If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
I firmly believe every home after your second (let retired people have their cabins) should be taxed exponentially.
The third home should be taxed so heavily that it’s prohibitive, and the fourth should be taxed so highly that it’s impossible to profit off of.
It should be illegal to have dozen of houses to begin with and if you don’t like this you can go fuck yourself because we live in a society
My mayor lives off the rent of 8 houses. I don’t think he’ll do anything to fix it
Some places do this. I have heard a few Welsh areas have gone for much higher council tax (approximate equivalent to a shitty property tax) on second homes. They are allowed to charge up to 4x the normal rate.
If you are renting it out as a holiday rental you can be exempt from the normal council tax but they are now requiring you to actually rent it out. It must be available for at least 252 days of the year and actually used for at least 182 days so you can’t just set rent to unaffordable amounts.
Hearing the crying about it has been great.
Nice.
This gives me an idea.Additional tax for rooms marked as “for rent”, but going unrented for enough part of the year.
Calculation will also take into account recent evictions.I’ve had a similar idea for a while. There should be a fine/tax for unrented properties proportional to the amount being asked for rent. Any money collected from this goes to housing support for low-income renters.
This creates a market incentive to lower rents if you can’t get someone in a unit.
I agree in principal, but it’s impossible to implement it in this manner.
What you can do is establish an “owner-occupant” exemption to future tax hikes, then hike taxes through the fucking roof for everyone else.
Landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants to buyers. They’ll be issuing “land contracts” (which strongly favor the tenant/buyer) rather than rental agreements.
You can create a statute to target 85% owner occupancy. Any year the owner occupancy rate is lower than 80%, the property tax rate will be automatically hiked 2% (for non-owner occupied properties only). If the owner-occupancy rate exceeds 90%, the property tax rate is lowered by 1%.
Oh, I like that a lot.
First one should be free. Let the property investors pay the property taxes. Apparently they can afford them.
I agree with the sentiment but should scale more exponentially.
I feel like two houses is ok’ish but when you start buying three or more is when you cross into commercial purposes.
I should be cost prohibitive to own 4 single family houses.
A more sensible metric would be the surface area of real estate IMO. A person with a 50 square meters home should not pay the same tax rate as a person with a 5000 square meters mansion.
Everyone get 100 square meters tax free (just an example here, depends on country), 1 x tax rate for the next 100 square meters, 10% increase every additional 100 square meters.
Not sure how that’s more sensible. A percentage of the value of the property is more reflective of what a person should pay. If I own an acre of undeveloped forest, that’s worth much less than a condo in upper Manhattan, but under your proposal I’d be paying significantly more.
Perhaps that undeveloped forest would do best without ownership
Your plan would never work in the U.S. No one would know what a square meter is.
Oh sorry I forgot, anything but metric.
So tax free at 1 Oval office, 100% at 2 Oval offices, 110% at 3 Oval offices, and so on…
How many bananas is that?
I’ve often thought that the taxes should relate to whether or not the home is occupied.
If you live in it as your primary dwelling, with more than 50% of your time there, then you should pay the normal amount.
If you have someone leasing the house to live in it, then you should pay the same property taxes as if you were living in it yourself. Maybe a bit higher.
If you’re using it as a full time Airbnb, the taxes should be much, much higher.
Unoccupied rental properties or vacation homes should be taxed at the much higher rate to encourage you to either lower the rent or sell it to someone who can live in it.
If you have someone leasing the house to live in it, then you should pay the same property taxes as if you were living in it yourself. Maybe a bit higher.
Wait why higher if you’re renting or leasing it out? Shouldn’t that be a reduction on taxes due to the home owner not using it for selfish reasons and/or being part of the problem of living in a single family house because owning a single family house is a greedy ass thing to do and makes you an awful person for taking up space that could be used for multi-dwelling apartment complexes.
Companies should pay 10x more.
I think this is the right idea but there should be focus on certain things. Like say car washes. At this point we know it’s a stake to flip the land as prices go up. I live in a place where it’s not uncommon to see a car wash within walking distance from another. May as well be the car wash capital of the world.
Car washes are not houses.
Well of course. But they could have been houses or actual business. I mean there was a burger place, one of the only two left in the country, got torn down and a car wash replaced it. The area was big enough for two or three houses or another business(s). Instead it’s a car wash that I never see anyone at. And this wasn’t like a really great place per say but it was a third space for bike and car meetups. I was trying to reference that those spaces could easily provide housing instead of something useless.
You’re talking about zoning strategies, it’s a whole other subject.
This is about taxing houses (one type of zoning).I’ve sadly seem the same in these parts… derelict houses demolished and replaced with hotels (after the mayor kindly changed the zoning of course).
I see, I wonder how this would affect residential & commercial zoned properties. As in it’s a house but it can also be commercial property. I get calls al the time from companies trying to buy my house because of it. The nursing home keeps sending offers two houses down, I’m sure they get the spam as well, to expand their facility.
A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.
Maybe companies shouldn’t be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.
Companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?
Landlords shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Imagine going to another city to attend university. Can’t just rent for a few years, gotta have initial capital to BUY an apartment first.
Publicly owned apartments you can rent. No need for a landlord who just takes money. That money could go to funding public services instead.
I hear this argument all the time. I reject it. There are alternatives.
A “Land Contract” functions very similar to a rental, but it is a purchase agreement. You are a buyer, not a tenant. If you walk away in the first 3-5 years, it functions exactly as a rental agreement, with the only exception being that the monthly payment was fixed for the duration instead of hiked annually.
If you stay longer than this initial 3-5 year period, the agreement automatically converts to a 30 year mortgage with the same payment.
So, you take out a “land contract” on your college apartment instead of a rental agreement. You can return it to the landlord after you graduate, or stay put and gain some equity for a few years.
Why would landlords offer such an arrangement? Simple: we’re providing owner-occupancy exemptions to property tax hikes. If you live in the house you are paying taxes on, you are entitled to the exemption, and pay a low rate. But If you don’t live there, we’re going to send your property tax rate through the fucking roof. You’re going to be begging your tenants to take a land contract instead of a rental agreement.
When we do this, small-time landlords who live in one of the units of a duplex, triplex, or quadplex will be able to rent out the other units while retaining the owner-occupancy credit. Corporate landlords won’t have the same capability. You’ll be able to rent one of these units, if you really want to rent.
Imagine houses that don’t cost nine and a half fortunes, because they are not considered one of the most profitable ways to invest, for the richest people in the world.
Housing doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive, whether temporary or permanent residences.
It’s not about temporary living in a place not existing, it’s about forbidding the ways that rich people go about making housing scarce, and corner markets.
That is true, but not what was pointed out. Who rents out homes then, it not companies or landlords? I fully agree companies should not own homes. And also believe rent should be pinned to purchase price value +x% per year something. And landlords should not be able to own more than a certain number of dwelling units.
But then who rents out the temporary homes, or homes for people who just don’t want to own for a reason
That works well as a thought terminating slogan online. Less so as a practice in the real life.
I’d hope it was a thought commencing slogan, maybe giving people curiosity as to think:
“How could another sapient person believe something so different from my own beliefs? That person is even making it a joke, therefore they must have had it bouncing around in their brain a bunch, so they must believe it and think about it a lot. Huh, maybe there is something more to know, and think about.”
I even made a comment with a small answer, to the other person, who asked like a human.
Clearly didn’t work on you though.
When people drop these one-liners that perfectly align with the popular view of the platform, my first assumption is that they in fact have not thought about it and instead are just saying the popular thing for applause.
Perhaps that’s a cynical view but in my experience it seems true more often than not. You too walked back on your original statement after being questioned on it. I can’t learn from people who don’t say what they mean or mean what they say.
Why not?
That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:
Being a “landlord”, that is, very specifically, an “owner of houses you don’t live in, but rent to people for profit”, is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.
You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it’s not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:
“Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I’m calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out”
It’s a way of making money, where the owner doesn’t do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.
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Landlords should be prevented from breathing.
Oh these 2000 people own 2000 completely unrelated companies! They all make business with each other because the market is so healthy! All the houses are offered at the same prices because the market works so perfectly by forcing companies to compete with each other so the real value is reached!
Is it troubling that this was my first thought?
No, it shows you know how the world works
Okay, now pay business registration taxes on every single one of those subsidiaries.
No way, it needs to go exponential.
This is essentially a square increase. If one home is one dollar, two home would total $4, three homes would total $9, etc.
I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.
After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.
This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.
And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…
This Vacant Property tax
How would that apply on derelict properties?
There is no reason any single family home to be owned by a corporation. Just ban that entirely. Companies can own apartment complexes, but they also need to be required to provide a percentage of “affordable” units that are capped at 1/4th of the states minimum wage.
Even better idea: Companies owning homes must be non-profits with publicly visible finances.
I say do it on square footage. One 4000sqft house counts the same as 2 x 2000sqft homes
Luckily for the billionaires they don’t own any homes, their homes are part of a complex companies, or some bullshit.
All too true - laws are for people who can’t afford lawyers.
Property tax should be like 1,800$ a year across the board, there should be a set rate by the federal banking system and it should go up and down based on income rates set by inflation.
I think there should be an absolute cap on liquid wealth and assets. Stocks, bonds, houses, vehicles, properties, all part of the asset pool.
IMO, we should rework the economic system outright - to ensure no one can be wealthy, and to take away incentives to be rich beyond a point. For example, arresting people who have too much wealth, and confiscating their wealth heavily, leaving them with up to half of the wealth caps.
We should aim for a society where everybody is within the same ballpark of agency. Not too poor, nor rich. Just able to live a good life, without trampling on humanity.
I think that there should be an age cap for wealth earning and I think that there should be a cap on how many properties you can own in total, like globally.
I think that after 50 or 60 you shouldn’t be able to accumulate more than 1mil a year.
