or better yet, overcome neoliberalism, the cursed legacy of Ronald Reagan
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.
In news related to this headline, America apparently running out of hyphens in addition to other observed punctuation supply shortages.
That won’t fix shit, that’s 2 million homes that corporations will buy up to jack the rent up. Shit should be illegal.
“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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Yeah but also charge less than $200k for a 3b 2b with a 2 car garage.
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.
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.
Usually, we use both measures.
Americans use any/all of bedrooms/bathrooms/square footage/lot size
Football fields
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
We also measure them in bulletproof ratings. The average house is a level 6.
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.
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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
Building houses to solve the housing crisis implies that the crisis was caused by a lack of homes. Every single one of the 2 million houses would be picked up by a property firm or a Chinese millionaire just the way it has been happening for the last ten years. What you really need is legislation, but what you are getting is more food for the hounds.
Supply and demand. Corporate interests will only buy homes when theres a profit incentive. A housing shortage makes great profit opportunities.
If there are too many airbnbs so they don’t get rented, there’s no longer a profit. If there are enough houses that you can’t buy to flip at guaranteed markup, there goes the profit. If there’s enough houses that you’re not guaranteed a quick sale on your investment, there goes the profit. The point is there are limits on those ownership patterns so you can build your way out of it
Never before have a seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username
OsamaBinLaden is right. Yeah, you’re right. That was weird to type.
We need legislation to prevent REITs and holding companies from purchasing small and medium residential dwellings and properties. The problem that will create when it passes and they relinquish their sizable holdings, is that adjacent properties devalue causing mortgagers to go upside-down. It’s a simple problem to identify, but not an easy one to solve.
Read the username again, it’s much worse than that
Be that as it may, Britain in the 1970s and before actually had a really good answer to this: The government just buys enough property and rents it out to people at reasonable rates, to puncture the bubble and make it unprofitable to be a landlord in the first place as a “job.” People have affordable places to live, we don’t have to have a fight about declaring it “illegal” to own or rent out property, and people with spare cash are motivated to invest it in businesses instead of in properties. Literally everyone wins. Which of course, means America will see it as communism and fight to the death to stop it from happening.
Not saying you’re wrong in your solution either, just saying one other way which has a proven track record.
Oof. That is worse.
My solution isn’t a solution. It’s just a new problem. Your suggestion has merit. Since Republicans would shoot that “anti-free market communist trash” down before it hit paper, we’d first need a Democratic majority in Congress to make it happen.
