Shelter Inflation: Is there a Shortage of Houses?

According to YUN there is always an inventory problem.

Agree with Mish, but there’s more going on.

People have never paid such a large proportion of their income for housing.
That money is going somewhere, and there has to be a reason everyone is paying so much more for shelter.

New funding source for taxing authorites.

Put some effort into verification of homestead claims.

There is too much money available as people/companies fearful of the stock market heights cash out, foreign money coming in from overseas, pension funds and such looking for someplace to put their cash that generates more than 1% interest, money laundering, etc.

AND 

How many vacant houses are there really in the Bay Area?

Estimates vary widely but census data suggests there are thousands

January 6, 2020

There’s a home on South Jackson Avenue in San Jose’s Mayfair neighborhood that has it all: excellent location within walking distance of a school, parks and shops; a nearly acre-sized backyard; and — a rarity in California — a basement.

But for at least a decade it has sat unoccupied — one of an estimated 46,000 such homes in the five-county Bay Area. It’s a surprising number in a region beset by a crippling housing shortage and a ballooning number of homeless residents, where vacant housing has become the latest flashpoint in an ongoing crisis.

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AND

Unmasking the secret landlords buying up America

By Aaron Glantz / December 17, 2019

America’s cities are being bought up, bit by bit, by anonymous shell companies using piles of cash. Modest single-family homes, owned for generations by families, now are held by corporate vehicles with names that appear to be little more than jumbles of letters and punctuation – such as SC-TUSCA LLC, CNS1975 LLC – registered to law offices and post office boxes miles away. New glittering towers filled with owned but empty condos look down over our cities, as residents below struggle to find any available housing.

All-cash transactions have come to account for a quarter of all residential real estate purchases, “totaling hundreds of billions of dollars nationwide,” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network – the financial crimes unit of the federal Treasury Department, also known as FinCEN – noted in a 2017 news release. Thanks to the Bank Secrecy Act, a 1970 anti-money-laundering law, the agency is able to learn who owns many of these properties. In high-cost cities such as New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, it’s flagged over 30% of cash purchases as suspicious transactions. But FinCEN also cites this bill to hide this information from the public, leaving the American people increasingly in the dark about who owns their cities.

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