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 on.
“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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Never before have I seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username
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.
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?
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.)
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn’t a primary residence of the property owner.
I was going to make a similar comment. Write into law that investors have to pay 4x property taxes to the town, if the town for some reason doesn’t want the taxes then it just goes to the federal government.
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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.
Aren’t there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don’t expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that’d cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can’t do that. I’m sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.
A lot of it is a question of where.
The town I grew up in is a great example: it is n a generally rural area and lost its major employer years ago. The economy never really recovered and the population has dwindled, but that’s also true of the surrounding area. There are many empty homes, even in formerly upscale developments, and I can literally buy one on my credit card.
In my current town, a starter home is like 15x the price, they sell within hours, and there’s no open land left to develop.
The expensive area is where people want to live, but there are all those empty homes selling for very little just a few hours drive away
I believe there’s been a general trend of moving toward cities, that leaves lots of inexpensive empty homes behind
There are some cities that are offering money for people to move there and work remotely. They have the housing but not the jobs? I know Tulsa is one, Somewhere in Kansas, I don’t remember where else.
Coming from a solid blue city in a solid blue state, that really doesn’t seem tempting. I’m sure it is much cheaper to live there but is it worth it?
Realistically, my company doesn’t want to let people move without adjusting pay and jobs. I’m sure many are like that. I’m privileged to get pay relative to a high cost of living area so I’m sure they’d be happy to cut me back to low pay. Lower pay and regressive/conservative …. No wonder there is extra housing supply
Plus many states just don’t have the money for such programs. Particularly the shitty ones with lots of empty housing.
yes there is currently extra housing but, unfortunately, sites like airbnb have moved large swaths of the housing market to the luxury hotel market leading to a shortage in actual housing as wealthy, investor, and corporate class people pay premiums for short term rentals that most people simply can’t compete with.
Also boomers are both buying retirement homes and holding onto their previous homes, rather than letting them go back on the market and alleviate some of the shortage. They have more purchasing power than any of the younger generations because they have decades of equity built up, and they’re trying to keep their previous homes to pass onto their children. Both are contributing to the upward price pressure.
What’s your plan to do that?
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.
Home ownership is 65%.
These headlines are wild.
Got a source on that? I’m seeing 26% home ownership rate in the US
The census. I have no idea where you got that 26% number. That’s not even in the realm of close by hand grenade standards.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/
