How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned? People and organizations can still own as many properties as they want, but at some point they’re going to be taxed so much it’ll be impossible to profit off of them.
How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned?
That’s functionally how the homestead exemption works already
they’re going to be taxed so much it’ll be impossible to profit off of them.
I would simply start a PAC with all my extra money and bribe/coerce politicians into reducing the tax rates.
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated. Our system fucking sucks and is designed to protect land owners which is why we’re in this situation. This is fucking up our entire society, slowly bringing us down, we’re losing to China. This change needs to happen soon otherwise we’re going to see the working class get milked hard enough that our real economy will collapse.
Build more housing. That’s what you need to prioritize.
We have significantly more vacant units (around 15M) than homeless people (around 600k-1.5M by various estimates).
New dense energy efficient units connected to social services and green energy infrastructure would be great for everyone. But the idea that we just don’t have residential space to house people is totally wrong.
And where are they located, and why are they empty?
There’s your next big problem, a significant fraction of them aren’t where people want (or need) to be, or are vacation homes and don’t belong in these stats (unless you want to eminent domain them). Suburbs and ghost towns and remote regions pushes the average up.
https://todayshomeowner.com/general/guides/highest-home-vacancy-rates/
And where are they located, and why are they empty?
https://smartasset.com/data-studies/vacant-houses-2023
More than 300,000 housing units in New York City sat vacant. However, the Big Apple’s total vacancy rate of 8.3% in 2022 fell slightly from five years earlier (9.7%). Meanwhile, San Francisco had over 52,000 vacant units in 2022 for a 12.7% vacancy rate.
Turns out nobody wants to live in checks notes New York City or San Fransisco.
a significant fraction of them aren’t where people want (or need)
There are definitely large numbers of vacant units in areas that were de-industrialized or hit with natural disasters. However, speculators moving in and gobbling up the properties at their bargain basement rates, then squatting on them to drive up the overall value of real estate in the area, result in artificially high real estate rates across these neighborhoods. Even in places with ostensibly low demand for housing, the prices remain higher than in historical periods of high demand.
Suburbs and ghost towns and remote regions pushes the average up.
Over-development in less accessible places can make neighborhoods unattractive due to the commute. But the solution to this problem is often to improve mass transit in these neighborhoods and develop local public services (schools, post offices, grocery stores, etc) at their centers. Then do the one thing that Americans hate and fear more than anything - BRING IN THE MIGRANTS. Populate the neighborhoods with large socially cohesive cohorts of new people and energize the neighborhoods with public works spending.
This creates a virtuous cycle of economic growth and development that brings in still more people and creates new demand for more goods and services. This is exactly what big midwestern towns did to revitalize in the wake of deindustrialization. Chattanooga, Tennessee installed public Gigabit internet and became the center of a Tennessee tech boom. Detroit accumulated a network of art collectives in its low rent housing and reinvented itself as a cultural center. Atlanta, Georgia is enjoying an enormous economic expansion thanks to new federally subsidized battery plants in the city.
When public policy identifies a housing surplus, policymakers can create a virtuous cycle of development by building new business capacity in the immediate vicinity. Then you solve joblessness, homelessness, and a stagnant economy in one go.
https://comptroller.nyc.gov/reports/spotlight-new-york-citys-housing-supply-challenge/ 🤷
I don’t disagree with the rest, walkable cities are important, speculators shouldn’t be involved in housing, etc. But some places genuinely have a lack of available housing and the solution is to build away.
Some places have a lack of affordable housing. But anywhere you go, you can find living space at a high enough price point.
The only real exception is in the midst of a natural disaster or similar event, at which point the housing is typically exhausted because it is gobbled up by state bureaucracies for housing troops going in or refugees flooding out. And these sudden shortages are resolved by moving people to long term housing in surrounding areas, not by throwing up enormous tower blocks overnight.
That’s not even to say we don’t need new builds. A lot of the existing housing stock is old, poorly maintained, or inefficient. But the idea that we simply don’t have enough units to go around is real estate developer ad copy. It isn’t based in reality. And pursuing the policies advocated by the “not enough housing” folks inevitably leads to large new Luxury branded establishments that get sold off to speculators rather than lived in by the unhoused.
Sounds like eminent domain talk if you think there’s enough suitable available homes already
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated
Who passes this law? Who signs it? My municipal and state governments are infested with real estate agents landlords, attorneys, and bankers, all of whom profit from artificially scarce housing.
If I could, I would pass a law saying that no corporation could own more than two dwelling structures. That still allows them to own things up to apartment high-rises. But only two.
they’d just make nesting doll structured holding companies with all profits going to the top but any losses being contained within each branch
actually this sounds like a great idea BRB gotta register some LLCs in Delaware
I would think that would be covered under antitrust legislation, but if it wouldn’t be, I guess I would pass that as part of the law.
The problem with antitrust legislation is that it rarely gets enforced.
The most common target of antitrust litigation has been unions.
There’s always talk about tax breaks for home owners…
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
That’s what would fix it. Tax them out of the housing market slowly and.prices will go down as they get out of the business.
Wouldn’t a tax hike only get passed through to the renter?
That’s why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
They could try to pass it on to consumers, but smaller landlords wouldn’t have to pay it.
Making the biggest get out of the game first
They will just split the units owned on more companies then.
That’s why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
That might not have been clear.
Set it at the parent company level so it’s not easy.
If they have X amount invested in rental real estate, that can just be taxed then
Believe me, the tax code for the wealthy is already complicated, they can handle this
Indeed. Nothing about this addresses rental markets and general extreme cost of living. Rather, it finds new ways to prop up severely overvalued housing markets.
Housing costs are so high because it’s become an investment over a necessary place for a human to live. A correction is severely needed and long overdue, but the government works hard to keep values artificially high from zoning laws at the bottom to preventing corrections at the top.
That and most people just do the standard deductions.
So tax breaks mostly help the wealthy in mansions.
It’s like how conservatives want to move income tax to sales tax. The wealthiest make a lot more than they spend. And when they spend it’s usually thru some shady shit where they don’t pay sales tax. Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a “company car” from a company they own.
