But whatever will poor Blackrock do with their real estate portfolio??
Are you serious? Who do you think would buy these houses? First-time buyers with cobbled-together financing, or massive corporations offering more than (inflated) asking price?
Legislation banning selling of homes to corporations. That’s the only thing that will solve the housing crisis, and permanently. If we’re asking for it and not getting it, it’s because our legislators are invested in the shell game…
Nope. Just need to force all landlords to sell. Make tax on rent ruinous. Tax additional homes. Make it illegal for corporations to own residential property.
Equity firms own 1.6 million homes in the US (both single family and multi family units).
Just saying, that would get us most of the way there.
How many are vacant? Those are the first ones that need to be reallocated.
(Meaning, I’m not pro equity firm, I’m saying an occupied house is a house that is occupied. These 2mil new houses are for new occupants, not shuffled ones.)
I think the key point is ownership. If the house is owned by an equity firm, even if it’s occupied it still counts as a house which could instead be owned by, well, homeowners.
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes? Won’t that just leave us back where we are now?
Do we think we can build more homes than Equity firms can spend other people’s money on?
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes?
Ideally, Madame Guillotine.
A fine French woman she is.
This bubble will be disastrous beyond imagination once it bursts.
Building those houses means current homeowners would miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars when they eventually sell their homes.
If you were to ask most politicians to describe their constituents, they would said ‘married, kids, two cars, and a house with a mortgage’. That’s who they are looking after, that’s their priority. You are not considered a real person or a focus unless you fall into the above description.
They’re looking after wealthy supporters. Rich folk, not middle class folk.
The systems in place are broken. I work 12hr days, with overtime. Credit score over 750. And there is no chance I can afford a house in my area.
Have you tried uprooting your family and moving to a place no one wants to live? Something something bootstraps.
Yeah but also charge less than $200k for a 3b 2b with a 2 car garage.
I thought Americans used sq ft to casually describe houses? Please don’t switch to number of bedrooms. That’s what we do in UK and it’s led to house builders squeezing closet-sized bedrooms into a house so they can sell it as a 4-bed.
I’ve never used square feet as a primary way to describe a house. The rooms are the main concern.
Look at some UK new builds on Rightmove and you will delete this. 1 decent bedroom turned into 3 shitty bedrooms just to make up numbers. You can’t even fit a bed in them all
There are apparently rules in America that require a minimum size
Although sizes can vary from state to state, 70 to 80 square feet in size is generally the acceptable minimum
Just be thankful we are using soemwhat sane measurements, ive witnessed someone use Humvee’s as a measurement. It was in relation to a pool.
Usually, we use both measures.
Americans use any/all of bedrooms/bathrooms/square footage/lot size
Football fields
We also measure them in bulletproof ratings. The average house is a level 6.
A coworker just bought a 1.5 bath, 2 car garage, 3 bed for $500,000+ in Portland, basically no yard/outdoor area.
I’m in that city too. I’m sure it requires a lot of upgrading for that price.
“The US needs to reclaim 2 million houses from firms to revive the American dream of homeownership”
Fixed. The housing exists, it’s just bought up so you can’t have it because they want more profit.
Also fck HOAs and the horse they road in in.
“An influx of immigrants in the country also isn’t helping the housing affordability equation as it has in the past.”
Go fuck yourself business insider. The ol’ “America is full” bit is it? The Great Enemy: the poor immigrant who is going to steal your piss poor paying job, but somehow also “steals” your super fucking overpriced house that even natural born citizens with full time jobs can’t afford.
Get fucked.
Or maybe billion dollar companies should be forced to sell so the average person can buy them
The volume held by investment firms and the like is large in a sheer numbers sense, but virtually nothing in terms of its percentage of the whole sum of residential real estate.
The fact is that we have been lagging in the supply side for decades and the Great Recession and then the COVID Pandemic cut new builds even more drastically. There simply isn’t supply available to address the demand at a reasonable and accessible price.
Do you have the numbers?
New private home starts since 1995: As measured by the Fed
Population of the US since 1995: As measured and estimated by the Census Bureau
Okay, but your assertion was that there are not enough homes currently to support our population if they weren’t traded as a commodity. In NYC alone there are over 3.6 Million Housing Units and a population of 8,258,035, with about half of the units being rental and about 1/20 being vacant.
You haven’t provided any evidence that there aren’t enough housing units in the USA.
A decline in housing project expansion is meaningless without context of how many are actually in use.
There are over 145,000,000 housing units in the United States.
Urban centers should have drastically more rental units than urban, exurban, and rural tracts. An unoccupied rate of 5% is pretty good to cover units in transition.
So if an average of 2-3 people are in a home there are enough. Since our current system puts home ownership just out of reach, selling former rental properties and properties owned by overseas investors would probably be the bump we need.
I’m worried that large developments could be harmful to the environment and a waste of resources.
Even a small percentage is good. The situation is desperate.
The fewer first time home owners that get out bid by corps the better. Doesn’t matter if it is a drop in the bucket.
And that’s even before considering how it would help stop housing from being an investment vehicle.
Housing is always going to be an investment vehicle.
Right, and trickle down economics works. /s
Maybe just redistribute some wealth? The richest nation in the world can afford to home everyone. Homelessness is a policy decision.
Well I mean they’re still going to need to build the houses, which of course would drop the price of the houses, so there’s more to it than just robbing from the rich. Mind you, robbing from the rich is still step one.
There are enough homes to house everyone, supply isn’t the problem, greed is.
It’s also probably a location issue, might not have enough houses where people want to live even though there’s empty ones in buttfuck nowhere.
Or empty ones in Detroit or Florida.
Don’t worry, those florida houses will be filled soon! With water of course, not people
The US had 3.1m houses sitting empty in 2023
property hoarding is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such, imho. Houses are for living in, not speculation.
Where are those houses? I know of plenty of empty houses going for cheap, but they don’t tend to be in areas with many jobs or amenities.
People misunderstand this stat for both single-family homes and apartments. These are not “sitting empty” they are unused and in a transitional state between occupants. This number is also consistent with the gross number historically and is actually below the average in percentage.
Well, some are definitely sitting empty for extended periods. But your point is well taken, there are what, 200m homes in the US? If they are vacated on average every 5 years because of a move, then if those homes are on the market for a month on average you’d have 200m/60 ~ 3.5m homes sitting empty at any given time.
And how many empty houses are there already?
15 million vacant houses. Around 600,000 homeless people. If only 10% of all vacant homes in the use were liveable we could still give every homeless person two and have some left over.
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn’t a primary residence of the property owner.
