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That won't fix shit, that's 2 million homes that corporations will buy up to jack the rent up. Shit should be illegal.
"The US needs to reclaim 2 million houses from firms to revive the American dream of homeownership"
Fixed. The housing exists, it's just bought up so you can't have it because they want more profit.
Also fck HOAs and the horse they road in on.
Or maybe billion dollar companies should be forced to sell so the average person can buy them
The volume held by investment firms and the like is large in a sheer numbers sense, but virtually nothing in terms of its percentage of the whole sum of residential real estate.
The fact is that we have been lagging in the supply side for decades and the Great Recession and then the COVID Pandemic cut new builds even more drastically. There simply isn’t supply available to address the demand at a reasonable and accessible price.
Do you have the numbers?
New private home starts since 1995: As measured by the Fed
Population of the US since 1995: As measured and estimated by the Census Bureau
Okay, but your assertion was that there are not enough homes currently to support our population if they weren't traded as a commodity. In NYC alone there are over 3.6 Million Housing Units and a population of 8,258,035, with about half of the units being rental and about 1/20 being vacant.
You haven't provided any evidence that there aren't enough housing units in the USA.
A decline in housing project expansion is meaningless without context of how many are actually in use.
There are over 145,000,000 housing units in the United States.
Urban centers should have drastically more rental units than urban, exurban, and rural tracts. An unoccupied rate of 5% is pretty good to cover units in transition.
So if an average of 2-3 people are in a home there are enough. Since our current system puts home ownership just out of reach, selling former rental properties and properties owned by overseas investors would probably be the bump we need.
I'm worried that large developments could be harmful to the environment and a waste of resources.
Even a small percentage is good. The situation is desperate.
The fewer first time home owners that get out bid by corps the better. Doesn't matter if it is a drop in the bucket.
And that's even before considering how it would help stop housing from being an investment vehicle.
Housing is always going to be an investment vehicle.
Right, and trickle down economics works. /s
"An influx of immigrants in the country also isn't helping the housing affordability equation as it has in the past."
Go fuck yourself business insider. The ol' "America is full" bit is it? The Great Enemy: the poor immigrant who is going to steal your piss poor paying job, but somehow also "steals" your super fucking overpriced house that even natural born citizens with full time jobs can't afford.
Get fucked.
There are enough homes to house everyone, supply isn't the problem, greed is.
It's also probably a location issue, might not have enough houses where people want to live even though there's empty ones in buttfuck nowhere.
I actually think the best solution would be the government to build a bunch of extra housing and crash the rental market with a two pronged supply approach:
sell housing to first time home buyers at 50% off under the condition they don't resale for 5 years and the government gets any value gains over the sale price for 10 years.
triple the existing public housing stock while slashing requirements to get into public housing
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn't a primary residence of the property owner.
I was going to make a similar comment. Write into law that investors have to pay 4x property taxes to the town, if the town for some reason doesn't want the taxes then it just goes to the federal government.
The US had 3.1m houses sitting empty in 2023
property hoarding is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such, imho. Houses are for living in, not speculation.
Where are those houses? I know of plenty of empty houses going for cheap, but they don't tend to be in areas with many jobs or amenities.
People misunderstand this stat for both single-family homes and apartments. These are not “sitting empty” they are unused and in a transitional state between occupants. This number is also consistent with the gross number historically and is actually below the average in percentage.
Well, some are definitely sitting empty for extended periods. But your point is well taken, there are what, 200m homes in the US? If they are vacated on average every 5 years because of a move, then if those homes are on the market for a month on average you’d have 200m/60 ~ 3.5m homes sitting empty at any given time.
Maybe just start with converting office space into housing so people homeless.
or better yet, overcome neoliberalism, the cursed legacy of Ronald Reagan
Nope. Just need to force all landlords to sell. Make tax on rent ruinous. Tax additional homes. Make it illegal for corporations to own residential property.
Maybe just redistribute some wealth? The richest nation in the world can afford to home everyone. Homelessness is a policy decision.
Well I mean they're still going to need to build the houses, which of course would drop the price of the houses, so there's more to it than just robbing from the rich. Mind you, robbing from the rich is still step one.
Equity firms own 1.6 million homes in the US (both single family and multi family units).
Just saying, that would get us most of the way there.
What's to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes? Won't that just leave us back where we are now?
Do we think we can build more homes than Equity firms can spend other people's money on?
What's to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes?
Ideally, Madame Guillotine.
A fine French woman she is.
How many are vacant? Those are the first ones that need to be reallocated.
(Meaning, I'm not pro equity firm, I'm saying an occupied house is a house that is occupied. These 2mil new houses are for new occupants, not shuffled ones.)
I think the key point is ownership. If the house is owned by an equity firm, even if it's occupied it still counts as a house which could instead be owned by, well, homeowners.
