Instead of lowering rent build affordable houses and apartments and sell them with a license that says they can only be owned by individuals who own no other properties.
No corporations, trusts or other business entities.
This is essentially the problem. Most of the homes that have been built in the past 20 years are these big ass houses... Nothing is small or affordable to build up equity, so apartments have no natural predators..
People who have houses dont want smaller, cheaper houses to be built, because it could lower their property value...
America is locked in an unspoken battle between people who are stuck renting, and people who live in houses.
The people in the houses, dont want more new houses... they want their house to be worth more. The only disadvantage to your house being worth more, is property taxes... but that often pushes people to simply vote against property taxes.
The people in apartments, want new places so they will be cheaper... this also lowers the rent, because the only way to lower the rent is to have vacant apartments...
The "a house is an investment" logic, has done serious damage to the economy, in that people view their homes as "investments to be sold for profit" rather than a place they lived their lives. So people sell them for far more than they were worth. If you're in a home, a high price market is for you... but now, if you want to even buy a home, you gotta make 100k, which means you have to *charge* 100k... and boom, look at that, now everything is 10x more expensive. as everyone fights to argue their worth the minimum 100k needed to buy a house.
The only real way out, is to push for more, smaller homes that allow renters a closer transition than a 600k house. and allow them to buy a place that is theirs... Realistically we needed to be doing this 20 years ago...
Even the small "starter" homes by me are like 200k. Or if they're not, they're going to need that much or more put back into them. I'm seeing houses that are barely more burned out husks asking for 50k on zillow, and ones that are stripped to the studs asking for 100k.
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u/YouDoHaveValue Jun 20 '25
Instead of lowering rent build affordable houses and apartments and sell them with a license that says they can only be owned by individuals who own no other properties.
No corporations, trusts or other business entities.