This would be great but you know centrists will fuck it up and it’ll be like, “You can get up to $25,000 as a tax credit if you’re a veteran who owns a small business in an opportunity zone and have a low income but also somehow have a spouse who is a lawyer and can spend 30h finding and filling out the paperwork and tracking down bank statements from when you both were 19.”
On top of that just pumping support money into real estate doesn’t fix either of the core problems: people aren’t being paid enough to afford homes and we’re not building enough homes to keep prices reasonable. The end result of this is that home prices inflate even further. If we treated houses as housing rather than investment vehicles we could actually do something about our housing crisis.
That’s a terrible idea. The real life effect is that prices will simply go up. You need to force down real estate prices in general, and offer very low interest rates for first time buyers.
Yeah a similar policy in the UK (from 10ish years ago) is one of the biggest reasons for hugely inflated prices among small properties.
Obviously, the only real solution is to work to lower real-estate prices, but that would be unpopular with most home owners (who are a majority in the US).
At worst, youre partially right. Maybe they’d go up 10K, but certainly not 25K. That’s just not how markets work. It’s the same argument as saying UBI will increase prices - yes, it will, but not by more than or as much as the UBI is. If everybody else sells their home at $25K more, you can sell yours in a month by going down to $15K more than before.
I agree, and i didn’t say it will increase prices by 25k. Still think this can be tackled in better ways. Low interest rates over a 20-25 year loan can save you much more than 25k. Edit: let’s ban corporate from buying up blocks of residential areas. It won’t cost you any tax money and will immediately drop the prices
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The real solution is probably to build unfathomable quantities of publically owned housing and rent them out at affordable prices. I suspect this won’t meaningfully move the needle on the issue.
Agreed. Not everybody can or wants to own a home even with a 25k bonus. Some people want the freedom to move around and explore without being bound for any more than a monthly or yearly term.
The solution is to pump up availability and let the prices correct themselves. Bind pay CEO as a multiple of their employee wages, and address economic shenanigans like stock buybacks and tax loopholes so that people end up with a larger piece of the pie–that way people can do what they want instead of being forced into one option or another.
