The post Property Tax Incentives For Housing Benefit Renters And Taxpayers appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.

Incentive programs to create affordable housing beat mandates again and again. getty Housing prices and rents go up with demand surges and supply doesn’t keep up. But there are nuances in what causes producers of housing to act, assuming the costs and risks of building new housing. The nature of the politics around housing complicates this significantly, with some believing that unless housing producers are somehow leaned on, they won’t build housing for people at lower levels of income. This has resulted in mandates, like Mandatory Inclusionary Zoning (MIZ), which I have likened to a bribery scheme in which people building housing are forced into paying fees to get their permits, and then those fees converted into subsidies for large non-profit developers. A recent report shows that incentives to produce rent restricted housing are far more effective, even in Seattle, its mandatory inclusionary scheme. First, it’s important to note that all new housing added in a housing market is ameliorative of price increases and overall inflation. Even new, more expensive units create options for people with more money to spend, and that means they won’t compete for housing products against people with less money to spend. If regulation allows, producers will respond to demand, even in those lower rated products. For example, when the housing economy began to recover after the 2008 crash, in markets like Seattle, there were many regular sized apartments being built but there were also microunits being built too. These smaller units in prime neighborhoods were cheaper even while other housing was more expensive. Still, policy makers aren’t happy when they look at the sticker price on new housing, often dismissing what one expert called, the “skew of the new;” like a new pair of shoes or a new car, newly constructed housing is often more…

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Filed under: News - @ July 4, 2025 2:24 pm