Here is my opinion:
As for me, I think one the main drivers of this problem is people treat housing as an investment asset instead of as homes. I think that there are a number of policies that the federal government can enact to help resolve the housing crisis, such as:
Market Regulation
Market Regulation
- Place a high tax on vacant properties. This way people who have extra housing while others don't have housing, will be motivated to either sell their extra housing or rent it out, just to avoid the tax, and they will have to sell or rent it at an affordable rate or else they won't get any buyers or tenants and the housing will still be vacant and the owner subject to the tax.
- Enact a national rent control program to control the rate of rent inflation. Because it is national, landlords can't just avoid the regulation by leaving areas with rent control, because everywhere will have the rent control. This however must apply to all rental housing (existing and new), so to avoid landlords jacking up rents on new tenants. Landlords may decided to just stop renting, but then they would be subject to the vacant property tax and they won't make any money; even if they would lose money by renting out at the rent controlled rates for some reason, the vacant property tax should make it so that they would lose more money by not renting out at the rent controlled rates.
- Placing limitations on home owner associations (HOAs) and providing more options for communities to abolish their HOAs, thereby requiring the locality to cover the services that the HOA provided, so that homeowners subject to HOAs don't have essentially double taxation from both the locality's taxes and fees and the HOA's fees, for no additional increase in real services. This will at least make some housing more affordable.
- Providing an option for households whose income decreased sometime after taking out their mortgage or whom have an sudden and unexpected cost, like medical debt (though I would prefer if we just switched to single-payer Medicare for All), to have partial mortgage loan forgiveness/cancellation, which the lender must absorb as a loss, and won't affect the borrowers credit in any way.
- Providing an alternative way to get a mortgage besides private banks, by offering affordable mortgages through public banking, and by providing subsidies and other benefits to credit unions and community banks to offer affordable mortgages.
- Enacting regulations that make it easier to refinance, always in favor of the borrower and never in favor of the lender.
- To ensure that everyone can get housing no matter what, we should offer a universal guarantee to high quality and rent-free public housing to all residents who want it. This will also serve to force private landlords to increase the quality of their rental properties if they want to attract any tenants, as tenants would have the affordable and appealing option to just go to the public housing option (any time you have a public competitor that offers a universal guarantee, such as a federal job guarantee or a public option for health insurance or anything, you force the private sector to at a minimum match the public competitor's offer). Even if we don't want to go that far, we can at least set up a public housing system similar to Singapore's.
- We can also support other forms of social housing, besides a government's public option, such as housing cooperatives, by providing subsidies and other advantages to social housing.
- We should establish and subsidize community land trusts, for people seeking to become homeowners without becoming housing speculators as well.
- Giving more power to tenants to establish the tenant equivalents of unions, so that they may collectively negotiate prices, conditions, rules, evictions, etc... and so that they may go on a rent strike if needed.
- NOTE: The U.S. has more than enough vacant homes per homeless person (person, not household), so there is not a problem with real supply, and the policies listed above would lead to more vacant housing reentering the rental market or housing market. However, there are some local areas in the U.S. where demand does outstrip supply, and a lot of the vacant housing in the U.S. is in a state of disrepair or in reduced livability for one reason or another. These reasons necessitate addressing housing supply.
- We should establish and subsidize, non-profit community development corporations (CDCs), to build more high quality and affordable housing to be sold to the people (not to corporate landlords, housing speculators, or investors), and to repair and retrofit existing housing. This service can also be provided by a public jobs program, such as a green new deal, or even a federal job guarantee. This will also help provide enough supply for a public or social housing program if such programs fail to purchase enough housing supply from the private market.
- I know that there is an argument for easing, reducing, or eliminating zoning regulations to make it easier for construction corporations to build more housing, however I think that this is unnecessary and may have some serious negatives as well. That said, I am willing to compromise on this pro-market policy, especially regarding making things easier for community development corporations and construction cooperatives. I am also supportive of mixed-use planning/zoning, and if easing zoning regulations leads to more mixed-use planning/zoning, I would be a little more supportive of easing zoning regulations as well.