"We have seen corporate landlords—who own a larger share of the rental market than ever before—use inflation as an excuse to hike rents and reap excess profits beyond what should be considered fair and reasonable."
As a US citizen living in another country and trying to buy a house, you want me to have to change my citizenship to do this? 0.o I've lived in Japan for the better part of a decade and am trying to buy a property where, hopefully, my wife and I can live for the rest of our lives. Having to become a citizen in Japan (which does not allow other citizenships except in some very specific cases) is a non-starter for me. I need to be able to freely enter and leave the US in case my family have any issues. Why should I be fucked like this?
And you could make that non-local residents and it would still work out well. Stop letting foreign and domestic "investors" buy up all the housing in cities they don't live in.
I just happen to live in Japan, but you can reverse the countries in my example if it helps. If I were a Japanese citizen living in the US almost 10 years and wanting to just buy a home for my family, I think it's unreasonable to have to give up Japanese citizenship just to get a house in the US. Using my example, I would not give up JP citizenship because I have aging family I need to have unlimited access to in Japan.
I'll be honest, I don't think it's unreasonable to need to go through some form of certification to purchase residential housing.
To use US terms, as those are what I'm familiar with, a greencard would be sufficient, since it would allow you to legally live and work in the country.
I would say "valid status of residence/visa" (greencard/permanent residence can be super long processes of over a decade), but yeah that makes sense to me.
So if that process takes a decade or more the person can just... go fuck themselves despite any intention of permanently living somewhere? This is especially rough on people who move mid-life. I also don't know if the US has an upper age on mortgages which could basically keep people out of home ownership which can also keep them in a position of less stability.
Young people can't own homes now because we have a lot of corporations and foreign ownership buying them to either rent at exorbitant costs or leave vacant as investments. I don't really care about the hypothetical person who might come over here at some point maybe pinkee swear when folks here are having issues now.
Also, I confirmed with someone who does mortgages that there isn't an upper age limit on getting a mortgage in the US, so that's not a concern.
I mean, this is just dodging the situation. I'm a hardworking, tax-paying person, but fuck me because some other people are doing bad things? That's not good policy. Stopping people living in the country on valid status paying taxes from buying a place to live is asinine.
Who's going to make apartment buildings? Isn't that the best solution towards making more housing, to have compact apartment structures? How do you think those get built?
You could make every one an HOA and have it be condos.
Honestly I don't think outright prohibition of companies owning buildings is good, but there needs to be a better mix of ownable housing units to rentable ones. There also needs to be better anti-trust enforcement so that three companies don't own and price control nearly all of the housing in a city (I think there's maybe six companies in my city that own almost all of the apartment complexes).
They should mandate that a certain subsection of newly zoned housing be owned by people instead of corporations. It would be a much better, much more competitive market for housing if it were possible to own apartments because you could get small time landlords in those buildings as well as people that own their places outright.
I guess my question is, what's the point in arguing about this? Are you saying the only housing corporations should own are apartment buildings, the biggest most efficient source of housing for individuals in large cities?
My bad I thought residential prop meant single family homes.
But I didn't say anything about who should own apparements. My only point was when people refer to residential property that refers typically to single family homes and is likely what op is referring to as well.
While that may be, companies should not be able to have a stronghold on what should be considered a basic human need. Housing is already in pretty short supply, and it’s worsened by the fact that these companies buy a considerable chunk of this short supply and then turn the purchased properties into rentals.
The idea being proposed here doesn't outlaw renting, only corporate ownership of residential property. It means that the people you're renting from are human beings who will eventually die and either be estate taxed or the house will be sold, rather than a corporation who owns your property until they go bankrupt or until the sun explodes.
A) 100% death tax on all money over 100,000,000.00 at time of death.
B) Closing loopholes that allow hiding that kind of money in unnecessary corporate assets or non-charitable trusts.
C) Cracking down on what qualifies as a charitable trust. Want to leave that money to trust that makes the world better, better have numbers to prove it or it gets disolved automatically into other more effective charities.
D) Automatically splitting every corpportation the moment it crosses a reasonable value threshold.