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by harryh
1439 days ago
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This isn't true at all. The vast vast majority of homes in the US are owned by single family homeowners. And even if that wasn't true it wouldn't make much of a difference. Investment firms don't purchase homes to let them sit there, they purchase homes to rent them out. To whatever degree they're competing against single family homeowners they're just causing a small percentage of housing to shift from owner occupied to rental housing which should actually lower the cost of rentals. Especially in NYC and SF the cause is very simple: local government has made it illegal to build enough housing to keep pace with demand. |
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Homeowners?
Mortagage generators & holders (that is, creditors)?
Developers?
What of markets with significant concentration of property ownership?
Or of commercial property owners, who can also skew zoning and construction / land-use patterns?
What of interest groups which can create red-tape nightmares even through good intentions by various mandates: setbacks, offsets, minimum clearances, ramp requirements, etc.
Podcats / video channels / blogs such as StrongTowns or Shane Philips (UCLA Lewsi Centre) are all great starting points for how a tangle of minimum requirements and/or prohibitions starts blocking any possible change from traditional urban-sprawl patterns. Most have observed that the highly-desireable dense development of older cities and towns (1870s -- 1950s, typically) simply isn't possible under current laws and regulations.
I'm generally a fan of regulation, but it's got to be good and effective, rather than simply piled on. As with software, code requires occasional refactoring.