Biden to propose new $5000 tax credit for first-time home buyers - eviltoast
  • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    This (correct me if I’m wrong) does nothing on the supply side, and only raises the amount that prices could be artificially increased by that to offset it, isn’t that the way these things play out?

    • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The more houses that actually sell on the market, the lower the prices due to competition. The trouble is getting this initiative out. It needs to come out election year or it’s not happening of course.

      This could back fire in a drastic way. If those families sell those houses to large companies; those houses will go off the market (perhaps permanently) to be part of renting farms where those big companies set the rent to whatever they like.

      I think Biden has something to deal with those large companies but if they are not discussing it during an election year, “Forget about it.”

      • Tolookah@discuss.tchncs.de
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        8 months ago

        That’s what I would worry about also, companies are trying to buy every house on the market it seems, and this just gives them more to buy

      • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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        8 months ago

        You cannot set the rent to “whatever you like”. There’s a reason why my NYC apartment is $2500 a month and not $250,000 a month. If a corporation does take an owned unit into the rental market, it’ll be competing with all other rentals. That will decrease supply for the ownership market, yes, but it also increases supply in the rental market, which tends to consist of people who are financially struggling more than people looking to buy a house.

        Regardless, the actual solution is to just build some more god damned housing so that it stops being an attractive investment in the first place. Housing cannot be both a good investment and affordable.

        • mightyfoolish@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          I understand prices are not arbitrary numbers but prices are different in markets that have many players versus ones that have only several big ones.

          Building more houses is a good long term solution. I agree with you there. Another one is too set a penalty for owning single family homes so ideally you would only want to own just one anyways.

    • BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social
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      8 months ago

      This is only available to first-time buyers, not universally, so it wouldn’t be quite that simple. If you’re confident your house will sell quickly, yeah, you’ll just increase the price by 5k, but if you’ve been having trouble finding a buyer, the credit might tip your current price into being affordable to a first-time buyer that would otherwise pass it up, so you may hold the price steady.

      That said, subsidizing demand like this while ignoring the core supply crunch issue is generally not very helpful.

      • cheese_greater@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Like the issue is still supply and getting NIMBYS/cities to fuck off, lack of middle + government housing, etc right? These first-time buyers things dont seem to be effective because the issue seems rooted in artificially restricted supply and overwhelmingly accelerating increase of demand (corporate purchasing and in my country at least, unsustainable international “student” policy to enrich schools and a fundamentally unsustainable immigration frenzy writ large

        Nothing against students and immigrants (we’ll need them since none of us non-blessed can reproduce) but we’re lying and taking advantage of many who aren’t rich and are banking on our rosier international reputation when the reality is its all fucked and everything that is seen to be done pours lighter fluid on the fire.

        Im so tired of all this 😭