I had an idea that would allow people to buy their own homes that they are currently renting:
- Every home gets appraised to determine what it would sell for. This is done by the county and is used for property taxes too.
- Every renter is allowed to buy a percentage of their primary residence from the owner. The owner has no choice in this. It’s a requirement for being able to rent a property. Edit: Since people are confused about this, the renter is not required to buy anything. They have an option to buy.
- Renters can pay as little as $100 extra per month and the county puts their percentage ownership on the deed. If the home is sold, the renter can’t be kicked out involuntarily. If they do leave, they get the percentage of home value they own.
Pros:
- This would avoid the issue of high interest rates hurting primary homeownership.
- This would blunt the impact of corporate landlords having a monopoly where they refuse to sell. They are forced to sell at a fair price.
- This would create a simple decision between owning their home and spending money on luxuries or eating out.
Cons:
- This would hurt small landlords who would have their property bought out from under them. This is actually a good thing because the benefits of rising property values are now shared.
- The implementation is hard. This is actually a good thing because bad landlords would sell property they didn’t want to manage, lowering prices for renters who want to buy.
- It would cost the county money to hire appraisers. But this could be paid for by increased property taxes due to better appraisals.
- Property taxes would go up for landlords. But this would be good, as it encourages them to sell the property. This appraisal process and increased property taxes wouldn’t affect people who just lived in their home without charging rent.
This has been tried in UK for council properties where the tenant has the right to buy. It was introduced by conservatives back last century 1980s) and has led to decimation of council housing stock needed for housing homeless and those or low incomes.
Objectively it ended up being a terrible policy for renters now.
A better way forward is to ensure there are no private and corporate landlords and only local councils are allowed to provide homes for rent. This ensuring local rent controls and stock.
To me that seems like a demonstration of why it would work. Allowing the people living there to buy the house from the government moved housing from the hands of government into private ownership. Allowing the people living there to buy the home from a corporate landlord will remove housing from corporate landlords, which is exactly what’s needed if we want people to be able to afford housing. People buying the home they live in from their landlord won’t remove council housing.
It’ll probably drive down house prices but that’s kind of the point. As a private homeowner I’d lose out on some potential money if I ever moved so that’s not ideal, but that’s a fair “loss” if it means other people can afford somewhere to live.
Do you have an article about this?
No just own musings, no mainstream political party in uk would pick it up
I’m a conservative and this sounds like a terrible idea (assuming it’s forced) to me. I wonder why the conservatives of the 1980s UK thought differently.
It likely was an attempt to get more people out of rent into home ownership (as home owners are more likely to vote conservative here) but what they failed to predict is that people would then resell on open market at higher cost when demand was high.