There is no American “housing crisis”— there’s a supply-hoarding crisis to rig local market prices above the liquidity of local buyer capital. 

The policy solution is simple: poison-pill tax all non-occupant-owned housing to force immediate sale to local buyers at actual market rates.

Allowing unlimited non-local capital to supply-hoard vacant housing is simply anti-resident eugenics. Current residents are too poor, so replace them with richer ones— even if it causes widespread homelessness, forced migration and absurd energy costs for the displaced to commute. It’s as discriminatory as Federal Housing Administration redlining of black neighborhoods in the 1940s.

Chocolate rainmaker. Singer. Thinker. Voice

The problem is that a lot of other things depend on real estate. This is an interesting idea, but if you executed it my personal guess is that the resulting crash in the assets that people are holding in brokerage accounts (while waiting to someday buy a home) would leave them just as far away from it as they are now.