I am anxiously following the real estate market and prices are far outpacing the wage growth, making real estate really unaffordable for a lot of people, and yet there is very little political will from politicians to do anything about it.
This is especially true for desirable areas and big cities, and slowly pushing low earners to the outskirts and even outside towns. I know plenty of people who hoarded multiple properties and now they simply rent them through Airbnb or booking not to mention big corporations trying to snap even more and rent them at outrageous prices. While plenty of people cannot afford even rent in those cities.
Mind you I am not US based, but I know that this is pretty much a world phenomenon for quite a few years who got really accelerated by the COVID pandemic, but its effect will cripple future generations severely who will never be able to purchase their own roof over their head and they will forever be stuck with ever increasing rents increasing enormously the financial burden of those people.
I don’t know for you but I believe this is completely unsustainable in the long term and this will become an even bigger problem in the future and I wonder why there is so little done to tackle the problem now, and what are those politicians hope, that this will magically disappear tomorrow and all will be roses?
Why aren’t universally some laws against home flipping and people owning more than one residential property? I think the right of having a roof over your head is a basic human right and every person out there deserves to have a decent home and not be forced to live on the street.
What should politicians do for first time home buyers? If you’re going to say give them money, I think that will actually only make unaffordability worse and drive up prices as everyone floods the market to use their credit.
What actually would help is if the US government created incentives to drastically increase the housing supply.
One way they could increase the housing supply is by severely taxing corporate ownership of single-family homes (and possibly low-occupancy multi-family homes like duplexes).
Give it a grace period, say… 3 months (to cover the cases where a bank forecloses and is sole owner while the house is auctioned), then charge like 95% tax on market value every quarter.
Additionally make it illegal to buy residential property if you do not spend more than 70% of your time living in the US (including travel) and must be a US citizen or US-headquartered company (with eminant domain type laws to reclaim the property if the company or citizen moves out of the country)
The town my parents live in would rather pay fines every year than build the state mandated amount of affordable housing and risk, gasp, lowering property values!