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
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’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…
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.
Why the exception for apartment complexes? Just buy and sell the units as condos.
Because I do think there is value in mid term, affordable, rentals. And coordinating that with a bunch of individually owned units and ensuring that some of them remain affordable seems like a near impossibility.
Might also be nostalgia for earlier days when not every apartment advertised “luxury units” and renting was way cheaper than buying. It’s what kids just out of high school did, or recent divorcees while they got back in their feet financially. Some oriole even preferred it so they didn’t have the responsibility of owning. Companies used to be decent stewards of multi family housing, I’m probably over optimistic that they could be again.
Even better idea: Companies owning homes must be non-profits with publicly visible finances.
Do you mind sharing why this might be a better idea? I’ve seen pretty scummy non profits.
Scummy non-profit with publicly available finances tend to get under media/political fire pretty quick when they are providing basic services. If you have an actually functioning democracy (aka not the US) or large enough masses on the street (aka also not the US, but mostly not because people don’t care; they are struggling too much to make ends meet, but have just enough to keep them content - but i see this balance slowly slipping) these things can be fixed.
How would that apply on derelict properties?
I
don’t get how vacant property tax works with two houses, if I have two there is no way I can live in both for longer than 4 months.am bad at math, that’ll only start being a problem from 3 housesAnd some summer houses where I’m from are built in such a way that you will really struggle to live there outside the season. I’m not sure this should be universally applicable especially in case of house used for living in it, and not renting out
This would be great, but it’s not feasible as described. Property taxes are assessed against the property, not the owner. The county can determine whether someone has paid the tax on a particular property, but they are greatly restricted on details about the owner of that property. There is no reliable mechanism to determine how many properties a single person owns. A county auditor would be able to determine how many properties you own in that county, but the auditor of Alameda County in California has no conclusive way of knowing if you also own property in Anne Arundel County in Maryland.
The county auditor does have access to your income tax records, drivers license records, etc. They can easily and reliably determine your claimed county of residence when you pay your tax bill.
If you were to claim residence in Anne Arundel, the Alameda auditor could determine that you do not qualify for an owner-occupant credit available only to residents of Alameda County.
We already have “homestead exemption” and “second home” property taxes in most of the country. These give some small credits or exemptions for various purposes for the property where a homeowner resides. What we need to do is expand the scope of these owner-occupant exemptions. They need to automatically match future property tax hikes, so owner occupants are explicitly protected against them.
And then we increase the property tax annually until the owner occupancy rate is above 85%. We run it through the fucking moon, actual homeowners don’t see any increase. Corporate landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to issue land contracts and purchase agreements rather than leases.
I say do it on square footage. One 4000sqft house counts the same as 2 x 2000sqft homes