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electrondoodtoday at 6:13 PM1 replyview on HN

I support this. The purpose of a home is for people who live in the area to live in, not to be a speculative investment.

This is part of the reason we have a housing shortage in the US: 20% of available homes are purchased by investors, which squeezes the supply.

Airbnb has made this worse. There are areas near me where during the COVID ZIRP, people snatched up like 70% of the homes to turn into rentals. Those places are now ghost towns, unless it's Memorial Day weekend.


Replies

dragonwritertoday at 6:20 PM

Essentially the whole problem with housing prices in the US is failure to build housing, largely forced through restrictions on building housing, including restrictive zoning.

“Some of the supply of housing that is permitted to exist is used a short-term rentals rather than as actual housing” may be “part” of the problem, but its a vanishingly small part, in that if you deal with the basic building problem, there would be no actual problem, even if the short-term rental thing continued.