Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.
A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.
Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.
Rich people have smart folks whose job is to think ways to avoid regulation.
In your example they would probably just have puppet citizens who buy land on their behalf. Sure the cost would be a bit higher because the puppets would demand some commission, but hey it’s the cost of running business.
It’s close to impossible to regulate concentrated money. See the drug cartels or Musk as two examples. The cartels operate their own army in South America completely ignoring government regulation. Musk bought an entire gov for himself.
While I can understand your cynicism, and I know the reality of loopholes, it would make it much harder.
Also, consider the more "puppets" needed, they less stable the system becomes, and the more likely a "puppet" exposes the system (as whistleblowers in the mafia).
In any case, the thinking can't be "it's too hard, we can't do anything anyhow" because then society is really f-ed and the rich get what they want: hopelessness and conformity.
Again, there are examples of northern & Scandinavian countries that did this with great results. It's just a matter of pushing through.
I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.
Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
That is an insane assertion, does your house stand on a cloud without plumbing or electricity? Some places require a plan for water and septic on your land before they'll even approve a house.
Realistically, I would not have been able to own my car, which is rapidly depreciating to nothing, without my land on which to park it. Are you suggesting that I should start telling people that my car is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'm quite sure I'll get a lot of funny looks, and probably some angered questions from my financial associates, if I heed your advice, even if it is actually true under some sort of accounting methodology.
You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.
This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.
Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.
It doesn't matter if you build skyscrapers for over a century if you don't build enough of them. The only places in the country where rent is actually going down is where housing is actually being built in any significant numbers. Austin builds more homes in a week than San Fransisco does in an entire year.
Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.
Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.
A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.
Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.