Comment by mattmaroon
2 days ago
They do it by citizenship, and you might be surprised how many investment properties are vacant homes, but I’m not necessarily advocating for this in any case. The real cure would just be right to build laws.
The problem is, you can’t do that at the federal level, and the people who vote at the local level are the homeowners who benefit from housing restrictions.
The federal government has a very difficult task. They want to make home prices basically stay flat for a long time, and they have limited tools with which to do it since they can’t do the one thing every economist agrees would solve the problem.
Could homeowners be convinced with truckloads of money? As in, yes if you increase density beyond demand the value of each individual home decreases, but the value of the land dramatically increases if suddenly your single family home with a lawn could be converted to a 9 story tower renting out units to 20+ households with infrastructure spending diverted to your area to improve it. Are landowners unaware or just do not care about the profit potential?
I just don’t think it works that way. The developers don’t buy existing homes, they buy farms and golf courses and large vacant tracts. They don’t frequently just like buy 4 homes and put 20 where they had been.
Most people have most of their money tied up in their home equity and would lose an amount that hurts