alt Hacker NewsUS will ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes
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> "People live in homes, not corporations," Trump said.
Very surprisingly progressive opinions from Trump.
I do completely agree though, the consumer surplus of housing should be captured by people. Not investors looking to profit.
It's extremely toxic to society when investors get to eat the utility of housing.
Even if their negative impact is a fantasy, they provide no benefit. There is no reason we shouldn't ban them.
This is another non-solution from Trump. Similar to the "no taxes on tips" nonsense that applies to almost no one since the cap is so high. It's a populist move that doesn't address the problem but appears to be a good thing for working class people at first sight.
Reuters taking the regime seriously is weird.
Yet again the Trump admin identifies an issue but misses the nuance. We want investors to encourage more homebuilding, the problem is more regional concentration - in regions where PE owns a big enough % of the homes that they can monopolize and control the rents. Or NIMBY policies (where the federal government could dock funding to states that don't build to match population growth).
title of post is "US will ban", title of article is "Trump threatens to ban". OP why are you misleading people?
Even if they do it's a little late at this point, plus I don't believe it, since Trump and most people in the admin are too friendly (borderline controlled) by the people who are friendly/control entities like Blackrock, it's either beneficial to them to stop the competition from doing it since they bought enough for now or there is a big gotcha in there.
I know how that paragraph reads, but the past couple of years have made me too cynical to trust anything they say they're going to do.
They should go all out and nationalize zoning. Let it be challenged all the way to Supreme Court. Trumps developer buddies get paid, the grift continues and the housing crisis is eliminated.
Do it. Do it now.
So there are (at least) six important aspects to the housing crisis.
1. Politically, this issue is a winner and it's crazy that the Democratic Party has refused to bang the drum on this, basically because it potentially upsets corporate donors. They have instead ceded this poopulist political ground to the Republican Party. The Democratic Party does not want to win elections and this should never have been more obvious than the 2024 presidential election;
2. Hoarding housing is state-sanctioned violence. You need housing to live. Housing affordability is the number one factor in homelessness [1]. That then subjects people to violence and danger that we, as a society, are allowing to happen. There is no reason that the wealthiest country on Earth can't provide a roof over the head of every man, woman and child within our borders;
3. The private sector will never solve the housing crisis because solving the housing crisis involves devaluing, definancializing and decommodifying housing. Wealthy people and large corporations who own a lot of real estate won't on their devalue their holdings. Things like Ezra Klein's Abundance claptrap are simply putting a Democratic bow on Reagan era trickle down economics and deregulation. This requires state action. That means the state needs to build significant amounts of housing to provide to people to regulate the housing market. The poster child for this policy is Vienna, Austria;
4. Voters have fooled themselves into thinking that increasing house prices are good for them. They're not. They're bad in virtually every way. There are people who bought a house for $100k in 1990 where that house is now worth $2M. Are you $1.9M richer? No. Because if you sell it what happens? You have to buy another house. And if every other equivalent house costs $2M you still only own one housing unit's worth of wealth;
5. Increasing house prices are simply stealing from the next generation and suppressing wages. Why suppressing wages? Because if you're laden with debt, you'll be a complaint little worker bee. You need that paycheck to not be homeless. You are in effect a debt-slave, particularly combined with student and possibly medical debt; and
6. The next wave of antitrust action will involve the use of AI as a means for market collusion and manipulation. A great and relevant example is RealPage [2]. If all the landlords use the same software and that software is designed to algorithmically increase rents, then that's market collusion. Honestly, dynamic pricing in general needs to be banned.
[1]: https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2023/0...
[2]: https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-s...
Now ban everyone from buying them :P Tax the land
I'll believe it when I see it in action.
Yea, right. "Wall Street" has publicized lashings and rules, but there's also a backdoor. And they obviously have a strangle-hold on rentals.
The end game for capitalism is for everyone to rent everything: healthcare, cars, software, music, physical items, roads, etc.
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Simple test
If anyone thinks this is not a problem, why would they comment, it would be irrelevant as banning salmon from participating in taikwondo
Instead everyone says how it's so false and this is just silly. This tells me - they are liars and it isn't silly at all
Will not happen with the current administration.
Like so many other big promises, it will appease a lot of people, but there will be no real follow through.
Any regulation that prevents unrestrained capitalism is immediately decried as socialism and therefore evil.
These kinds of promises are made which temporarily create market volatility, and once it later (usually quite soon) becomes clear that the big thing will not actually happen, the markets snap back. At this point, it’s incredibly likely that these situations are manufactured to both look good AND create large short term investment gains for people in the know - without actually changing anything.
A clock is right twice a day
I’m from the government and I’m hear to help!
There is hope for humanity.
How about stopping all non-occupants from buying properties.
Anything bad for Wall Street is generally good for the rest of us.
Just ban corporate ownership of private homes. Ban second homes altogether.
There will be no way to enforce this such that “Wall Street” can’t easily get around it, so it is clearly for show and not an actual attempt to solve a problem.
This is a good thing, the next step however is to block the guys that use sites like BiggerPockets.com from buying up more then 5 single family homes. I know a whole bunch of guys who own 10 or more houses. That is excessive. We need to limit all investment of single family housing. Apartment complexes? Be my guest buy all you want, build all you want. But lets keep our neighborhoods full of people who can actually live in them.
People want the value of their house to go up after they buy it, but stay low before they buy it. This is all nonsense. If people in an area keep breeding, housing costs will go up. It's that simple. Increasing housing prices are actually one of the only checks that keep humans from overbreeding and ruining large swaths of desirable places to live.