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'Renters Are Struggling': Economists Back Tenant-Led Push for Federal Rent Control
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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I mean, boo hoo?
I bought a house, not because I wanted an investment, but I wanted a place to live. Fuck the CCP, but man were they on the money saying "Houses are for living in," their current, ironic, housing bubble aside. Houses are homes. You want an investment vehicle, buy stocks or bonds.
If the people who see housing as an investment are outweighed by the people who simply want an affordable home as a right, it's become an unsustainable and unjust privilege and needs to be rectified.
Also, I think this ignores the larger factors of: poor zoning due to NIMBY-friendly policies at the local level, and corporate greed as companies, not people, buy up supply. Solve these two problems and we don't have to pick between housing as a right and housing as an investment.
The problem with this plan is that it assumes that we're only hurting some cigar puffing Wall Street fat cats but, in reality, the pain would be felt much more broadly.
In the US, the majority of people own the home they live in. https://www.propertyshark.com/info/us-homeownership-rates-by-state-and-city/ Those aren't big corporation or greedy landlords, they're 50+ percent of the population of each state. Some of those people are billionaires and many of them have below median income. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/chart-assets-make-wealth/
Those super wealthy people that we're happy to throw under the bus don't have their wealth tied up in their homes. Their real estate investments tend to be small fractions of their portfolios. The ones that would get hit the hardest are the ones with less than $100k. I'm glad that you're in a position where you can survive a large financial loss on your house but a lot of people don't have that luxury.
Any plan that just kills their investments without some way to take care of those people will create a disaster. Maybe we could bump up Social Security somehow? That would involve significant tax increases but it could plug the gap.
Huge swaths of our economy are set up to assume that houses are financial assets. NIMBY policies are largely about maintaining or increasing the financial value of the real estate. The corporations buying up all the housing are kind of a red herring. The US has one of the highest owner occupancy rates in the world. There has been a slight (about 1.6%) in non-own occupied housing and only a fraction of those 1.6% are corporations. So it's technically true that corporations hold more residential real estate but they hold so little of it that it's unlikely to be a primary factor in home pricing or availability.
As I said elsewhere, the data is very clear on the matter. We don't have a lot of empty housing inventory being horded by greedy investors. By any reasonable measure, we have a housing shortage.