thank you for your comment. just to add to it:

If you have a 1 km² (one square kilometer, = 1 million square meters) area. And the law dictates that only single-family houses can be built on it, with a minimum lot size of 500 m² each, then assuming 4 people per house, you can build 2000 houses in that area or house around 8000 people.

If you allow multi-family houses. Such as i live in one in Austria. Close to the city. The house has a lot size of about 1000 m² (with a big park in the middle), and 25 people live in it. If you build houses like that, you can house around 25000 people. More than triple!

Property values increase over time as the surrounding area becomes more developed and economically advanced,

they will actually decrease long-term (in most areas) as the population is shrinking, meaning less demand for housing.

i think the problem of institutional investors is mostly that they’re unnecessary middle-men, taking a slice of the cake while not actually providing anything of value.

they buy the house, then rent it out to the local population. in the end, they make a profit that way, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. that is money that could have gone into the local community instead.

either you need local middlemen, like the municipality (which i am advocating for!) or people need to buy the houses directly themselves. i remember reading an article that renting is often better for inhabitants since they don’t need to do a down-payment and also they carry less risk that way. also interestingly many can build more wealth by renting+investing instead of house buying. ~~https://www.moneydigest.com/1580083/renting-vs-owning-both-can-help-you-build-wealth-according-to-personal-finance-expert/~~

edit: damn it i can’t find the article anymore

I mean sure we can ban institutional investors from buying up houses in your area, but the question is: will new houses stlil continue to be built? or are houses mostly built because the developers intend to sell them to institutional investors that can pay high prices for it?

in any case, the opposite of institutional investment is social housing. you can’t only ban one without also pushing the other.

First of all, that would only apply to companies with a build-and-hold business model, not to ones that develop a property and then sell it off to owner-occupants. Clearly, there do exist people who want to be owner-occupants, so the real issue is how to construct the regulations etc. to incentivize the latter business model.

fair point. i had completely not considered that. especially as we were discussing blackrock which is a buy-and-hold business model.

Also what i find very interesting about this topic is how demographics plays into this

i personally think that the UN predictions about how the population numbers are going to evolve are utter bullshit. it is well known that the population pyramid looks something like this:

and it’s going to get thinner and thinner at the bottom as time progresses.

anyways, i think a lot of organizations that could build housing are a bit reluctant mostly for that reason. a company thinks “if i build a house today, there’s a good chance that there won’t be demand for that house in 30 years, so it might not pay off”. and municipalities, i’m afraid, are way too under-invested in building social housing in general because that would be communism or sth.

after a quick search on the internet, about 1.6 million people live in public housing in the US in 2024. that’s about 0.5 percent. Source

Meanwhile in Europe, about 9.3% (45 million people) people live in public housing according to this article, with some countries like Austria having 24%. (8% of EU according to this OECD study).

yeah the UK is going downhill very quickly and it’s evident in how nervously they respond to that saying.

i indeed only found out about that rn

But you seem like a refreshingly normal person rather than one of the ideologically motivated internet cold warriors

hehe thanks, i try to be.

i mean yeah, literally, look at how the Iranian regime is allowed to post its anti-US propaganda lego movies on Twitter.

edit: nvm that was a bad take.

i’m literally advocating for higher housing creation. i specifically stated

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

Which is as direct a request of municipalities to build social housing as it can be. I don’t get how people interpret that as “corpo dick sucking”?!?

seizing wealth/companies from billionaires has a name and it’s called wealth tax. i’m saying this again and again because people keep demanding that we take billionaire’s wealth (which i can agree with) but then as soon as somebody utters “wealth tax”, everybody immediately says how that’s not a solution or sth. it is the solution. it is exactly “seize the means of production”. that’s literally what it is.

Removed by mod

so what you’re saying is that market manipulation (= monopolies) is the problem, not companies owning houses?

10% of houses being unoccupied sounds like a lot to me. I would guess that a maximum of 3% would be a healthy amount.

I wonder, how do companies actually make money from owning houses that they don’t use? If you are a company, how do you get more dollars per year from a house that’s empty than one that is occupied and giving you rent?

Let’s make an example. Rent let’s say is $1000/month, which is $12k per year. How do you make $12k per year from owning a house without renting it out?

deleted by creator

Edit: do you people not understand that your attitudes play right into the hands of the private equity oligarchs? Y’all are literally defending authoritarian laws that distort the market in their favor.

no, unfortunately people don’t seem to get that. there’s a serious shortage of mathematics and statistics skill in the average lemmy user. i think to actually improve the world one must study mathematics and use it to properly interpret the data about our world that we need to understand and handle it. which i hope somebody does more of. In fact it would be nice to see more lemmy posts about this.

this whole thing just doesn’t add up in my head.

people will bash blackrock for owning houses but really, what is actually happening here?

governments all around the world have the liberty and possibility to build houses and rent them out to people at-cost. Like, your city can do that. Where do you live? Seattle? Have you considered looking into how many houses the city of seattle has built in the last 20 years? And how many of them it rents out to people for cheap?

You can’t ban corporate houses if there’s no alternative. There needs to be an alternative first, otherwise you’re just creating a vacuum, and as the proverb goes, a vacuum always sucks.

The only way to do this is if meaningful alternatives exist first.

you can’t ban corporate-owned social media because the population would revolt. It’s already revolting when social media is about to be banned for teenagers. just ask anyone on lemmy about this.

the fediverse needs to become an acceptable alternative first, only after that can people move away from big corpo-owned networks.