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America's housing shortage is keeping home prices high
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this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2023
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I mean, one good long term solution is either ban or heavily, heavily tax corporate ownership of single family homes. And heavily tax short term vacation rentals. Basically force all the companies that are buying up blocks and blocks of single family housing to sell.
Then, take a look at zoning laws. I have no experience with this side, but they're probably often a barrier to creating medium or high density housing. Which we're gonna need a lot of in the near future.
Apparently foreign home ownership is a big issue in Canada, so I have to assume it's also a (smaller) issue in the US.
Basically, the issue I see is not that there isn't enough housing. It's that corporate greed is pricing people out of their neighborhoods and then the houses are sitting empty because they're barely worth $150k, but the "market" says they can be listed at $400k, and not many people can afford that.
A lot of this comes from the mindset of real estate as an appreciating asset. That drives the desire to buy and hold, because it only ever goes up.
A lot of people here in the US have bought into this as their retirement strategy. The value needs to go up, so they can downsize and ride the leftover cash for the rest of their life. If the number doesn't go up, they can't retire. This forces otherwise normal people to become very, very, invested in ensuring real estate is an asset with value that outpaces what people can afford. It's a ponzi scheme.