“We” - as in the government or the taxpayer - don’t build investment or luxury homes at all. Private businesses build them. All they need is permission to build them.
And they want to build them because there’s demand for them. If you don’t let them meet that demand, it will be met in a worse way: by rich people buying the homes of poor people and converting those into luxury investment housing. You can see that everywhere - flips, teardowns, gentrification, etc. That’s what happens if you don’t let enough new luxury housing get built: you think the luxury buyers are gonna stop buying?
So to solve the housing crisis, 2 things need to happen:
government needs to invest heavily in affordable housing and public construction infrastructure.
government needs to get the hell out of the way of the private sector that will happily profit from stopping the bleeding.
Your saying just cut out the process of converting or gentrifying altogether? What is the point of building homes for the rich when it’s the poorest that need it the most. I agree we still need high end homes for high end earners but they’re already in a great position and don’t need, but rather want, more property. Maybe there should be a cap or heavy tax on owning multiple properties.
How do you do that? Let’s say I buy a run-down house, spend 2 years dumping a bucket of money and sweat into it to make it into a nice place, and then sell it. That house is now converted and gentrified. That kind of “flip the house I live in” is how a lot of people got started into playing the housing market. And at slower pace that’s just the normal process of how normal non-investment houses function as they go crazy-high in value, without even involving “investors”.
How do you ban that? And more to the point why would you want to?
We don’t need to build more investment and luxury homes. We need to focus on affordable housing.
“We” - as in the government or the taxpayer - don’t build investment or luxury homes at all. Private businesses build them. All they need is permission to build them.
And they want to build them because there’s demand for them. If you don’t let them meet that demand, it will be met in a worse way: by rich people buying the homes of poor people and converting those into luxury investment housing. You can see that everywhere - flips, teardowns, gentrification, etc. That’s what happens if you don’t let enough new luxury housing get built: you think the luxury buyers are gonna stop buying?
So to solve the housing crisis, 2 things need to happen:
government needs to invest heavily in affordable housing and public construction infrastructure.
government needs to get the hell out of the way of the private sector that will happily profit from stopping the bleeding.
Your saying just cut out the process of converting or gentrifying altogether? What is the point of building homes for the rich when it’s the poorest that need it the most. I agree we still need high end homes for high end earners but they’re already in a great position and don’t need, but rather want, more property. Maybe there should be a cap or heavy tax on owning multiple properties.
How do you do that? Let’s say I buy a run-down house, spend 2 years dumping a bucket of money and sweat into it to make it into a nice place, and then sell it. That house is now converted and gentrified. That kind of “flip the house I live in” is how a lot of people got started into playing the housing market. And at slower pace that’s just the normal process of how normal non-investment houses function as they go crazy-high in value, without even involving “investors”.
How do you ban that? And more to the point why would you want to?