Kill the billionaires who horde homes.
Ban, and jail, participation in price fixing systems that most people use, especially apartments, to price their product.
Kill the billionaires.
Put caps on resell values of 5% per year to stop flippers.
Again, kill the billionaires.
Set maximum rent increases to 5%.
Kill the… etc.
Billionaires and rent-seeking companies. There are at least three national companies I can think of who are hoarding single-family homes in major cities and renting them out.
Generally they purchase at scale via REO scenarios, and provide no value whatsoever while driving up prices drastically
One example is a company called “Progress,” no better or worse than the others but with a meaningful web presence if you’re curious.
Maybe we should progress on Progress.
Also Black Rock.
Kill the billionaires who horde homes.
It isn’t the billionaires, it is the funds the billionaires and multimillionaires invest in. I have seen these funds buy under-privileged neighborhoods almost in their entirety in less than a year. They replace the cabinets with builder grade stuff they buy in bulk, same with the carpet, a few.light fixtures and a coat of paint (maybe $5k investment) and they rent them out to working families. A neighborhood goes from ghetto to starter within two years, but rents go from ~$800 to ~$2200 as well. Also, those homes will never be within reach for anyone looking to purchase.
Well, of billionaires who invested in these funds found themselves with fewer fingers, they might reconsider their investments.
I actually think we need to cap rent increases to about 2%. In a little over 14 years, your rent doubles at 5%. So $2.5k/mo becomes $5k/month- $60k/year! Since wages have largely stagnated, most renters would be in an even worse place (although definitely better than 10% increases).
I’m down for 2% 😁
Whatever happened to public housing? City governments should start getting into the development business and light a fire under these greedy mfs with $200,000 starter condos.
I wish we had social housing like in Vienna
Yes. Unfortunately city gov’t always reasons that the public money will be better spent if developers front the cost of building, but the developers aren’t building the kind of housing that houses the populations that need it (and in the Bay Area many of these luxury towers have very low occupancy). I wish my tax money would go directly to building affordable and dignified housing that would be managed by a public trust or similar.
People rag on NYC’s projects and claim that they’re proof that council housing will always be terrible, but built correctly, affordable housing can be both desirable and yet still profitable for the council.
The key is to spend a little money to make it nice, plant some trees, hire some security guards, and build some respectable communal space that people actually want to be in. Good public transportation links are also important.
In Hong Kong, all blocks of flats built by the Housing Authority will usually have one security guard on duty 24/7. They become a fixture of the community. Of course, Hong Kong public housing projects tend to be 30-storey high rises with hundreds of units each, but one 24/7 security guard per group of buildings should be enough; it’s more about the perception of security than anything.
Then charge $700 a month in rent or sell the units for $200,000. Even better—set up financing through a publicly-owned non-profit financial institution or a credit union for potential homebuyers. Reinvest profits to build more. It’s a virtuous cycle.
I guarantee there’ll be waiting lists three miles long.
Most places it’s severely defunded or mismanaged. In my town the waiting list is extremely long, housing was limited for years before the recent housing crisis and for some reason they don’t even follow the list of people they have waiting, they skip around. There’s public and section 8 housing that sits vacant for months or years even though the list of applicants is a mile long.
A starter home isn’t just “the cheapest thing in a given market.” Some neighborhoods aren’t starter home markets.
You can’t say “It’s a starter in Malibu” or “That’s starter home prices in downtown Manhattan.” Neither of those locations have starter homes in them.
That said, abolish NIMBYs but let’s be real, no one can afford a “Starter” in those places because they aren’t Starter locales.
Also nearly 1/3rd of all homes in the USA are purchased with cash, no financing.
Salaries in the US are a bit mad though, so it’s mostly inflation surely?
No. Wages have remained stagnant and actually have gone down. The median salary is $74k, and remember that half of people in the US make less than that. 62% of Americans can’t afford to buy the cheapest house in the cheapest state for housing.
To clarify, $74k is the median household income and not salary. Median salary in the US is $37k. Median salary in California, where half of the cities mentioned in the article are, is just shy of $40k.
If you live in the cheapest state, your salary is probably correspondingly low
It doesn’t take much to find plenty of people on Reddit talking about how they make 130k a year as a Walmart truck driver. Or the hordes or software engineers with 300k salaries, grads starting straight out of uni with well over 100k.
There is definitely inflation, the corresponding salary increases just don’t seem to be across all industries.
So anecdotal stories are more important to you than statistics from the US census bureau? For the record, the department does more than send out a survey every 10 years; the survey is like a recalibration for their statistics.
There are 3 primary factors contributing to the housing crisis:
- Inflation
- Low wages
- Housing being treated as a commodity stock
These 3 issues aren’t the end of the story either, the opiate crisis, climate change, exclusionary politics, and many other factors are contributing to the housing crisis. The primary issue is that workers aren’t being paid enough.
Not to mention across demographics. Plenty of people don’t use Reddit for reasons of taste, time, or simply access.
Plus, there’s definitely a bias towards bragging about ones high salary (whether real or imagined). Not a lot of us who are struggling like to broadcast exactly how much we’re struggling. It fucking sucks, and the majority of our lives are spent dealing with that fact.
You’re operating on anecdotal evidence in a heavily biased context. This is why you’re getting the downvotes you deserve. Get your head out of your ass.
Fuck is you talkin bout? Let’s say you have a couple making $100K each, with two kids. Good salaries, maybe even a bit “mad”. You think they can afford childcare and a $1M home?
I work for a small private employer in rural America, in a field where there are no other places to work at without moving. I haven’t had a raise above inflation rate since covid, technically I’m making less money than years ago. Everyone here is fighting each other to take more of that 1% of the wealth we all have to share. Our government is complicit and backroom-contracted into keeping money in the wealthiest hands. A politicians vote isn’t even that expensive.
For real, I remember reading that all it takes for Ted Cruz is like $10,000.
Have you had raises at inflation rate?
Only way to achieve that is to leave for a higher paying job, or threaten to do so, credibly. Worked for me.
That works if you have negotiating power (i.e. marketable, in demand skills). It’s not an option for many people. For instance, I live in Arkansas where Tyson Foods is a major employer. They have poultry plants in small towns all over the place. Higher paying jobs don’t exist in a lot of those places.
I offered to quit for 6 months to get out from a non compete since I am technically a contractor and that got me a new contract and a small raise… That was neat.
I seem to have stumbled upon an employer that actually values its employees, seeing how I keep getting raises that match inflation.
Granted, I left a different job for that initial 40% “raise” …
We’ll see how it pans out.
Mad? You mean not relative to inflation because they are LOW?
