thinking that homeless illegal immigrants are the root cause of home shortage where a single corporation or a billionaire buys thousands of flats to rent them to people for exorbitant prices.
in one way it works because if you kick out many homeless people out of the country, you can say that in one year you cut homelessness by half.
Thats currently already done with jail. The main problem is homeless people don’t pay their jail bills. In my state 15 years ago it was 30$ per day you had to pay to be incarcerated in jail, not prison.
Neither choice is great. One is evil.
That 25k quickly becomes “oh, everyone had 25k more so we can charge 25k more”.
Don’t give rich house builders tax breaks, they’re the ones causing the problem by deliberately not building enough. You’re the fucking government. Build houses yourselves. Rent them through social housing programs.
25k is for first time home buyers, not everyone. You can’t have separate prices for first time buyers and the rest of the public, and a seller won’t know how you are financed until after the house is listed anyways.
This absolutely will help, because if you’d just ask anyone trying to get a home, the down payment is the hardest part to satisfy.
The only way a house cartel can form like this is for those that own the homes. The builders don’t own the homes, corporations do. Those corporations collude and price fix to create a cartel. Focus on that.
dont allow corporations and billionaires to buy thousands of flats
Yeah, that too.
The precious “free markets” have had their crack at it, and have shown that they’re not to be trusted to either own or build them. Prices have soared and that’s 100% intentional on their part.
Most builders are already fully booked for work. The one’s that could work faster generally aren’t the ones you want building your house.
I’ve started to come around on the 25k down payment assistance. It definitely has it’s problems, and there will absolutely be those who gouge because of it. But because it’s specifically down-payment assistance it will still help first time buyers get mortgages on houses they can afford the regular payments on, but don’t have the extra to set aside for a 10% down payment because rent is taking everything they could be setting aside for a down payment. And it’s limited to first time home buyers, with 2 years of on-time rent payments, and says “up to” 25k. Wouldn’t surprise me if it ends up being limited to 10% of the purchase price (which gets you more favorable loan terms).
My wife and I only own our home because her wealthy dad was willing to front about half of the down payment with an interest-free repayment to him alongside the mortgage. With 25k from the government we’d not have needed that, and we got an acre in California. 25k is huge.
We’ve only ever had trouble with this mortgage once, and it was trouble we could have managed without help had we just tightened our belts for a while (just don’t go to the ER. Even if you have insurance. Even if you’re dying on the floor and an ex first responder demands you to for your safety: die instead. I am not joking, had it not been for familial help we’d be paying it off for the next 5 years and it would eat almost all of the little savings we’ve finally started managing to build up, so one more bump and we’d lose fucking everything), so it looks like all those “well sure you can afford rent that’s 1.5x the cost of the potential mortgage, but how do we know you can afford it on the job you’ve had for 8 years?” Pricks were wrooooooooooong
So the mass deportation would be of lawful alien residents, because undocumented residents cannot buy houses unless it is straight up cash, and even then would have a hard time getting insurance or utilities, you know, without a SSN, credit history or IDs. Unless they use a stolen SSN, which is very difficult and rare.
As usual, the blue choice is obviously much better than the red choice, but only in comparison to this bat shit crazy red choice. On it’s own, the blue choice is still rather bad.
I’m starting to think that Republicans just exist to make the bad Democrat options look always better in comparison.
If you have one side that is pushing into the crazy territory really hard, the public discourse will change and shift in a way, that a moderate position will be perceived as extreme. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
Your comment made me think of this spoken piece at the end of Anti-Police Aggro by Oi Polloi.
“Revolution isn’t a thing that happens overnight. It’s not a thing that - the orgasmic storming of Buckingham Palace and everything’s all right in the morning, we’ve got a revolutionary society. We’ve got to realize that as things get harder - when we have a revolution, when we’re headed towards a revolution things’ll be harder still - and when we’ve obtained our revolution it doesn’t stop - it continues on and on and on and on - It continues on until WE are the moderates. Right? When we are the moderates that’s when we have a revolution. When ordinary people say “Anarchists? Ah, fuck - they’re a load of fuckin liberals - they don’t believe in revolution at all, ah, fuckin hell they’re useless, like, you know” - Yeah, that’s what I wanna see. That’s what I’m fuckin’ fighting for.”
I’m curious how many houses/apartments are unused in the US, acting as a speculative asset and if building more is even necessary.
If enough more houses are built that prices stop increasing faster than inflation, housing will no longer be valuable as a speculative asset. Building more houses BOTH makes housing immediately available, and changes the market forces in a way that pushes out investors squatting on un-lived-in units.
Building more is necessary if the available housing is not located where appropriate employment is located. Thus, the gross number of available homes isn’t a good metric to use for determining the actual need for new construction.
The US has a population density of 33 people km2, But “Massss deportation!”
Of course there’s the best option which is an non-occupancy tax that goes up exponentially for each additional property you’re sitting on for speculation.
That right there would be a hard counter to wallstreet hoovering in the housing market.
It’s like you’re not even considering the feelings of the millionaires and billionaires with 72 houses each and I for one just won’t stand for it.
That on top of a tax that is highly progressive after x number of properties, regardless of occupancies.
If a landlord who actually takes their job as servant to their tenants seriously gets some efficiency of scale - say enough units to justify a full time maintenance person who is available on call to support tenant issues - I don’t want to punish them for that. Surely we can develop metrics to identify predatory landlords that are more accurate than number of properties.
The worst idea is ever giving down payment assistance. Government subsidizing actual builders, sure, but free money to property owners just increases the price to meet supply and demand and goes right into their pocket. It actually increases home prices. Extremely stupid.
Of the four ideas that are listed on this picture that’s the one you gonna go with for being the worst?
This is just to first time home buyers, not to anyone buying a house
It’s more pointless than bad, I would think.
I’m all for it of they include vacant land… I wouldn’t mind having acreage, and getting one of them unfinished Amazon houses.
“Kill 3 kids and bulldoze the neighboring nature reserve (it won’t give us more chairs, but it’ll feel good)”
its called a nature reserve because its a piece of nature thats reserved to be used as a golf course in the future
Immigrants own Chase Manhattan?!!?!
Damn, lern somethin’ new errday …
Bothesidezzz
This meme is extremely naive. For many American voters, the primary residence is their one major investment – and will severely punish any elected official that reduces housing prices. The result is neither party will do much on this issue.
I hope that you’re right, because in 20 years that will no longer be true, and maybe we’ll be able to make real progress on housing at that point.
It’s only going to get worse in the coming years as weather gets more extreme and entire towns and city’s get swallowed up by the ocean.
“destroy nature and ruins lives” vs “destroy nature, increase stock value, build three luxury chairs that no one is allowed to live in.”