The worst idea is ever giving down payment assistance. Government subsidizing actual builders, sure, but free money to property owners just increases the price to meet supply and demand and goes right into their pocket. It actually increases home prices. Extremely stupid.
Nah, using tax dollars to increase property values in a housing crisis is counterproductive as fuck. It increases rents for everyone else as well. Better off attacking it from the supply side with a massive subsidized housing effort and just tanking the market. But that’s politically toxic.
Don’t know that it would be sufficient, but it’s not free money to all property owners, just those that haven’t yet been able to get to home ownership, but have been renting consistently for a couple of years.
So if in a normal market, a new homebuyer has a budget that’s about $15k less than some speculative asshat looking for an investment rather than a home, then this tips the scales in favor of that would-be new homebuyer.
There needs to be some sort of tipping the scale in favor of people seeking to own their own primary residence versus those that already have their primary residence and ideally disincentivize those looking to acquire property they have no interest in using themselves.
When I say free money to the owners, I mean the primary effect on the market is only to increase the price, giving more money to sellers and more equity to owners. Without a significant increase in supply, it won’t help much and giving 25k for single family homes would be counterproductive in general in my opinion. You want to fuck speculators and parasitic landlords, you do it by increasing supply. That can include a focused effort on high density and mixed use housing that the 25k doesn’t help with.
