City Life

The threat investor owners pose is proportional directly to the number of investor-owned vacant properties in a city. In some, these vacancies are a real issue... but I don't think I've seen any city where these vacancies represented enough to explain more than 5-10% of the total issue. In most it is far less than that.

Being an investor-owners of a vacant property only makes sense if the market is ALREADY fundamentally inelastic and broken. In a healthy market, the vacant property should be a stable, low-risk, and low-return investment. That is, a weak, boring investment. Ditto for greedy landlords and airbnbs -- none of these things are a major issue in a city with a healthy, elastic housing market, but I don't know of ANY reasonable large city that has such a market. Even in major tourism centers that are majorly impacted by the likes of airbnb.... lack of housing, periphery development, and even hotels are CAUSING those airbnbs to be so worthwhile to operate. In a healthy and elastic market, only someone skilled at running that kind of business would be able to succeed while doing it.

Lack of supply, poor development patterns for cities, weakened labor leading to high wealth inequality, lack of civil rights protections for buyers and renters, exclusionary zoning, outdated building codes, regular old greed, lack of alternatives.... there are tons and tons of other major contributors.

The narrative that merely slapping down a few pied-à-terre taxes and airbnb bans will be enough to make major progress... anyone who believes that is deluded. The solution needs to be a bottom-up rethinking of development patterns. We need to fundamentally change the way cities grow and develop starting at the most basic units.

We can't really expect the market to deliver developers that aren't profit-driven. That means we need direct social housing programs -- and those programs are only going to work if they favor local ownership and infill development (preferably by right or with easy, straightforward rules). We need financial paper products administered by local lenders who are willing to work with the complex and tight needs of a small project. We need small, local contractors who now how to build based on the needs of their own communities rather than outsiders who only know how to deliver a product from their catalog. We need things to work basically the full opposite of how they do now.