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
A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.
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…
I say do it on square footage. One 4000sqft house counts the same as 2 x 2000sqft homes
Companies that own homes should pay a higher rate per house in general.
Also, I’m voting to raise my property taxes this year. I get the benefit of living in a house AND making sure that public schools can keep feeding and helping kids. Fucking yes please.
That’s not a bad idea.
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.
Home owners would complain about property values because they care about unrealized gains more than a working economy.
Im a homeowner and I want my property value to plummet.
I have no intention of selling this place in the foreseeable future, so all those unrealized gains just makes my insurance and taxes cost more.
Few random gun shots into the ground… Random grafetti… Invite some black/brown friends over…
Get creative and you can lower your property value
Um, no.
They would use proxy owners to stay at 1%. Maybe every employee of the corporation could be “an owner” for taxation purposes.
That could be easy to stop too. Just make sure that it’s not legal to be compelled to own a house for a corporation or any human you can’t demonstrate a close relationship with (relative, friend, partner), and any benefits you get (financial or other) for acting as a proxy owner can be demanded back and reappropriated by the gov later.
Enforcement doesn’t need to be perfect, just enough that people aren’t interested in taking the risk at a notable scale.
I’d go further (current flat rate)^(number of houses owned -1)
Meh I wouldn’t go exponentially. I would go 1=1. 2=5-7 depending on size and availability, 3 = 20-150. 4=1500+
we should break out the guillotine while we’re at it and solve the rich cunt problem
To an extent “Homestead Exemption” can do this, if the exemption is a significant chunk of the taxable value - which it has been at some times (my first house’s HX was 50% of its taxable value), and not so much at other times (we’re at about 10% now)…
So, if you’ve got 50% homestead exemption, you only get that on your first home and you pay double taxes on others. But, if you’re playing in the 10% bracket that’s basically in the noise.
Or just ban mega corps from buying housing stock. It’s not difficult to enforce.
That being said, at least where I’m from, the biggest cause for expensive housing was bad zoning laws + suddenly increased demand due to immigration.
The government laxed zoning laws while (seemingly) temporarily reducing immigration. This has caused housing prices to drop quite a lot
What’s a mega corp? Lots of billionaires don’t have all their money in one big company, they spread it out over many small companies. They have friends and family members and trusts to spread the ownership around.
Me too! I’m in Austin
Or just ban mega corps from buying housing stock. It’s not difficult to enforce.
When the mega corps own the legislature and the courts it’s pretty difficult, when they own the executive branch then they de-facto will not have anything enforced upon them.
pass it down to renter
