| You've probably overstepped a few things here. While I'm a socialist, I'm also a realist and the ideas that you can regulate away markets or money is more than a bit delusional, and several of these ideas are just going to lead to worse outcomes. And the first thing that really needs to happen is a lot of the regulations around development need to be removed in order to increase supply, which you've completely missed. So SFH zoning restrictions, height restrictions and aesthetic concerns need to be eliminated. Development that "fundamentally changes the character of the neighborhood" needs to be allowed. The problem with this is that there's a large amount of people opposed to this on all sides who will try to water it down -- this includes bougie socialists (who probably own homes) who don't want to see developers make money and are actually opposed to change. > the government should provide people with the deposit needed to buy a home That's probably going to lead to inflation and more bubbles. > everyone who wants to own a house should have the means to buy one Probably not a good goal either. Every financially responsible household should be able to buy one but this should be accomplished by other policies (increasing supply, banning financial speculation, attacking the causes of poverty, etc). Once the price of housing drops, and the standard of living increases, then this should be an outcome of those policies. > banks should be banned from requiring deposits Maybe I'm just becoming a bit of a boomer, but I'd rather see us go back to 20% down up front. That helps to tamp down speculation since your leverage is capped at 5x. Of course it shouldn't be 20% of current bubble levels of affordability since nobody can afford that. > people should be financially punished for owning more than two houses
> any house that is rented must be offered for ownership to the long term renter
> corporations must be banned from owning homes in order to rent them I hear you on these, I'm not sure how we get there. Houses that sit empty should also be punitively taxed. I'm also not sure that I mind apartment buildings being rented out by a company as long as you allow overbuilding to tank the rents down to something more reasonable, I'm willing to be told that I'm wrong about that though. To throw some additional gas on the fire, I'll also suggest that the government should allow more wage-price inflation. We've seen lots of rising in the prices of assets, but now that wage earners more towards the bottom are getting negotiating power over their salaries everyone wants the Fed to raise rates and throw the brakes on the economy to create a recession and throw those people out of work. What needs to happen is for some moderate 5%-8% wage-price inflation to take hold and for 10 year and 30 year rates to rise accordingly. Right now the actions of the Fed/Government work to contain inflation to the assets that rich people hold, suppressing wages in the bottom half of the economy and increasing wealth disparity. If a moderate wage-price spiral were allowed to happen that would have a corrosive effect on the wealth of the upper 10%, while those living paycheck-to-paycheck would not see their real economic power change (keeping in mind that this is allowing price increases to spill over into wage increases, where what we've seen so far has mostly bee price increases spilling downhill in our economy with no increase in wages). Then with more reasonable 8% rates on 10 year and 30 year bonds this would also remove froth from the financial system. Counterintuitively this will not happen by the Fed raising rates now, that will tank the economy and long term bond rates will still hover around 3% -- but this is what is going to happen. If you want higher 30 year rates you need to let inflation take off and start finally landing broadly in wages. |