this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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Basically whomever runs for president needs to announce building out - nationwide concrete apartment complexes construction program on a massive scale.
Offload at least 30-40 mln people demand. Housing costs gonna drop insanely
Unfortunately as that would gain votes. It would also prevent votes as it would be basically announcing to anyone that owns a house that their retirement nest egg is going to shrink drastically. One of the perks of owning a house right now is it's worth a lot of money and is going to be worth more in the future. So I don't see anyone who currently owns a house voting for this . It's a shitty situation but i don't know the solution. Well government housing is the solution but they're going to have to sneak it in somehow and it's going to piss off a whole lot of people. I think 99% of millionaires are millionaires by real estate or some crazy number like that.
Rising home prices have driven retirement nest eggs for generations. People would own a house for a few decades, and it would steadily rise in value.
Today, people expect to speculate with their houses. They expect the value to double every decade. That's not good for anyone. If you own a house whose value has risen dramatically, who is going to buy it? And if they do buy your house, where are you going to live, when presumably all the other houses have also risen?
All this speculation has done is drive the price of housing up so only the wealthy and investment groups can afford houses. That means that all those Middle Class people who used to grow their net worth by buying a house when they were young, and holding it for life, are now priced out of participating, leaving a few lucky people with expensive houses that nobody can afford to buy or rent.
You buy another house that's cheaper and you pocket the difference in value.
That may not be in the town you want, or the size you want, or etc. but that's life. Where I live people make 500K a year whine there are no houses, but that's because they want to live in mansions in the most expensive towns and won't settle for the 1.5million dollar 'dump' they can afford.
Investment groups don't own anything. Most properties are owned by people who use them and they want the values to go up as much as they can, while their property taxes go as low as they can. normal people are insanely greedy, and everyone who becomes a homeowner becomes this way because it's it's in their self-interest. very few people are going to want to buy a house if it goes down in value.
if you were a landlord you would not think rent is theft. you'd start realizing how much it costs to own property and you'd keep having to raise you rent as those costs went up. If I went and bought a 3 unit building in my city it would be 2-3 million dollars. The mortgage would be about 15K alone, which means before all other costs, reach rental unit would have to be 5K. Even if I bought it outright, the taxes, fees and other costs would be 2K per unit. The market rate in my city for such a unit is about 3K. Is that 'greedy and evil' or is it just basic economics?
Simply WRONG. Companies like Blackstone (and many others) are buying up single family homes as fast as they can, with an eye on controlling the rental and purchasing market, and they are already having an effect on prices. Even MAGA is considering regulating it.
And of course you can sell your home in a HCOL area, and buy a new one in a LCOL area, but what if you don't want to leave the area where you grew up, raised a family, made friends, where you family still lives etc.?In order to access your retirement fund, you have to leave your home and go somewhere far away, to place that isn't nearly as good, away from everything you built in your life.
And where are those LCOL places anyway? Florida used to be the big one. Sell your expensive house in the Northeast, and buy a nice house in the Florida sun for a quarter of the price, and all your relatives and friends will come and visit often.
Except Florida housing is as expensive as NY now, so that doesn't work. Perhaps you can find a reasonably priced house in a small town in Alabama, or Mississippi, where the nearest movie theater is an hour away. That should be fun. I'll bet your relatives can't wait to visit you in Buttfuck Holler, Kentucky.
And yeah, it's simple economics, except you forgot the part of the equation where housing prices have skyrocketed, while decades of harshly suppressed wages, and crippling student loan debt, have made it increasingly impossible for people to afford housing. We have now entered an era where your "simple economics" have led to living in your vehicle being considered a viable housing option.
Employ some Critical Thinking Skills, and don't just parrot empty Conservative talking points.
only 9% of residential housing is owned by corporate entities. corporations are no sizable impact on housing prices in the market at large. 91% of homes are owned by individuals.
housing prices have skyrocketed because residential homeowners and renters, oppose new housing. the USA has systematically build less housing than it needs since the 1990s, meanwhile the population is has grown by about 100 million, while only building new homes for about 1/3 of those people. in 2024 the USA build 1.35 million new homes, willing adding 3.2 million new residents. we are building about 1/3 of the housing we need just to stabilize prices. if you want to lower them, than you'd need to build more houses than there are incoming people.
in my own city, which has highest housing costs in the country, renters groups systematically oppose new housing, and wonder why their rents go up 5-10% a year. we build about 3000 new units of housing a year, meanwhile we have 30K incoming residents a year. if you have about 10x the population coming in every year as you have new housing, rents are going to skyrocket until you build enough housing to meet demand, and rents won't go down until you build enough housing to exceed demand. if rental groups stopped opposing new housing, we'd have more than double the amount of new housing, and rental prices would be less than they are.
people liek you are the problem. because you blame CORPORATIONS MAN. when it's people like you that go to your town/city meetings and demand all new housing projects be stopped or downscaled because you don't 'want anymore people moving here since i already live here'. but when it comes to say, adding jobs to the local economy you are all for it.
my city recent approved a massive development that will bring 20,000 new jobs. this new development is also building 200 new units of housing. it was proposed with 20K jobs, and 2000 new units of housing. but the people who live this city thought that was 'too much' and wanted the 20K jobs but 1/10th of the proposed housing.
the issue is everyday average people including renters. they don't want new homes to be built. so the prices keep going up.
if you want prices to drop or stabilize in your city, then go to city meetings and demand that every any any housing project be built ASAP and as largely as possible.
First off stop looking at all home ownership and the percentage owned by corporations as that does not dictate pricing as a whole, you should be looking at what percentage of houses that are being purchased over that past few years are owned by investors. Those new purchases and homes that trade hands are what drive the cost of a home. Most of that 91% is not continously buying and selling, they are holding on for long term and even passing on properties to their kids. The corporate entities on the other hand are buying up surplus real estate to drive the pricing of the market as there is very little liquidity in the housing market when you compare it too the shear total amount of residential properties in existence.
A good way to determine what percentage of the housing surplus (the real liquidity in the market that drives the price as a whole) is owned by corporate entities would be to look at different data points. Like say what percentage of vacant homes are owned by corporate entities. Here you get much more staggering figures like the fact that corporate entities own over 50% of vacant residential properties.
Take exhibit a:
And exhibit b:
Source: https://nationalmortgageprofessional.com/news/investors-hold-most-empty-houses
Now corporations holding over 50% of the liquid market of housing is a much more substantial fact here and highlights how they are controlling the market as a whole to drive prices up for their benefit while pricing the average person out of ownership market and into the rental market.
Now that we can see they DO control a majority of the liquidity of the housing market lets also see what percentage of rentals are owned by corporate entities as well.
So lets actually brake down your little 9% figure and explain why its a terrible metric that obscures reality and is just also misleading, as you seem to think 9% of residential properties being owned by corporations means on 9% of residential housing is owned by corporations.
I am going to be using US rental housing stats from 2020: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R47332
First we have:
Ok so first we can see that a lot of residential rental properties are single unit properties. Over 85%. But how does that actually relate to the amount of units available for people to rent and does that meam that your little 9% of properties could be hiding the real kicker that corporations own most of the actual residential rental unit supply?
Oh so its does hide the fact that most of the rental units available are in multi-unit properties. So while 85% of all residential properties are single family unit rentals, that 85% only covers about a 1/3 of the rental market, with the rest of the market being dominated by multi unit properties.
Hmm well surely since you seem to think owning 9% of properties is small and irrelevant to the housing and rental market that must mean that most of those multi unit properties must also be owned by individuals and not corporations right?
Hm I guess not. I guess while single family units make up 85% of the properties it turns out most rental units are in those massive multi unit properties. Meaning just shy of 2/3rds of the rental unit market is owned by corporations.
So lets recap here shall we.
Corporations own over 50% of the liquidity in the residential housing sphere so they have a massive influence on the pricing of houses on the market.
Corporations also own nearly 2/3rds of the rental market supply when you amount for units instead of just properties. Also granting them the ability to have a massive influence on the rental price market.
So yeah your right corporations may only own 9% of residential land across the US, that completely hides the ugly truth that they control the market by dominating the liquidity which underpines the pricing of housing market for ownership and also obscures the fact that on that 9% of land they have so many multi-unit properties that they own nearly 2/3rds of all rental units allowing them to control the pricing in the rental market as well.
So no the problem is corporate greed in the housing market you are just too willing to listen to corporate propaganda that misrepresents reality by cherry picking what statistics they push out to the public to placate them into feeling like its their neighbors or generic human greed that causes these problems not them.
Next time before you start acting so stupid maybe actually check the sources and dig into how they got their numbers in the first place to make sure it paints an accurate picture of what you are buying into.
First of all, 9% is a HUGE number, far large enough to start influencing prices, and it is growing quickly. That 9% will be more like 20% within the next few years. We can see the trend clearly, do we really have to wait until it is an irreversible problem before we even acknowledge it, and then abandon hope for a solution because it's too late? Or maybe we say, "Hmm, 9% and growing? That's going to become a problem, maybe we should do something about it NOW."
Secondly, good for your state or whatever who is putting controls on building. My state, and my area, is not. I travel the entire east coast for work, and traffic in Central Florida, where I live, is easily the worst on the East Coast (the only competition is the DC-Baltimore stretch at rush hour, I avoid it at all costs), and they can't build huge housing developments and apartment complexes fast enough, and dump more cars on the streets. And just this week, they just announced that the Mormons, who own a giant tract of land east of Orlando, are going to build an entire new CITY, with a population that will rival Orlando. The state has already approved a new TOLL highway that will connect the area, and that new Toll road will run through two protected conservation areas, which the county is not happy about. In Florida, conservation land is really important...until you have to build on it.
Of course the state is happy to cooperate with attracting a few hundred thousand Mormons to Central Florida, diluting the Democratic voting strength in the last Democratic stronghold in Florida.
So nice try, but your experience is not what's happening in MAGA regions of the country. They are using housing to service the only MAGA constituency - the wealthy.
you're wrong. objectively. you are delusional and making ridiculous statements that are objectively false, both about housing and about MAGA, neither of which have anything to do with each other.
democratic voters have higher incomes than republican voters. most high income people (100K+) vote democratic in the last election the groups that voted republican were working-class incomes between 30-100K.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls
What are you talking about? Do you not understand the concept of TIME? What does the income of Dems vs Repubs have to do with it?
There is an obvious trend of investment companies buying up single family houses. This is not "objectively wrong," it is the truth, and ALL those companies have publicly stated they intend to buy up so many single family homes that they will control the cost of housing in America. This is FACT.
https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106643
So it doesn't matter where it stands NOW, the important point is that they own a larger percentage of the market than they did a year ago, and they will own more a year from now, and even more a year after that.
Your solution is to ignore the growing problem, pretend it doesn't exist, and then when it is too big a problem to ignore, wonder why someone didn't do something about this a long time ago, say, when they still owned less than 9% of the market, like now.
Why concrete?
It's energy intensive (~& polluting), unhealthy, and does not last.
Various other options are available now. Lime hempcrete, and various myco-based solutions, for a couple examples.
With various suppressed technologies, if de-secreted and availed, we could even be building giant forest arcologies, and even linking them up to create vast forest arcologyscapes, increasing the carrying capacity of earth into the hundreds of trillions. Not saying we should, just saying we could, and that we have so much headroom without these crooks, these rentiers, seeking to keep others down just to maintain their power over others, even if it means making themselves worse off than what they could be in real terms, in egalitarian freedom and abundance.
Also, I hear there are already sufficient number of empty housing to house all the homeless... but the hoarders do not want to avail that for good use. They want to remain complicit in the manufactured scarcity to increase their return on investment, keeping the bubble growing.
AFAIK, those are replacements for insulation. They have like 1/10th the compressive strength of concrete
A more immediate solution than building khrUShchevkas would just be to announce broad rent caps and implement rent assistance programs.
Tax on second (or more) homes, tax on unoccupied by owner homes, should both be astronomical.
Oh god yes, my municipality just implemented an unoccupied home tax and the change has been night/day - the tears of AirBNB owners watching their property values plummet have been absolutely wonderful to watch, too.
Both can be done, though. There's more demand for dense housing in cities than there is availability. Simultaneously build millions of housing units for social rent and cap existing prices or directly expropriate rented housing.
I think at a certain point this line of reasoning devolves into "the US should become communist" and while yes that would be a solution it's not exactly a practically achievable one in the short term.
However, the US already already sort does this - there were ~6 million total subsidized housing units in the US as of last year, and roughly 7 million total Khrushchevka apartments built across the USSR. The US is behind the soviet statistics here, having a higher population and lower subsidized housing count than the USSR at it's peak (and should absolutely be doing better to be clear), but it's not like this is a completely neglected concept - and there are real, practical barriers to implementing a similar policy of mass construction: the US largely already being urbanized and building modern codes being the two biggest (look into the state of the foundations for a Khrushchevka if you ever want to see why extremely time consuming site prep steps like soil surcharging and foundation curing are critical (soil hydrodynamics is a shockingly modern discipline in structural engineering)).
Things like an unoccupied home tax (as someone else mentioned) are an immediately workable solution, and have had excellent results thus far. Hopefully they can continue to be adopted, though I fear there may be a brief pause on any kind of beneficial social progress while we have a small civil war in the US.
edit: clarity
Source for the 7mn Khrushchevki? That number seems entirely too low. Maybe you're not counting Brezhnevki? Because I remember figures of more than a million housing units being built yearly.
While "US becoming communist" is not achievable on the short term, "regulatory policy to improve rent under capitalism through reform" has even less of a background if you ask me. Like, housing is getting worse everywhere under capitalism, and better nowhere. What makes you think reformism is a more likely scenario?
The many recent examples of mucipalities and states passing regulatory policies to improve rent under capitalism are the primary one I'm using here. People are doing things to address housing,
I'm not, no - nor stalinkas (not that those were all that prolific comparably though). It's a limited measurement, obviously USSR social housing policies do not compare to the US, but the initial suggestion was specifically about rapidly-constructed slab concrete buildings and nothing typifies that better than a Khrushchevka. If you have a better source I'd love to see it, I approximated that off the average apartment size of 46m and the total constructed of 2,900,000,000 sq m, which is the best approximation I could get from the wikipedia sources and I may well be missing some reports.
Can you tell me generally big examples of places where this has happened and things have gotten better? As a European, the only cases I know of are the Berlin referenda for rent caps and expropriation, and both have had no lasting effect because higher courts have sabotaged them and declared them illegal (I don't understand how a referendum can be illegal).
Are you sure this is flat-area and doesn't need to get multiplied by number of flats per building?
That's a really specific request, but sure: Vancouver empty home tax, California Tenant Rent Cap.
As far as I can tell this number is accurate, again if you can find a better (or more clear) source than what's given on wikipedia I welcome it since this is a composite number pulled from housing reports originally written in a language in which I am functionally illiterate (and can only barely speak) (so I'm relying heavily on the translations since I cannot go and find the primary sources)