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I run a condo building and there’s about half a dozen apartments in the building that have been sitting vacant for as long as I’ve been here for about 5 years now. The owners don’t even live in the country. Just apartments sitting there unused for years
they are an investment.
here in boston, chinese people buy up apartments for their children to go to college, years ahead of time. several vacant buildings near my own place. even if their kid doesn't go to school here, it's still an asset that appreciates. chinese landlord that lives half a globe away doesn't care about renting it out either. it's just a place to park their money.
As long as we refuse to decouple housing from a tool of speculation, we will not address affordable housing.
most people's wealth is tied up in housing. so if you decouple that you will make most americans much poorer
I think it's fine to use it as a speculation tool if you are living there. If not, then it should be a massive tax liability. Pressure people buying empty homes to either rent them to someone for cheap, live in them, or sell them.
this is precisely what NIMBYism is. People living in their own homes, who want to force up the value by preventing new homes from being constructed.
it's also the reason for the crisis. without that attitude and all the zoning restrictions, our housing market would be much more cheap and flexible. but when you have towns that only permit like 50 new houses a a year, and the population is growing at 3x that, you have a serious problem
The flip side is when your state mandates allowing 4-6 homes on regular SFH plots and then your property value goes up because you can now build more housing
I think the concept of a tax penalty with some relief for having a tenant that isn't being gouged sounds nice.
Hell, just requiring HAVING a tenant would be great for starters because of how many empty homes there are. If you've got the empty homes, and a tax penalty for them being empty, suddenly they'd have to compete for tenants. Wouldn't that be wonderful?
What we need is a mandated and enforced vacancy tax nationwide. Make it high enough to fix the housing crisis.
*Edited to add: according to the Wikipedia article I linked, Canada and the USA have cities that have implemented vacancy taxes. We need to do like France and Ireland and make it nationwide.
Exactly this. Any sort of "is the tenant not being overcharged" check would be extra complexity that's not strictly necessary anyway. Once more properties become available on the market (because their owners want to pay less property tax), rents naturally start going down. Just need the vacancy tax to be high enough. If it's a tiny tax, it doesn't make a change.
Most homeowners only own the home they live in. For what it's worth, housing prices don't matter if you don't intend to buy or sell.
I think much more money is tied up in funds that indirectly own the houses. Common folk likely have some of their 401k tied up, knowingly or unknowingly.
Housing prices shouldn't matter, except you can borrow against the valuation, making the hypothetical cost real. Also real estate taxes and insurance.
yes, they very much do. most people aren't selling their 401K anytime soon if they aren't in their 60s.
but the value of that asset very much impacts their sense of financially security and their spending habits. a drop in the stock market doesn't impact people day to day, but it very much causes them to belt tighten.
i was only able to go to college because of the appreciation on my parents house. they never had the income to pay for college, but since our hose went from 200K to 400K they were able to get me into college. a lot of people have only been able to build financial security by leveraging the value of their home for loans.
So your parents borrowed against the value of their home to put you through college. They could have also taken out parent plus loans to do the same thing. Why is this an argument for letting home prices soar?
you can't take out loans if you have no collateral to back up the loan.
the could not have taken out the loan without the housing value ti back up the loan.
do you not understand how loans work? you can't just get 50K from the bank without collateral.
the point is most americans have banked their entire lives on the value of their home. if you sudden deprecation everyone's home by 25% the economy will go into a depression.
it's not an argument for or against it. it's the reality of the situation.
Yes you can take out parent plus loans without collateral. That's their entire reason for existing.
I think you should be a resident with records of living in the country before being allowed to buy. Letting the Chinese wealthy buy up all our land is stupid and short sighted