What about banks, real-estate, and just random big companies?
There are companies that are crowd funding buying homes too, where the person is the investor and earns dividends on it. It’s getting insane.
Out in Silicon Valley people were pitching these all the time. They’re also popular with medical doctors from what I hear. I got pitched by a guy driving a top of the line Tesla Model S as an Uber driver years ago - he said he was driving for Uber just to meet potential investors.
Slightly OT, but recently (at a cannabis dispensary oddly enough), I overheard a guy in full hunting camo talk about how he day traded in the deer stand. The investor class is fucking weird.
Sucks when your deer blind’s wifi gets interference from the asshole in the other deer blind who doesn’t set his wifi channels correctly.
Link?
Link to what? My friend works for one, lol.
Link for evidence. Your friends aren’t trustworthy since the coffee shop incident.
Isn’t that what a timeshare is? Those have been around forever
You don’t get dividends on a timeshare. You just get the right to (theoretically) vacation there.
I thought the same. Is there data somewhere to suggest hedge funds specifically own more than the others?
Hedge funds have been disproportionate buyers of single-family homes over the last few years.
Traditionally, real estate investment funds didn’t own single family homes to rent. Most companies with single family home exposure were builders.
There’s still a ton of other multi-family and apartment REITs out there, but I believe they’re not being targetting both because they’ve existed for a long while and also because usually a person looking for a family home doesn’t buy the entire apartment building.
Here’s a source with some more info: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/21/how-wall-street-bought-single-family-homes-and-put-them-up-for-rent.html
I have no idea who down voted you. Let me find some…
Edit: https://reiclub.com/articles/single-family-houses-the-5-biggest-buyers-in-america/
Banks usually own them only for the time they’re for sale after being seized from an owner that defaulted on their payment, no?
Directly, no. Indirectly, yes.
https://www.ftadviser.com/property/2021/07/07/lloyds-makes-private-rental-debut-with-new-venture/
Baby steps
There’s always got to be loop holes so they can keep doing it while making it look like they did something
Now ban non hotel licensed entities from renting living spaces for less than a month
Fuck that Air BnB shit
Air bnb, flippers, Zillow, and 0% fed funds rate inflated the housing market destroying young peoples’ dream of home ownership.
Good, now find a way to make the Republicans let it pass.
So you say you’re a dreamer. Well you’re not the only one. —would be great if people could get into a 1200sf starter home for under 500k in my area.
If they just ban some human rights I’m sure they’ll come around.
See! Democrats never do anything!!! -_-
This should be one of those things that leads to violence.
For every single-family home a hedge fund owns over a certain limit each year, it would be subject to a tax penalty, the revenues from which would be used for down payment assistance programs for those seeking to buy their first home from a hedge fund.
Sounds like even if this gets passed, whatever penalties get assessed are just going right back to the hedge funds anyway? And it’s a 10-year plan… Kinda sounds like a whole lotta nothing. Disappointing.
They need to change the property tax system to tax non occupant owners a much higher rate and lower the rates for owner occupants. Add a big penalty on top of that for vacant non occupant owned houses. Punish them for hoarding vacant houses to artificially inflate prices.
So the goal is to push up rents relative to ownership? Why is it that the solution to the problems of capitalism always seems to be shifting around how poor people give money to rich people?
Just flat out say no corporation is allowed to have ownership or controlling interest in any SFH. Period. No incentives. You have a few years to divest until the property is auctioned off.
It’s not a perfect solution. Maybe not the best. But I’m so tired of pretending all we can do is basically nothing.
Capitalism is wonderful when everyone is on similar footing, but the natural result is to concentrate wealth which breaks the system. I don’t hate capitalism, but we are too far into the late-stage broken part and we need a way to reset that ideally doesn’t involve violent revolt. Eventually people get sick of living under the boot of a situation created by their ancestors and which they’ve received nothing beneficial from. Concentrated wealth and generational wealth needs to go away. People like Musk and Trump are only problems because they were born to more wealth than most people will ever know.
Get rid of that shit and redistribute their wealth to the people and that will fix so many of our problems.
Wealth trickling up is the nature of Capitalism. If I start with ten and you start with ten, and I sell you something worth 2 for 4, I now have more wealth because I’ve just gained $2 profit and you’ve lost $2 of value on your goods.
This will continue to snowball and accumulate. It’s baked into physics.
Not saying Capitalism can’t work. But it has to be heavily regulated and we need a wealth cap. Hence Bernie suggesting anyting over $1 billion gets taxed at 100%. I favor a logerethmic approach using a soft cap on earnings and counting investments as earnings. Basically, the closer to X amount you make each year, the less you take home. You never hit the cap, but you might be keeping pennies on the dollar the closer you get to it.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
I think we’re in total agreement. The accumulation of wealth is natural under capitalism. And as long as wealth is not overly skewed, capitalism aligns somewhat well with the needs of humanity. But as the balance tips, the alignment drifts. People could argue about the exact point at which capitalism no longer serves the people, but I think many of us believe we are currently past that point. I believe we are.
It’s not that capitalism is wrong, it’s that it has become unbalanced and we need something to reset it. In the past that something has been revolution and violent upheaval. I hope we are able to find another way.
It’s not that capitalism is wrong, it’s that it has become unbalanced and we need something to reset it.
Its parasitic though (it truly benefits well only the few), and as you stated, needs constant resetting.
Not sure that you can call a system that needs constant ‘resetting’ as the right system to use.
the person with more resources tends to win and the prize for winning is more resources. combine that with corporations that are literally immortal and you have a system that pushes resources upward and then locks them in place once they get there. there has to be an artificial intervention to shake those resources loose and get them circulating again or the whole machine is gonna seize up and fail when we insist on producing what no one can afford to buy.
The way our system is structured that even a good intention law like this, someone would find a loop hole around it. Lawyers lawyer.
I trust there are smarter people than me who could take this idea and improve on it. My plea is just to look beyond the confines of capitalism. I mean just take a peek and see if there is an answer there. Maybe not, but the people in places of power won’t even look.
That would affect a lot of farmers. A farm is a business, and even smaller farmers (what’s left of them, anyway; doing this isn’t going to help) often own their land and buildings under a corporate structure owned entirely by themselves.
If it could be limited to corporate structure with more than a few shareholders, that could work.
A farm isn’t a sfh
The house for the farm usually is, and it’s covered by everything else.
Split the land the house is on to it’s own lot and sell it then. Or knock it down/rezone it so it’s not legal for living/renting.
You’re handing your opponents a talking point against it before you even start.
Yeah I’m just an ordinary guy, you know? I don’t have all the answers. I’m just saying we need to look further, consider more options. Maybe your modification is better or necessary. Maybe not. My point was we need to stop merely putting our finger on the scale to create incentives to make capitalism do better and just consider perhaps a solution lies, at least in part, outside that framework.
Well, that’s part of what collaboration (in good faith!) is for. No one of us has all the answers, but we can put forward proposals, hash it out, and hopefully what comes out is workable for a broad selection of the working class. Farms, factory, and office workers alike.
Problem is, conservatives only need to poison the well a little bit to destroy the presumption of good faith. Any pointing out of issues that would affect one group disproportionately is treated with suspicion, and the whole thing falls apart.
been saying this over and over for a while now
Make the 3rd home any entity owns taxed at 50% property tax rate. Make it prohibitively expensive to try and turn the American Dream into a subscription model.
This is not for us. This is for your children who will otherwise “own nothing and be happy”.
Fuck the kids, I got mine! - Republicans
This already exists in in most every state. Property taxes for a primary residence are much lower than secondary homes.
You must be new to Democratic legislation.
I want to believe…but I can’t. I’m glad someone put the bill out there. But there is no way this gets bipartisan support or gets pushed through in any way. It will die in the halls of our inept, depraved, corrupt government.
The chance of any bill passing is about 30% regardless of what level of public support it has.
The same is not true when you compare the chances to the support the rich have for a bill. When the rich support a bill its far more likely to pass. When the rich oppose a bill, it is far more likely to fail.
So it will be no surprise when this bill unfortunately fails.
Expect better, agitate for it. Get excited for a livable future. Write letters and make phone calls. Go to a protest. Resolving to do even one of these in a year puts among the rarefied few who actually put in the extra 10% effort to move progress incrementally forward.
I did, for many years. But I live in a grossly red state so all the replies I got were basically “lol no”. It made zero difference. So I just vote in my local elections and hope something changes for the better.
That, or the bill will have some obvious loophole. Like maybe a hedge fund can’t own a house, but they can buy another entity which can own a house.
Supreme court: preventing hedge funds from owning single-family homes infringes on their free speech to dictate what you have to pay to not be homeless.
This exact opinion coming in 2024 if this bill somehow passes.
Bonus points if communism gets brought up in the process.
well, I mean, communism is when the government and the more the government the communister
The when what now?
they seem to have decided that “free speech” allows them to invalidate any law they don’t care for under the doctrine of “you’re forcing them to agree with the law by obeying it and that’s compelled speech”.
That’s really the entire republican platform in a nutshell. “being forced to obey laws violates my free speech or religious freedom”
that’s half of it. the other half is “being forced to let other people do what they want violates my freedom”
Damn it how could I forget that part
See: universities claiming religious exemptions to Title IX (so they can expel students explicitly for being pregnant, LGBT+, etc etc)
I hope to god this passes.
More than likely it’s a pander to voters, but if it works and he doesn’t follow up- we’re still better off.
As a somewhat recent homeowner who therefore benefits from the housing crisis, I agree 100%. Fuck hedgefunds. Even if it somehow were to tank the housing market and cut the value of my house in half, I’d still be down. After renting for a decade, I view my house less as an investment and more as a regular payment that won’t increase absurdly YOY, with the added benefit that I can destroy the walls as I please.
I am currently in the process of buying my first house w/ my wife. And if the market crashes we can refinance at a lower rate. I’m here for it.
I can’t express how excited this makes me.
I have been saying for years now that regulation is the only cure for the housing crisis, and resulting homeless crisis.
I wrote my Congresswoman about this a while back.
Fuck. Yes.
I wouldnt get too excited. The hedge funds will just start an LLC or s corps or some other legal loop hole and continue forward doing what they do.
At least make it hard for them. Keep squeezing, and they may move on to some easier racket. Do nothing and you guarantee they keep robbing from you in broad daylight.
you’re excited and that’s cool but it’s almost certainly not happening
This is one of those bills that gets proposed just for the attack ads.
“Republican Senator Dickweed WANTS hedge funds to own your home.”
Dirty but effective pool, I’m glad Dems aren’t still “going high.”
Is there some additional piece to this bill that would make it impossible for Republicans to support? Other than it being amazingly beneficial to the general public?
Republican ideology is that you increase the housing supply by attracting investors into the home development industry.
So they would say blocking investors makes the problem worse.
Republicans don’t support anything proposed by democrats. On purpose.
Just want to throw this out there in case anyone thinks he’s being sarcastic or hyperbolic. He is not. Opposing anything Democrats do en masse by default is GOP mantra now, championed for many years by Mitch McConnell – a man once known for killing his own bill because it started getting Democrat support. Compromise and bipartisanship are considered signs of weakness in the GOP, to the point where it’s almost political suicide today to even think about it. Whatever the Democrat position on any given subject is, the GOP must rally against it. This is not sarcasm. This is not hyperbole. This is GOP dogma.
Isn’t the fact that it tries to stop big business from making even more money enough for them not to support it? Or just the mere fact that Democrats were the ones proposing it?
I don’t understand what you are commenting on. It this also about not supporting the bill, or just the upcoming ad campaigns?
Republicans control the House. There is very little chance they’ll let this bill reach the floor and essentially 0 chance any on them will vote for it.
Ok. Thank you for explaining. If you don’t mind, what would you rather have proposed
iror what other issue would you like worked on instead?
Homes should be for living, not profit making.
Housing can be affordable or an investment, not both.
Sort of like food should be for eating, not profit making.
But all the food I have ever bought has been within a for profit system.
All the food you have ever bought sure, but what about eaten? I’ve eaten wild blueberries, venison jerky that a coworker shot, gutted, and processed himself, my grandma used to grow rhubarb in her garden and made pies and jam from it, my other grandma grows tomatoes & broccoli…
Sure I guess. I have also pitched a tent in a forest before so didn’t have to deal with for-profit housing in some instances too.
The issue is the vast majority of instances are for profit. And it would be impossible for the vast majority in modern urban society to grow/hunt their own food or pitch a tent in the woods.
Ever been to a potluck or gotten a free meal at a church? I’m with ya that I still think we need industrial level AG, just I think we could do better if it wasn’t all driven for-profit.
Yep, turns out workers like being paid for providing goods and services.
Commerce isn’t the same as things being for-profit. And, indeed, workers getting paid is the primary thing that cuts into profits.
Wages aren’t “personal profits”. The idea that they are is a lie the ownership class has been selling for generations.
Profits are what you get paid for owning property, not for doing work.
Profits are what you get paid for owning property, not for doing work.
Many farmers own their property and are very much so interested in getting paid for their work. Zero profits means only costs are being paid, the farmer very much so still wants to be paid for his work.
See you are still mistaken the owner and worker in your example are the same person where as in many big businesses they are two distinct groups, with the smaller (in proportion of people) owner class having most of the leverage in negotiations. To the owner if they employ others the wages they pay are a cost to their profits, with the farmer he is also his worker so his overhead beyond his operating costs is his “wage”. Both have operation costs like buying raw materials rent/taxes on properties, machine operation/repair costs. Profits are a cost that employees pay to the owners if you want my opinion on it. There’s an argument that the owners deserve some portion of this but at the moment profits are put over people because the leverage like I said earlier is in the hands of the owner class.
Oh, only 40+ years too late, thanks.
The best time to plant trees is 50 years ago. The second best time to plant trees is right now.
The best time to kill all capitalists was 50 years ago. The second best time is today. Oh I’m not on hexbear sorry.
Better late than never. And where are the Republicans?
Opposing?
Something something “let the free market (billionaires) decide how it should work. Regulation isn’t the answer, and will stifle the market.”
There’s probably some loophole about how they can’t do it as a hedge fund but a shrub fund is just fine.
Hedge funds will only own many small investment firms, and those little firms own the houses.
If a hedge fund registered an S corp for each property, they could be the sole shareholder and at the same time not technically own those properties. Each S corp would one one property.
Edit: the tenants would fund the registration
I’d say the loophole here is that it only affects single family homes. Duplexes or quadplexes are still open season.
Wall Street: Lol no.
Not going anywhere and they know it. Pretty much exists for grandstanding purposes in the 24 election.
Well, it’s better than total inaction.
Press x to doubt
Messaging is still important, and showing voters that you’ll actually vote for something when Republicans vote it down. If we dismissed all statements that had no political feasibility there’d be a number of progressive politicians who’d barely talk.
And like I said, that’s okay! It isn’t a dig at Progressives. It’s actually exactly what they need to do to pull the party left.
On the other hand, if they know that the opposition will defeat it, they can propose anything even if they would oppose it in actually without a second thought.
And if that’s the case, it could backfire if the opposition knows that the proposing party doesn’t really want it, they could give them some votes for it in battleground districts and make the proposing party vote to defeat it’s own proposal.
Fair point. I’m curious, do you know of anywhere this has happened/is happening?
I am aware of a case where this happened and backfired. Mussolini didn’t want Ethiopia to join the League of Nations back in the period between WW1 and 2 because he intended to invade them, but was playing politics with France and Britain. France supported Ethiopia joining while Britain opposed it, so Italy declared support for Ethiopia joining to look good with France while expecting Britain to succeed in blocking them from joining. Instead, Britain backed down when they saw Italy throw in support, so Ethiopia was accepted into the League of Nations. Which didn’t do them much good because Mussolini invaded anyways and the League didn’t do anything other than a few sanctions followed by falling apart once they lost all credibility.
Maybe so, but at least they can say they tried to. It’s not going anywhere because conservatives will do everything they can to get it shot down. Even the medical care Obama was miraculously able to get through is a completed gutted version from what it was supposed to be because of conservatives.
Saying they tried is the whole point. All too often, bills like this just don’t get reintroduced once the party is in power, though.
It’s all about show.
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Do you know why it’s not going anywhere? Any guesses?
Because the voters aren’t holding their elected officials accountable. People should be following bills like this and voting against politicians that don’t support it. Then holding the ones that said they support it accountable if they don’t follow through (after fully understanding why they didn’t/couldn’t).
People on here call this pandering. Good. Saying that they will do things that benefit society is a good thing. Maybe the problem is with the party that campaigns and the people who give them votes on a platform of hurting society.
This is the kind of bill oppositions always propose, but never prioritize once they’re in government.
Check the news cycle. Something like this pops up every once in a while and nothing ever happens. No one wants this passed, they just wait till we forget about it.
There’s at least 5 representatives that want it passed, as it was proposed and sponsored. The speaker is free to bring any proposal to a vote, but instead it will die in a pile on his desk. Pretty easy to see why nothing happens.
Great. The selling over a ten year period is a little frustrating because it’s a fucking decade, which means ten years on will likely be the soonest any action is taken if they don’t.
But I am glad for the ground it gives against the commodification of housing.
Housing is a need, not a commodity. It really shouldn’t have to be a transitional period, it is kind of just a switch, but let’s see if it actually passes.
Nah, it forces them to sell over the ten years, since if they wait up until the last moment, the market’s gonna get flooded, meaning they’ll have to lower prices to be competitive
Ah true. While it is likely they would indeed maximize profits, I also can never rule out capitalists being bad at capitalism.
dont matter won’t and could never pass
