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.
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.
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.
Yea they tried to make America into Camazotz.
I am a builder and have watched this mess get worse and my solution is to get rid of air bnb and corporate investment in housing and to tax the holy hell out of second and third homes.
Edit: Camazotz is the mundane world in A Wrinkle in Time. Its description always had me picturing the suburbs.
Been saying for years the easy way out of this mess is that residential property may only be owned by individuals, and to prevent hoarding, add an additional 10% to the property and sales tax of each property above one. So your 2nd property costs a mere 110%, but your 11th property will be assessed at 200% of the taxes.
We would also need some enforced rent controls, so that expense isn’t passed on to the renters.
For those wondering like me, Camazotz is a Mayan bat spirit at the service of the lords of the underworld. So, I’m really not sure what to make of that reference.
Maybe they meant Camelot? Although that doesn’t make much sense either, at least it’s building-related.
Camazotz is the mundane world in A Wrinkle in Time and its description in that book always reminded me of the suburbs.
As a similar alternative, a Land Value Tax would be a good way to drive more efficient uses of land. Single family homes on large lots in cities would quickly become uneconomical.
This is the root of the problems with housing. We stopped building cities the way cities were built for thousands of years to try a new method. Even after proving that method costs more, uses more land, and is socially isolating, that method is promoted.
I personally think corporate greed helps keep it this way as this type of development promotes more spending. You have to buy a car, gas, insurance and you have to use it to get anywhere. This lets those “I’m already here so I’ll get this” or “I dont wanna drive again so ill buy more” mindsets flourish. Single family homes often leads to everyone owning a lot of stuff as well, private pool, private lawn equipment, private playground for your kid to play alone.
Developer greed also plays a role as buildings are built to be the most profitable, not the most useful, even most new SFH developments are massive, luxury homes. Developers won’t build smaller, affordable homes because they get less money per square foot of developable land.
I don’t think the “corporate greed” argument is that relevant here, not having to buy all of those things means someone has more disposable income, so spending I don’t think really changes, it’s just you spend less on necessities and more on “fun stuff” so to speak. There’s not much imperial evidence to support it either way, and most of the opposition to zoning reform comes from NIMBys who are scared of any changes in the neighborhood and maybe a little bigoted.
Speaking of which - developers: They have good reason to support denser housing, they’ll get higher returns on selling more houses or apartments on the same land. The reason houses are built huge and expensive is that zoning laws specify large minimum lot sizes, forcing developers to sell what few homes they can build for higher prices. Single family zoning creates artificial scarcity (again mostly out of bigotry and paranoia). If developers weee given more freedom to build what they want, it would be most economical for them to build transit-oriented rowhouse developments. This was standard practice a century ago, but since then it’s mostly been banned.
Unfortunately, the political climate favours corporations over public opinion, so corporations have the real power to change our policies. I doubt they would want anything that helps local busniesses thrive (like density and transit) and reduces our dependancy on products like gasoline, cars, and bulk processed foods. Building in a way that the only convenient option is to drive to whatever strip mall is close to you ensures that the corporations in the strip malls and big auto/oil still get your money while they are subsidized by cities/governments.
This seems rather conspiratorial in my opinion, though it’s probably true in a few cases, I doubt it’s the majority. I think a lot of the pushback is from older people who are resistant to the idea for a variety of reasons, and they also happen to be more civically active in a number of places.
I see far more evidence do the latter than the former.
Ditto on pushback coming from private citizens rather than big corporations. I’ve seen it with my own eyes, NIMBYs in my neighborhood killing a proposed denser construction project. The “greedy” development firm wanted to build, the NIMBYs killed it. The article itself even mentions this, this is democracy doing its thing:
Homeowners wielded huge political influence to block any changes they believed could hurt their property values.
Blaming corporate greed is a stupid take. If only we relax NIMBY zoning laws, then the “corporate greed” of developers would automatically incentivize them to build all the dense housing we need (they are in fact very happy to build denser smaller lots if allowed to, contrary to what fire retardant claims), and finally start increasing the supply of housing in order to lower market price.
