76 Secrets of U.S. Home Ownership - Conclusion
Let’s make home ownership boring again.
Buying a house for your family should not be a speculative investment, it should stabilize your family. It should be a way to buy and own a house for your family to live in for many years to come.
Mortgages and the rest of the system should be designed as much as possible to make buying a house for your family a sure thing again instead of a gamble if you happen to buy in the wrong year.
#1 – Get rid of ALL possible government incentives (taxes, laws, policies, etc.) to own single-family homes and condos that aren’t incentives for people to own those homes as their primary residences.
#2 – Remodel U.S. mortgages and the U.S. mortgage system to maximize the free-and-clear home ownership rate over the long term, not home sales over the short term.
#3 – Increase the development of social housing, as well as, for-profit housing.
More sustainable house price increases would stabilize and increase the U.S. economy and the wealth of Americans.
We can at least stop our current federal and state government policies that unnecessarily distort the market signals for owner-occupied single-family houses and condos, and that destabilize house prices and American families.
Today, for example, we give huge tax breaks to landlords of single-family houses and condos that live-in owners don’t get (in addition to the tax breaks landlords get on the houses they actually live in themselves). Those (additional) landlord tax incentives, naturally, destabilize the market because they pay landlords to buy more houses and to pay higher prices for those houses than they would naturally without the tax breaks.
In addition, investors jump into the market during booms, making our real estate booms far bigger than they would be without the huge tax breaks for investors. Then investors quit buying and are much more likely to walk away when prices fall during busts, making our real estate busts far bigger than they would be otherwise. Live-in home owners don’t jump into and out of the market anything like landlords.
In addition to stabilizing and increasing U.S. economic growth and wealth, these solutions would also stabilize U.S. politics because, when – through no fault of their own – house prices and family wealth tanks, a lot of people naturally get mad at the world and their politicians and want radical change.
The Transition is the Hard Part for #1. We could remove all landlord tax breaks on future purchases of single-family homes and condos, and phase out all the current landlord tax breaks on current rentals over many years or a decade or two. The U.S. home ownership rate, household wealth, and U.S. economic growth would increase during the transition and would be permanently higher and more stable after the transition.
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You can find the entire “76 Secrets of U.S. Home Ownership” here.