[somewhereoutth]

Completely not true and in fact dangerously (willfully?) misleading.

Housing is much more complicated than supply and demand - for a start houses are not fungible. Local conditions are extremely important.

A lot of high house prices is due to financial engineering - for example long mortgage periods at low interest rates. Just one of many mechanisms to make the rich richer by making the poor poorer. Any momentary affordability benefit is soaked up by higher prices, and those mortgages have to be paid off for longer with much higher total payments.

High house prices are also caused by demand elasticity - things like AirBnB, 2nd, 3rd, 4th homes for the super rich, and housing as a place to park funny money (regardless of whether the house is actually being used to home people) mean that normal people can't compete with this non-home demand.

We could go on.

[Workaccount2]

Cool.

But the only fix is to build more houses.

Regulate all you want. You'll just end up with shadow markets and loopholes.

[danaris]

That's not true, not if your regulations are sufficiently strict.

For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year, you're going to end the purchase of empty real estate to park money, without directly affecting ordinary middle-class people who just want a place to live.

Unfortunately, such a measure would be politically untenable—frankly, even in the 2024 environment, and exponentially moreso now.

[matwood]

> For instance, if you tax second homes (or third homes, or homes not occupied at least 8 months out of the year, or whatever specific condition you want to use) at 100% of the value per year

Many locales already charge much higher yearly property taxes on homes not owner occupied [1]. Where I used to live my property taxes were ~2k/year or closer to 10k/year if not owner-occupied. Of course most of that increase will just end up passed on to renters.

[1] Look up 'homestead exemptions'.

[danaris]

Well, I think there are two slightly different things we're talking about here:

1) Homestead exemptions, where the extra tax is on properties that are not owner-occupied

2) Taxing vacancy, where the extra tax is on properties that are unoccupied more than a certain amount of the year. (This is the one I was describing.)

Both are worth considering; both have their own pros and cons.

[Workaccount2]

You can create LLCs that own the homes. You can rent the home to a friend one night a year so it's an actual business.

The ways to get around something like that are fractal and lead to dumb wasteful whack-a-mole legislation.

So to actually fix the problem, you just build more housing.