Put a limit on how much landlords/companies can charge for rental housing by square footage and don’t allow landlords or companies to require a specific credit score or 3 times the amount of rent. Make housing affordable again!
Your suggestion is only treating a symptom. Let’s look at the reasons landlords can get away with charging so much to begin with and go from there.
Obviously, supply is too low and/or demand is too high. Why is this?
Supply: too much red tape on construction. Getting a new house built is too expensive because of administrative costs. Because building any housing is expensive, new construction focuses on $500,000 McMansions, and the prices on starter homes remain high.
Demand: the massive influx of illegal aliens has seen overall demand increase. To make things worse, many illegals are willing to pack in like sardines and split high rents amongst more people. Plus, there have even been government subsidies on housing for illegals.
Market Manipulation: private equity firms like Blackrock, Vanguard, and Blackstone buy up relatively cheap properties with reasonable rents and withhold some of the units so rent prices increase. When they do this, they pretend that the property has become more valuable because they cost more to rent, thus fooling their investors into thinking they made money.
The supply-side solution is obvious, do whatever you can to simplify building codes. Releasing some federal land for privatization would be nice as well; imagine a neo-homesteader act.
On the demand-side, we need to deport the illegal aliens, simple as.
I don’t have a perfect solution to private equity buying all the housing, but I’m sure there are others on this forum who have a pretty good idea.
Make housing affordable again!
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Truthfully, I feel like if we limited investors to max of 5 properties they can own within the country unless they can prove an actual necessity for anymore than that.
This will stop investors from buying these houses, turning them into rentals, and collecting the rent. Then they will also buy 10 properties, rent out 3 of them and keep the other 7 off the market to make it look scarce and to artificially increase prices. Limiting how many properties a person or company can own would solve this issue completely.
I’d be inclined to say no property taxes on an individual or family’s primary residence. That would subtly push the balance of power toward individual homeowners over rent seekers.
If that’s not enough to do the trick, you could impose a progressive tax based on how many residential properties you own.
Unfortunately rent control almost always ends badly in the medium to long term. Here’s a typical example: a city enacts rent controls, but property taxes, trade job costs and materials all continue to rise. Pretty soon the landlord or management company stops fixing things and if that continues they will go out of business and the renters will either have an option to buy the house, or the house might be sold to a bigger investment company thst can absorb the losses, or the tenants may forced to go somewhere else. It happens every time.
The price of housing and everything else is directly tied to inflation and supply and demand. We need to focus on those things to fix housing, which I think was already mentioned.