[BelleOfTheBall]

> banning foreign property ownership

Don't you worry, a completely local conglomerate will gladly buy all those houses and that conglomerate may be owned by foreign citizens, but the company would be 100% American.

I know this is very pessimistic but we've all seen how lenient we get with corporations and I don't expect this to be an exception.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's completely irrelevant. If people need 500,000 housing units and there are 400,000 housing units, you can assign ownership of the 400,000 existing units to whoever you like and you're still going to be 100,000 short. The only solution is to build the needed additional units.

[ikekkdcjkfke]

But there is a seemingly infinite supply of fiat but a finiye supply of housing. Only way is to property tax second homes to a very very high degree. Edit: the problem we are trying to solve is getting people a first home, so naturally other categories must suffer untill the problem is solved

[Shawnj2]

This is where CA prop 13 hits to make everything suck lol

Although I still think if we just nuked zoning laws for housing and said anyone is allowed to build any form of housing on any land previously zoned for anything else unless it’s literally a health hazard to so + nuked parking requirements it would solve a lot of problems since we would stop building SFH’s and start building mid rises which would actually meaningfully alleviate housing shortages.

[AnthonyMouse]

> there is a seemingly infinite supply of fiat

This is simply nonsense. If it was the case then the price of housing and stocks and any other asset would be infinite because investors would continuously pour their infinite money into anything valuable that had a finite price.

It would also stop happening if housing prices stopped going up, because investors want investments that go up.

> Only way is to property tax second homes to a very very high degree.

So now the property is owned by a corporation who rents it to the corporation's owner (or the owner's buddy). Unless you intend to do the same thing to all landlords, in which case you can expect rents to increase.

You have to build more housing. There is nothing else for it.

[thereisnospork]

If I may try and put your point succinctly: if there is a housing bubble more supply will make it pop.

To wit: is popping bubbles (or preventing their formation) not the job of economic policy?

[willis936]

If you tax the profits then there is no amount of rent increase that would fix that. Every added penny would go to the state and there would be no incentive to raise rents beyond their operating cost. Sure, there's incentive to commit fraud, but that's always the case. We always need a healthy audit and punishment system to close loops.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Every added penny would go to the state and there would be no incentive to raise rents beyond their operating cost.

There would also be no incentive to be a landlord, so the units would get converted to condos, no more would be built and anyone who can't afford a down payment is homeless.

You also have rather a problem when it comes to operating costs, because when the mortgage debt is most of the value of the property, most of the rent is going to loan interest, which is a legitimate operating expense. But if they can't keep anything in excess of operating expenses then there would be no reason to pay down principal to reduce operating expenses (i.e. interest), so all the buildings would be on interest-only loans and rents would be just as high but the profits would go to the lenders.

[willis936]

>There would also be no incentive to be a landlord, so the units would get converted to condos

This is what I'm after. If too extreme then a tax point that sets the desired ratio of individual vs corporate owned housing units. That ratio should be 100% individual owned imo but I'd be happy with people at least legislating something on the issue.

>most of the rent is going to loan interest, which is a legitimate operating expense

Then don't tax payments on principal or interest.

>rents would be just as high but the profits would go to the lenders

But we would have successfully cut out a middleman with means, motivation, and opportunity to squeeze via anticompetitive practices. Having individuals negotiate rates with a bank is a much better situation than facing price fixed rents.

I'm still granting that some amount of fees be charged to the tenants for shared resources (hallways, elevators, etc), so there is room for some money to be made, but that too should be closely monitored.