Yeah if you want to make them cheaper you gotta cut the buyer pool and increasing the taxes exponentially based on number of homes owned seems very logical, I’m sure there would have to be some careful thinking to make it something can’t just get around with trusts or whatever but I’m sure someone can figure it out
That’s a fair criticism of my ideas, but also fairly easy to address (I think). Set a cap on the loan value based on an appraisal of fair market value. So let’s say there’s a home where the winning offer would be $600K all cash from an investor. The goal of the program is to make the winning offer a $600K offer from a regular person on a government backed mortgage at 4.5%.
We need more housing too, there are definitely multiple factors causing the problem. My premise is that if we could snap our fingers and build enough houses over the next few years, we’d still see investors snagging them and turning them into rentals.
nimbys tho
Probably need to allow corporations to own at least apartment buildings, but I’d cap their profit margins and executive pay or something. That’s obviously never going to happen, though. But taxing the shit out of the 4th+ home to make it impossible to accrue an empire of rental properties sounds like a good way to go.
Curious what you think about programs like California Dream For All.
Shared appreciation loan to help first time homebuyers with their down payment, which is paid back to the state fund when they sell the house. So the program sort of becomes self-funding.
Just pay for fucking child care, that crushes millennial budgets more than anything
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I’m only a little familiar with it, but it seems good - at least it’s an attempt to help first-time homebuyers get a foot in the door. Sounds like it’s been working, but it’s a very small program so far? Like it only accounted for less than one percent of homes sold.
My understanding is that they can also pay it back anytime and then they’ll own all the appreciation?
It’s a big part too, and Dems should be trying to subsidize it, but plenty of people without kids are getting killed on housing inflation regardless.
The problem with that chart comes from the word real. That means it’s adjusted for inflation and this whole argument is really about how inflation is calculated and how poorly that captures the disparate impact of different goods in the very different baskets of lower, middle, and upper class people. Poor people have a much lower homeownership rate than middle class or upper class people and food consumes a much larger share of a typical poor families budget than it does a middle or upper class family. Rent increases have absolutely kicked the poor’s teeth in and every one I know feels worse off than they did in 2019. It’s the combo of rent + food that just absolutely wiped out any gains they got from going from 13-20 bucks an hour. They typically live in worse apartments and eat less meat in 2024 than they did in 2019, it’s hard to tell someone who downgraded their living quarters and diet over the last five years that stuff is getting better for them.
I should note that there are few subjects in economics I am as passionate about as how unbelievably shitty the metrics that are in common use to measure the economy are. Granted most of the problem there is simply that the idea that big econometrics (GDP, inflation, CPI, unemployment rate, heck even the labor force participation rate) could ever accurately do what we use them for is a joke. There comes a point where you’ve generalized so much that you’ve entirely lost touch with reality for large chunks of the population, and that happens at a much smaller scale than any of the headline economic stats.
Just catching you up to the state of play. Last time we had this argument CaffeineNeeded got absolutely wrecked and now comes back to periodically passive aggressively post some article from some mainstream media person that also buys into the usefulness of big econometrics in the real world… and it starts again.
For the record the anti econometric crowd openly acknowledges that the US is doing better than the rest of the world and Biden is overall doing a pretty good job on the economy with the cards he’s dealt. We just think Biden holding off on crowing about how great the economy was was actually a good political move and Caffeine Needed thinks Biden should have been taking victory laps a couple of months ago.
If you make 20k a year and you got a 4k a year raise you saw your income grow 20%. If rent went up by 400 bucks a month you’re still poorer than you were before you got the raise. This is another artifact that starts happening with huge econometrics where tiny amounts of money to a rich person actually cause huge swings in wealth and consumption further down the ladder.
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A big part of that is an endless rightwing drumbeat about how the economy is shit ever since Dear Leader got ousted, and just plain old Republican partisanship that thinks the economy is always great under Republicans and bad under Democrats, unshakably. Why is counter-messaging this so terrible?
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I think telling people “the economy is great” is unlikely to be helpful because there will be reflexive arguments of why it isn’t. But I do think there is utility in saying specific things that are good (like unemployment) then if some people use that info to think the economy is great on their own so be it.
And yet, somehow, messaging that the economy is terrible just plain works?
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There’s no way saying the economy is good doesn’t work. People are morons and sheep who are very persuadable as to what reality is. You have to sell that reality though.
Nobody believes they have enough money, so telling them economy sucks reinforces a belief so is easily accepted.
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Dunno, Trump bragged about the economy and stock market all day, everyday and it worked for him. Think he would have cruised to reelection on that if not for COVID.
Wat? He got beat by some old man
Tax 2nd homes 20%, 3rd homes 30%, etc…
Stuff like this is generally okay, but like CN mentioned I think it also falls into the bucket of things where programs that make it easier for more people to buy homes adds to the demand side of the equation, and without any levers pushing on the supply side as well, that just ends up increasing prices for everyone. Kinda like how federally-guaranteed student loans have ballooned university tuition costs and saddled an entire generation with debt they can never discharge.
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This would be such an awesome change.
One of the real estate bros that I’m “friends” with on FB is always posting stuff like “just closed on another banger, gonna be flippin this one with Joe muscle tee and adding to my rental portfolio”. This one dipshit probably has 15+ rental properties now, and continues to siphon up good starter homes and single family homes removing them from the market for potential buyers so he can bleed renters dry. And this is just one failson in one area. And because he is a real estate agent a lot of these aren’t even getting to market in the first place, he’s buying them before they even get listed.
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