The U.S. Treasury Department will soon propose a rule that would effectively end anonymous luxury-home purchases, closing a loophole that the agency says allows corrupt oligarchs, terrorists and other criminals to hide ill-gotten gains.
To your point, this rule, whether it becomes an enforceable regulation or not, isn’t even targeted at increasing supply. It’s targeted at preventing money laundering.
Oh I know; that was aimed more at the people talking about corporations owning housing, as if that’s particularly relevant. I’m quite skeptical that the corporate boogeyman is really a meaningful target when it comes to housing costs though. We’ve been drastically underbuilding for decades now - with quite a lot of that directly coming from extremely onerous zoning laws. The sheer fact of the matter is that in most American cities (where people actually want to live - empty shacks in rural Nebraska are not particularly helpful here), there are far more people who want to live there than available housing, and the inevitable result of this is that the wealthiest people are those who get to live in them. This will be the case regardless of whether the housing is owned by a corporation or a mom and pop. The fundamental problem is lack of supply; anything that doesn’t address that will not meaningful reduce housing prices and is at best a band-aid.
