this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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A Boring Dystopia
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Ban corporations from buying single family homes. Full stop, this should have never been allowed to have happened. Eminent domain every rental house and sell at auction to first-time homebuyers only. Then go after the landlords who are charging $2k per month for apartments that are 40 years old and entirely paid off.
Would such a strategy legally work in the USA?
Here in the Netherlands, a plan to regulate maximum rents seems to be much more promising.
We will know if it worked in about 2-3 years.
Would it work legally? Sure if it got passed as an amendment to the constitution. As currently structured there basically is zero legal argument with that other than another constitutional amendment.
The chance of that happening with the actual political situation in the USA is essentially zero. To be clear it isn't actually zero but I. The same way that your chance of walking out the door and dying by direct meteor strike isn't zero but it isn't worth planning for over a large number of far more likely things to happen.
If that amendment both directly allowed shared ownership of property for things like high rise apartments/condos and for companies to function as management but not owners I do really think it could work. I'm sure companies could abuse that management position of course but still a huge improvement over our current situation.
As a self response I should add that since you asked about legality I'm this what it would take with the existing government structure. I think the chance of there being a full on revolution and government rebuild from the ground up is more likely than the idea above.
TL;DR - This is a bandaid solution that won't have much impact short term or long term. We need millions more houses, unfortunately building houses is an expensive endeavor and no one is going to do it without a huge payout which only comes from building huge houses. Governments need to provide incentives for developers to build houses people can afford.
I'm against investment firms owning SFRs and renting them out, but this is a very small part of the problem. If we converted every rental house into an owner occupied house it wouldn't actually increase the number of houses available, it would just change some renters into owners. Then what?
The actual problem is that we don't have enough houses. We need millions more houses to meet current demand (for owners and renters, not everyone can or wants to own a home), and we're getting further behind each year.
We need to make it easier for builders to build homes, whether that's private development companies or publicly owned housing councils. We need developers to build medium and high density "missing middle" housing as well as smaller units that are affordable to low income people. As it is, private developers don't build these types of houses because they aren't as profitable per square foot as shitty McMansions. Since housing projects take an extremely long time to complete, no one wants to tie up their money without a high return on their investment that they get through McMansions.
The federal government needs to step up and apply some pressure to change zoning laws and encourage development of missing middle and smaller houses. Some ideas on how the federal government can do that:
If we somehow manage reach housing supply and demand equilibrium we can't stop development. We need to keep building so we don't have the same situation we had after 2008 and end right back here 15 years later because all the developers walked away.