America’s housing crisis continues to worsen, renters are struggling more than homeowners, report says
America’s housing crisis continues to worsen, renters are struggling more than homeowners, report says
In America, home prices are at record highs while hundreds of thousands are homeless.
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What a terrible article. The solution is throwing more subsidies? Of course it's not! The solution is making it illegal to own more than a few properties. It really is that easy.
Why is the for profit house building industry involved in solving the problem they had a hand in making?
Reform the CPA and just build ourselves. Or use the army core of engineers. They are getting paid either way.
Non-profit / below market housing is crucial. Without it, the people who actually keep cities functioning and interesting, service workers, artists, etc get pushed out.
I have a career that enables me to pay a lot of money for housing but I don't want to live in a neighbourhood that only consists of people like me, cause I'm boring as fuck. I also don't want to be part of the reason those people get displaced.
More social housing now!
Don't be stupid. How else an I going to make money by doing nothing? Get a job? That's for people who don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
I pulled myself up by my parents bootstraps.
See, this guy's knows how to make money, unlike the rest of you pleps...
Raise property taxes 500% for property that is not registered as the owners primary residence.
That should do it
The solution is to build more housing where people want to live.
Don't get suckered into their blame game. This just results in everybody pointing fingers while the prices continue to soar.
Prices only go up because there's competition to buy them.
Tax and other policies encourage the parasitic behavior.
I feel that you missed one basic aspect of economics. Competition is one reason prices might go up. There are other reasons, which are relevant here. Monopolies, collusion, price fixing, goods that people can't live without, speculation, those are also reasons that prices go up.
In the housing market, it's not fair, it's not free, this isn't a basic supply and demand situation.
The solution is making it illegal to own more than a few properties
This problem does not have a single solution. Get rid of landlords and you're still left with a large group of people fighting over a limited supply. Better zoning laws, removal of parking minimums, better transit + micro-mobility infrastructure, and more below market not-for-profit housing.
It's not a simple problem, even if the motives that created the problem are.
I think we agree, with the caveat that you need to be careful when stating a position like yours, because it's often used as an excuse to do nothing at all.
A few? How about just 1.
I'm down with anything. The point is that your rent is not high because Bob has two houses. It's because the real estate speculators own five thousand.
Bob should be paying 200% property tax on the 2nd house
Bob is not the enemy, Bob is a lucky retiree.
Berkshire Hathaway and their 500k rental properties, are the enemy.
Both/neither of them are the enemy. The enemy is the system that allows anyone to profit off owning homes.
To be fair, everyone doesnt want to own housing all rhe time (say you study somewhere for a year for example, you might want to rent. Or when you try out anew city) so some landlording is needed. We don't need landlords having lots of homes though.
Landlording should never be done for profit. Socialize the fuck out of it. My water, electricity and healthcare is socialized, why do parasites profit off my home?
Profit, profit, I'd say reasonable profit and mandatory standards.
For example, when I lived in sweden I knew a landlord, he was stopping because you beeded around 50 appartments (might be inflated from his side, but in many countries you can live off of 2 so ...) to make a decent salary.
In sweden you cant rent out a shitty appartment, you cant set the rent as you like it, and youre taxed etc. etc.
I mean it should be like a normal job, not granting you robber rights.
that will make it easier for people to buy, and even harder to rent. Ie. that will worsen the problem.
EDIT: it's apparent that Lemmy users don't understand why someone would actively want to rent, and think everyone wants to buy. This makes the entire topic very difficult to discuss.
"More supply will increase demand"
Hmmm
not my quote.
More supply of houses for sale will make it easier to buy.
Buying is not renting.
Removing rentals from the supply makes renting harder and more expensive.
But right now the situation is people who want to own homes being forced to rent, not people who want to rent being forced to buy a home.
The point is that it doesn't solve the problem. The problem is one, we don't have enough housing supply, and two, the housing supply is largely controlled by parasites (big and small) who profit off their ownership.
Getting rid of landlords solves half the problem but you still have a large group of people who cannot afford to buy homes. You might think that's good because housing prices will crash but who's going to build homes when no one can afford to buy them?
I'm not saying I have all the answers but I know for sure that getting rid of landlords is not a silver bullet solution.
Well mortgages and rent costs are pretty close these days aren't they? Its the down payment and closing costs that price people out of buying a home then? Why not take away the down payment requirements so that renters could participate in the buying market. Maybe there can be deals where someone sells you there home for 1-2 years for 50% market rate but they have to give the house back at the end of the term?
I think the point being made is that this landlord stuff almost rarely works out well these days so why not change?
no.
that is not THE situation. That is A situation.
it ignores foreign students wanting to rent while they study.
it ignores people renovating and needing a place to live for 3-5 months.
it ignores people needing a place to live after they move to a new city for work while they shop around to buy a place.
so much ignored.
Soooo many landlords just eager for those 3-5 month rental contracts.
/s
heh, yeah, which is yet another problem!
Pretty sure renting is what townhouses and apartments are for. Single family homes don't need to be rentals at the rates they are now.
What do you think drives the price of rentals? Not being able to afford to buy keeps people stuck in rental living where they can be price gouged. If the price of houses drops due to an oversupply, more renters will buy, which reduces demand for rentals, which will drive down the price of rent making it more affordable to rent.
supply. and I look at growing population + foreign investment + rising post-covid building costs.
you're talking about shifting rentals to buys, which is stupid, because it flat out ignores lack of supply. we need more housing.
Landlords hording property reduces the supply to people who want to buy. This shortage reduces the supply:demand ratio, which drives prices higher. Higher house prices informs the price of rent which is controlled by the people creating the shortage.
People aren't suggesting to abolish investment property, they are simply saying we should remove the abuse investment.
but landlords "hording" property increases the supply to people who want to rent, which drives prices down.
The entry cost of the housing market is a greater driver of rent than vacant rental properties. The laws even encourage property owners to leave a property empty than lower the rent.
Wait a second. You think that if large-scale landlords have to sell property, that will magically make it harder for other people to buy it? Now now. You can do better.
Buying would be easier, renting not so much. They are different markets.
I swear, these people are functionally illiterate. Thanks.
TO RENT IT. jfc. I said rent. what the hell is wrong with you?
There's very few cases where renting is the best option, and for that group they usually are well off enough to have options.
Society is concerned with folks who can't afford to buy a home right now, even with the mortgage price being less than the cost to rent in some cases. That group has no other options, and because that group is expanding at the moment, its increasingly likely to be affected either personally or via those in your community.
false.
also, I said EASIER TO BUY.
EASIER TO BUY.
HARDER TO RENT.
Can you hear me now?
I was having trouble understanding what you meant because you didn't think about the obvious implications of millions of properties being unloaded in a short time.
If the number of landlords drastically increases, which would happen when you have mass property sales, then there's more competition, and rent goes down.
Or, depending on your setup, the government seizes some of the properties that people refuse to sell, and turns them into public housing. This also drives rent down.
So then, what happens? Oh yeah, both buyers and renters win. Was that clear enough? Perhaps I should write in all caps.
false.
That was .. not convincing. I'm here to learn things. Why are you?
I mean I agree with the notion that corporations shouldn't be buying up entire neighborhoods, but at the same time if a corporation is building neighborhoods then I think it's fine if they own them. We need more units ultimately
And that kids is how I ended up I owing my soul to the company store.
That's stupid. If a company is buying up already existing units to manipulate prices then there's clearly an issue with that, but if a company is buildings new units to sell or rent, then where's the problem? They're literally introducing new units to the market. God, people on Lemmy are so brain dead.
It's one thing to build a house and sell it, it's another to build it for the sole purpose of renting it at peak market rate.
Corporations use to build company towns and rented them at higher rates than they paid the workers.
People fought to stop this but there are always people who insist on relearning these lessons the hard way.
There's nothing wrong with the concept of renting. It only becomes a problem when companies are manipulating the market or price gouging. If companies are renting out units are peak market rate, then the issue there's way more demand than supply. The solution is fairly easy, build more units to flood the market and bring down the prices. It's a tried and true method. Want to see in action? Look at how Texas managed to get all of its major cities to have a big decrease in their average rents compared to last year:
Austin managed to slash rent prices by 9.3%, San Antonio by 8.2%, Dallas by 3.7%, Houston by 3.2%. It's not just Texas, Nashville managed to slash prices by 8.3%, Atlanta by 5.2%, Baltimore by 5.5%, and the list goes on and on. What's the thing common with all these cities? They build more units. They flood the market with so many units that landlords have no choice but to bring rent prices down.
It's not just rents, housing prices are also down in places that build more:
https://www.realtor.com/news/trends/home-prices-falling-cities-where-prices-dropped-most-past-year/
Home prices went down by 11.2% in Miami, Denver by 6.3%, Seattle by 5.5%, Kansas city by 4.9%, and the list goes on and on.
Want cheaper rents and houses? BUILD MORE HOUSES. Can't do that? Update the outdated zoning laws to allow for multifamily buildings, mixed zoning properties, and higher density. This is the path forward.
These articles are speculative on the cause. I don't see any data on the supply increases.
Some of these cities, didn't increase supply. For example San Francisco saw similar decreases it they offer to exploration there.
The rents decreases are year over year but are flat over a two or three period of time, it's just as likely the rent increases were a bubble that popped and not because of some unspecified change in supply.
I mean every city is different. In the case of San Francisco, it could be that city is shrinking and that is driving down prices. However, in the case of the Texan cities, which are all growing, the decrease in rents is indeed due to flooding the market with new housing units:
Though the price housing has gone up considerably which is slowing down construction, which might bring up the rents again. However, this still shows that building new housing units in mass does bring down prices.