The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
Is this actually true or just post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It seems like we shouldnt need a tax on millionaires just to pay for lunches. It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunches more than it is inspiring that we are now.
IMHO it’s not just to pay for lunches (or whatever else); the primary goal is to limit price inflation and housing speculation. The fact that it generates revenue is an added bonus.
I think you misunderstood my question. I was genuinely asking if it was directly from this tax that the program was expanded. The articles I read on it said that this tax would help, as it’s allocated to public schools and transportation. But they also said part of it would be coming from federal grants.
I am all for taxation, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a failure of our government that this took a millionaires tax to accomplish. And I don’t think this goes far enough in either the taxation or the allocation of funds for our school children.
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Tax the shit out of the businesses that are holding onto these houses. Extra penalties for letting them sit empty. Special tax for companies with more than x% of purchasable inventory within certain regions. A lot of this could be fixed by taking money away from the people hoarding it.
We need to tax holding property as an investment if you aren’t living there or using it for your business. I’m not sure if it’s already taxed as capital gains or not, but it sure as hell should be. There’s nothing wrong with property being an investment – you should think of your house as an investment – but there’s a significant problem in treating property like stocks.
There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.
In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.
There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.
Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it’s NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it’s happening.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year.
There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
Also don’t forget that people don’t like housing built near them because it “drives down housing prices.” Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.
“prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent” which idk what it even theoretically means, and limiting AirBnBs, are both means of constraining housing.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Ehhh, you’ve got the right spirit, but that won’t happen lol.
What would be useful is banning, or at least limiting, speculative real estate ownership. A liveable home being unoccupied for no productive reason is a massively arrogant thing for a society to allow.
The issue here is buying power is dramatically dropping which is a function of both wages and prices. Raising the minimum wage alone won’t fix that; instead, price controls will have to be implemented such that all housing is bought back down to prices that are satisfactory to consumers. That can’t happen without federal legislation.
Price controls cause shortages. The solution is plain old taxes - take money away from the rich. Housing will be cheaper to buy up front when recurring taxes are higher. Your dollar will go farther when other dollars are removed from circulation.
A 4% tax on millionaires in Massachussets got free lunch for school kids in the state
Is this actually true or just post hoc ergo propter hoc?
It seems like we shouldnt need a tax on millionaires just to pay for lunches. It’s more depressing than we weren’t paying for lunches more than it is inspiring that we are now.
IMHO it’s not just to pay for lunches (or whatever else); the primary goal is to limit price inflation and housing speculation. The fact that it generates revenue is an added bonus.
Because billionaires lobbied congress to reduce budget for public schools
Just look it up. And we should need taxes for it, because that’s what taxes are (at least they should be) for.
I think you misunderstood my question. I was genuinely asking if it was directly from this tax that the program was expanded. The articles I read on it said that this tax would help, as it’s allocated to public schools and transportation. But they also said part of it would be coming from federal grants.
I am all for taxation, don’t get me wrong. But it’s a failure of our government that this took a millionaires tax to accomplish. And I don’t think this goes far enough in either the taxation or the allocation of funds for our school children.
We need more housing in general too, to be honest, and to stop people buying it and directly distribute the housing to families looking for a primary residence.
Tax the shit out of the businesses that are holding onto these houses. Extra penalties for letting them sit empty. Special tax for companies with more than x% of purchasable inventory within certain regions. A lot of this could be fixed by taking money away from the people hoarding it.
We need to tax holding property as an investment if you aren’t living there or using it for your business. I’m not sure if it’s already taxed as capital gains or not, but it sure as hell should be. There’s nothing wrong with property being an investment – you should think of your house as an investment – but there’s a significant problem in treating property like stocks.
The best way to reduce the viability of housing as an investment is to just build more housing.
And no, you ideally should never think of your house as an investment, because that means housing prices are rising.
There’s fairly few units that people are just letting sit unused and empty.
In 2022, 23% of vacant for-rent units were vacant for less than a month. Only 26% were vacant for more than 6 months.
There’s more vacant housing “held off market”, but keep in mind that includes housing occupied by people with usual residences elsewhere, housing that’s currently held up in legal proceedings, housing currently under construction or repair, or in need of repair. The amount that’s being held off market by Blackrock to keep prices high is tiny at best.
Vacancy taxes have been tried, and their effect is generally fairly small. That’s not to say that they’re bad, just that they’re only a small part of a larger solution.
Prices are a matter of supply and demand.
Housing starts plunged during the Great Recession, and recovered to only mediocre levels. However, over that time the population continued to grow.
We fundamentally have a housing shortage, particularly in places people want to live. One massive problem is that it’s currently quite difficult to build net-new housing in places people want to live, due to a combination of overly-restrictive zoning and NIMBYs who ate empowered to block new projects.
The problem is particularly bad in popular urban areas. Either you build outwards or you build upwards. But if someone wants to live “in Boston”, “in NYC”, etc, they probably don’t want to live in a new build an hour’s drive away from the city in traffic. And infill development is generally highly regulated.
Adding a price ceiling without fixing the underlying shortage is going to benefit the people currently living in an area, but it will make it harder to find a new unit. Adding units isn’t the only important thing, but it’s pretty important.
I live in the north area of the San Francisco Bay Area and there is a shocking number of new builds happening right now. Soooooo many apartment complexes and housing developments. It seems like every day another one has begun. Just on the street I work on there have been three very large apartment complexes put in where there used to be businesses within the last two years. On my 8 mile commute home I pass four more, where there used to be pasture land. This area is known for it’s NIMBYs but laws have been passed (by voters) requiring more housing and it’s happening.
There are 25 empty houses for every homeless person in the US. There are people like Bezos who own multiple $25 million dollar mansions, that sit empty 300+ days a year. There are places with housing shortages, but that is not the case nationwide. The problem is that our government cares little to ensure adequate housing for its population. It sees absolutely no issue in allowing property to be hoarded by the rich and used to strangle the poor.
That’s one of those things that’s technically true, but quite misleading.
The number of houses you could reasonably move homeless people into tomorrow is much smaller than the number of vacant houses. Unless you suggest putting homeless people in buildings undergoing renovation, in new houses that are almost done being constructed, in houses that were sold but have the new owners moving in next week, in rental units that have been on the market for a month, or in your grandmother’s house after she dies while the estate is being settled. Or into chalets on a ski hill, into seasonally occupied employee housing, etc.
The vacancy rate includes basically everything that isn’t currently someone’s primary residence on whichever day the census uses for their snapshot. Low vacancy rates are actually a bad thing and are bad for affordability.
Do you have a source for all of this?
Fun fact: homeless people can’t afford mansions.
Build them places to rent.
Fun fact: Every mansion or luxury condo built is 100+ affordable units not being built.
We’re building at record rates in many places, but just building housing does nothing but line the pockets of developers, because they will always choose to prioritize more profitable ventures, and current methods of requiring a small single digit percentage of their units to be “affordable” aren’t cutting it.
We need to be specific in what we’re building, and who we’re building it for. People moving in from out of state with high paying jobs are often prioritized by city and county governments because they increase the tax base, but this simultaneously raises rents for all of the current residents in crises as the market is dragged up. If we’re not specifically building affordable housing for local residents within each effected community to the best of our ability, then we’re only going to exacerbate the issue further. I’ve lived through “just build more” in my state for 20 years, I know how it goes.
If you build any housing at all, you are opening up “affordable housing” at the bottom of the totem pole. That’s how buying houses works.
No one is going to build a dumpster apartment to rent on the cheap. There’s no incentive there.
Let people build and the less-desirable homes will be scooped up as prices fall. It’s basic supply and demand.
Your state, like mine, has probably been kneecapping development in favor of NIMBY policies for those 20 years
No, they haven’t. They’ve been working hand in hand with developers to entice new money for them to tax, and ignoring the poor who only get poorer.
What does that have to do with this discussion?
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Knocking down single-family or small unit homes to build more multi-family housing is a good thing actually.
Also don’t forget that people don’t like housing built near them because it “drives down housing prices.” Homeowners themselves are more a problem than corporations are.
Then we need master lists of who currently lives in an area and for how much, and who wants to live in an area based on housing bids, homeless populations, etc., like with an application or something.
Or, hear me out on this, we could build more housing.
We could do this by upzoning basically the whole city, and by disempowering NIMBYs. Make it so that every location can build just a bit more densely, by right (i.e. where the approval is automatic).
Make it so you can build triplexes by right in what was an exclusively single family zoned area. Take areas with apartments and let them build a few stories taller. Let neighborhoods evolve into density over a decade or two.
Rent control is absolutely not the solution. Building more is the solution.
How about regulating all the big companies - prohibit sitting on apartments to drive up rents, limit Airbnbs,that sort of thing.
How would limiting housing get more housing, exactly?
Where does he say “limiting housing”?
“prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent” which idk what it even theoretically means, and limiting AirBnBs, are both means of constraining housing.
prohibit sitting on apartments to raise rent - prohibit leaving apartments empty to keep rent high
Limiting air bnbs - keep housing for permanent resident rather than short term rent
You don’t need to keep a short term rental to not limit housing. Otherwise hotel rooms that can be upwards of $300 would count as houses.
Gonna need to see some citations on that happening, and reasoning as to why someone is not allowed to not rent out their property.
If you limit AirBnBs you’re just directly limiting housing, and there’s no other way to even begin to phrase that.
Hotel rooms won’t ever count as houses because you don’t own them, the hotel does.
Only for it to be snapped up by corporate interests and not handed to the families that actually need it.
We need a list of all of the families and single people looking for a primary residence, build new housing, and just give it to them first. No buying allowed.
Ehhh, you’ve got the right spirit, but that won’t happen lol.
What would be useful is banning, or at least limiting, speculative real estate ownership. A liveable home being unoccupied for no productive reason is a massively arrogant thing for a society to allow.