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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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The thing that bothers me is the shortage is completely artificial. There are approximately 28 vacant homes in America for every unhoused person. I live next to a housing development with an ungodly number of 4 bed 2.5 bath McMansions, most of which have, as far as I can tell, sat empty for the last two years. Not for sale, not for rent, just parked as an investment.
This 100%. There is no shortage of physical houses. There is a shortage of AFFORDABLE houses.
I just went through the buying process. I don't make any crazy money, but a totally fine amount, more then a lot of people (65k/year)
That meant even with a sizable down payment that I was rather lucky to have, my MAX was 200k. That meant I could afford like.... 1/10 of the places for sale where I live.
and we're soon going to find out if Biden's student loan forgiveness is going to be canned by fascist ideologues or if the midterms spooked them well enough to handle it correctly. If they decide to pull some shenanigans, there's a real possibility that we're staring down the barrel of a 3rd once in a lifetime economic crash from yet another bubble.
Yes, same. I considered buying but given the 3% increase in the interest rate we saw, I'm just going to keep renting and hoping that things come back down before I'm 100 years old.
The only reason I got away from renting, even with the interest, was that it was still gonna be $100 cheaper, except +1 bed +1 bath and I actually OWN it.
Plus, with my loan the interest rate can't go any higher, but can be refinanced if things go lower. So since I was basically break even on the current interest, I decided to take it.
I sort of like the idea that I can just... leave... and not worry about having an expensive albatross hanging around my neck. And my rent is low for the area so I'm doing better for now renting. I'd like to own eventually, I guess, but I prefer not to spend more per month if I can avoid it.
My rent was gonna go up $300, so that made it pretty easy as well haha. (I woulda stayed renting too if it had been cheaper /month)
I deal with a lot of small business owners and it's amazing how many of them have second homes. These guys are well-off but not what you think of as ultra wealthy. I think housing has been such a high-return investment that both corporations and individuals have been buying up houses they don't need.
Most states in the US I believe have homestead exemptions for property tax on your primary residence. Maybe if they just jacked the prop tax way up on anyone or entity that owns more than one single family property that would make it a less enticing investment.
Honestly I'd scale it. There's a lot of people who don't sell their first home when they move into their second and it's helping them financially to rent it out. I don't want to go after these people...
Raise the tax per every house you're doing it with. Make it prohibitive at scale.
That's not a bad idea. Tax rate is X. First house is X. Second house is XY, third house is XY*Y, etc.
Problem is property rates are usually city, county, state so you're not going to see consistency between them.