I guess what they hope for is that landlords would face foreclosures or dump property, causing prices to fall, enabling more people to buy their own housing. That all depends on how many of current tenants are just outside the ability to buy and that being the main reason they rent instead of own.
The last thing you want if you
want to decrease unemployment is for people buying homes. Once you buy a house you limit your mobility and limit your optionality to go to where the jobs are.
In fact, you should be encouraging shorter leases.
I got rid of my house in 2012 after getting married so my (step)sons could stay in their much better school district. I was hesitant to buy a house in 2016 because I had no idea what direction my career might take when my youngest graduated in 2020.
I might have even gone the r/cscareerquestions route and “learn leetCode and work for a FAANG” and move to the west coast. But my rent was increasing like crazy and I wanted to lock in my housing costs by buying.
Thank God I found a remote opening at $BigTech. If not, I would be selling my house in the next couple of years and trying to move - under normal non pandemic circumstances.
If the mobility was true to such an extent you wouldn't have the overinflation the real estate market to the degree we see in certain places. That all goes out the window if the employers in the area close down, of course. But then the landlords have the same problem anyways.
Over inflation is mostly on the west coast because of the inflated salaries of tech companies that until now, didn’t want people to work remotely. There is no reason that a software company couldn’t have all of its employees work from anywhere in the country.
As far as I know, the entire cloud consulting division of the three major cloud companies always had plenty of by default remote jobs. I know that AWS does (that’s where I work).
I probably would if everything dropped 25-50%, I imagine a lot of other people would too. Or if they were already going to buy a house or condo they’ll just get a bigger one.
So it would help pretty much anyone who is not over leveraged (barring second effect like a pension relying on MBS) and in the market for real estate which is pretty good in my book. We shouldn’t set up our economy so that we allow people to overleverage in investments assets and then bail them out when they run into issues because of that.
I could not care less if overleveraged landlords crash and burn. It’s money in my pocket because my rent may go down (when I switch places) and it makes it easier for me to afford a place to live in.