The US needs to build 2 million houses to revive the American dream of homeownership

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.

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.
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

Aren't there currently more empty homes than homeless in the US? Like, by a decent margin, too? I think that statistic is getting a bit dated, but I also don't expect it to have improved. What we really need is to treat homes as homes, as essentials for life, instead of as investments. But, of course, that'd cost rich people money instead of giving them a way to make even more money, so we can't do that. I'm sure some towns and cities could benefit from more homes, but the core of the problem is societal, not material.

yes there is currently extra housing but, unfortunately, sites like airbnb have moved large swaths of the housing market to the luxury hotel market leading to a shortage in actual housing as wealthy, investor, and corporate class people pay premiums for short term rentals that most people simply can't compete with.
- Airbnb isnt as big a problem as much as corporate owned housing is.
  
  Companies like Blackstone need to be absorbed by the US Govt.
- So then our problem is that we allow moneyed interests to monopolize home ownership so they can extract wealth from people who actually generate it. It is quite literally the definition of rent seeking behavior.
- .
A lot of it is a question of where.

The town I grew up in is a great example: it is n a generally rural area and lost its major employer years ago. The economy never really recovered and the population has dwindled, but that’s also true of the surrounding area. There are many empty homes, even in formerly upscale developments, and I can literally buy one on my credit card.

In my current town, a starter home is like 15x the price, they sell within hours, and there’s no open land left to develop.

The expensive area is where people want to live, but there are all those empty homes selling for very little just a few hours drive away

I believe there’s been a general trend of moving toward cities, that leaves lots of inexpensive empty homes behind
- There are some cities that are offering money for people to move there and work remotely. They have the housing but not the jobs? I know Tulsa is one, Somewhere in Kansas, I don't remember where else.
15 million long term vacant houses to 600,000 homeless.
- That doesn't sound right. I think there are much much more than 600,000 homeless people in the United States. Maybe that's the number who actually sleep on the street but doesn't count people who are staying in shelters or groups of people who rent rooms in extended stay motels?
This is also about reducing rentals
What's your plan to do that?
- I didn't realize I needed to have a formal policy plan before I opener my mouth. I'll freely admit I don't fully understand the intricacies of how we handle real estate, but the general belief that real estate prices must be protected and they must generally trend upwards is the unhealthy core of the problem. It prioritizes profits over human needs.
- So, there actually is a solution, and Britain did it until Thatcher came along, and it worked great: The government buys up a lot of property, and rents it to anyone who wants it at reasonable rates. They’ve got the money to do it, and it brings in income for them anyway, and it pierces the bubble so that private landlords can’t charge “market rates” and send the whole operation into an ever-increasing spiral of both rents and property values.
  
  A lot of British landlords actually wound up selling to the government anyway, since the lack of a bubble means you can’t even make that much from renting out properties as a business venture, so they’d rather just get rid of the properties and invest in some other endeavor that’s an actual profit seeking enterprise. Literally everyone wins except the cockheads.
  
  I am sure in America it would be absurdly unpopular, but it works great.
- It will be the workers, with their courage, resolution and self-sacrifice, who will be chiefly responsible for achieving victory. The petty bourgeoisie will hesitate as long as possible and remain fearful, irresolute and inactive; but when victory is certain it will claim it for itself and will call upon the workers to behave in an orderly fashion, and it will exclude the proletariat from the fruits of victory. ... the rule of the bourgeois democrats, from the very first, will carry within it the seeds of its own destruction, and its subsequent displacement by the proletariat will be made considerably easier..
  
  Source
  
  /s

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.

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.

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.
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.
I was gonna say or 200k small apartment/condo buildings or 20k large apartment/condo building or like 2k large highrise buildings.

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...

Maybe just redistribute some wealth? The richest nation in the world can afford to home everyone. Homelessness is a policy decision.

Well I mean they're still going to need to build the houses, which of course would drop the price of the houses, so there's more to it than just robbing from the rich. Mind you, robbing from the rich is still step one.

Yeah but also charge less than $200k for a 3b 2b with a 2 car garage.

I thought Americans used sq ft to casually describe houses? Please don't switch to number of bedrooms. That's what we do in UK and it's led to house builders squeezing closet-sized bedrooms into a house so they can sell it as a 4-bed.
- Americans use any/all of bedrooms/bathrooms/square footage/lot size
- Usually, we use both measures.
- We also measure them in bulletproof ratings. The average house is a level 6.
- Just be thankful we are using soemwhat sane measurements, ive witnessed someone use Humvee's as a measurement. It was in relation to a pool.
- I’ve never used square feet as a primary way to describe a house. The rooms are the main concern.
A coworker just bought a 1.5 bath, 2 car garage, 3 bed for $500,000+ in Portland, basically no yard/outdoor area.
- I’m in that city too. I’m sure it requires a lot of upgrading for that price.

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.
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.

Nope. Just need to force all landlords to sell. Make tax on rent ruinous. Tax additional homes. Make it illegal for corporations to own residential property.

Cool, landlords can buy all of these up too!

And how many empty houses are there already?

15 million vacant houses. Less than 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 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.

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.

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.
- 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.
- Do you have the numbers?

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.

or better yet, overcome neoliberalism, the cursed legacy of Ronald Reagan

Building those houses means current homeowners would miss out on hundreds of thousands of dollars when they eventually sell their homes.

If you were to ask most politicians to describe their constituents, they would said 'married, kids, two cars, and a house with a mortgage'. That's who they are looking after, that's their priority. You are not considered a real person or a focus unless you fall into the above description.

They're looking after wealthy supporters. Rich folk, not middle class folk.
- They're in such a bubble they think the rich folks are average

"An influx of immigrants in the country also isn't helping the housing affordability equation as it has in the past."

Go fuck yourself business insider. The ol' "America is full" bit is it? The Great Enemy: the poor immigrant who is going to steal your piss poor paying job, but somehow also "steals" your super fucking overpriced house that even natural born citizens with full time jobs can't afford.

Get fucked.

This bubble will be disastrous beyond imagination once it bursts.

I actually think the best solution would be the government to build a bunch of extra housing and crash the rental market with a two pronged supply approach:

sell housing to first time home buyers at 50% off under the condition they don't resale for 5 years and the government gets any value gains over the sale price for 10 years.
triple the existing public housing stock while slashing requirements to get into public housing

"The US needs to reclaim 2 million houses from firms to revive the American dream of homeownership"

Fixed. The housing exists, it's just bought up so you can't have it because they want more profit.

Also fck HOAs and the horse they road in on.

That won't fix shit, that's 2 million homes that corporations will buy up to jack the rent up. Shit should be illegal.

In news related to this headline, America apparently running out of hyphens in addition to other observed punctuation supply shortages.

Maybe just start with converting office space into housing so people homeless.

Home ownership is 65%.

These headlines are wild.

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..
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/

Whatever