Land. Value. Tax.

Value.

Tax.

For existing houses the investors might very well overbid the market price to get the lot, thereby making it inaccessible for any individual to realistically buy. They'll gladly overpay the market price on adjacent lots so they can "regenerate" the area, by stuffing four houses into two lots. Any individual simply wanting to buy the existing lot is out of luck, because it wouldn't ever make sense for them to overpay the asking price.

For new lots, it works so that whenever a city council decides to change the zoning of a lot of land to allow for residential construction, the price is set for investors to bid on. The entire lot is bought by an "investor" or "developer" who will either build on the lot or sell individual parts of the lot for others to build on. There's no risk. There isn't necessarily any work carried out. There's no service provided. It's just paying for ownership at one price, shuffling the papers and selling at a higher.

It's the same fucking thing as scalping, only over longer time and for larger amounts.

So the idea that "If it's so easy, why doesn't everybody do it?" or "It's fair, because they paid above asking price, you could just have bid higher" is wrong because I for one can't afford to buy ten fucking houses just to get one of them at the right price.

This is how capital accrues.

I don't enjoy the whole foreign investor solution, I think it's a scape goat.

It matters little to me if the person fucking me was born in China or 10 miles from me. Being born in this country doesn't mean you can screw over the rest of the population.

I'd rather see hard limits on how much property one can own. There is no reason for anyone other than the state to own those huge apartment complexes. Dismantle the land barons class, no one should own enough to house thousands.

The house price just fluctuates continuously and when the "investor" or "scalper" purchases it, it was available at that price for everyone.

That doesn't mean everyone (or people who needed it) have the ability to purchase it. The down-payment is simply too high that most people who want a house cannot afford it.

This is the same as scalping other goods, they have a unfair advantage in the market, and then they can make back all their money via rent and selling the house. They have nearly no way to lose in this game.

The unfair advantage is what making people angry; they are not making money by labor, insight, or even luck. The only reason these people are becoming richer is because they started rich.

I absolutely agree with your solution BTW, just arguing that people scalping houses are very much brain-dead scalpers. Many of them probably don't even care about the basic human right to shelter.

Capitalism is both disgusting and predictable.

Not just buying it up, of course, but making the market openly hostile to any kind of competition.

Maybe that's through state regulation. Maybe that's through some smear campaign. Maybe that's through leveraged buyouts or vertical integration or just doing a little industrial espionage to fuck over the business next door.

Just ask Aaron Swartz what happens to guys who try to foster open-sourced alternatives to cartels and monopoly concerns.

No. Every American should be able to have 40 acres and a mule.

What do you mean, that’s more than 5x the total acreage of the US? This is a minor problem, we’ll just make more land or steal some more from the Indians.

Zoning laws in the US are particularly fucked. This video breaks it down quite nicely, I find.

Here is the thing North Americans love single family homes.

they could fix the housing crisis by regulating the market.

Idk, its not like there's no housing shourtage/rant gauging in other countries with more sensible zoning.

If only there were some sort of governing body that could regulate things like that...

Over here foreign investors are banned from buying property, they can only build property. Unless you send your kid to uni here, then it's all fine apparently

man that's a lot of words to say that a theoretical person is a hypocrite

It's free market exploitation. If you believe a free market can exist without regulations, you're imbecile.

Just imagine: People need fridges. All fridge manufacturers agree to raise prices of a fridge by 2000%. So what, people are going to stop buying fridges? No - because they need them.

You would say: it's a free market, some new manufacturer is going to offer fridges at regular prices. Well - no you dumb fuck. What's the incentive for the new fridge manufacturer to sell at lower prices, when people are going to buy fridges anyway, because they need them? The answer is - none. It would be a dumb business decision, because your supply is limited, and you're going to sell it at market price, because that item is essential.

So how does the economy even work if that's possible? That's right idiot - because it's price fixing and it's fucking illegal.