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Comment on The consequences of not building enough housing

mic_check_one_two@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them. Then take the proceeds of these taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.

First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent.

Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.

Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.

But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.

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pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
It’s true that it’s doubtful that this stuff will get implemented if we continue the way we are going. Most people don’t know about these issues and talking about it gets this info out there. The propaganda coming from the corporate landlords is heavy and strong. I’m surprised this isn’t getting trolled heavily tbh. Not sure why it isn’t.

Things to continue talking about and what I don’t think people realize, know, or understand how bad it is:

Price fixing is a huge problem in rentals. They have website services that help the landlords do this.

Corporate landlords hold empty homes and apartments vacant until they can get the prices they want rather than lower the price. This is why that trickle down housing shit doesn’t work.

Corporations buy up all cheap housing so downturns in markets are only good for them too. See the first 2 bullet points.

The push for more housing means that there are more luxury apartments, not homes for who need them. They’ll say that homes will be available when they get shitty over the years. See above bullet points and even if that were true, would take 30 years anyway.

Go after the corporate landlords and corporate airbnb shit first, then go after the nimbys. The nimbys are the distraction and pits the neighbors against the 15 minute city types instead of the corporations that are making fucking bank.
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- ScoffingLizard@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
  I was recently a NIMBY. Let me explain. People from California sell their homes for millions and come here and offer way over asking price so we are priced out. Natives cannot afford to live here now. In 2020 they fucked me out of a house I wanted, even after I offered well over asking. Now they want to put 450 homes behind the neighborhood where I finally got a house. The roads are already damn near impassible. The state refuses to allow us to charge the developer an impact fee. We’re running out of water. Our water bills just went up 149%. Real estate has flown through the roof. We do not have enough infrastructure, enough schools, and an ambulance might take 45 min. Traffic is ridiculous. Some person from Cali was in Reddit asking locals for advice, and they attacked her so bad she said never mind, I’m absolutely not moving there.
  
  Honestly, we’re not bad people. We’re just sick if it. For some reason people in high COL places romanticize this area and it’s ruining everything. Like damn, how much more do things have to be to accommodate all these people?
  
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  - pelespirit@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago
    The corporations are the ones making you feel guilty, especially if the infrastructure isn’t there. That’s how they tried it (and won) in Seattle. They’re all like, build, build, build, and then covid hit. The transit takes hours if the person can’t afford to live in the city (see my bullet points). There are a lot of grey areas and people like you. The system is broken and they’re blaming the home owners who don’t want to live in a fucked up area. The CEOs don’t care because they’re money hoarders and living in gated communities somewhere.
    
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