I mention that because I remember reading during the pandemic that institutional investors generally make shittier landlords: they're quicker to evict, quicker to raise rents, less likely to work with a tenant on a payment plan, and they have fewer ties to the community. There was a concern that with all the eviction moratoriums during the pandemic that large landlords could wait it out, while smaller landlords got screwed and got out altogether in some cases, leaving their housing stock to be gobbled up by the shittier institutional landlords.
Always gets me is the ideological contortions people will get up to in order to not face that California is short a couple million units of housing. Really the US has been investing in looting schemes and not in build out for the last 40 years.
Doing the same search for "owner occupied" shows only around 50%, though. I don't know where to get the data that teases apart housing units and standalone houses.
I know that my main assertion there was it was a relatively lower number. Adding it to the 19 of this story would still leave owner occupied higher than 50ish. Such that I clearly need help to put a lot of this together.
On the other hand, during the upswing in prices, house flipping in California was really popular with investors because the (then) low interest and likely capital gain made things easy.
The headline is true and relevant if you are wondering how investors influence housing prices - with a 20% share, clearly investors influence prices a lot. Moreover, California is where the housing bubble began but it's quite logical it's no longer where the bubble is concentrated so again 20% doesn't imply investor ownership is unimportant.
To understand the meaning of this, consider that supply/demand curves are naturally non-linear and even 5% increase in demand can double the prices.
This low hanging “remedy” is likely to exacerbate the supply issue, not help it.
Some of those homebuilders build because they can rent homes if they can’t be sold. Others build because they have large investors to sell to if necessary. All of them build with their financial models account for carry time, as carry costs are extremely important to their bottom line.
If the average carry time goes up even a little bit (and it will because investors close faster) that can make whole developments untenable.
Assuming the policy to reduce non-primary home ownership is tax based, carve out tax exceptions for home builders. Personally I would carve out exceptions for home flippers too, but could see that being more contentious. Either way though, this part of the problem would be, IMHO, trivial to solve.
> If the average carry time goes up even a little bit (and it will because investors close faster) that can make whole developments untenable. Others build because they have large investors to sell to if necessary.
I think that's fair. But conversely carry time is also high because prices are high, and investors drive up prices; builders also do this to an extent, by e.g. buying down points to avoid lowering prices, to keep the perceived price elevated. I have no illusions this is a simple problem to solve. The right question here is probably figuring out whether the overall supply going up by X increased rate because of investors will be worth the cost of the total homeownership rate being controlled by a shrinking proportion of the population (I would guess no).
My personal proposed solution here would be to kick out investors (tax policy), and also directly incentivize home builders selling to first time owners (via tax credits, comparable to e.g. EV tax credits). The latter would be quite expensive, but if the overall homeownership rate increases and home prices drop, it would likely be popular.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
But note that’s not the same thing as housing affordability. You probably can goose the homeownership rate by appropriating a bunch of homes and redistributing them to the marginal buyers who are currently not owners.
But it will not drop the price of housing, it will increase it because supply will still be constrained (think of the normal case of someone moving temporarily for work. If you disincentivize them being allowed to rent the unit out you now have 2 units off the market).
Carry cost is mostly about financing costs and regulations not the price of homes.
Right, which is why trying to link the two is misleading at best.
> there are many valid arguments that treating housing as an investment isn't a stairway to ending homelessness
Such as? We seem to agree that the existence of rental units isn't a cause of homelessness.
If we're going to tackle homeless, we have to remove systems that incentivize the collection of homes as a financial asset. Make more homes by one person or entity less desirable or simply undoable.
Instead of trying to manipulate a market through yet another layer of regulation, you can just let builders build more.
And, why did we just give them a YUGE tax break?
"Build more" is not an option, because the incentives don't align to solve the problem. The things getting built are built to capture margins and not to solve the housing problem.
Need regulation.
Build more is the only option to actually fix the problem. The incentives could not be more aligned between home builders and home dwellers. Builders want to build, and there are dozens of them in all major metropolitan areas. Home dwellers want shelter. Sounds like an ideal situation to keep margins low.
More regulation == more regulatory capture, which your kind supposedly doesn't like but you don't seem to be able to help yourself.
I'm not "missing the point" because I don't agree with economic principles that got us where we are today. Doubling down on those very same principles thinking we will have a different outcome? Nonsense.
It's not a coincidence that there's a huge overlap between people who use terms like "turbo greed", those who "don't agree" with the economic principles that have outperformed all known alternatives, and those who think that more state involvement is the solution to every problem.