“I think the comparison to a prison wasn’t perfect,” Cohen candidly admits of his post
lol
To be fair, the plan does look a lot like something I’ve built in Prison Architect.
This is a move in the dead wrong direction.
We don’t need more 350 square-foot landlord-owned prefab boxes, we need affordable homes.
The shift to a renter-only market (except of course for the wealthy) just locks people further into poverty and paycheck to paycheck subsistence, because there’s no accrual of home equity, there’s no generational wealth transfer of that equity, there’s no point at which you stop paying rent, and can easily survive on a fixed income…
There are more vacant homes than unhoused people. We’re not lacking in homes, we’re lacking in the political will to solve the real housing crisis, which is overpriced homes.
We don’t need more 350 square-foot landlord-owned prefab boxes
Especially big corpo landlords. Think your average slumlord is bad? Well you haven’t tried hyper-capitalist slumlord!
Something like a Vacancy Tax would be helpful in insuring that more housing is available, it would do little to create more home ownership because the land itself is expensive even if nothing is on it.
I see this as smart use of land. Instead of another Big Box store and sprawling parking lot the city gets the store and 800 more apartments in the same footprint.
Haven’t done any research and I’m mostly just curious about your thoughts – would the situation be different the implementation of these were rent to own?
I think that as long as there is a Lease Option written into the contract that legally forces the owner to sell (or if it’s a lease-purchase), and as long as there is some guarantee on the down payment amount if the seller breaks the contract, I’m mostly fine with Rent-to-Own. But R2O contracts are something you probably want a lawyer to double-check, because there are ways you can get screwed as the buyer (like if you lose your job prior to sale, and it’s a Lease Purchase, they might charge you a LOT of money to break the contract).
