Corporations should not be allowed to buy or hold large amounts of residential property or zoned housing land. They create artificial scarcity by holding it back, driving up prices purely for profit.
A less direct but still effective approach is to restrict residential property purchases to citizens. This helps prevent international hedge funds and (sovereign) wealth-funds from monopolizing the housing market.
Some of the most affordable housing markets in the world, such as Austria, implement these policies—alongside strong state-led housing initiatives.
Rich people have smart folks whose job is to think ways to avoid regulation.
In your example they would probably just have puppet citizens who buy land on their behalf. Sure the cost would be a bit higher because the puppets would demand some commission, but hey it’s the cost of running business.
It’s close to impossible to regulate concentrated money. See the drug cartels or Musk as two examples. The cartels operate their own army in South America completely ignoring government regulation. Musk bought an entire gov for himself.
While I can understand your cynicism, and I know the reality of loopholes, it would make it much harder.
Also, consider the more "puppets" needed, they less stable the system becomes, and the more likely a "puppet" exposes the system (as whistleblowers in the mafia).
In any case, the thinking can't be "it's too hard, we can't do anything anyhow" because then society is really f-ed and the rich get what they want: hopelessness and conformity.
Again, there are examples of northern & Scandinavian countries that did this with great results. It's just a matter of pushing through.
I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction. It’s not like we forgot how to build houses and apartments we just aren’t allowed to.
Even if you could build as you please, the labour costs still make up the large marjory of the cost of the home. There isn't a whole lot of room for the costs to come down.
That is unless you destroy the price of labour... Which undoing the global economy will help with.
When I bought my land the #1 driver of cost was either covenants (basically irreversible burden written by now dead boomers in the 80s who were furious someone would build anything but a mansion next to their mobile home pig farm) or zoning. I knew I needed to build as small as possible to keep prices down, so I had to find a needle in a haystack of someplace without onerous covenants or zoning but with some way to establish or create utilities. Everyone was wanting 1000+ sq ft houses on their vacant desert shithole land.
Just water and electric can be a nightmare. I lucked out buying an unproven already drilled old well that was grandfathered in, but if not you have to deal with hoping you'll be allowed to drill or access water and costly regulation for that. Same story with electric. I finally got it, after paying the coop to run new poles down the road, but only after a long fight with another company that kept asking for endless paperwork and expensive surveys that they later admitted weren't even needed. And then there is septic. I found a guy who used to be the county inspector to navigate that for me, but without connections you can get yanked around into all sorts of expensive hurdles or overengineering.
That is an insane assertion, does your house stand on a cloud without plumbing or electricity? Some places require a plan for water and septic on your land before they'll even approve a house.
Realistically, I would not have been able to own my car, which is rapidly depreciating to nothing, without my land on which to park it. Are you suggesting that I should start telling people that my car is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars? I'm quite sure I'll get a lot of funny looks, and probably some angered questions from my financial associates, if I heed your advice, even if it is actually true under some sort of accounting methodology.
You are right that in practice a house requires land, but that does not mean that houses and land are the same thing. Especially given the context here about being able to build where you please, which explicitly took land constraints out of the equation.
You don't seem to understand how land works in the US. Owning land is more like a license to do certain things in a certain place. Part of that is the license and infrastructure that forms a house. Land is part of the house.
Your argument is totally disingenuous and pedantic, you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath the footing and make this argument. In your car analogy, a house without a deed is like a car without a title, you don't own it in any useful sense.
> you will be sued for fraud if you sell a house to someone and rip out the septic system and the soil underneath
If the agreement includes the land, septic system, etc., then sure, absolutely. Likewise, I could also sell my car with the driveway it is currently sitting on, given a willing buyer, and it would equally be fraud if I ripped up the driveway. Lawyers can draft up all kinds of different agreements as far as your imagination, and another willing party, can take you.
But it is not unheard of to sell a house alone. Granted, houses are becoming massive – with the average home today being twice the size of the average home in the 1950s – which makes them harder to load onto a trailer, let alone fit down the road, and thus seeing less and less of it, but it was somewhat common in the past to move a house (and I don't mean a mobile home) from one property to another. They are clearly distinct things.
But, most importantly, the context of discussion explicitly removed land from the equation. It was posed under a theoretical assumption that there were no land constraints. To keep talking about the land in that context doesn't make any sense.
Moving the shell of a house in my county is illegal without waste treatment, which is part of the house permit that forms the legal entity of a house. And I live in about the most deregulated county in the lower 49.
You could theoretically buy a shell of a house in a vacuum but it would be condemned the second it drops off a trailer. It's not useful in a vacuum, no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
> no one talking about housing prices wants a useless condemned house husk.
Nobody is talking about housing prices, so... They are pointlessly squabbling over whether or not a house and land are the same thing, when it is obvious that they are not.
>>I’d argue most of the cost of scare housing is supply limits imposed by ridiculous over regulation of new construction
>Nobody is talking about housing prices
Actually we were?
Nobody but you thought land and a house is the same thing. House prices include the land they are on. Unless you are living on the space station or sea steading, the land and infrastructure is part of housing prices.
I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
We were earlier talking about the cost to build a house. I suppose that is close enough to satisfy your historical observation, but we also moved on from that a long time ago.
> House prices include the land they are on.
It was recognized that we are in different jurisdictions, so maybe things are different where you are, but around here you effectively need to own the land[1] before building the house. How, exactly, can the price include something that doesn't even exist at the time of the land purchase?
Perhaps you are suggesting that once the house is standing and all the bills are paid one might sum it all up and say that is what it cost to get them into a house? Perhaps, but the prices (e.g. the price of the land and the price of the contractor) will still have been observed independently.
> I have no idea why you took such offense to the infrastructure of the house being part of house prices.
I have no idea how you think someone could take offence to a comment on the internet. It is an emotionless venue.
[1] It is not entirely unheard of to build a house on someone else's (e.g. a family member) land, but in that case it is even clearer that the price of the house is not included in the price of the land.
This is 1000% true. Owner builder DIY building is basically unregulated where I live. I built a 600 sq ft house for like $40,000 last year. I have a plan that works, but either no one believes me or they spend all their time looking for ways that it fails rather than how they can succeed.
Nah, 2d space is finite. If you flood an “island” (desirable location) with demand then prices can only go up. We are building skyscrapers in manhattan for over a century so what? Rent is still $5k and $1000 per sq ft to buy.
It doesn't matter if you build skyscrapers for over a century if you don't build enough of them. The only places in the country where rent is actually going down is where housing is actually being built in any significant numbers. Austin builds more homes in a week than San Fransisco does in an entire year.
Rent is 5k because the supply isn't meeting the amount of demand.
