Biden to propose new $5000 tax credit for first-time home buyers

The housing crisis won't end until (among other things) corporations cannot freely own limitless numbers of single family homes. We will see perpetual renting because it's effectively passive income for the corporations, and they have deeper pockets than 99.9% of individuals.

As companies own more and more, but don't sell, supply dwindles, and the bubble never bursts.

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Preventing corporations is one piece of the puzzle, the next is finding a way to not incentivize people using their owner-occupied houses as the retirement investment vehicle.

We won’t be able to build more houses if people keep justifying their votes for bad planning over this fear their house value will drop to zero.

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It won't end until we have significant growth in the supply of housing units in the places people want to live relative to the number of people we have. Anything else is just window dressing.

We've been chronically underbuilding for decades, while population continued to grow. What would you expect to happen?

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We tried this in Oz. House prices immediately go up 5k.

Government effectively funding the housing bubble.

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Some part of me thinks that many of the backers of this idea want exactly that.

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I suspect that the goal with this program is to advantage first time home buyers over their competitors, such as REITs and hedge funds that have been indiscriminately buying up housing across the country. Obviously the devil is in the details but there's a way to implement this that makes sense and isn't insane, but we'll have to wait until the bill passes to see if that's the path we take.

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That's not what happened the last time they did this in the states.

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This (correct me if I'm wrong) does nothing on the supply side, and only raises the amount that prices could be artificially increased by that to offset it, isn't that the way these things play out?

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The more houses that actually sell on the market, the lower the prices due to competition. The trouble is getting this initiative out. It needs to come out election year or it's not happening of course.

This could back fire in a drastic way. If those families sell those houses to large companies; those houses will go off the market (perhaps permanently) to be part of renting farms where those big companies set the rent to whatever they like.

I think Biden has something to deal with those large companies but if they are not discussing it during an election year, "Forget about it."

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- That's what I would worry about also, companies are trying to buy every house on the market it seems, and this just gives them more to buy
  
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- You cannot set the rent to "whatever you like". There's a reason why my NYC apartment is $2500 a month and not $250,000 a month. If a corporation does take an owned unit into the rental market, it'll be competing with all other rentals. That will decrease supply for the ownership market, yes, but it also increases supply in the rental market, which tends to consist of people who are financially struggling more than people looking to buy a house.
  
  Regardless, the actual solution is to just build some more god damned housing so that it stops being an attractive investment in the first place. Housing cannot be both a good investment and affordable.
  
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This is only available to first-time buyers, not universally, so it wouldn't be quite that simple. If you're confident your house will sell quickly, yeah, you'll just increase the price by 5k, but if you've been having trouble finding a buyer, the credit might tip your current price into being affordable to a first-time buyer that would otherwise pass it up, so you may hold the price steady.

That said, subsidizing demand like this while ignoring the core supply crunch issue is generally not very helpful.

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- Like the issue is still supply and getting NIMBYS/cities to fuck off, lack of middle + government housing, etc right? These first-time buyers things dont seem to be effective because the issue seems rooted in artificially restricted supply and overwhelmingly accelerating increase of demand (corporate purchasing and in my country at least, unsustainable international "student" policy to enrich schools and a fundamentally unsustainable immigration frenzy writ large
  
  Nothing against students and immigrants (we'll need them since none of us non-blessed can reproduce) but we're lying and taking advantage of many who aren't rich and are banking on our rosier international reputation when the reality is its all fucked and everything that is seen to be done pours lighter fluid on the fire.
  
  Im so tired of all this 😭
  
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Trolls seem to be saying nothing is better than something. Didn't he just lower the credit card penalties? Didn't he lower the cost of insulin?

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That's great and all, but 5 grand won't even make a dent in the money you'd need to put as a down payment to get a mortgage that you can actually afford to pay.

Build more houses, please. Especially more low and middle income complexes. The government is the only entity that has the ability to do so, because the private sector can't make money off of low income sales.

This is just paying lip service to the problem, not solving it.

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Add 2 zeroes

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You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. We just bought our first home last year and found out then that the tax credits I grew up hearing about ended several years ago and now it’s back now that I’m no longer qualified :|

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You own a home, why are you disappointed about this?

Humans are fucking weird, man.

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- Uhhh because it's not fair? Humans are kind of obsessed with that concept
  
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Wow, 2-4* whole months of payments on a 30 year mortgage, what an incentive! /s

(*Depending on location)

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You don't get it obviously.

This helps people right on the cusp of being able to close on a house. 5k can make the difference in so many cases.

Keep being stupid, stupid.

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- Great for all 1-2 thousand of them. For the rest of us it means fuck all to take 5K off the top of a deposit on a 500K house, nor does it make it make sense for a landlord special "remodel" from a house flipper to cost as much as much as it does.
  
  Housing as an investment model is bullshit.
  
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Biden throwing Americans the smallest bone possible with this tax credit. The ruling class has no interest in offering anything meaningful unless forced.

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LOWER THE COST OF GROCERIES !!!

FUCK

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This is the best summary I could come up with:

Biden will also call on Congress to provide a one-year credit of up to $10,000 for families who sell their starter homes, so long as their houses are below the median price in their county.

The idea is to free up a part of the market that has been effectively frozen, as thousands of homeowners cling to low mortgages of 2 or 3 percent and avoid buying a new home with a much higher rate.

Meanwhile, some housing experts raise concerns that new credits could inject even more demand into the market while supply is still catching up — possibly pushing prices even higher.

And Biden will unveil a new $20 billion competitive grant fund as part of his budget, expected next week, which would support the construction of affordable multifamily rental units and remove barriers to housing development.

Those include steps taken to reduce closing costs for home buyers, which the White House stresses can add thousands of dollars to a purchase and put it out of reach.

“President Biden is absolutely right to lay out his plans to make housing more affordable,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, a left-leaning think tank.

The original article contains 978 words, the summary contains 197 words. Saved 80%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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Instead of funding the creation of rentals, which will only lock Americans into renting forever, why don't we fund low cost condos? Literally the same buildings as apartments but with individual ownership.

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I will keep my 2.2% thx

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A tax credit of $5k for a house that is overvalued by $300k-$500k with like 7% baseline mortgage interest?

Fun stuff.

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Great. Now Biden's supporters are gonna act like housing is solved forever.

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