• MudMan@fedia.io
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    6 days ago

    Yeeeeah, I was too adult in 2008 to go “you know the real problem? We check too hard for solvency when giving out mortgages”.

    Not that I have a silver bullet for solving a housing crisis. There probably isn’t one. You need a lot more public housing as a percentage of the total pool, that much I can tell. How you fix a job market where nobody holds the same position for more than a handful of years is beyond me. You probably need to make it much more expensive to own a house without living in it or renting it out. You definitely want to make it much more expensive for corporations to own housing.

    Guessing that’s harder to fit in a pithy, viral tweet, though.

    • FireRetardant@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      The biggest thing we can do for the housing crisis is making density legal again and allocating more space in cities to housing instead of parking cars.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        6 days ago

        Yeah, that’d work a lot better for me if I was American and not painfully aware of similar issues happening in cities where cars fold like umbrellas and are almost entirely parked underground.

        I mean, don’t get me wrong, you guys have a whole continent you can use for this, so maybe you can brute force it. Definitely not “the biggest thing” where I’m from, though.

    • KombatWombat@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      I’m glad someone mentioned the 2008 financial crisis. Banks need to be fairly confident the person they are giving the mortgage to can afford the payment now and for the next thirty years. There are plenty of unfair reasons why someone may not be able to buy a home today, but not being able to afford a down payment is not one of them.