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The invisible laws that led to America’s housing crisis
(www.cnn.com)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2023
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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?
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.
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.