The Housing Crisis Isn’t Going Anywhere Until We Tackle Property Wealth Inequality
The Housing Crisis Isn’t Going Anywhere Until We Tackle Property Wealth Inequality
The housing crisis will never end without levying forceful taxes against real estate speculators and investors. A recent report outlines the necessary actions to impose taxes that can actually narrow the wealth gap and alleviate the housing emergency.
I think the most novel proposal we put forward in the report is taxing the total real estate holdings of large landowners, as opposed to individually taxing each property using the aforementioned brackets. This could entail situations where large landowners own a portfolio of properties, each falling below that $3 million threshold, but that cumulatively add up to tens of millions of dollars. In this scenario, by taxing the total holdings instead of each property separately, these owners would no longer be able to avoid paying those progressive property tax rates.
There's a few interesting bits to this article, but I like this one the most. Property taxes on the cumulative amount of property a person or company owns is huge. It provides a punishment for buying up large amounts of property.
People already pay taxes on cumulative properties. You need this plus the progressive tax idea.
I'm 100% on board with this. Hell, why not both?
We could also do a residence + 1 option where your house and 1 other property are taxed reasonably. The any property beyond that is taxed as escalating rates that ramp up significantly for each additional property.
I think the concern is that:
- The rich would try to skirt this with numbered or shell companies, or family or other relations.
- The rich would pass this onto tenants.
Now, the solution is to a) couple this with rent control, b) exempt purpose-built rentals from this endeavour, and c) punish serial transgressions with confiscation.
Frankly, I think the idea of punishing malfeasance by landlords with confiscation to be just awesome: if you're a predatory slumlord, we take the house and repurpose it as RGI public housing. Do I worry about the government becoming predatory? Yes, yes I do, but in this case it's a lesser-of-two-evils thin.
There are so many great ideas that could have been implemented by now, and have been implemented in other countries. But the Liberals have only instituted policies to make it worse. Only now that the youth vote is leaving them they may at least pay lip service to it. It's honestly disgusting.
Preach. I voted Green. Mike shows promise and he's consistent with messaging. Next election I'll more than happily stump for them.
Triple property taxes for units not occupied by owners. Quick fix.
Forbid corporate ownership of anything under 4 units/12 bedrooms, and require them own 100% of any contiguous building over 4 units. Added taxes will just be passed on to residents. Corporations are used to aggregate money (both public corps and family/friend groups) and avoid taxes.
Then make a financial law that forbids making property loans with collateral which includes any real property that is not the property being purchased. No condo bros buying units and then re-fi-ing out to buy more.
The issue is owners just fake the documents when your property tax or vacancy tax mail arrives. Friend of mine rents basement suite, landlord has not lived in main house for over two years, it has been empty the entire time. somebody comes every few weeks to collect mail.
Whistleblower law that lets people who finger this kind of landlord take ownership of the property at a nominal fee for processing the paperwork. Call it $25.
We still don't physically have enough houses. It's quick, but not a fix.
how about prevent cooperate take over of nin commercial property, especially foreign takeover. Look at how they're swooping in on the victims in Hawaii after the fires.
Land value tax would fix this.
Georgism making a comeback baby!
I hope so. Subscribe to !georgism@kbin.social if you haven't already.
this would work. It would make things like the 2009 banking crisis more of a crisis but maybe thats not a bad thing.
the other thing is downward pressure needs to be applied to the market: new units sold at below market value to people that don't already own homes
The solution is to build more housing.
So BlackRock can buy it and rent it out to people for $3,000 a month? What use is more housing if rich people who own 1,000 houses are just going to buy it? The solution is more complicated.
If there is too much inventory the price for rent will go down.
I don't think that will happen. The empty houses problem is probably much exaggerated, since it gives less returns then renting them out.
That would require making more land and increasing the capacity of existing high-use, aging infrastructure for water, sewage, power, and trash. I can find you a cheap place to live out in the sticks. Hell, the town down the road from me has brand new, 3BR 2.5BA 1900SF homes with garage for $270k (USD). You only need 2BR/1BA and 1100SF? $150k. Thing is, it's a 30-40 minute drive to the center of my 200,000 person MSA. But this isn't a fun, entertaining city with excellent walkability, public transit, a major airport, and multiple concert venues and public spaces so people aren't flocking to move out here.
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We must always punish to the poor. /s
They could, but that's still going to take a lot to balance the scales. It should be part of an overall plan for housing affordability
So Basically, there's always going to be a crisis. Cool thanks.
We need to eliminate corporate ownership of single family properties, and we need to make it easier for people to get loans for their own residences. Most rentals of private homes are stashed on corporations for two reasons: aggregating capital and shielding liabilities (real and tax).
Law 1: Corporations may not own single family housing, which includes any residence or unit of residence which is part of a 4 unit (or 12 sleeping rooms) or smaller building. Where a building is larger than 4 units, a corporation must own 100% of the units to be eligible for ownership.
Law 2: The government will provide funding to banks at 0% cost for single family home loans to be serviced at 1.25% interest with the requirement that the mortgagee meet underwriting requirements by the financial intuition except that a 3% down payment is the maximum that can be required. Only one mortgage per taxable unit (all social security numbers filed as part of your federal tax household) is allowed, it must be a primary residence receiving all federal and mortgage official correspondence for the mortgagee. Penalties for violating the residence requirements are the greater of 10% or the maximum of double the 30 year treasury bond rate over the life of the loan, times the number of years the loan has been in place. The penalty is applied twice - once to the mortgagee and once to the lender.