The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis
The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis
In the 1910s, US cities began enacting policies that would shape neighborhoods and, unintentionally, lay the roots for the severe housing shortage today: single-family zoning laws.
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Zoning laws affect what you can build where. But a quicker route to increasing the supply of homes (this lowering prices) is to levy high taxes on single family homes that the owner does not live in.
Single family homes have become an investment opportunity for corporations and wealthy individuals. When vast sums find their way into a market, prices can go up sharply. Corporations, private equity funds, and the like cannot inhabit a home. And a person can only inhabit one primary residence (>50%). So if people (or companies) want to own homes as rental properties, they'd pay higher taxes. Some would sell those extra homes, reducing Demand and putting them on the market, increasing supply. The additional taxes some would pay to keep the extra single family homes could fund housing-related programs like section 8, redevelopment of depressed areas and so forth.
Can anyone with experience in housing policy with in? Would this work? Aside from pissing off rich people?
In most states there's already an additional tax for not living in the home in the form of not receiving the homestead exemption.
Expanding the homestead exemption could be part of the solution.
Perhaps, but the prevalence of single family homes is a huge problem itself. They generally bring in less in tax dollars than they cost the city to maintain, since it's more road, sidewalk, sewer, etc. for one household. My tax dollars as someone who lives in a multifamily building subsidize others in my city who have one household on much larger properties. I don't want these people to have more tax breaks and incentivize more of that to be built.
This is a huge problem with suburban devlopments (single family homes, strip malls, box stores). Almost all of them rely on denser parts of the cities to maintain themselves. Unlike the denser parts of cities, the commercial zoning often struggles when the original business leaves, unlike denser areas that are more flexible. Not only do these developments cost more to build and maintain, they often don't provide for as long and can be costly/resistant to redevelpment due to suburban zoning and NIMBYism.
My tax dollars for a single family home are far above that paid for a tiny apartment, and that’s as it should be
So your solution is to cram us all into sardine cans?
There’s a wealth of options between suburban sprawl and 50 story towers of 300 sqft apartments.
https://missingmiddlehousing.com/
Further: legalizing density doesn’t mean that you personally are forced into them. There will always be a market for detached single family homes, especially if you don’t value being in a city anyway.
Is that what were calling apartment buildings now?
I agree an apartment building is nothing but a glorified can.
And its sucks
The guy above you, below you or next to you has a sub woofer going? Yeah you have to listen to it.
Have a home? Not anywhere near the issue.
Yeah but we’re ok with making sardine cans out of wood now, because who needs sound proofing. It’ll make housing cheaper
Yes, I refuse to ever live in a can, not being able to simply open my door and go for a walk. Trying to force that on people is cruel.
Nobody is forcing anything stop with the fake hysteria. it's ok to make it legal to build apartments in more places if people want to.
Is that not what started this whole conversation? Someone claiming single family homes are bad and shouldn't be built?
Where did anyone say that?
No, it wasn't. They were saying the TAXING STRUCTURE for single family homes NEAR CITIES or close suburbs is bad. Single family homes out in the country or in smaller towns are fine. The density isn't needed there. Single family homes in suburbs could be fine, if the taxes paid for denser housing that is needed to support a larger city. People in New York are able to live in the city because of dense housing availability or easy access to commuter trains to get farther out where less dense housing exists. People in Los Angeles/Houston/Atlanta don't have great public transport options AND don't have much high density housing, so the sprawl is horrendous (along with the associated car traffic). If the taxes for single family homes in Los Angeles were higher than for condos/townhouses, then the city could fund either higher density housing (which are actually banned by local zoning laws in some neighborhoods, since nobody wants an apartment building next to their single family home) or better public transport for people living farther out of the city.
Lol are you my wife? She's like, "We need space so we're not looking into the neighbor's windows."
And 100% of the time, I think she's implicitly opting to pay an additional 2-3 hundred thousand dollars (where we are) just to be on an .5 acres of land, living on 15% of that half acre, and utilizing like 5% of it on a daily basis.
We don't need that much space. We shouldn't be laid on top of one another like sardines in a can, but we also don't need to waste as much space as we do for real comfort and fake status. There's a lot of transformation between the urban dispersion of the Southwest (where I live and everything is far away from everything else) and the urban density of Manhattan.
So your wife sees at as simply a status thing it sounds like, that is stupid. I need space because I have dogs, I like to have backyard parties, and I genuinely think I would hate my life if I opened my front door into a hallway.
I also hate big cities. Anything over 20k is too much population for my liking.
Just those who can't afford better.
The consequences of that would be tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people like me quickly losing their place to live. Lots of people can only afford to live right now because they're fortunate enough to know somebody with a second place which they can rent at below market rates. Most of the neighborhood I live in was bought and built in the late 80s, and is now the de facto retirement plan for dozens of military members who bought these places. No one idea fixes anything entirely, but I think the zoning ideas are the most widely and quickly effective, without destroying lives of average people.
The reverse would actually happen.
Home prices without corporate/wealthy investments would quickly fall due to the increase in supply and a decrease in the purchasing power of the average buyer. They would eventually stabilize at prices that people like you could afford.
Rent for multi-unit buildings would also fall as more renters could afford to buy a home.
Those who purchased homes as rental units would still be able to recoup most of their investment by selling the place. They could then invest somewhere that is not hoarding resources and causing other people to suffer.
You wouldn't lose your place to live. Your place to live would become for sale on the open market for someone like you to buy, and if tens (hundreds?) of thousands of those places went up for sale at once then someone like you could afford to buy it. Having necessary housing for other humans be a retirement plan is kinda fucked up.
The issue is there's nothing stopping house owners from increasing the rent they charge to cover their costs. There needs to be enforced rent control in order for the profit margin to be squeezed.
That's a different argument. The point here is that extra money (even if it is paid by the renter) then goes into the city funds to build more high density housing and more public transit to get from lower density areas to the higher density areas.