• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Can’t. Rich assholes and massive firms are buying them at insane prices so they can rent them out at double what a mortgage would cost. And that drives more people to apartments which drives their prices up.

    There’s a housing shortage in my area, and 30 percent of houses are empty. But if you jack up the rent enough, you make more money off those that can pay the ransom than you would by lowering the rent to get all units rented. It’s an artificial scarcity created by landlords.

    I work in municipal development and literally every single-family project that’s approached the city in the last 18 months is for rental only, because they figured out that mortgages don’t go up and eventually end, so why sell the houses at all?