The “owners” of the past ten years have simply followed what the “experts” have told them. They had every reason to believe that lenders wouldn’t make loans that they could not pay off, as has been done for decades/centuries before. Nobody let them know that the rules had drastically changed between ~1997 and 2001.
If landlords are the ones who’ve *built* the rental units, then I’m willing to make concessions for them; but most landlords, as a group, are simply monopolizing a basic necessity (shelter) and forcing others to pay them rent. I don’t equate asset price speculation or rent-seeking with productive investment that actually **grows** productive capacity and/or increases the availability of goods and services. Speculation and rent-seeking are zero-sum, while investing in productive capacity is the ONLY way to truly grow the economy. The inability of so many to make this distinction is why we’re in the mess we’re in today.
BTW, paying market-rate property taxes is not a regressive tax. In the case of Prop 13, if tax subsidies are eliminated for non-owner-occupied properties, it will not result in a reduction of tax revenues. Any new purchases (from landlords to owner-occupiers) would be reassessed at market value, anyway.
