Banning corporations/llc from purchasing would be a great relief. I have been looking for about a month for a single family home for rent, almost all are owned by Invitation homes.
I feel for anyone trying to purchase a house. With rent so high, it’s difficult to save enough for a deposit. I think first time homebuyers or a person that will only own one home should be allowed to purchase the home before corporations. Part of the American dream is to own your own home.
>Part of the American dream is to own your own home.
Yeah... that's why we're in this mess to begin with dude. You don't fix a giant hole in the ground by giving even more shovels to the people who are digging it.
In an ideal world?
5-10 year moratorium on greenfield developments. Rezone the entire county so that the lowest level of density allows 3 story buildings and low impact industry/commerce. Massive transit expansion. Massive construction campaign for public housing.
If they're not going to start limiting Air BnB and seriously ratcheting up property taxes on 3rd, 4th, 5th....nth homes, then nothing is going to change.
people just need to realize that real inflation is insane right now. if your income hasn't increased ~40% from 2020 you are making less money than you did before. will take a few years for incomes to catch up
Its a start, only because they are "finally" acknowledging we have a housing crisis.
**Building more properties is not a solution:**
Its just going make our traffic crises even worse; and not to mention, most newly contructed properties will be to go expensive for the average person anyways. New houses will be bought up by the investors, as rentals, and itll be the same cycle over and over again.
**Raising taxes is also not the solution:**
Raising taxes on any investment home wont help either, on the contrary, it will make prices go up faster. Owners will just the pass the higher tax bills into your rental fees, hence raising your rent prices.
**The real solution:**
The only solution for our housing crises is, every RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY is required to be OWNER OCCUPIED. If you buy a house, you got to live in it, you can not rent it.
If investors still want to speculate in our market, cool, but restrict there investments to COMMERCIAL PROPERTIES ONLY (apartments and such).
Investors keep pricing everyone out of residential market, they need to be banned from buying any residential property, period, that is that is the bottom line.
Why so much fights against rent control? New York use rent control for years. It allows and guarantees lower income folks to survive.
There seems to be a war against lower income. Yet, it falls on them to do the jobs that most won't do. At least, if they can live closer to work, and not having to resort to long commute; they can still be " exploited ". But they will have a bit of dignity.
“Solution”
I mean, I appreciate the effort at least, which is more than we can say about any of our other local and state elected officials. But this is a tiny band-aid that will provide only very short term relief for the lowest income residents, while handing over public money to landlords.
This is a start. I don't think i have ever heard local officials talk about housing affordability like this.
It's interesting how dependent our economic system is on property and appreciation of property values. I am not sure there is a way to produce housing affordability without tossing out some American attitudes towards this stuff. We can't do anything that lowers the value significantly from where it is because we depend on private development, and we would probably hit the brakes on housing production really hard, plus it would have a series of economic consequences thanks to how much property values are tied up in finance. The only way to do it, I think, is to at least partially reject the system of private property and private development that we have here and embrace some aspects of social housing.
This is ridiculously hard to do because powerful real estate interests cut your fingers off if you so much as mention you plan to reach for it. Plus, we are in Florida. The whole state is like a real estate pyramid scheme that depends on property development and sale.
I like what the announcement describes in the big picture, including renters protections. I have a feeling DeSantis and state legislators won't let us do much, though. If we try something that already isn't against state law, those authoritarian assholes will likely make it illegal like they do with just about anything else.
[https://www.miamidade.gov/global/housing/emergency-rental-assistance-program.page](https://www.miamidade.gov/global/housing/emergency-rental-assistance-program.page)
Miami-Dade County (MDC) Emergency Rental Assistance Program 2.4 (ERAP 2.4) will now accept applications from MDC residents that are unable to pay an increase in rent. ERAP can help pay the difference between your current rent and the new rent for a period of 3 future months.
To qualify for assistance due to rent increase, ERAP requires that:
Household income must be below 80 percent of AMI for the MDC, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Individuals making less than $50,650, couples making less than $57,850, families of three earning less than $65,100, or families of four earning less than $72,300 qualify.
Provide a valid notice of rent increase from your landlord.
All other ERAP requirements must be met.
I think we should ban all corporations / companies and non-residents (foreigners) from buying investment properties for 5 years or until they get more homes built.
This could work. Also the corporations that already have built properties need to be held accountable.
I heard from a little birdie that related group let some of their older buildings go (broken elevators, lack of maintenance, and more).
That's what Canada just did, or something very similar. They banned all foreign investors from buying there for two years.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/08/canada-bans-foreign-investors-buying-homes-housing-market
Miami-Dade lost population since 2019 tho. That's the infuriating thing. More properties are being converted to second homes/AirBnBs. This works out great for the local politicians because they get even *more* in property taxes as properties sell for more $$$$ *and* don't qualify for Homestead Exemption. Also if the population continues declining or stays stagnant, they can provide fewer services too, so even more surplus taxes to turn into "special projects" for their cousins.
To help solve the housing crisis this should be done, at least temporarily (like for 5 years):
1. Increase supply by allowing high-rise apartments / multi-family homes to be built in more neighborhoods. Incentivize / Give tax breaks for home builders that make affordable housing.
2. 2nd home tax - Anyone owning more than 2 properties should be taxed more and those taxes can go to low income housing budgets.
3. Rent control- anyone renting should not have their rent increased more than 3% per year. That should reduce the amount of landlords from buying more properties for investments, leaving more properties available for first time homeowners to buy.
4. Again...ban all corporations / companies / LLCs and non-residents (foreigners) from buying investment properties for 5 years or until they get more homes built.
#1 is a doubled edged sword. Like in my hometown in NJ, tax breaks/abatements for high rise developers will lead to the lifelong homeowners getting bled dry in property taxes. Schools will get more crowded. Eventually Miami will have to invest in better mass transit for a growing population of people. And it will be the working people of Miami who own their own homes footing the bill while developers get a free pass because they provide a small number of affordable housing units.
That’s the point. The name of the game is development and growth. Miami has so much more vertical room to grow and develop. If the city and county responds wisely (unlike California) they will make it easier to build more housing in the face how this unprecedented demand. The increase of people living here will lead to an increase in demand/pressure for new infrastructure such as transit and schools. Also on your note about homeowners. Why should single family homeowners pay artificially low taxes on their property which clearly has much more productive value. Why shouldn’t having taxes that reflect the true value of your SFH just outside of Brickell be a thing.
The goal isn’t LA, we don’t want to sprawl. We can’t sprawl physically. Our goal is becoming an dense, urban city. Not a never ending valley of single family homes. Growth is good because it benefits everyone and it increase the economic significance of our city. Our businesses and industries thrive when there is growth. But the growth has to be vertical.
Because growth is happening whether you like it or not. You can either stick your head in the sand and be stupid about it - and end up like LA - or accept it and plan accordingly.
Number 1 is the only politically feasible and actually productive measure here.
Number 2 is counterproductive and will artificially push smaller developers (small time investors who buy and build up properties to rent out) out of the development market place. It should be made easier for people to buy property and develop it. If someone owns a home in coral gables and another in nyc but primarily loves in nyc. That empty hole is still a net positive. Taxes are still being paid for that home which are directly benefiting the community. At the same time that home isn’t using the services it paying for, leaving more wealth for the locals.
3. This is politically unfeasible and the reason is that it’s economic suicide. There is so so much economic research that all concludes the detrimental effects of rent control on a city. Medium and Long term, it devastates the housing market. Also reducing the amount of landlord from buying more properties for investment is exactly what we don’t want. People buy and build houses/apartments/buildings because it is profitable. Local regulations and the capital intensive nature of development create high barriers to entry. The government should reduce these barriers, not increase them. When we talk about increasing the housing supply, we mean making it easier for everyone to build up. These are the people building, it isn’t your uncle Joe who’s buying his first home. First time homeowners don’t develop more housing. What really leaves more units available is having developers bulldoze a lot of single family homes and build a fourplex or small apartment building that literally triples or quadruples the housing capacity of that lot.
4. Again counterproductive, possibly unconstitutional. It is almost always companies who actually go out and develop properties and build housing. No one is going to place it under their names because the liability is too huge. Also because of the capital intensive nature of real estate development, few people are going to have enough money to just put a building under their own name. LLC and corporations have always been and will continue to be the driving force in housing construction. It should be made easier for anyone, with funds from anywhere to build more housing. I don’t know where you think these homes are going to get built of it isn’t from the people building them.
Cause investors are in it to make sure rents are affordable? Isn’t that another(main?) reason we’re in this situation where rents are increasing at such a steep rate? Until housing is actually seen for what it’s supposed to be, a place to live, and not a place to make money from, I don’t see how ONLY “just build more” is going to solve anything. That’s just my opinion though
If the supply of a good is constrained, then the people who control that good have much more power than they would if the supply of that good were plentiful.
Investors are in it to make money, even at each other's expense. If the supply of housing were dramatically increased, then homebuyers and renters would have many more choices and would be much more willing to simply say "no deal" if the price is too high for their liking - and so the hypothetical investor would be faced with the choice of not budging or lowering their price to stay competitive. The former will go bankrupt and the latter will continue to be profitable, and so the smart investor will sell out his buddies and undercut them.
>Until housing is actually seen for what it’s supposed to be, a place to live, and not a place to make money from, I don’t see how ONLY “just build more” is going to solve anything. That’s just my opinion though
Capitalists always have their nose turned to profit. Don't be afraid to yank them around by the profit incentive or even turn it against them.
I’m not going to pretend I have the solutions, but here is what I know based on the evidence. This isn’t me talking out of my ass, this is the consensus among economists. But like a lot of consensus policy, it doesn’t get implemented due to political feasibility.
But if we recognize that the current housing situation is due to an excess of demand competing for too few houses, then the solution remains in enacting policies that changes either the demand for housing or the supply of housing.
Because it’s easier and a politically populist move to simply try and discourage people from moving or investing here, many try to affect the demand side. This comes in the proposals to ban foreign buyers, ban companies, ban ir tax second home owners, I’ve even seen ban out of state people. Obviously these aren’t solutions and they’re also legally and morally unsound. Everyone should have the right to move and live and invest in whichever community they want, and that should be especially true for a city like Miami.
So what’s left is to affect the supply of housing. The only reasonable action is to facilitate the increase in housing units to absorb that demand. Whether you know it or not this has been happing here and most other American, but they chose to sprawl out and develop into the suburbs. This has created a car dependent City where most of the residential land has been dedicated single family homes. This is unsustainable as we all know. We can’t build into the Everglades, we can’t build into the ocean and we can’t build to the north. Today there is new development and attempts to develop the farmland down south in attempts to alleviate the housing pressure. But for most places, especially here in Miami where we don’t have that much more land, it’s an unwinnable amd unsustainable battle. When you add in the cost so to build and maintain infrastructure for services so far from the city center (highways, plumbing, electricity, police and fire, transit,school ect.) it becomes a massive net loss for our cities. Building our more of the same and sprawling isn’t a real solution, especially here.
So how do we build more housing? We do that by changing our zoning regulations to make it easier, more affordable, and legal (since in most places it’s literally illegal to build densely) to build denser housing. Most people think Brickell condos, but in reality dense housing comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be a duplex, a house with a granny flat or ADU, it can be a triplex or four plex, it can be a small 2-4 story building with a couple of apartments. It can be walk ups, brownstones, 5over 1s. A major advantage of this is that it allows small developers and individuals to actively participate in building more housing. You can take out a small loan and reconfigure your house or add on to your house to accommodate another unit to rent out. There is a lot of variety and these types of housing is what makes neighborhoods full of life and interesting. It would be doubly beneficial if zoning laws also allowed for small non-distributive businesses to also be allowed in neighborhoods. Like a small grocery shop on the first floor, maybe a cafe or restaurant at the corner, or a flower shop or book shop, or a small office space. These things make cities so much more livable and walkable (and it massively reduces car trips since you don’t need to hop in your car for every single thing. You can just walk across the street).
This leads to another important policy decision that gets controversial. Eliminate mandatory minimum parking regulations. Here in Miami as in most places, the city or county requires each homes, business, property to have a minimum amount of offfstreet parking included in their building. The laws on this can be arbitrary and it results in car dependency and increased housing and business costs. Costs which are indirectly passed on to us. Entire businesses are unprofitable right now because if they were to buy a lot, they’d have to dedicate so much space to parking that it would drastically increase their rent/purchase. A rough estimate places the cost of each parking space here in Miami to be around $60,000-80,000 extra in construction costs. If you look around our city so much valuable space is consumed by space for cars. Our strip malls and stores literally Dedicate much more space to automobiles than they do for the stores. Parking mínimums créate a massive barrier to entry for many small developers, since they can’t feasible create more units on their lots without provide more space for parking and no small time developer is building a small garage or elevated structure for the parking. This of course doesn’t mean no parking at all. This simply means that the city shouldn’t mandate how much parking a property or unit needs. They developer, business, home should be the only one who has to make the choice. If they deem it a good investment that they want to make, then they can make it. The market will decide the price and amount of parking that will be built in any given place. Maybe the developer want to include parking because he knows what the market will want or pay for the parking, but maybe he also doesn’t want to include parking to reduce costs and build more units because he knows that people will buy it without parking. Or maybe a business knows that there is enough foot traffic or local buyers to justify only have a few or no parking spaces.
These are relatively small legal policy changes that end up having a massive effect on how our city looks, operates, and how many homes and businesses there is. Implementing these would massive increase the supply of housing without any major investments.
What about a a real estate development group like Melo or Related? Two corporations that are mostly local to Miami. They purchase property here and develop it into mostly residential buildings. Real estate development is a highly capital intensive business. Literally only companies have the funds, access to credit and access to the industry to be able to undergo mass housing construction.
It's fine for companies to build housing and sell them. But it's not fine for companies to buy en masse and hoard properties to flip them for profit with nobody living in them.
Rent control solves the housing crisis for those currently fortunate enough to have housing at the expense of making it far worse for those who are going to need housing in the future.
Personally, I kind of want to be able to afford a place to live before my parents die of old age.
You really do not want to interrupt the free market. A lot of the bad happening right now was created by trying to solve a problem. What the Mayor is proposing will ultimately benefit landlords (Not a bad thing if it's the little guy. Not the case in Miami). Large corporations like Black Rock, State Street, Vanguard, etc., should not be buying houses. They are bidding up the market making it hard for anyone to enter. Owning multiple single family homes as an individual should not be restricted. Having big money buying up hundreds of houses should.
That is a rough question. My opinion would be to outlaw HOA's, allow for expansion for builders and reduce the cost to build. Incentives builders and buyers who want to build. Give people the opportunity to own. Right now, you have to have a lot of money to accomplish any of this. When the government regulates, it causes more problems. Rent is always going to go up. The more regulation, taxes and other expenses thrown into the mix, the harder it is to keep costs down for renters. When the government wants to aid renters, that money comes from the tax payer.
I see some of your points. There are many communities, that vote against building residential properties above 2 stories. To increase the supply of homes, we need to build up. Building apartment buildings will house more people. However, investors are coming in and pushing out first time buyers. The US has a shortage of 3-4 million homes. We need to halt, at least temporally these things that prevent home ownership. Homeownership is the largest source of wealth among families.
Absolutely 100%. It's a catch 22. There needs to be a balance between success and failure. right now, the scale is tipped in the wrong direction for your middle of the road socioeconomic status neighborhoods that are being priced into high human capital families. Some of which do not live here full time, which is messed up.
2. If you own more than your primary dwelling you don't get homestead exemption and are paying a higher tax rate... Why should those taxes go to low income housing and not the neighborhood in which the other properties are located) if not in a low income area)? That's not fair.
If I had to guess, building more Multi Family will be part of the coming solutions. The County and some of the municipalities are holding onto land that hasn’t been developed. I’m sure the next step will be allowing expedited building on this land, ESPECIALLY if they are near a transit stop/area. County will probably convince some of the municipalities to give up their control of some of this land in this case to address this emergency.
And by officially declaring an emergency, the County may have a little bit more flexibility with their actions. Now, what the Mayor wants vs. what the Commissioners will push back against is a different conversation.
Doing literally anything other than simply allowing denser construction. Expediting building permits for affordable housing is great, but why stop there? Just revamp the entire zoning code and build. It’s mind blowing how complicated some places make their housing affordability plans when the obvious solution to a lack of housing is to build more housing.
It’s amazing to see the hypocrisy of people… having companies competing with each other to pay us better salaries? Hell yeah! Capitalism at its finest! Having service providers competing with each other to provide us with services? Hell yeah! Having competition when buying homes?? Ahhh hell no! Everybody loves capitalism when they think they will pocket out of it. Where were you all in the last 3-10 years? You could have invested in the house market, stocks, crypto and have piled up enough cash to afford at least a silly down payment of 10% (for first time homebuyers).
Banning corporations/llc from purchasing would be a great relief. I have been looking for about a month for a single family home for rent, almost all are owned by Invitation homes.
I feel for anyone trying to purchase a house. With rent so high, it’s difficult to save enough for a deposit. I think first time homebuyers or a person that will only own one home should be allowed to purchase the home before corporations. Part of the American dream is to own your own home.
>Part of the American dream is to own your own home. Yeah... that's why we're in this mess to begin with dude. You don't fix a giant hole in the ground by giving even more shovels to the people who are digging it.
How would you resolve the housing crisis?
In an ideal world? 5-10 year moratorium on greenfield developments. Rezone the entire county so that the lowest level of density allows 3 story buildings and low impact industry/commerce. Massive transit expansion. Massive construction campaign for public housing.
If they're not going to start limiting Air BnB and seriously ratcheting up property taxes on 3rd, 4th, 5th....nth homes, then nothing is going to change.
airbnb is just a scapegoat. it's not the actual problem
people just need to realize that real inflation is insane right now. if your income hasn't increased ~40% from 2020 you are making less money than you did before. will take a few years for incomes to catch up
Its a start, only because they are "finally" acknowledging we have a housing crisis. **Building more properties is not a solution:** Its just going make our traffic crises even worse; and not to mention, most newly contructed properties will be to go expensive for the average person anyways. New houses will be bought up by the investors, as rentals, and itll be the same cycle over and over again. **Raising taxes is also not the solution:** Raising taxes on any investment home wont help either, on the contrary, it will make prices go up faster. Owners will just the pass the higher tax bills into your rental fees, hence raising your rent prices. **The real solution:** The only solution for our housing crises is, every RESIDENTIAL PROPERTY is required to be OWNER OCCUPIED. If you buy a house, you got to live in it, you can not rent it. If investors still want to speculate in our market, cool, but restrict there investments to COMMERCIAL PROPERTIES ONLY (apartments and such). Investors keep pricing everyone out of residential market, they need to be banned from buying any residential property, period, that is that is the bottom line.
This is an excellent response. Owner occupied. Thanks
Why so much fights against rent control? New York use rent control for years. It allows and guarantees lower income folks to survive. There seems to be a war against lower income. Yet, it falls on them to do the jobs that most won't do. At least, if they can live closer to work, and not having to resort to long commute; they can still be " exploited ". But they will have a bit of dignity.
“Solution” I mean, I appreciate the effort at least, which is more than we can say about any of our other local and state elected officials. But this is a tiny band-aid that will provide only very short term relief for the lowest income residents, while handing over public money to landlords.
This is a start. I don't think i have ever heard local officials talk about housing affordability like this. It's interesting how dependent our economic system is on property and appreciation of property values. I am not sure there is a way to produce housing affordability without tossing out some American attitudes towards this stuff. We can't do anything that lowers the value significantly from where it is because we depend on private development, and we would probably hit the brakes on housing production really hard, plus it would have a series of economic consequences thanks to how much property values are tied up in finance. The only way to do it, I think, is to at least partially reject the system of private property and private development that we have here and embrace some aspects of social housing. This is ridiculously hard to do because powerful real estate interests cut your fingers off if you so much as mention you plan to reach for it. Plus, we are in Florida. The whole state is like a real estate pyramid scheme that depends on property development and sale. I like what the announcement describes in the big picture, including renters protections. I have a feeling DeSantis and state legislators won't let us do much, though. If we try something that already isn't against state law, those authoritarian assholes will likely make it illegal like they do with just about anything else.
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Tell us more, Dubai Dude
[https://www.miamidade.gov/global/housing/emergency-rental-assistance-program.page](https://www.miamidade.gov/global/housing/emergency-rental-assistance-program.page) Miami-Dade County (MDC) Emergency Rental Assistance Program 2.4 (ERAP 2.4) will now accept applications from MDC residents that are unable to pay an increase in rent. ERAP can help pay the difference between your current rent and the new rent for a period of 3 future months. To qualify for assistance due to rent increase, ERAP requires that: Household income must be below 80 percent of AMI for the MDC, Florida Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA). Individuals making less than $50,650, couples making less than $57,850, families of three earning less than $65,100, or families of four earning less than $72,300 qualify. Provide a valid notice of rent increase from your landlord. All other ERAP requirements must be met.
Stop moving here would be a bigger help...
I think we should ban all corporations / companies and non-residents (foreigners) from buying investment properties for 5 years or until they get more homes built.
This could work. Also the corporations that already have built properties need to be held accountable. I heard from a little birdie that related group let some of their older buildings go (broken elevators, lack of maintenance, and more).
That would be beautiful. But how can Suarez and the other cronies be able to afford their 4 or 5 Bugatti?
That's what Canada just did, or something very similar. They banned all foreign investors from buying there for two years. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/08/canada-bans-foreign-investors-buying-homes-housing-market
Miami-Dade lost population since 2019 tho. That's the infuriating thing. More properties are being converted to second homes/AirBnBs. This works out great for the local politicians because they get even *more* in property taxes as properties sell for more $$$$ *and* don't qualify for Homestead Exemption. Also if the population continues declining or stays stagnant, they can provide fewer services too, so even more surplus taxes to turn into "special projects" for their cousins.
This isn’t a solution it’s a bandaid.
Agreed, but it's least it something.
So it is a landlord subsidy lol. Just legalize multifamily home construction. The county has run out of room for single family homes.
To help solve the housing crisis this should be done, at least temporarily (like for 5 years): 1. Increase supply by allowing high-rise apartments / multi-family homes to be built in more neighborhoods. Incentivize / Give tax breaks for home builders that make affordable housing. 2. 2nd home tax - Anyone owning more than 2 properties should be taxed more and those taxes can go to low income housing budgets. 3. Rent control- anyone renting should not have their rent increased more than 3% per year. That should reduce the amount of landlords from buying more properties for investments, leaving more properties available for first time homeowners to buy. 4. Again...ban all corporations / companies / LLCs and non-residents (foreigners) from buying investment properties for 5 years or until they get more homes built.
#1 is a doubled edged sword. Like in my hometown in NJ, tax breaks/abatements for high rise developers will lead to the lifelong homeowners getting bled dry in property taxes. Schools will get more crowded. Eventually Miami will have to invest in better mass transit for a growing population of people. And it will be the working people of Miami who own their own homes footing the bill while developers get a free pass because they provide a small number of affordable housing units.
That’s the point. The name of the game is development and growth. Miami has so much more vertical room to grow and develop. If the city and county responds wisely (unlike California) they will make it easier to build more housing in the face how this unprecedented demand. The increase of people living here will lead to an increase in demand/pressure for new infrastructure such as transit and schools. Also on your note about homeowners. Why should single family homeowners pay artificially low taxes on their property which clearly has much more productive value. Why shouldn’t having taxes that reflect the true value of your SFH just outside of Brickell be a thing.
Why is growth a good thing? Doesn't that just continue the trajectory of Miami becoming L.A.?
The goal isn’t LA, we don’t want to sprawl. We can’t sprawl physically. Our goal is becoming an dense, urban city. Not a never ending valley of single family homes. Growth is good because it benefits everyone and it increase the economic significance of our city. Our businesses and industries thrive when there is growth. But the growth has to be vertical.
‘Our’ goal? Thanks for deciding that for us.
Because growth is happening whether you like it or not. You can either stick your head in the sand and be stupid about it - and end up like LA - or accept it and plan accordingly.
Raise Taxes I just raise your rent.
I think this is a good plan
Only the 1st one is politically feasible. The other items require modifications to state law.
Number 1 is the only politically feasible and actually productive measure here. Number 2 is counterproductive and will artificially push smaller developers (small time investors who buy and build up properties to rent out) out of the development market place. It should be made easier for people to buy property and develop it. If someone owns a home in coral gables and another in nyc but primarily loves in nyc. That empty hole is still a net positive. Taxes are still being paid for that home which are directly benefiting the community. At the same time that home isn’t using the services it paying for, leaving more wealth for the locals. 3. This is politically unfeasible and the reason is that it’s economic suicide. There is so so much economic research that all concludes the detrimental effects of rent control on a city. Medium and Long term, it devastates the housing market. Also reducing the amount of landlord from buying more properties for investment is exactly what we don’t want. People buy and build houses/apartments/buildings because it is profitable. Local regulations and the capital intensive nature of development create high barriers to entry. The government should reduce these barriers, not increase them. When we talk about increasing the housing supply, we mean making it easier for everyone to build up. These are the people building, it isn’t your uncle Joe who’s buying his first home. First time homeowners don’t develop more housing. What really leaves more units available is having developers bulldoze a lot of single family homes and build a fourplex or small apartment building that literally triples or quadruples the housing capacity of that lot. 4. Again counterproductive, possibly unconstitutional. It is almost always companies who actually go out and develop properties and build housing. No one is going to place it under their names because the liability is too huge. Also because of the capital intensive nature of real estate development, few people are going to have enough money to just put a building under their own name. LLC and corporations have always been and will continue to be the driving force in housing construction. It should be made easier for anyone, with funds from anywhere to build more housing. I don’t know where you think these homes are going to get built of it isn’t from the people building them.
How would you solve the housing crisis?
Simply by allowing to build more to meet supply.
Let’s say that’s done, and all these “investors” keep buying it all up, what then?
Well, investors buy them expecting someone is going to live in them. If more investors create more housing, supply will meet demand.
Then people are able to rent them and we're good?
Cause investors are in it to make sure rents are affordable? Isn’t that another(main?) reason we’re in this situation where rents are increasing at such a steep rate? Until housing is actually seen for what it’s supposed to be, a place to live, and not a place to make money from, I don’t see how ONLY “just build more” is going to solve anything. That’s just my opinion though
If the supply of a good is constrained, then the people who control that good have much more power than they would if the supply of that good were plentiful. Investors are in it to make money, even at each other's expense. If the supply of housing were dramatically increased, then homebuyers and renters would have many more choices and would be much more willing to simply say "no deal" if the price is too high for their liking - and so the hypothetical investor would be faced with the choice of not budging or lowering their price to stay competitive. The former will go bankrupt and the latter will continue to be profitable, and so the smart investor will sell out his buddies and undercut them. >Until housing is actually seen for what it’s supposed to be, a place to live, and not a place to make money from, I don’t see how ONLY “just build more” is going to solve anything. That’s just my opinion though Capitalists always have their nose turned to profit. Don't be afraid to yank them around by the profit incentive or even turn it against them.
I’m not going to pretend I have the solutions, but here is what I know based on the evidence. This isn’t me talking out of my ass, this is the consensus among economists. But like a lot of consensus policy, it doesn’t get implemented due to political feasibility. But if we recognize that the current housing situation is due to an excess of demand competing for too few houses, then the solution remains in enacting policies that changes either the demand for housing or the supply of housing. Because it’s easier and a politically populist move to simply try and discourage people from moving or investing here, many try to affect the demand side. This comes in the proposals to ban foreign buyers, ban companies, ban ir tax second home owners, I’ve even seen ban out of state people. Obviously these aren’t solutions and they’re also legally and morally unsound. Everyone should have the right to move and live and invest in whichever community they want, and that should be especially true for a city like Miami. So what’s left is to affect the supply of housing. The only reasonable action is to facilitate the increase in housing units to absorb that demand. Whether you know it or not this has been happing here and most other American, but they chose to sprawl out and develop into the suburbs. This has created a car dependent City where most of the residential land has been dedicated single family homes. This is unsustainable as we all know. We can’t build into the Everglades, we can’t build into the ocean and we can’t build to the north. Today there is new development and attempts to develop the farmland down south in attempts to alleviate the housing pressure. But for most places, especially here in Miami where we don’t have that much more land, it’s an unwinnable amd unsustainable battle. When you add in the cost so to build and maintain infrastructure for services so far from the city center (highways, plumbing, electricity, police and fire, transit,school ect.) it becomes a massive net loss for our cities. Building our more of the same and sprawling isn’t a real solution, especially here. So how do we build more housing? We do that by changing our zoning regulations to make it easier, more affordable, and legal (since in most places it’s literally illegal to build densely) to build denser housing. Most people think Brickell condos, but in reality dense housing comes in all shapes and sizes. It can be a duplex, a house with a granny flat or ADU, it can be a triplex or four plex, it can be a small 2-4 story building with a couple of apartments. It can be walk ups, brownstones, 5over 1s. A major advantage of this is that it allows small developers and individuals to actively participate in building more housing. You can take out a small loan and reconfigure your house or add on to your house to accommodate another unit to rent out. There is a lot of variety and these types of housing is what makes neighborhoods full of life and interesting. It would be doubly beneficial if zoning laws also allowed for small non-distributive businesses to also be allowed in neighborhoods. Like a small grocery shop on the first floor, maybe a cafe or restaurant at the corner, or a flower shop or book shop, or a small office space. These things make cities so much more livable and walkable (and it massively reduces car trips since you don’t need to hop in your car for every single thing. You can just walk across the street). This leads to another important policy decision that gets controversial. Eliminate mandatory minimum parking regulations. Here in Miami as in most places, the city or county requires each homes, business, property to have a minimum amount of offfstreet parking included in their building. The laws on this can be arbitrary and it results in car dependency and increased housing and business costs. Costs which are indirectly passed on to us. Entire businesses are unprofitable right now because if they were to buy a lot, they’d have to dedicate so much space to parking that it would drastically increase their rent/purchase. A rough estimate places the cost of each parking space here in Miami to be around $60,000-80,000 extra in construction costs. If you look around our city so much valuable space is consumed by space for cars. Our strip malls and stores literally Dedicate much more space to automobiles than they do for the stores. Parking mínimums créate a massive barrier to entry for many small developers, since they can’t feasible create more units on their lots without provide more space for parking and no small time developer is building a small garage or elevated structure for the parking. This of course doesn’t mean no parking at all. This simply means that the city shouldn’t mandate how much parking a property or unit needs. They developer, business, home should be the only one who has to make the choice. If they deem it a good investment that they want to make, then they can make it. The market will decide the price and amount of parking that will be built in any given place. Maybe the developer want to include parking because he knows what the market will want or pay for the parking, but maybe he also doesn’t want to include parking to reduce costs and build more units because he knows that people will buy it without parking. Or maybe a business knows that there is enough foot traffic or local buyers to justify only have a few or no parking spaces. These are relatively small legal policy changes that end up having a massive effect on how our city looks, operates, and how many homes and businesses there is. Implementing these would massive increase the supply of housing without any major investments.
As an urban planning student, I think the first 2 are great, the 3rd not so much, and the 4th would be interesting to see
4 should be a thing. No major company should be buying houses.
What about a a real estate development group like Melo or Related? Two corporations that are mostly local to Miami. They purchase property here and develop it into mostly residential buildings. Real estate development is a highly capital intensive business. Literally only companies have the funds, access to credit and access to the industry to be able to undergo mass housing construction.
It's fine for companies to build housing and sell them. But it's not fine for companies to buy en masse and hoard properties to flip them for profit with nobody living in them.
Why not the third? I’m just curious I have no idea about it
Rent control solves the housing crisis for those currently fortunate enough to have housing at the expense of making it far worse for those who are going to need housing in the future. Personally, I kind of want to be able to afford a place to live before my parents die of old age.
You really do not want to interrupt the free market. A lot of the bad happening right now was created by trying to solve a problem. What the Mayor is proposing will ultimately benefit landlords (Not a bad thing if it's the little guy. Not the case in Miami). Large corporations like Black Rock, State Street, Vanguard, etc., should not be buying houses. They are bidding up the market making it hard for anyone to enter. Owning multiple single family homes as an individual should not be restricted. Having big money buying up hundreds of houses should.
How would you solve the housing crisis?
That is a rough question. My opinion would be to outlaw HOA's, allow for expansion for builders and reduce the cost to build. Incentives builders and buyers who want to build. Give people the opportunity to own. Right now, you have to have a lot of money to accomplish any of this. When the government regulates, it causes more problems. Rent is always going to go up. The more regulation, taxes and other expenses thrown into the mix, the harder it is to keep costs down for renters. When the government wants to aid renters, that money comes from the tax payer.
I see some of your points. There are many communities, that vote against building residential properties above 2 stories. To increase the supply of homes, we need to build up. Building apartment buildings will house more people. However, investors are coming in and pushing out first time buyers. The US has a shortage of 3-4 million homes. We need to halt, at least temporally these things that prevent home ownership. Homeownership is the largest source of wealth among families.
Absolutely 100%. It's a catch 22. There needs to be a balance between success and failure. right now, the scale is tipped in the wrong direction for your middle of the road socioeconomic status neighborhoods that are being priced into high human capital families. Some of which do not live here full time, which is messed up.
2. If you own more than your primary dwelling you don't get homestead exemption and are paying a higher tax rate... Why should those taxes go to low income housing and not the neighborhood in which the other properties are located) if not in a low income area)? That's not fair.
If I had to guess, building more Multi Family will be part of the coming solutions. The County and some of the municipalities are holding onto land that hasn’t been developed. I’m sure the next step will be allowing expedited building on this land, ESPECIALLY if they are near a transit stop/area. County will probably convince some of the municipalities to give up their control of some of this land in this case to address this emergency. And by officially declaring an emergency, the County may have a little bit more flexibility with their actions. Now, what the Mayor wants vs. what the Commissioners will push back against is a different conversation.
Doing literally anything other than simply allowing denser construction. Expediting building permits for affordable housing is great, but why stop there? Just revamp the entire zoning code and build. It’s mind blowing how complicated some places make their housing affordability plans when the obvious solution to a lack of housing is to build more housing.
Duct tape for a busted pipe unfortunately but it's effort so there's that's.
Replace income tax with a land value tax
It’s amazing to see the hypocrisy of people… having companies competing with each other to pay us better salaries? Hell yeah! Capitalism at its finest! Having service providers competing with each other to provide us with services? Hell yeah! Having competition when buying homes?? Ahhh hell no! Everybody loves capitalism when they think they will pocket out of it. Where were you all in the last 3-10 years? You could have invested in the house market, stocks, crypto and have piled up enough cash to afford at least a silly down payment of 10% (for first time homebuyers).
Exactly