Cool, landlords can buy all of these up too!
There are enough homes to house everyone, supply isn’t the problem, greed is.
It’s also probably a location issue, might not have enough houses where people want to live even though there’s empty ones in buttfuck nowhere.
Or empty ones in Detroit or Florida.
Don’t worry, those florida houses will be filled soon! With water of course, not people
Home ownership is 65%.
These headlines are wild.
Got a source on that? I’m seeing 26% home ownership rate in the US
The census. I have no idea where you got that 26% number. That’s not even in the realm of close by hand grenade standards.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/184902/homeownership-rate-in-the-us-since-2003/
That is the percentage of homes owned by the people living in them, not the percentage of Americans who own homes.
Over a third (35%) of single family homes are owned by landlords, not by the people living in them. When a third of your single family homes are not owned by single families, then there is an issue.
The 26% number another person used might be percentage of US adults who own a home, but I can’t find that number anywhere. The difference is most single family homes have 2 adults (or more) but is only “owned” by one of them. Or that is a statistic that uses multi-family housing where most of the families are renters.
Doesn’t technically the bank own it until you pay off your mortgage? I’d be curious how many have the titles to their house.
I had actually put that info in my post but deleted it. It’s around 34% that own their house outright without a loan.
Home ownership is 65%.
That’s 65% of homes are occupied by the owners, not 65% of the population owns their home.
Those are wildly different things and people keep using the former in a likely attempt to portray the latter as much higher than it really is.
In fact, that second statistic is impossible to find as every article or study from a mainstream or even semi mainstream source uses only the misleading one.
Tl; dr:
“How many homes are occupied by their owners” ≠ “How many people own their home”
Addendum: That almost 35% of all homes are owned by someone who doesn’t live there shouldn’t be a point of pride…
But whatever will poor Blackrock do with their real estate portfolio??
Are you serious? Who do you think would buy these houses? First-time buyers with cobbled-together financing, or massive corporations offering more than (inflated) asking price?
Legislation banning selling of homes to corporations. That’s the only thing that will solve the housing crisis, and permanently. If we’re asking for it and not getting it, it’s because our legislators are invested in the shell game…
Building houses to solve the housing crisis implies that the crisis was caused by a lack of homes. Every single one of the 2 million houses would be picked up by a property firm or a Chinese millionaire just the way it has been happening for the last ten years. What you really need is legislation, but what you are getting is more food for the hounds.
Supply and demand. Corporate interests will only buy homes when theres a profit incentive. A housing shortage makes great profit opportunities.
If there are too many airbnbs so they don’t get rented, there’s no longer a profit. If there are enough houses that you can’t buy to flip at guaranteed markup, there goes the profit. If there’s enough houses that you’re not guaranteed a quick sale on your investment, there goes the profit. The point is there are limits on those ownership patterns so you can build your way out of it
Never before have I seen such a confluence of right comment and wrong username
OsamaBinLaden is right. Yup. That was weird to type.
We need legislation to prevent REITs and holding companies from purchasing small and medium residential dwellings and properties. The problem that will create when it passes and they relinquish their sizable holdings, is that adjacent properties devalue causing mortgagers to go upside-down. It’s a simple problem to identify, but not an easy one to solve.
Read the username again, it’s much worse than that
Be that as it may, Britain in the 1970s and before actually had a really good answer to this: The government just buys enough property and rents it out to people at reasonable rates, to puncture the bubble and make it unprofitable to be a landlord in the first place as a “job.” People have affordable places to live, we don’t have to have a fight about declaring it “illegal” to own or rent out property, and people with spare cash are motivated to invest it in businesses instead of in properties. Literally everyone wins. Which of course, means America will see it as communism and fight to the death to stop it from happening.
Not saying you’re wrong in your solution either, just saying one other way which has a proven track record.
Oof. That is worse.
My solution isn’t a solution. It’s just a new problem. Your suggestion has merit. Since Republicans would shoot that “anti-free market communist trash” down before it hit paper, we’d first need a Democratic majority in Congress to make it happen.
Or maybe billion dollar companies should be forced to sell so the average person can buy them
The volume held by investment firms and the like is large in a sheer numbers sense, but virtually nothing in terms of its percentage of the whole sum of residential real estate.
The fact is that we have been lagging in the supply side for decades and the Great Recession and then the COVID Pandemic cut new builds even more drastically. There simply isn’t supply available to address the demand at a reasonable and accessible price.
Do you have the numbers?
New private home starts since 1995: As measured by the Fed
Population of the US since 1995: As measured and estimated by the Census Bureau
Okay, but your assertion was that there are not enough homes currently to support our population if they weren’t traded as a commodity. In NYC alone there are over 3.6 Million Housing Units and a population of 8,258,035, with about half of the units being rental and about 1/20 being vacant.
You haven’t provided any evidence that there aren’t enough housing units in the USA.
A decline in housing project expansion is meaningless without context of how many are actually in use.
There are over 145,000,000 housing units in the United States.
Urban centers should have drastically more rental units than urban, exurban, and rural tracts. An unoccupied rate of 5% is pretty good to cover units in transition.
So if an average of 2-3 people are in a home there are enough. Since our current system puts home ownership just out of reach, selling former rental properties and properties owned by overseas investors would probably be the bump we need.
I’m worried that large developments could be harmful to the environment and a waste of resources.
Even a small percentage is good. The situation is desperate.
The fewer first time home owners that get out bid by corps the better. Doesn’t matter if it is a drop in the bucket.
And that’s even before considering how it would help stop housing from being an investment vehicle.
Housing is always going to be an investment vehicle.
Right, and trickle down economics works. /s
Property hoarding could be solved by quadrupling propert taxes on any home that isn’t a primary residence of the property owner.
I was going to make a similar comment. Write into law that investors have to pay 4x property taxes to the town, if the town for some reason doesn’t want the taxes then it just goes to the federal government.
I don’t think the US needs more single family homes, I think we need more, or at least more affordable, multifamily housing. Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment. What we need to be doing is bringing down the cost of housing in cities, as well as making cities as pedestrian friendly as possible, with walking and biking infrastructure, and public transportation.
I was gonna say or 200k small apartment/condo buildings or 20k large apartment/condo building or like 2k large highrise buildings.
I completely agree, but we need much stronger rent and ownership laws, as well as public housing. Companies are bulldozing low income housing, building shiny new apartment buildings, and using algorithmic rent to empty out most of the apartment complex and keep prices artificially high across a city.
https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-realpage-rent
It’s so terrible, because the end result is a lot of half empty apartments downtown, and normal people effectively getting pushed to suburbs because there’s no way most people could afford an apartment that costs $4k a month. For low income people, it’s even worse.
Even just having some (30%) mandatory $500/mo rent apartments in all new construction over 30 units could help.
I think we need a LOT more of this kind of housing, to make housing as affordable as possible for everyone.
Suburbs are expensive, inefficient, and bad for the environment
This is what I’m always saying! Car-centric spaces are also bad socially. They’re dehumanizing. You want people walking around if you want a community, and having a strong community is good in many ways.
For us, the suburbs are cheaper than the cities. We basically have no choice. I have to work in the city but can’t afford to live there with a family. Mainly the rent/mortgage prices, and groceries. It’s all cheaper when I’m willing to drive 30-60 minutes outside of the city.
It’s cheaper for you because suburbia effectively gets subsidized, and because housing in cities gets artificially limited through ridiculous zoning rules. Ideally, suburbs should have to actually bear the costs of the infrastructure necessary to their existence, and we should do away with things like detached single family housing and absurd parking minimums in urban areas.
That’s rapidly changing all over the place. The question is now whether you want the suburb life and a commute or to live in the city with amenities. The prices are very similar now.
deleted by creator
I’ll always wonder what you posted…
Something off topic about not wanting to live in a city. One of the reasons I’m big on urban renewal is maybe it will get more people to move into cities so there’s fewer of them in rural areas where I want to live.
Maybe just start with converting office space into housing so people homeless.
This bubble will be disastrous beyond imagination once it bursts.
Whatever
Equity firms own 1.6 million homes in the US (both single family and multi family units).
Just saying, that would get us most of the way there.
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes? Won’t that just leave us back where we are now?
Do we think we can build more homes than Equity firms can spend other people’s money on?
What’s to keep Equity firms from buying those 2 million homes?
Ideally, Madame Guillotine.
A fine French woman she is.
How many are vacant? Those are the first ones that need to be reallocated.
(Meaning, I’m not pro equity firm, I’m saying an occupied house is a house that is occupied. These 2mil new houses are for new occupants, not shuffled ones.)
I think the key point is ownership. If the house is owned by an equity firm, even if it’s occupied it still counts as a house which could instead be owned by, well, homeowners.
And how many empty houses are there already?
15 million vacant houses. Around 600,000 homeless people. If only 10% of all vacant homes in the use were liveable we could still give every homeless person two and have some left over.
The US had 3.1m houses sitting empty in 2023
property hoarding is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such, imho. Houses are for living in, not speculation.
Where are those houses? I know of plenty of empty houses going for cheap, but they don’t tend to be in areas with many jobs or amenities.
People misunderstand this stat for both single-family homes and apartments. These are not “sitting empty” they are unused and in a transitional state between occupants. This number is also consistent with the gross number historically and is actually below the average in percentage.
Well, some are definitely sitting empty for extended periods. But your point is well taken, there are what, 200m homes in the US? If they are vacated on average every 5 years because of a move, then if those homes are on the market for a month on average you’d have 200m/60 ~ 3.5m homes sitting empty at any given time.
The systems in place are broken. I work 12hr days, with overtime. Credit score over 750. And there is no chance I can afford a house in my area.
Have you tried uprooting your family and moving to a place no one wants to live? Something something bootstraps.
