How can home price inflation be reduced or eliminated?

Question

Personally, I think having a home should be one of the most basic human rights our government was founded upon. With home prices rising to extortionate levels, even people who earn college-graduate salaries may never be able to afford the lifestyle they had toiled for. What can be done to reverse this troubling trend?

Answer 1

Home price inflation will remain simply because:

1) Land is limited.
2) Population is increasing.

That's all you need to see demand will be ever-increasing.

If you want to reduce or eliminate inflation, make it so incredibly expensive to buy a house (in terms of financing) that homeowners have to drop their prices severely in order to sell.

Or allow a plague to reduce the population. Seriously, the only recorded instances of a reduction in housing and land prices follow massive population reductions due to plague and relocation.

Even a natural disaster wouldn't help - unless it chases away the inhabitants while leaving the buildings intact.

I suppose we'll see some relief if we come to a birth crunch - when the population actually starts decreasing (something that would only happen if we substantially restrict immigration).

Answer 2

Take away the tax incentives for speculative buying and that would go a long way in helping relieve the problem. Money(or the promise of earning it) drives behavior, plain and simple. Take away economic incentives and people's behaviors are going to change. I live in San Francisco and make close to six figures, but still can't afford a one-bedroom condo. Sad, I know, but I love living here. Many of the high-rise luxury condos going up are being bought as second homes by empty nesters, while very few(if any) affordable homes are being built. There is alot of concentrated wealth out there driving prices up. Combine that with the creative financing we've seen pop up over the past 6-7 years and it leads to a depressing situation for the rest of us. I try not to think about it so much.

Answer 3

habitat for humanity is an international company that houses 40%or something crazy like that of LA county, 11% of our population can afford to buy a house in LA, our middle class is shrinking everyday,and we need to break the trend of widening the gap between the have mores and the have nots.
first thing we can do, is take away those great tax write offs the oil cokmpanies are enjoying while they also enjoy the largest profits in history according to consumer reports and that is profit after the overhead is payed, and since our lifestyles have suffered do to being screwed at the gas pump and paying almost 4 bucks a gallon ,this cuts into money used for other expenses and if the government stopped offering a thousand dollars a head for referring new recruits for the military to college students and put the money back from where they took it,like health care and education and higher education ,and some people who are recieving retroactive hospital bills and cancelled insurance notices for making mistakes on their initial insurance application forms, instead or letting corporate powers that be have their way at the expense of the middleclass, some of us might be in better positions to pay our bills, and purchase homes whatever the cost maybe.but lately our government has been making alot of changes with legilation at the macrolevel of society that has helped this disappearing of the middleclass trend, which makes housing unaffordable as we are all one step closer to the wortking poor and have alot more homeless people with fulltime jobs in our society