The solution as far as rent seekers see it, is to legislate and regulate to make housing more predictable. That is, like bonds, as the population expands housing should expand at a rate much less than is necessary to house the growth in order to drive up the value of their investment at a fixed rate.
To break that cycle you need a fluid market in land and cuffs removed from construction. If I can buy land + build at a rate that's substantially lower than the value of an existing property, I will. If 6 1950s character homes happen to be sitting on a good place to build instead 300 apartments, I will. In the case of low land prices / high land availability its more valuable to be a builder than a rent seeker.
But there are several issues, notably that people in government tend to be people who own property and want their guaranteed unconditional return.
Anecdotally, I know of someone local to me who owns a large hobby farm. They are getting long in the tooth, and went to sell it to fund their retirement. The only evaluations they received came in an order of magnitude lower than the average land sale price locally. This surprised them, as their farm has actually become engulfed by housing. They imagined, quite rightly, that their farm could easily be subdivided. So they set about doing that themselves. The council denied their application because it was over their quota. Bear in mind that the state I live in has a supposed 2% housing growth quota they have never met. The councils quota was an internal policy and not written down anywhere. They simply get the right to refuse rezoning for whatever reason they so choose. Now, at this point the owners were thinking that if they succeeded at getting the land rezoned and parceled out they would be able to sell directly to individuals. 40k per plot multiplied by x plots would certainly be enough for them to live on in retirement. Great idea honestly. They did eventually receive an offer for their land, well under local value, from a large house construction consortium. Turns out their game works like this:
1. Purchase land from someone at a heavily reduced rate.
2. Lean on government to get it rezoned. (often using inducements like agreeing to some maintenance costs, building a park or whatever)
3. Build commercial shopping and other sites nearby and rent those out as permanent assets.
4. Flip the individual lots for a set fee to downstream construction companies.
And ofc, politicians in all levels of government have extremely cushy relationships with these businesses. Taking campaign donations etc.
In effect, housing supply is being limited as a coercion tactic, for larger landholders (and government land release) to sell only to a small subset of land bankers / land arbitrageurs in deep with the government. And controlling such a large portion of new housing supply allows them to ensure that their investments never go backwards. In some instances they will purchase a large lot of land and just withold it from development for a decade until they think introducing that housing suits them.
Sorry for the rant, the tl;dr is that to remove land holding as an investment, the sure path is to move against the land bankers. Release heaps of land, rezone all the things. Just pump new dwellings hard. Crash their investments. Make everyone gunshy of property investment. It should be a market not guaranteed return for life.
To break that cycle you need a fluid market in land and cuffs removed from construction. If I can buy land + build at a rate that's substantially lower than the value of an existing property, I will. If 6 1950s character homes happen to be sitting on a good place to build instead 300 apartments, I will. In the case of low land prices / high land availability its more valuable to be a builder than a rent seeker.
But there are several issues, notably that people in government tend to be people who own property and want their guaranteed unconditional return.
Anecdotally, I know of someone local to me who owns a large hobby farm. They are getting long in the tooth, and went to sell it to fund their retirement. The only evaluations they received came in an order of magnitude lower than the average land sale price locally. This surprised them, as their farm has actually become engulfed by housing. They imagined, quite rightly, that their farm could easily be subdivided. So they set about doing that themselves. The council denied their application because it was over their quota. Bear in mind that the state I live in has a supposed 2% housing growth quota they have never met. The councils quota was an internal policy and not written down anywhere. They simply get the right to refuse rezoning for whatever reason they so choose. Now, at this point the owners were thinking that if they succeeded at getting the land rezoned and parceled out they would be able to sell directly to individuals. 40k per plot multiplied by x plots would certainly be enough for them to live on in retirement. Great idea honestly. They did eventually receive an offer for their land, well under local value, from a large house construction consortium. Turns out their game works like this:
1. Purchase land from someone at a heavily reduced rate. 2. Lean on government to get it rezoned. (often using inducements like agreeing to some maintenance costs, building a park or whatever) 3. Build commercial shopping and other sites nearby and rent those out as permanent assets. 4. Flip the individual lots for a set fee to downstream construction companies.
And ofc, politicians in all levels of government have extremely cushy relationships with these businesses. Taking campaign donations etc.
In effect, housing supply is being limited as a coercion tactic, for larger landholders (and government land release) to sell only to a small subset of land bankers / land arbitrageurs in deep with the government. And controlling such a large portion of new housing supply allows them to ensure that their investments never go backwards. In some instances they will purchase a large lot of land and just withold it from development for a decade until they think introducing that housing suits them.
Sorry for the rant, the tl;dr is that to remove land holding as an investment, the sure path is to move against the land bankers. Release heaps of land, rezone all the things. Just pump new dwellings hard. Crash their investments. Make everyone gunshy of property investment. It should be a market not guaranteed return for life.