The cost to live in Lahaina on the Hawaiian island of Maui keeps rising thanks to a chronic housing shortage and an influx of second-home buyers and wealthy transplants snatching up properties.
If we just banned housing sales to non-full time residents, this would probably work itself out in time, but that would make too much sense.
Exactly, get corporations out of the housing market. It’s a joke that there hasn’t been any legislation about this when it is such a big problem. Those in charge do not care, if it effected their investments it would be illegal tomorrow.
Unfortunately it’s not just corporations, it’s also individuals coming over to buy second (or third, fourth) homes to rent while they’re not here, or just straight up buy properties to turn into short-term vacation rentals, or overpriced long-term rentals. Both of which fuck over residents.
Making it worse is that most of these people aren’t happy with anything, so they’ll do unnecessary, expensive renovations that they use to jack up the prices, then eventually get tired of it and sell to the next jackass who rips everything out, installs brand new things, and raise the prices again. Meanwhile owners surrounding them who haven’t done any improvements are like “you’re charging what for rent?” and immediately raise their prices to match “the going rate” even though nothing was invested to make it better. Makes us want to stab people ngl