I recently moved to California. Before i moved, people asked me “why are you moving there, its so bad?”. Now that I’m here, i understand it less. The state is beautiful. There is so much to do.
I know the cost of living is high, and people think the gun control laws are ridiculous (I actually think they are reasonable, for the most part). There is a guy I work with here that says “the policies are dumb” but can’t give me a solid answer on what is so bad about it.
So, what is it that California does (policy-wise) that people hate so much?
The thing is that commercial real estate investment corporations are the ones behind most of that. Individual Californians that made enough to retire on elsewhere in this country aren’t responsible for the real estate prices increasing across the country. REITs are the issue here. We need to outlaw the ability for corporations to invest in residential property. We then further need rent controls and punitive property and sales taxes to disincentivize hoarding. The idea I would propose is that rent controls are strictly enforced by the IRS, and for each residential property that any individual owns, the sales and property taxes will increase by 10% for each property greater than one. This would make their tax burden, that they are unable to pass on to a potential renter, 110% for their second property, but 200% for their eleventh property.
The rent controls should be easy to implement since the landlords already have a company that uses algorithms to charge the most rent possible, it should be easy to cap rent to 1/4 of the Mode Wage of the area.