What a terrible article. The solution is throwing more subsidies? Of course it's not! The solution is making it illegal to own more than a few properties. It really is that easy.
Its not a difficult concept. The “market” is not going to build anything that lowers the price. The market is not going to build anything fast enough. The market is absolutely not going to give a flying fuck about building to create communities.
Decommodify housing along with every other human necessity, like water, food, utilities, and healthcare. There's no way that any of these problems will be fixed permenantly otherwise.
How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned? People and organizations can still own as many properties as they want, but at some point they're going to be taxed so much it'll be impossible to profit off of them.
Of course they are, landlords are buying the house for what you would and doubling the mortgage payment as your rent. It should be illegal for people/corporations to rent out more than one single family home.
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated. Our system fucking sucks and is designed to protect land owners which is why we're in this situation. This is fucking up our entire society, slowly bringing us down, we're losing to China. This change needs to happen soon otherwise we're going to see the working class get milked hard enough that our real economy will collapse.
A partial solution is to remove nimby laws that prevent accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and medium and high density housing. Then you use the tax laws to heavily punish corporate ownership of low and medium density housing, and make it progressively more expensive for mom and pop landlords after a reasonable number of properties.
Hopefully this would lower the cost for single family housing, while increasing supply and variety of rentals. But somehow you'd have to prevent end stage capitalist collusion from fixing prices so competition could actually work to drive down prices.
If I could, I would pass a law saying that no corporation could own more than two dwelling structures. That still allows them to own things up to apartment high-rises. But only two.
What frustrates me is there doesn't seem to be anyone in a position to promote change to this problem that is really talking about it. They may pay it lip service but nothing beyond that.
Just a shot in the dark, but are there any apparent problems with capping the rent at like half the mortgage? Or like 80%? Then there would be financial incentive to keep the tenant happy, to keep working, and keep the property in working order.
Of course, this does not take into account properties without mortgage, or properties where the housing was paid in part with liquid cash.