buy old warehouse space and develop it into housing or to build small businesses (groceries, shops, etc) in areas zoned residential.
Ending/reforming zoning would solve so many issues... (I say /reforming because there are limits, most people don't want to live 10ft from a factory). But I hardly hear anyone talking about it whether on Lemmy or in the media... but it seems like it would fix so many issues.
I remember when I went to Germany and saw apartments with stores on the ground floor, blew my child mind at the time but it's so obvious it hurts.
Unfortunately in Germany this is only in the older city centers. It's far less common in newer "suburban" developments.
Incentivizing new construction for homes people actually live in is another facet of her plan.
I agree here. I don't see how anything will help that does not involve buidling more. heck build it till its not profitable rent property. didn't china boost their economy with building housing?
You don’t need more cities when there’s about 7 times the empty, perfectly functional living quarters for the amount of homelessness.
More houses is not the answer. There are plenty. Making more just make greedy capitalists more fuel.
Use what we got more efficiently.