I am not an expert in this area, but I hope some that are will respond.
Chattanooga and much of the country is suffering from a shortage of affordable housing. Real estate prices have rapidly increased, and much of that is driven by investors who are buying houses they do not plan to actually live in.
Right after WWII people were encouraged to buy their homes. One incentive was the home mortgage interest deduction. This has been taken away. Now real estate speculators and other investors who buy homes they do not intend to live in are still able to deduct mortgage interest as a business expense, but homeowners are not.
I know one family that got around this by forming a corporation that owns the homes and rents them to the family members. The corporation can deduct the interest. If the individual family members owned the homes they could not. This option is not available to ordinary families that do not have family members who are rich lawyers.
We need to find ways to use tax policy to encourage individual home ownership again.
John L. Odom
Ooltewah
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The home mortgage interest deduction still exists, but it increasingly is only used by the very wealthy due to the increases in the standard deduction over the past decade.
And, counterintuitively, the mortgage interest deduction works against affordable housing policy because more expensive homes have higher deductions.
If we want affordable housing we need more housing, which means more density. Supply and demand.
Nathan Bird