A community for discussing and documenting the second great housing bubble.
That's actually fewer homes that Blackstone owns than I would have thought.
Not that it makes things any better, I just would have expected the number of homes Blackstone owns to be in the millions by now. Maybe they have subsidiaries that are buying up homes under different names.
Obviously, there are plenty of other corporations that own thousands of homes so it doesn't make much of a difference.
I genuinely don't understand why this is legal. It's tied housing with extra steps, isn't it?
Just wait until we find out that Blackstone's algorithms, trained on actual real estate deals, are giving preferential treatment to a man named Dave with bad credit over a woman named Lashawnda with good credit.
I wonder if the board of Blackstone have names and addresses...
Well they obviously have 300000 addresses duh
Nationalize it.
Do you want your housing to be on the line every election? Just look at what Trump is saying today about removing immigrants and liberals from jobs and country.
No imagine he's your new landlord too.
This is what drives me crazy every time I hear people talking about needing to build more housing. The first thing we need to do is correct this problem. My suggestion is an increasing property tax premium on vacant homes. I’d suggest doubling the tax rate for each consecutive year a property is vacant for more than 185 days-just over half a year.
This has the side benefit of making Airbnb landlording less feasible as a small time investment strategy.
True, but it is not just about that there are X million houses emtpy and Y million people homeless. It is also about location of those empty houses. That might not overlap with location of the homeless, and I guess we are not talking about forced relocation here. There is probably still a good overlap of locations of empty houses and homeless and that part needs fixing.
See: the Bay Area and most of LA absolutely suffocated by suburban sprawl. You could build higher density residential dwellings, but first you need to tear down a few existing homes, plus get it past all the NIMBYS whose property values might go down if there's not hyperinflated demand.
Agreed, but the problem is that the 'we' in this scenario votes for this every two years. When both ruling parties tell us they're capitalist, we need to believe them.
Maybe it would help to massively increase property taxes on all houses that aren't the primary residence of their owners, and use the proceeds to build more houses
Sounds like it's time to start burning shit down
Or just start squatting in the vacant properties.
A vacant property tax would help with this.
Exponential increase for each and every additional unit (house or apartment) vacant for more than 3 months (without undergoing active, actual remodel with a set end date for the work) in a given year.
Oh no, not enough people for every unit to be filled? Bummer, better divest starting with single family structures!
Edit: actually, now that I think more about it, I see absolutely no reason we shouldn’t just hard cap the number of housing buildings any one company or individual (no shell companies and whatever bullshit loopholes) can own if they didn’t originally build them. Let’s say 200 multi-family (apartment) buildings or 10 single family buildings. Anything more than that must be sold for whatever the market is willing to pay. Too bad, so sad if you lose money on it, that’s the risk landlords are always telling us they take.
Nobody needs more than that, at all, because housing shouldn’t be a commodity to profit from, and if they want more buildings to profit from, they can build them instead of just buying it as a ~~leech~~ investment. Fuck companies who treat everyone like shit for profit.
How about a 1% tax on every extra home you own. Still allows the millionaires to have their second homes in florida or whatever, but makes it impossible to earn money after more than a few extra houses.
This makes the housing market sound similar to Diamond marketing.
Hmm what's gonna happen to these rich landowners?
How does this jive with all the talk of a housing crisis. Where's that invisible hand of the market making things affordable. I hate capitalism
https://www.commondreams.org/news/wall-street-buying-houses
Emphasis is mine.
"The real estate industry would like you to believe the problem is entirely one based on supply and demand," and that regulations need to be changed to allow for the construction of more affordable housing, reads the report. But with 16 million vacant homes across the U.S.—28 for every unhoused person—"the reality is that the owners of concentrated wealth... are playing a more pronounced role in residential housing, thereby creating price inflation, distortions, and inefficiencies in the market."
Take it easy! Balance will trickle down any day now. We just have to trust them to regulate themselves just a little longer. They wouldn't deliberately sabotage the market for profit, now would they?
I'd like to see a breakdown by zip code, or at the very least by county, of home values and vacancy rates. I have a suspicion that the problem is a local supply and demand problem rather than a national one. It makes no difference to the insane silicon valley housing market that there are thousands vacant homes in Michigan. This is why the build housing first plan is critical. We need housing where people need to live.
This is anecdotal, but I live in an Indiana town that isn't especially desirable, but the cost of living is quite low. I live in one of the best neighborhoods in town in terms of things like very low crime and neighbors who get along, but there are plenty of houses for sale here that never get sold. I've looked them up. They're all way, way out of our price range regardless of their size (it's a weird subdivision with homes of all sizes). Our own home has more than doubled in value according to Zillow and we only bought it in 2017 or 2018.
The only house I have seen get bought even relatively quickly was the one next to ours, which we think was foreclosed on, was sitting vacant for years, and probably had someone squatting in it. The photos on Zillow were a nightmare. I don't even think the second story floor would have been safe to walk on. It was valued at about what we initially paid for our house despite being twice its size including a finished basement (we don't even have a basement). Someone bought that one within a month and is now fixing it up, presumably in the hopes of reselling it. I wish them luck.
Fair, but a national mandate that WFH be offered for any jobs that it’s possible to do from home would mitigate the “having to live” in a given locale.
Eh I don't think that would have as big an effect as you think it would. It might move the problem around. Remember around 2021 when the housing markets in nice towns near nature like in Montana went crazy cause suddenly all these tech workers were working from home? The local supply demand got a huge shock since the inflow of money was not representative of the local economy.
No war but class war.
Be a shame if someone burned em all down and we all just started over.
You mean if someone burned them down and blackrock got an insurance payout valued higher at the homes were worth allowing them to build lower quality replacements and rent it out at an even higher price to people because it's new and driving the average home price even higher? Yeah, that would be a shame
Meanwhile insurance prices go up for everyone else, and housing supply goes down, making cost of housing higher still
I mean you SAY shame......I would feel shame.....
Hey, we got any pyromaniacs in the house? We got a thing to do!
