All three of the five things most economists say about house building - and each one will hit house owning voters hard making it hard to replicate.
But none the less a triumph of common sense :-)
All three of the five things most economists say about house building - and each one will hit house owning voters hard making it hard to replicate.
But none the less a triumph of common sense :-)
If you are in your terminal home, you also want low prices until the week before you eventually sell your house, as Texas has a high property tax rate to make up for the lack of state income tax.
In a negative way?
These things push against that.
Really, I'd prefer not having policies that tend to push up housing prices or discourage people from moving, but here we are, those types of policies are common.
Which is myopic.
As a homeowner, I want cities to be livable and affordable for those who want or have to live there. I don't care if the value of my home changes one cent. It's honestly kind of useless, because it's not like I can sell the house and buy a nicer one. All the houses are more expensive so it's always going to be a lateral trade. It only helps if you sell and move to a lower cost of living area.
It's kind of a sham that we have been conditioned to treat housing as an investment. Housing is where people live, it shouldn't be a commodity to be hoarded.
In that sense I agree with the current state of reality.
But what I am saying is that if we want to change that reality -- and it most certainly is possible to change -- it will take people rejecting the status quo. And there at least some of us who are already there.
It's a minority of people who are ok never capitalizing on their home value.
The only people in the low income neighborhood I grew up in that could afford to weather this wave of out-of-state and investment banking homebuyers were those who were of retirement age and had their property taxes “frozen” at an affordable level.
Going down might be nice, perhaps I could buy the neighbor's house and combine the lots and make a nice set of row houses ...
House go up being important is really only needed if I'm using it for leveraged appreciation and doing something like dragging the cash out like a piggy bank; but that's a tiger that will have to be dismounted eventually.
I am strongly opposed to building homes in stupid places, worsening traffic or overburdening infrastructure. This is why I tend to strongly oppose ADUs. If you want to turn my neighborhood into a dense urban environment, fine, but buy my house and my neighbors' houses, bulldoze them, and build proper urban density.
I also have a lot of skepticism regarding our housing shortage. You can go find people making the same arguments about housing shortfalls in 2006(underbuilt for years, new family formation, prices will remain high...). But then something happened, and it wasn't that 10% of Americans suddenly died. Suddenly we had more homes than we needed. Why? Because housing demand is related to economics. Now that we're slowing down reproduction and kicking out or scaring off immigrants we're likely setting ourselves up for another round of oversupply. "Good!" Well, tell that to the soon to be unemployed home builders.