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Why are politicians doing nothing for first time home buyers? (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) by filister@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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I am anxiously following the real estate market and prices are far outpacing the wage growth, making real estate really unaffordable for a lot of people, and yet there is very little political will from politicians to do anything about it.

This is especially true for desirable areas and big cities, and slowly pushing low earners to the outskirts and even outside towns. I know plenty of people who hoarded multiple properties and now they simply rent them through Airbnb or booking not to mention big corporations trying to snap even more and rent them at outrageous prices. While plenty of people cannot afford even rent in those cities.

Mind you I am not US based, but I know that this is pretty much a world phenomenon for quite a few years who got really accelerated by the COVID pandemic, but its effect will cripple future generations severely who will never be able to purchase their own roof over their head and they will forever be stuck with ever increasing rents increasing enormously the financial burden of those people.

I don't know for you but I believe this is completely unsustainable in the long term and this will become an even bigger problem in the future and I wonder why there is so little done to tackle the problem now, and what are those politicians hope, that this will magically disappear tomorrow and all will be roses?

Why aren't universally some laws against home flipping and people owning more than one residential property? I think the right of having a roof over your head is a basic human right and every person out there deserves to have a decent home and not be forced to live on the street.

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[–] techwooded@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 months ago

As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing