Comments by "Gabe" (@gabetalks9275) on "How Money Works"
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"A family home should be the bedrock of your financial life."
That statement is the real reason why housing is so unaffordable. We have been conditioned to think that living in a single-family home is the only ideal and valid way to live, and that anything else is substandard, which just isn't true. Not everyone needs a single-family home because not everyone needs that much space, and renters tend to like not having to worry about utilities and renting gives you greater flexibility to move than homeownership does. Every type of housing has its pros and cons. Not everyone rents just because it's cheaper. A lot of time, people rent because they prefer living in dense neighborhoods along with the pros that come with renting. If we really want to fix the housing crisis, we need to humanize renting, ban single-family zoning, and legalize missing middle housing. Rentals are homes too! The lack of housing diversity is what's manufacturing artificial housing scarcity. That's the whole reason why the investors are buying up so many homes. They're taking advantage of the artificial scarcity that our zoning laws create. Blaming investors and landlords simply because they're wealthy misses the real root of the problem and even makes it worse.
In San Francisco, they passed rent control to ban landlords from increasing rent. The result? Instead of rents dropping, homes were bulldozed and replaced with luxury housing in order to replace the profits lost from rent control. It made the problem worse.
In Rotterdam, they banned investors from buying up a certain amount of homes. While it did increase the homeownership rate, the decreased supply of rentals increased the price of rent, feuling gentrification.
The investors and landlords are not the villains here. They're simply reacting to the consequences of 1950's car-centric suburban zoning. That's the real root of the problem. Until we fix that, nothing will change.
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