NIMBYism Is Good If the N Stands for Nuclear(bloomberg.com) |
NIMBYism Is Good If the N Stands for Nuclear(bloomberg.com) |
If real estate is as an investment, then you can be damn sure that people will do everything they can to protect their investments.
This is more of a "cultural" thing, and I think most important.
Following that, in practice there are supply side and demand side methods of driving down the cost of living. The big ones are probably maximum height requirements, minimum parking requirements, and minimum size requirements.
China is probably the most extreme end of real-estate-as-an-investment mentality. Even without NIMBYism and zoning laws, everybody invests in real estate because it's impossible to make money off the stock market without insider government knowledge i.e. the government can destroy entire industries overnight like the recent private education bans. They're experimenting with increasing property taxes for each non-primary residence but only time will tell if it'll work.
Unfortunately, culture will take multiple decades/generations to change so the current generation are essentially out of luck if they are not in a high income career or have rich parents
I figure the simple answer is a large tax on non-owner-occupied homes. If the tax rate was 50% or 100% of assessed value per annum, it's unlikely property prices would rise enough to justify holding the asset.
Maybe require 60 or 100 days per year of residence, to be considered "occupied" with excused exceptions like "pandemic travel lockdowns". This would allow for a modest second-house model that keeps daylight between people like elderly "snowbirds" (who maintain a household in Arizona in the winter, and Minnesota in the summer) and the speculators who have no real intention of ever occupying the homes.