Whatever they may say, no politician actually wants to cut house prices
. No one seems to have much idea how the government proposes to double construction – it seems to beIf that sounds overly cynical, it’s born of long experience. Governments have been unveiling one program after another to rein in housing prices for years, toPossibly this is not entirely accidental.
This is not necessarily irrational. Prices may have turned frothy in the past couple of years, but on the whole the social impact of high house prices has been greatly exaggerated. Millennials, in particular, are not the generational victims they have been made out to be, asThey found millennials, the generation now in their 30s, had one-third higher median incomes and a two-thirds higher median net worth than Gen-Xers did at their age – who in turn were better off than the Baby Boomers were.
But all right. Suppose governments did want to cut house prices, rather than just talk about it. How would they go about it? One way is to reduce the demand for housing: that’s coming, withThe “flipper” tax offers another intriguing possibility: the precedent of taxing capital gains on principal residences having been set, the way is open to lengthen the minimum holding period.
That, stripped of the rhetoric, more or less seems to be the aim of the budget’s New Housing Accelerator Fund, which is to “incentivize” cities to get more housing built, including “up-front funding for investments in municipal housing planning and delivery processes.”