- cross-posted to:
- neoliberal@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- neoliberal@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41774241
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A lack of housing is not the problem most places. The problem is that housing shifted from being a place for people to live to a way for people to acquire “passive income”. Hell, the very design of housing changed in a noticeable way: houses shifted from being homes to being feature laden investment vehicles.
I’m not really buying the no housing thing now. The thing is, it turned into a commodity. If you just build more, then those with all the money (because that gap is pretty damn vast nowadays) will just buy and hold and rent them
Wait till air comes next, or some stupid ass shit.
It’s all about the used backpack market here man!
After the embarrassment of the last ten years, and the ongoing embarrassment until the fat orange child rapist dies, then I’d say getting a backpack and leaving the Nazied States of America is probably the best move.
That is not the consequence of enough housing. It’s from wealth hoarding.
Residential housing shouldn’t be owned by corporations. It should be built by them and then sold to individuals.
A co-op could handle it without much problem.
Yeah, anything that prevents the financialisation of residential housing floats my boat. In Iceland we have big corpos selling each other houses at over market price to increase the average m^2 price in an area. It’s pretty bonkers.
IMO: do what Vienna is doing: state provided apartments and flats, competing with everyone else. Try price fixing now, corpos. If Vienna did not have this, it would be at the same level as other european metropolises.
Edit: typo
We have plenty of housing. The problem is its all tied up with money hoarders. There are several times the number of empty houses than there are homeless. If we got rid hedge fund scumbags ability to horde everything including single family dwellings it would go a long way toward fixing this inequity.
Obviously fake and misrepresented. The paint isn’t peeling off that van.
No, it’s the consequences of capitalism.
There are over 15 million empty houses in America, over 5 million of those are in the 50 largest metropolitan areas of the US.
770,000 people were counted as houseless in 2024.
Sure not every house is in great condition, and not every house is in a major city - but there is surely enough that people could use to if not house everyone, at the very least make a huge dent in that figure. The issue is people cannot afford to buy them because housing is seen as an industry not a basic life need.
You know I see this figure a lot, but I wonder how many of these are actually liveable.
My grandfather’s old home is unoccupied, that’s because the roof entirely collapsed. The county refuses to remove it from the property taxes. Based on all available records it’s an unoccupied home, but it’s a total loss in reality.
Who knows, but you only need 5.13% to be in good condition to house everyone.
Oh yeah we certainly have that many homes ready to be occupied tomorrow
Precisely. This is extreme inequity. There are plenty of resources to go around.
The future was stolen.
There is enough housing. It sits unoccupied and sometimes disrepair.
Occupy Homes
that did happen on various degree, only 1 incident in the west last years ago.
Yes, though also some are in such economically depressed areas that you can barely get a job.
Which is a concern, but can largely be mitigated by encouraging work-from-home jobs. If people are able to reliably WFH, (and COVID proved that many jobs can be done entirely from home), then the local job market doesn’t tend to matter as much.
We also need to organize for clean public transit; in the meantime, there’s often plenty in bustling areas, as well.
Lots of empty apartments are in luxury buildings right in the best parts of big cities.
Fully furnished too, just empty tax shelters to be traded back and forth by billionaires and their kids when they need cash.
We need to convince the desk staff and security in this buildings to help people squat in them indefinitely.
Knowing how poorly these employers tend to compensate the staff, they may be happy to accept roommates in the accommodations.
But a lot of them are in densely populated suburbs or cities, driven out by the artificially inflated rental costs. The owners would rather have a few units empty than lower the rent.
How about taxing owners of unoccupied homes?
Haha
I was just watching a YT travelogue of a US guy in his 50s (Gen X) who was travelling the world frugally with a backpack because he can’t afford rent in the US. He had some investments and spent less travelling then working and living in the US, so his investments have grown in the 3 yrs he’s done this.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuNKV0CMgcVUiJNdA-JNlJA
Plent of US retirees in Cambodia for the same reaon, can’t afford the US anymore.
- Crack down on price fixing
- Don’t let corporations run AirBNBs or similar
- Don’t let corporations own any rental building under approximately 10 units.
- Don’t let rental buildings have more than a low percentage of empty units for turn around. They have to lower the rent then. If it goes to $200/month, then so be it.
There are so many things to try, but Trickle Down Housing never works.
Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them.
Like the first vacant house you own may be near a normal tax rate, the second makes both more expensive, the third makes all three super expensive, etc… And these tax penalties should get expensive fast. Like up to (or even over) 100% if you’re sitting on more than like five or six properties. Then take the proceeds of these higher taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. I’d even go so far as to say that renting a single family home shouldn’t totally eliminate the tax, only reduce it. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.
First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent. If the unit is occupied, the tax is lower. And again, even the most expensive landlords should only be able to feasibly own three or four extra properties before the taxes get prohibitively expensive, even after being mitigated by occupation.
Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.
Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.
But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.
It’s true that it’s doubtful that this stuff will get implemented if we continue the way we are going. Most people don’t know about these issues and talking about it gets this info out there. The propaganda coming from the corporate landlords is heavy and strong. I’m surprised this isn’t getting trolled heavily tbh. Not sure why it isn’t.
Things to continue talking about and what I don’t think people realize, know, or understand how bad it is:
- Price fixing is a huge problem in rentals. They have website services that help the landlords do this.
- Corporate landlords hold empty homes and apartments vacant until they can get the prices they want rather than lower the price. This is why that trickle down housing shit doesn’t work.
- Corporations buy up all cheap housing so downturns in markets are only good for them too. See the first 2 bullet points.
- The push for more housing means that there are more luxury apartments, not homes for who need them. They’ll say that homes will be available when they get shitty over the years. See above bullet points and even if that were true, would take 30 years anyway.
Go after the corporate landlords and corporate airbnb shit first, then go after the nimbys. The nimbys are the distraction and pits the neighbors against the 15 minute city types instead of the corporations that are making fucking bank.
I was recently a NIMBY. Let me explain. People from California sell their homes for millions and come here and offer way over asking price so we are priced out. Natives cannot afford to live here now. In 2020 they fucked me out of a house I wanted, even after I offered well over asking. Now they want to put 450 homes behind the neighborhood where I finally got a house. The roads are already damn near impassible. The state refuses to allow us to charge the developer an impact fee. We’re running out of water. Our water bills just went up 149%. Real estate has flown through the roof. We do not have enough infrastructure, enough schools, and an ambulance might take 45 min. Traffic is ridiculous. Some person from Cali was in Reddit asking locals for advice, and they attacked her so bad she said never mind, I’m absolutely not moving there.
Honestly, we’re not bad people. We’re just sick if it. For some reason people in high COL places romanticize this area and it’s ruining everything. Like damn, how much more do things have to be to accommodate all these people?
The corporations are the ones making you feel guilty, especially if the infrastructure isn’t there. That’s how they tried it (and won) in Seattle. They’re all like, build, build, build, and then covid hit. The transit takes hours if the person can’t afford to live in the city (see my bullet points). There are a lot of grey areas and people like you. The system is broken and they’re blaming the home owners who don’t want to live in a fucked up area. The CEOs don’t care because they’re money hoarders and living in gated communities somewhere.
hell yeah, rentals should be made prohibitively expensive to keep empty, if the city don’t have the demand to rent it? Then you should sell it at a price people will buy in a short enough time.
Don’t let corporations own single family homes. Drastically increase the tax rate for more than 3 houses by any single person. A landlords income is not producing anything useful, it’s stealing income from people actually providing society with something useful.
Drastically increase the tax rate for more than 3 houses by any single person.
I would say that it should start building the tax after one house and go drastic like you said on the 3rd.
Don’t let corporations own any rental building over approximately 10 units
Wouldn’t corpos be the ones to buy larger buildings (e.g. over 10 units)? It’s tough for typical individual investors to be able to buy a 100-unit building.
It’s SFH that they shouldn’t be buying.
I meant under 10 units, you’re right. I fixed it. I’m down with a cold and I knew it wasn’t quite right, but my brain couldn’t fix it, lol.
Edit: That has to be in conjunction with them not being able to have airbnbs though too. Cuz that’s just a hotel.
Best I can do is fed interest rate cuts.
China is facing opposite problem
