New Legislation Proposes to Take Wall Street Out of the Housing Market
New Legislation Proposes to Take Wall Street Out of the Housing Market
www.nytimes.com
New Legislation Proposes to Take Wall Street Out of the Housing Market
201 comments
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They should never have been allowed to buy them to begin with.
The second best time is now.
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People require housing. Corporations are people. /s
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I'll believe that when one is executed.
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Yeah, but you can squeeze 285,000 corporations in one office building!
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I mean it's a free market, it's not reasonable nor desirable to proactively prohibit all possible bad scenarios
edit: to anyone downvoting, read carefully
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I read your comment carefully and still downvoted because its an incredibly dumb thing to say.
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That's a really good point. I should be able to buy some people since it's a free market and it's just impossible to curb exploitation.
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A true Libertarian utopia.
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If allowing ordinary people to be priced out of owning homes is your idea of a free market, then fuck the free market.
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Fuck the free market. Fuck capitalism. Fuck you, too.
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It's not a free market... that's not an actual thing that can ever exist. It's a state where the markets are in a perfect, frictionless state, where barriers of entry are non-existent and everyone has equal access to trade on the market... Ignoring petty things like needing to actually source things
It is, in fact, both reasonable and desirable for the government to proactively watch and interfere in the markets before they enter a failure scenario, that's their job in the market.
It's often willfully misunderstood, but what you're describing is a half step from lasse faire capitalism. Which is the idea that a "free market" is a stable state, and we just need to let it settle long enough without interference. But that's literally psuedoscience...
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And this is the sort of legislation that should be passed by direct referendum, will of the people, and not by representatives who have been bought out by special interest groups. Desperately needed but unlikely to happen.
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the country would function so much better if we just sent out ballots to everyone to vote on every bill if they want to
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I non-sarcastically love your optimism. But part of me really believes that 50% of the country votes however their church tells them to. So I'm not sure it'd be better.
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I would be very careful with that. US should try having a more representative government first.
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You'd get people voting for all the projects and none of the budget.
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So long as you don't like a functioning economy, sure.
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This will pass at the same time as the healthcare, world peace, and word hunger bills.
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From the article:
With a divided Congress, the bills are unlikely to pass into law this session. But Mr. Smith said legislators needed to start a conversation.
Solid odds this will be a campaign issue, which is a great thing.
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It will be a campaign issue and then nothing will be done about it. Fingers will be pointed.
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Everyone will talk about it, nobody will do anything to improve the situation.
Once you reach the ranks of the Senate, you have more financial interest in the future of your REIT-heavy investment portfolio than the price any of your constituents are paying for housing. Hell, more than a few Senators come straight from the halls of Wall Street themselves. That's how they have the kind of surplus cash to run for office to begin with.
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can’t wait to see conservatives line up in droves to defend wall street buying houses in a few months time
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Do your part and vote 3rd party. If we want change we have to vote for it.
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Our current electoral system is inherently biased against 3rd parties. We need to switch to approval/STAR voting to make 3rd parties viable.
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Please, tell me you're a child who knows nothing about the US electoral system without telling me. People like you got us Trump
Too much of a baby to read and understand the spoiler effect that comes with FPTP? Too impatient and short-sighted to push for election reform (RCV or approval voting) and just want some low effort immediate option that requires nothing more than casting a vote? Child. Democracies require effort to survive.
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don't forget gun regulation
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Looking at companies like Blackstone, who buy up houses at auction, lightly flip them and put them back on the market as high-priced rentals. THEY'RE the big reason for the lack of affordable housing.
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I mean, would it be better if we had a thousand mid-sized car dealership style house flippers rather than one singular monolith doing the same thing?
Blackstone agents are operating at a national scale in a market that's been flush with speculators and flippers going straight back to the colonial era. The high price of real estate is the consequence of housing as a commodity. There's no more free land to develop on the cheap and no more suburbs for young people to push out into searching for cheap new constructions. Take everyone at Blackstone out of the market tomorrow and you'll have a hundred smaller banks lining up to repeat their formula by the end of the month.
So long as cash is cheap, housing is in demand, and REITs are a thing, you're going to have businesses looking to profit off the difference between sale rates and rental rates as well as the gap between the prime rate and the going mortgage rate.
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Did you just scoff at the idea of competition improving a market?
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The solution is to make hoarding rental properties an unattractive investment. Put an escalating tax on owning multiple residences. If the 5th property is at 40% tax every year it's no longer a money maker in a competitive market. Put the money towards tax rebates for single mortgage interest. Now you have buyers back in the market and landlords looking to sell.
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Yes it would be better. Monopolies are bad. Near monopolies are bad. The more market power a company gains the more they can charge for no reason at all except "fuck you pay me".
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There WOULD be more suburbs to develop if we were allowed to work remotely. I would gladly move to the developing suburb of bumfuck-nowheresville if I could go there and keep my job, but I have to stay within a reasonable commuting distance of the nearest metropolis.
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Well said, people think that making certain companies go poof will suddenly resolve issues for a long time, without thinking about resource availability, the circumstances which led to the sutuation and the customers who enable them.
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Monopolies are bad.
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So preying on the victims of the growing wealth innequality and income gap. That will surely accelerate the decline of civilization.
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Remember that Blackstone and the other institutions are only financing it. These companies have names; like American Homes/AMH, invitation, opendoor and so on. There are a lot of them and they are all given billions to go buy as many houses as they can get their hands on... essentially bottomless pockets. And those are just the large ones. There's plenty of people churning 100s of homes and letting property management companies do all the work, financing new deals with existing rentals as leverage.
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Something like 6% of US Homes are owned by Chinese Investors. More than 1 in 20 homes.
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Achievement unlocked: socialism
Though I absolutely don't mind!
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I kind of agree, but has this ever been done successfully? It seems to me at some point you disincentivize work to the point it all collapses
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It's a fair question. The first universal basic income experiments have just begun in the last few years. Based on this article there's been a little success at least.
https://globalaffairs.org/bluemarble/multiple-countries-have-tested-universal-basic-income-and-it-worksI think we're only recently getting to a level of technology that we need less human workforce and can still prosper when inevitably some choose not to work.
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But like, you bring up "human basic necessities" and soon the old arguments about Maslow's Hierarchy rear their ugly head.
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How does this limit a corporation from doing the same thing?
So a hedge fund doesn't do it, but a specific company does the same thing and that's fine. What am I missing?
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That sounds like the perfect opportunity to work in property management because the owners will be so diffuse that you could be very lazy and they would be none the wiser
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If we actually had a democracy, there would be a total of 0 people against this. It's so incredibly unfavorable to want corporations to buy houses for profit.
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There are people profiting from this either by owning the investment firms e.g. through stocks or by working in them in highly paid positions. In a democracy, the majority might be for such a law, but certainly not everyone.
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0 souls then
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Inb4 the Republicans vote it down
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Nancy Pelosi's husband is literally one of these real estate ghouls.
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Please do. I'd love to see more supply.
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Home Ownership and protecting the middle class used to be phrases so often uttered by the Republicans 40 years ago that I yawned.
I'm glad to see someone pick up the gauntlet. Boggles the mind that this hasn't become a huge political issue yet.
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it’s cool they had the idea. hopefully they act on it
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Please make it happen, it's an important first step
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why were they ever allowed to do this? why should the system allow you to gamble on houses?
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Because they saw an opportunity to fuck America again after imploding Wall St in 2007-08.
Rampant unfettered capitalism only cares about the money they can make, never about the people's lives they destroy.
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Now what’s the chance of this actually passing?
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Who ever tabeled this needs to run for your president. Seriously
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Step in the right direction, hope some version of it gets passed.
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The Republicans won't let it happen.
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Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is, according to David Howard, the chief executive of the National Rental Home Council, a trade association. The country needs anywhere from 2 million to 6.5 million units of new housing, according to various estimates.
“Policies really need to be shaped and crafted so that they support the production, investment and development of new housing,” Mr. Howard said. “I think bills that work against that ultimately are just going to perpetuate the challenges we’re already facing.”
While I certainly disagree with this person on some of their specifics, and don't necessarily agree with the "teeth" of this bill (10k per home owned isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, and can just be priced in to an already out-of-control market), seeing a trade organization argue for the actual long-term solution bodes really well for the future of solving the housing crisis.
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That's crazy that they say we need more housing when there are so many empty houses sitting on the market from corporate real estate investing and other house flippers. "Wall Street is not the problem, a lack of new housing is" really sounds like the guy with gasoline and matches in hand saying "it wasn't me" at the scene of an arson fire.
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A lack of housing is very explicitly our problem. Houses that are empty are not unowned.
Until housing is no longer seen as an investment, which can only happen if we are allowed to build sufficient housing, housing will continue to go up in value, and thus more people will invest
Anyone who sees their home as their "nest egg" is part of the problem.
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A significant problem isn't just the lack of housing, it's the lack of affordable housing. Builders keep building single family homes in spread out suburbs which is problematic in its own way. But not everyone could afford those homes regardless of whether they are buying or renting.
Investors owning single family homes is a big problem, the bigger problem is exacerbated but not explicitly caused by that. Affordable housing simply isn't available in places where it's needed. That's why people say we need more homes.
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The head of an organization that represents landlords is advocating for building more houses. Now why do you think that is?
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Because they want to build more to make more money.
Please explain how this is a bad thing? This is rental org explicitly stating that the lack of supply is hurting their growth and profit.
That means they believe that the supply/demand curve is so out of whack that cheaper housing will make them more money.
This is absolutely and 100% a win-win.
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The trade organization is arguing for investment into their market rather than regulations that would improve the efficiency of their market. The bill is likely a negative for them, and they want something that would be a positive.
The situation is not caused by a lack of number of houses. It's caused by the lack of efficiency in housing. It's more beneficial to leave units empty than to fill them because there's little penelty (and sometime incentives) to do so. There should be something like a land value tax that pushes for more efficient use of land, not investments that push for less efficient use.
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The trade organization is arguing for investment into their marke
This is the only solution to the housing crisis. We have too little housing. We need more.
The situation is not caused by a lack of number of houses
This is not supported by math.
There should be something like a land value tax that pushes for more efficient use of land
Stop, stop - I can only get so erect! I'd absolutely love to see more of a push for LVTs, but we both know that's our fantasy and not a serious discussion in the near term.
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What about private equity?
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They're trying to get it passed, I doubt people sitting in on that vote would shoot themselves in the wallet?
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DNC really driving it home what their platform is with actions instead of words, lately.
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In case you want to learn about the bill:
NYT article (archive link):
Press releases:
https://adamsmith.house.gov/press-releases?ID=637A8E58-8F0D-4CB0-AECC-1D4690A00725
Text of the bill:
https://www.merkley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/MCG23660.pdf
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I do like this.
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Can we expand this to multi-family houses? I don't think we need it for apartment buildings too, but triple-deckers, for example, are not that different.
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It'll never pass, unfortunately.
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If it gets through the house then I think it'll fly through the senate. Correct me if I'm wrong but a simple majority can pass this bill, and even a few Republicans would sign a bill like this.
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Well, Republicans don't really have that strong of a majority in the House, given that they gave Santos the boot, and McCarthy is getting set to retire after losing the Speakership. It's also possible that by the time this makes it to the floor, McConnell may finally shuffle off this mortal coil (fingers crossed).
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These bills are about forcing a conversation and forcing the cowards in the gop to go on the record with a vote against common sense bills that benefit everyday people. It's not impossible, but harder for some of the purple district representatives to go on record against something as centrist and popular as this idea.
If it got to the Senate, this is one area where you might have your mansions and sinemas having their putrid moments in the sun, but again, sometimes these are there as conversation starters, so there's value either way.
Less likely sure, but I wouldn't say NEVER here. There's also a 10 year ramp down to sell, which is ridiculously long.
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Will be nice to have anything close to this, but 10 years is too long of a ramp down.
They are holding housing hostage in the interim. They don't feel that at all, the people do
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🧱 🔫
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I will be SO surprised if this happens.
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201 comments
Fucking do it you cowards.
I think you're forgetting about Republicans.
Or more than half of the democrats that do Wall Street's bidding too.