Close Reading

We have unlocked the coded media term "Brampton Driver"

There is in fact no actual housing shortage in the USA whatsoever. The problem is that that wealthy individuals have strong incentives to park excess capital in real estate and landlords have strong incentives to maintain asset values through cash flow potential (appraised through $/sq.ft rent revenues). What ends up happening in both cases is that you end up with lots of empty houses sitting collecting dust artificially gaining value due to scarcity, and with rentals, you end up with perpetually inflated rents and vacancy rates that are as high as a landlord can tolerate just to maintain the appearance of value to the lenders. Often these owners will borrow more money and use an apartment that might be 40% vacant as the collateral for the lender and go buy another building and so on. What people don't penalize is the fact that that 40% vacant building with 60% rented out at above fair value gets treated on the balance sheet to the bank as if its 90% rented out from an asset value perspective thereby setting the asset price artificially high. Simple legislation of the tax code can fix this issue and unlock lots of sidelined housing. All we have to do is progressively tax 2nd 3rd 4th ect. homes higher and higher rates that essentially cancel out the asset gains, and do something similar for vacant units in a apartment building. \nIts just at the core a case of the rich hoarding something that has been made artificially rare. On top of all of this, because of how valuable properties have become, there are now many interests that capitalize on the entire process of building new housing that make it ever more expensive. Our taxes are funding numerous regulators that stymie new development, while the developers have to then hire numerous attorneys and planners to pitch a project and litigate it through the cities to get approvals. This can take over 10 years in a major city. All this contributes to the ridiculous costs of building these days.