Flutterby™! : A few notes on housing policy

A number of people have asked me about my reactions to the Harris housing plan, such as has been published, and I just wrote this for a private forum:

Working off of https://mailchi.mp/press.kamal...ower-costs-for-american-families : Last night, at the Petaluma Urban Chat board meeting, the Realtor had the same reaction to the $25k down payment support for first-time homebuyers that I did: That just raised the cost for starter homes by $25k. And, it's hard to be against "Stop Wall Street Investors from Buying Up and Marking Up Homes in Bulk", but I'm not sure that a fund buying 100 homes in a struggling development is all that different from 20 individuals following the Rich Dad playbook with 5 homes each. People like to piss and moan about institutional investors, but as long as constrained supply makes housing a super profitable investment, it hardly matters if it's single homeowners or institutional investors.

Though the bit about breaking the strangle-hold of monopolistic rent pricing is good.

I know a couple of people who make their living as affordable housing developers, and anything that simplifies the funding path for them is good (I mean, it reduces the demand for their services, but...), and I hope that the bullet points under the "Calling for New Construction..." is focused on multi-family. Which is tough to do as a small developer, but if the rules really do get simplified then maybe we can get to building single-digit-n-plexes by neighborhood developers.

I kinda doubt that there's room for Federal policy to override some of the worst of the local land-use regulations, because that stuff really needs more regional solutions. I'm all for the ways that the California State Legislature is overriding local control on some of the worst Prop 13 driven single-family zoning, but at the Federal level it'd be really hard to build policy that'd do the right overriding both here and in Ohio.

All of the good solutions are gonna deflate the housing market in some way, so are gonna be politically unpopular. So... it's something. I'd like to find the document that goes into more specifics, but I probably don't have the background to read the text of "Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act" and the "Stop Predatory Investing Act" to actually understand them.

And... one of the challenges with policy in campaigning is that the more specific the proposal, the easier it is to pick it apart, so getting too specific means that the press is gonna shower you in negative bullshit. Which we're seeing here, even with the generalities. Which makes me wanna be a cheerleader, even though I think a bunch of the more popular proposals here are going to be counter-productive.