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Does step 1 mean I can't rent my apartment from a company anymore? Seems complicated in that case, I don't want ro own a house, I don't know anything about them and I don't care.

I'd prefer if step 1 was something like "remove government subsidies to people who buy or own real estate". And step 2: Build publicly owned apartments.

> Does step 1 mean I can't rent my apartment from a company anymore?

Why should a company own a residential property for the purposes of renting it out and spinning a profit? I'm saying we must remove that if we want housing to be affordable.

> I'd prefer if step 1 was something like "remove government subsidies to people who buy or own real estate".

This is such a classic misunderstanding of the problem. Government subsidies are not the core problem here, and they have extremely minimal impact on the cost of housing, or the availability of housing for sale.

> And step 2: Build publicly owned apartments.

As we know projects like this take forever and go through literally decades of red tape and bureaucracy. There is a much simpler and faster way that will address the crisis NOW. Let humans who need a house to live in buy the houses that already exist but are being horded by companies and other people whose sole purpose to own the house in the first place is to spin a profit.

We absolutely should not let companies like Nestlé buy all the available drinking water on the planet so they can sell it for high profits, so why the hell are we letting companies (and people) buy all the available housing for the purpose of renting it at a profit?

It would be interesting to apply the existing anti-monopoly rules designed to prevent Nestlé from buying all the water to the companies who are buying all the houses.

Knowing the deep aversion to risk the owners of these companies have I guess it would only take one successful ruling to discourage pretty much the whole market and significantly reset house prices.

Private landlords would take a bit more finagling given that renters also dream of one day owning multiple homes they can rent out but maybe one could sweeten the pot by finding ways to help folk retire more easily?

Implementing this may take winning a national election and a non-trivial amount of social engineering but it's not like it hasn't been done before in other places at other times.

I do like your ideas.

> that renters also dream of one day owning multiple homes they can rent out

This is precisely what needs to stop.

As soon as you have some people buying multiple houses to make a profit from, you make housing un-affordable, and there are not enough to go around because some people have many.

I'm sympathetic to the goal of achieving affordable housing, but by this logic why would we let private companies run anything?

We do because private companies are often good at running things and usually their profit is small compared to the benefits they bring by being competent and professional. This is far from always the case, of course, but in my experience the renting market works well and I'm happy I don't have to deal with the hassle of owning an maintaining part of a building.

Step 1 is good in my opinion, though you might need some carveouts for corporations/trusts as there are sometimes good reasons for those; it should be a whitelist though -- only some very specific circumstances are allowed, like say a property being held in a trust to be passed onto a descendant.

For Step 2 though, what about instead of limiting how many houses you can own (as there will probably be significant legal challenges to that) what about progressively punitive property taxes on additional properties. Every house past the first pays 10% more annual property taxes than the previous one. By the time you're on your 10th house, you owe more than the value of that house every single year in property taxes. That gives those with really large amounts of fuck-you money the chance to still have those sorts of houses, but they operate at a pure loss, and we all get the benefit of that tax money.

> Step 1 is good in my opinion, though you might need some carveouts... like say a property being held in a trust to be passed onto a descendant.

What you're saying makes logical sense, though I think as soon as you make a carveout, it will get exploited.

Many countries around the world have a housing crisis. There is no reason for a house to be held for some decendant to have it later. People need houses to live in NOW, not for them to be tied up waiting for some person to have it sometime in the future.

It's ruthless, but I would just as soon force them to sell it so someone else can use it. Like drinking water or food, it is not reasonable to horde a limited resource which then means others miss out.

> For Step 2, what about progressively punitive property taxes on additional properties. That gives those with really large amounts of fuck-you money the chance to still have those sorts of houses, but they operate at a pure loss, and we all get the benefit of that tax money.

Still doesn't fix the problem.

We don't want more tax money, we want houses for people to live in. A billionaire could still own 100 houses and just run them all at a loss and not care. That's 99 people that now don't have a home because one person is greedy.

> as there will probably be significant legal challenges to that

Well, yes. We're talking about changing the LAW to make this thing explicitly illegal. That means there will be people that won't like it, and interestingly enough it will only be the greedy people who are hording and stopping other people having houses that will be upset. That is what we want. If those people are not upset, we're not doing enough to stop them ruining society for everyone else.

> It's ruthless, but I would just as soon force them to sell it so someone else can use it. Like drinking water or food, it is not reasonable to horde a limited resource which then means others miss out.

The ruthlessness is part of the problem. You need some escape hatches, or you strongly incentivize a lot of people to not go for this. You want to give those on the fence a reason to go to your side of it.

> We don't want more tax money, we want houses for people to live in. A billionaire could still own 100 houses and just run them all at a loss and not care. That's 99 people that now don't have a home because one person is greedy.

Well, I would argue that having to pay 1000% of the houses' value every single year will be beneficial to the rest of us. Yes, sure, it takes some houses off the market, but a $1m house would be generating $10m in tax revenue every single year for the locality. At that sort of return, let them have their 100 houses. We can use the money they pay to fund building more housing or maintaining infrastructure.

I'm willing to let a few dozen billionaires have their vanity homes if it means we get to absolutely fleece them for the privilege.

> or you strongly incentivize a lot of people to not go for this.

By very definition if we do literally anything that makes housing more affordable, we make it less of a good invetment, which means a lot of people will not go for it. We already covered that in my first comment.

Old people that own houses want them to be a good invesment.

Young people that do not own houses want them to be affordable.

Pick one group to make happy.

> We can use the money they pay to fund building more housing

Now you're complicating the issue and getting away from the core issue/problem here. Yes, building more houses would be great, but that is NOT the fundamental problem here.

The fundamental problem that has to be addressed first, is that housing can not simultaneously be a good investment AND be affordable. We MUST fix that first.

> Old people that own houses want them to be a good invesment.

This sounds very simplistic. The majority of homeowners don't care.

You talk a lot about investment but if you ask homeowners if their house is an investment or a home, the majority will say the latter.

For homeowners who want to live in their home (as opposed to house flippers) the value of the house is not relevant. They live there, they plan to continue living there. Having the value go up is not good, it just means paying more taxes for the same home. It's better for the value to remain constant or even go down (same home, less taxes, yay!)

> housing can not simultaneously be a good investment AND be affordable

That's impossible from simple economics. As long as there is inflation (and there will always be inflation, it is a goal of the fed), a durable good cannot go down in price over the long haul (unless the whole city collapses like Detroit, but that's not good for anyone either). What you wish for is impossible.

I think your last objection is either incorrect or at least an uncharitable/incurious read of GP.

What do we mean by "good investment"? When I use that term, I generally mean something close to "someplace I can put my money and have it grow faster than inflation".

In that sense, something that is a "good investment" will tend to get more expensive over time in real dollars (by definition).

If housing is affordable at some moment in time and is a good investment, it will increase in real price until it becomes unaffordable at some moment in time. This argument is the fundamental reason that it's bad economic policy to try to make housing into an investment, but rather to have policies that tend to make it a poor investment, in order to preserve affordability.

> What do we mean by "good investment"?

Housing is not a share of stock, it's a place you live in. So by good investment, I think the criteria is not that it beats any kind of index fund, but simply that it beats renting. Because you have to live somewhere. Either rent or buy.

> to try to make housing into an investment

What does this mean? Who is trying this? What do they do?

As a homeowner who is reasonably (best I can) politically aware and always vote, I have never experienced these forces trying to make housing an investment. It's never been on the ballot here.

> have policies that tend to make it a poor investment

I believe that's impossible. Only way would be a dictatorship that says your house will be taken away from you and demolished every 30 years, or something like that. Would you want to live in such a world?

> So by good investment, I think the criteria is not that it beats any kind of index fund, but simply that it beats renting.

By that logic, a used (rather than new) car is a good investment as well. Since they're a good investment, I guess I should load up on used cars.

A car is an expense. If you need one, it is indeed a much better financial choice to get a used one. But your needs probably don't scale, so you don't need ten cars, just one. You can't have an expense and make it up in volume to become profitable.

Of course not, because finding a more efficient way to meet the needs which require an expenditure of money does not make that expenditure a good investment by the typical usage of that phrase. Same is true in used cars vs new cars and owner-occupied housing vs rented housing.

> Step 1

> Step 2

So you've almost completely eliminated rentals from existing, is that good?

From these discussion, it seems there are people who like and want to rent.

I rented many different places over the years, as I was moving around in my younger days (and certainly didn't have enough money to buy new furniture, let alone an entire house to shelter in).

It seems odd for people to not consider the highly beneficial aspects to some tenants of a useful/viable rental market existing.