IMHO, the answer is simple.
No corporation may own more than X single family or multifamily (up to 4 family per building) housing units, other than for occupation by its employees, for more than 120 days. Any housing units owned for more than 120 days are taxed at a rate of 50% of their fair market value per year.
Watch how fast companies like Zillow that tried to get rich fast by ‘playing the housing market’ dump houses on the market.
I’m invested in real estate, and I want this to happen even though it’ll hurt me economically. Real estate is horrifically overvalued, and corporations owning huge numbers of single family homes / small multifamily homes are a big part of why.
I’m all for investing to make money. Some things should be considered public resources, not vehicles for investment. Land and health are among them.
Why should corporations be able to own housing at all? They don’t live in them.
I’ve been thinking along these lines for years. Contrary to what is often said, about landlords being leeches, I believe they provide a service. Not everybody can afford or wants to buy a house, but renting should be affordable.
Land, however, is a finite resource, and should be taxed accordingly, to redistribute wealth, and normalize the market.
I find people who invest on housing as a means to enhance their retirement, for example, fine.
However, hoarding and speculation that leads to inflated markets is not.
A proggresive taxation on individual owners, say 10-15% on the first 3 properties (maybe one or two could be second residences, why not), 20% on 5-10, 50% on 10-20, for example (I’m throwing numbers around) would make hoarding a diminishing returns game.
Businesses should have much higher brackets, on residential. Commercial should be taxed, but less so.
Empty residential should be taxed punitively, and also progressively, and after a certain period, made available to municipalities for social housing.
Capitalism is good, when there are effective checks.
Social housing should be a priority.
There are tons of ways to promote a sane and socially responsible market.
I believe in capitalism, with effective checks, and redistribution of wealth, progressively.
Rich like to collect shit and then hide it.
No…. The immigrants stole them all
My simple solution ( although there is no simple answer to this complex question) is to put a 1% on the landlord for every empty home. After 2 years it goes doubles.
So if your a home owner with a second or even a third home you should be able to cover the cost or at least until you get someone in. But if you happen to own 50 plus over priced properties, you can either lower the price,or sell the house.
Properties should not be investment
It’s completely written by AI, but ChatGPT makes a good point.
How many of those are within walking distance of a grocery store? Many of them would likely not be suitable for a low income resident without a motor vehicle.
We prefer to call them investment properties.
And if you let people live in them they might depreciate in value. So…
I’d love to ensure everyone has an acceptable home and access to clean water and food. It seems like we could do that.
Conversely, I’ve seen people’s living situations and people are fucking gross. This includes home owners and non homeowners.
People get shit on and then just repeatedly shit on. I’m not sure what I would do, had I held the power. Probably let people have smaller homes and start there. Like those little mini homes? Still homes, still have housing, but limited. Earn more?
Idk. I’m not a politician.
That’s true, but also inversely generally being gross on a property does not outweigh the value of the property over time in most cases. Even having gross tenants over time at market rent generally results in net profit after they leave and any additional cleanup costs incurred, plus you still own the property at the end of the day, and if we’re talking about houses, you probably own the land too.
I’ve seen what you’re describing and I think what you’re getting at is more of a societal systemic issue related to mental health and income. Most people I think would like to live clean and healthy lives, but they either need mental health support they aren’t getting/can’t afford, etc, and/or are spending more time working/taking care of family/battling addiction or whatever and end up not taking care of themselves or where they live
But at the end of the day this is all anecdotal and the whole thing should be addressed by a governing body made up of compassionate voted-in representatives using available resources and a scientific approach that want to fix the problem rather than arbitrary individuals chatting about it
Yeah that makes sense. I do wish the humans were more caring of each other. We’re all here together to live. Why not help each other?
Are you trying to make a case that a gross tenant who doesn’t pay rent is the same as a nice tenant who does pay?
They specifically said that a gross tenant paying market rate is better than no tenant.
or you cant rent them out in perputuity.
Thats not what depreciation means.
If youre trying to say the wear and tear decreases the property’s value, it wouldn’t decrease much more than a rented property, and the investor would have all that rent income.
Also they already get a tax break for depreciation…
In most jurisdictions you cant claim depreciation if the property is not available to rent.
We need a land value tax to stop real estate speculation.
Yes, these are built for investors only.
Also we have more churches than homeless people. If churches aren’t even helping one of the most disadvantages and the individuals damn near every holy book says to help. What are they doing? They don’t even help the homeless children.
They should never have been allowed to become gambling chips.
Noone should be allowed to purchase a home without agreeing to live in it full time for at least a year afterwards. Split it into a duplex to become a landlord? Another year. Wanna be a landlord? You must live in that building full time along with your tenants. Outrageous? Not nearly as outrageous as homelessness because of the prices.
Easiest way is to ensure the unit isn’t vacant for more than a year, else they will get taxed extra. Also rent shouldn’t be x% higher than the mortgage.
Good idea. There are plenty more conditions that could be added on to make becoming a landlord/gambler much less attractive. Like: you can’t even begin to buy another until you’ve finished your year and sold the place.
Yes, the government can actually do something about it if they want, and imo that’s the issue, because taxes from property sales is much more attractive to them.
Don’t forget brib…sorry, I mean lobbying from rich people and corporations owning a lot of properties.
The first rule seems likely to work. The second guarantees no property will ever be renovated.
Some cities in Australia have a vacant property tax. It makes sense in some areas.
Make the tax on properties you don’t personally inhabit a percentage of unrealized capital gains of all assets. Limit untaxed property size to an area the median person reporting for jury duty can circumnavigate on foot within one minute. Is the untaxed property size too small for your preference because the people of your county are too unhealthy? Maybe improve your local healthcare system.
Basically, tie metrics coupled with the well-being of the median citizen with taxes on the wealthy. Eventually, the metrics will be framed or rigged by a corrupt charlatan or strongman (e.g. by exiling the sick and homeless), but to the extent that the laws are updated and enforced, people will be healthier.
it’s called a vacancy tax.
landlords already get tax discounts for living in properties they rent out in most communities.
You shouldn’t be allowed to own residential property you don’t live on. There needs to be a way for people to move so after 3 months of owning a property that is not your primary residence taxes go through the roof and double every year.
“What about renters?”
Basement suites / duplexes exist. An apartment building will be better taken care of when the owner has to also live in the apartment building.Another good idea would be to require every rental to include a rent-to-buy option. If the renter wishes, a substantial portion of those rental fees would count as equity, and at any time they can afford it, they can exercise that option to buy. If they decide to move out, that equity does not revert to landlord but goes into a special trust which pays for more affordable housing.
This is somewhat similar to how the right to buy initiative worked with council housing in the UK till they sold them all off and stopped building more.
To do something like that you’ll need to introduce public housing, maybe nationalise blackrock? 💀
Now those homes slowly rot and lose value and become dangereous to live in.
As a result, rich people can’t run airbnbs. Capitalists are losing in long term for pride/greed/incompetence.
At this rate they will require government subsidies to rebuild them later. All because those selfish low-to-upper middleclass people are refusing 50 year mortgages.
the houses don’t lose value. the land goes up faster in value than the deprecation on the physical house.
the price of the land is what matters way more than the house on it.
To an extent. But I can buy a house for like 25% of the typical cost around here for a 1986 property versus a recent build, even with comparable location and land area.
Varies by locale, in LA the value of structures are likely a rounding error, in the middle of nowhere, the structure is nearly everything.
yes, but most of the population lives in urban centers. they don’t live in the middle of no where. and it’s not viable for them to move there.
there are houses 2 hours from my city that cost like 200K. i could easily by them. but I can’t live there because it would mean spending 4-5 hours in a car every day. there are no jobs in those towns. anything that’s an hours drive or less, is closer to a million dollars. which i can’t afford.
Doesn’t cost much to keep some upkeep temp in the house, that keeps away mold at least
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
The problem is resource hoarding. Regulate the real estate monopolies. Stricter bans on AirBnBs and second vacation homes. Rent control properties. And renovate buildings that aren’t up to code.
Outside of extremely dense cities, it’s never, ever been a population issue. It’s a class issue.
I really don’t see how building more houses/units is not the solution, at least in some cases. I live in a VHCOL area and we straight up have a housing shortage for a variety of reasons.
Who needs a Bitcoin to live? Nobody. But the price of a Bitcoin is still 90,000 dollars. People aren’t living in their bitcoins, they want Bitcoins because other people want them. That’s why they’re expensive.
A house is like a Bitcoin that you need to live. Rich people are hoarding houses because other rich people want them, the same as Bitcoins. The problem is everyone needs a house. So we need to ban rich people from hoarding them somehow. Then the price will go down.
I’ve said time and time again that “building more houses” is not the solution.
I mean, it’s also been said that a lot of these empty houses are in rural/suburban neighborhoods outside of dying industrial centers. We’re effectively talking about “Ghost Towns”, with no social services and a deteriorating domestic infrastructure, that people are deliberately abandoning.
And we’re stacking that up against the homeless encampments that appear in large, dense, urban environments where social services are (relatively) robust and utilities operate at full capacity around the clock.
Picking people up from under the I-10 overpass and moving them to
doesn’t address homelessness as a structural problem. It just shuttles people around the state aimlessly and hopes you can squirrel them away where your voters won’t see them anymore.
At some point, you absolutely do need to build more apartment blocks and rail corridors and invest in local/state/federal public services again, such that you can gainfully employ (or at least comfortably retire) people with no future economic prospects. You can’t just take folks out to shacks in the boonies and say “Homelessness Resolved!”
Sounds like all those places need are people to live in them.
It’s a win-win.
…But nobody wants to live there.
You could give a bunch of homeless people housing, but there’s simply no structure around it. They have no money, and there’s no jobs. There’s no services around. They won’t be much better off than homeless in a big city tbh. Might be WORSE off.
There needs to be available housing near the places where there’s actually things to do, jobs to hold, services to use.
Worst part is, I bet a LOT of those ghots towns are suburban, not urban - so it makes it more difficult and expensive to build up a new community there. Everything is spaced out
They need economic activity to be livable. Shoving broke people onto a reservation doesn’t accomplish that.
They create the economic activity.
More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.
On average, each additional person contributes more than they take out.
They create the economic activity.
You have to go back and actually read Kapital.
More people living in an area means there’s more to do and more people to do it.
Visit a refugee camp and explain that to the locals
Stalin thought Siberia needed a lot of people living there. Look how that turned out.
Forgive my ignorance; I don’t know much about Siberia other than it is desolate and not much fun. How did that turn out?
You need jobs near those places first. The locations are dying because of lack of industry.
The people who move there will create jobs and demand.
That’s really not how it works. If you’re homeless you’re not in a position to be a job creator.
More people living in a location means there is more work to be done and more people to do it.
Each additional person, on average, can contribute more than they take out.
More people living in a location means there is more work to be done and more people to do it.
If that were universally applicable the towns wouldn’t be dying to begin with. The houses are empty because there’s a lack of available work.
Homeless people, on average, contribute less to society than housed people, on average. Generally multiple societal structural failures and bad luck are major contributions to a person ending up homeless, but their own genetic- and nuture-driven characteristics play a role, too, and having a higher physical and mental disability burden than the average human is common.
Also, living remotely often means subsistence is a major part of how people get on, and subsistence is an intensely knowledge- and skill-based task highly specific to locale. Hunting in rural Alaska is not immediately transferable to hunting in Greenland, and dumping someone in rural Montana is not going to poof make them an expert gatherer.
A lot of those places suck and they’re not going to turn into vibrant cultural centers with social services quickly.
It won’t happen overnight.
If homeless people would prefer living in tents under highways, that’s their choice.
It’s also the huge amount of housing that’s built that’s not affordable. We have had 5 neighborhoods built within 4 miles of my house over the past 5 years. Nothing is below 500k starting price.
The alternative is that nothing gets built and people compete for the existing stock which drives up prices anyway
Or, now hear me out, we limit profit on things like this.
Either take your 500k house or be happy on the street, there are no other options.
The land is expensive. Every time you buy and build or rebuild you want to make a profit off of your investment and effort so it goes up. Even if the structure is crap and you intend to tear it down and rebuild the seller still expects to be paid for the structure. The only way to make land more affordable is to build upwards and make condos/apts and increase the number of residents per unit area.
that’s because you can’t build homes for cheaper than that.
developers aren’t going to charge 300K for a home that cost them 400K to build
They actually can build homes cheaper than that, there’s a certain price point where they feel they’re making the kind of profit they want which is basically the cost of a older home profit-wise. There’s a recent article that came out that I’m can’t find right now but I read it just a couple months ago that talked about the 400 to $500,000 price range is the profit margin that builders want to make. That means they’re probably making 20 to 30% profit. And while they can build cheaper homes they make less profit so they are not motivated to.
I know it’s not going to happen under this regime but it seems like the solution is to offer tax breaks, subsidies, or whatever we think might give the developers some incentive to build lower income housing.
OK. you go develop those homes then.
since you’re such an expert and seem to think a 10% margin is totally worthwhile?
I run a company, and it often is. Think about it this way. If you sell a 250k home,10% would be 25k. A developer often sells an entire neighborhood, so let’s say conservatively 30 homes. That’s 750,000$. If that’s not enough profit to keep building, well, you now know the problem with our society.
It doesn’t need to be an either-or situation. We can attack the problem from multiple sides, since there’s isn’t a silver bullet. New housing absolutely has to be part of it, but obviously it’s not super helpful if the new stock isn’t affordable or practical for average people.
Counterproductive regulations (restrictive zoning, vetocracy setups) have prevented environmentally sensible and affordable housing from being added in sufficient quantities in most of the US for a long time. We have more people living in smaller households than we used to; it just doesn’t math without adding new stock.
New construction is always more expensive. We should keep building anyway. The new construction of today becomes more affordable over time.
We also need way more investment in mental health and rehab services.
I’ve said the same thing. More housing will just be bought by more speculators. I also think a massive tax on owning more than 5 properties would be helpful as well. Put the revenue from that into affordable housing subsidies.
If you build enough housing it gets back into being economically competitive for the average person to own their home. Speculators can speculate until it doesn’t make sense any more.
We got into the current situation because we slowed way down on building homes.
Just one more suburb bro I swear, it’s all we need just one more and it’ll be fixed
Massively increase property taxes. Exempt owner-occupants from those increases.
You want a second home, you’re going to be paying the full, punitive tax rate on one of them.
Building more housing is the solution, even if those homes largely go to the upper middle class and wealthy. Building new homes primarily for well off people isn’t a historic anomaly, it’s the norm. If you’re already building a house, it doesn’t take that much more to add some luxury features to make it appeal to the high end of the market. This is how it’s always been. Historically, the affordable housing of today is the luxury housing of yesterday.
Preventing new home construction doesn’t prevent neighborhoods from gentrifying. You just end up with yuppies living in newly renovated former tenements.
seriously. poor people don’t buy new homes. rich people do. i grew up poor. every house we lived in was 30+ years old. poor people buy homes that are old.
the issue is there are no more old homes anymore because we don’t build enough new homes. so now rich people buy old homes and push our the poor people who can’t afford any home.
people like me, making 150K and now going into poor communities and buying up the homes for ourselves because we can’t afford anything newer. all the old homes in the richer towns are crazy expensive, and the new ones are 2x the cost of the old ones.
new constructed home in my city is about 2-3million. a 50 year old house is like 1-1.5 million. a newly constructed home in a poor shit down is 500K. a old home in a shit town is like 350K. I can afford a 350K house. i can’t afford one that’s 500K or more.
people move to wear they can afford homes.
An excise tax on multiple house owners would be good in my opinion. And make the percentage go up with the number houses an individual or entity owns.
Are you including landlords? Most people with multiple houses have them to rent out: they’re not empty.
Some percentage of people have a second “empty” house for vacations or as snowbirds, but I imagine the number with more is vanishingly small.
I like the variation we have now, but more so. Let’s increase property taxes substantially, but also increase the residential exemption significantly.
- Low end houses become close to free of taxes
- the average house is taxed the same
- but taxes on high end houses and multiple houses are higher
- so overall property taxes go way up
I didn’t say anything about empty houses. I just said houses. Fuck landlords. And if you can afford an extra house that you don’t live in all the time, you can afford extra taxes on that house.
Oh and yeah, we should absolutely lower the taxes on single occupancy homes. EAT THE FUCKING RICH
Exactly this
except you’re wrong.
housing production has been below population growth for over two decades.
when covid happened rents in my city dropped 50% overnight. why? because nobody wanted to live there anymore.
demand is everything. prices are low where demand is low, and prices are high where demand is high.
renovation is often more expensive than new housing. what needs to happen is for all the SFH crap to be zoned to multi family and for 3-5 story condo buildings to replace them. boom housing crisis solved.
also you need a vacancy rate of 8% or greater or more to bring prices down. the vacancy rate in my city is like 1.3% only way to get a massive vacancy rate is a economic crisis or to build more housing than there is demand.
Fixing the supply problem fixes the hoarding problem. Housing is an attractive investment because it’s scarce. Once you build enough, investors will invest in something else.
No, you’re just wrong. You can’t twist reality to fit some niche ideological fantasy that you find sexy.
The reality is that statistics show that if we took all the vacant houses including all those that are inhabitable, under renovations, all the second, third, whatever homes, and we took all the investment properties as well and made them all immediately available, there would still NOT be enough houses to meet the current demand.
The reality is that we have very nonsensical and outdated zoning as well as restrictive construction process that strangle output. We need to reform our zoning laws and expedite construction to pump the market with many new housing units as possible to not just meet, but also exceed demand. That’s the only way to bring house prices down in a genuine way while also giving people homes that they actually want to live in places that they want to live in.
Property developers well never, not in a million years, build enough new housing to make their industry significantly less profitable.
The only solution is local government building social housing and being as good landlord at low prices. Good luck with that, America!
Where do you have those statistics from? Because all sources I’ve seen draw an image like this. where even the states with the lowest amount of empty houses per homeless person still have more than 5:
https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/images/us-homeless-crisis.jpg
Where did you get your information from? Please cite some reputable sources. I’m pretty sure you’re !confidently_incorrect@lemmy.world.
I have an idea. Why don’t the empty houses just eat the smaller number of homeless people?
Jesus. I remember the figure being like, 10. Which was already absurd.
11 was the number I remembered it being. Been quoting that for years. Jesus Christ, it’s more than doubled. Wtaf is wrong with humanity
Fuck me, I only knew it was greater than the number of homeless people, didn’t realize it was by that much
Stupid people keep supporting their oppressors and getting mad at anyone who calls it out.
I think if you consider is as a percentage of all homes, the number doesnt look as insane. There’s about 133m homes and 17m are vacant according to the article which is roughly 13% of homes are empty.
I’m not sure what the average vacancy rate is in other countries is so not sure how bad 13% is but it doesnt sound as crazy as 27x.
Update: According to this article the US does rank pretty high in vacant properties. Im actually surprised Japan is 1st.
https://realestatemagazine.ca/canada-ranks-11th-for-the-highest-proportion-of-empty-homes/
LAND VALUE TAX
Legally disallow speculation on human needs.
I feel like this is already possible through homestead exemptions. You can even extend this to higher density rental complexes (more incentive for an apartment complex to be fully occupied). Unfortunately this exemption is tiny in some places.
Im not sure how it would be possible to directly outlaw speculation (pretty much anyone who buys a house would be suspect), but LVTs are a way to change the incentive structure of landowning to ensure it can’t occur at all, while also funding the government (or a UBI).
Isn’t this property tax? Which I believe every state has. There should probably be a larger homestead discount though. It’s nothing where I live.
it’s a tax on land.
not a tax on property or improvements on the land.
often the idea being you incentivize development because the developed land is taxed at the same or lower rate than undeveloped land.
a conventional property tax taxes the land and the improvements equally. this often disincentivized development because developing the land means paying more taxes.
But doesn’t development increase the land value as well? In high demand places the land value is the significant factor in the property anyways.
Development of surrounding land increases land value yes, but the idea is that since the landowner didn’t do that development themselves, they shouldn’t be able to profit from it through increased value of their own land. “Land value” is kind of an amorphous though, another way to think about it is that we want to incentivize the most economically optimal use of land in high demand areas, thus we should tax all land proportional to demand (measured via price) to encourage those landowners who have undeveloped or under-utilized land relative to demand to use it.
(note this is counter-intuitively pro-environmental because it applies most to land with high demand, e.g. cities, not forest or farmland, and if cities can be successfully densified to satisfy housing demand, pressure to sprawl can be reduced, increasing those lands left to nature)
Ok so the idea is we want high density land development to be cheaper relative to low density land development to encourage urban living?
It’s still unclear to me why land value tax vs property tax is different in this scenario.
If the land surrounding an underdeveloped parcel rises in value, so too does the property tax. Do you mean that we should decrease the tax on improvements? I think this can be done with taxation based on things like number of tenants or businesses (less tax for more density). Otherwise you just end up with lower density luxury condos everywhere.
And by economically optimal, do you mean optimal for the most people or for the most profit? These often differ.
The other people didn’t mention it, but this comes from the economic school called Georgism. If you want to know more that keyword should help you out.
Thanks, it’s good to learn. Not sure I agree completely.
Yep. The ‘housing crisis’ is a load of bullshit.
It really isn’t, the area I grew up in has a ton of empty houses because people do not want to live there due to a lack of jobs and opportunity in general. The area I live in now has tons of NIMBYs blocking new housing development despite there being tons of jobs and opportunity.
Its make believe, now everyone loose your minds!
Why: Baltimore has 10,000 vacant homes. You’ll die or get seriously injured sleeping im about 90% of those. We sometimes call them bandominiums here.
So is there any statistic that excludes unlivable places?
What, like Baltimore? :D
Id like to see that too.
Paywalled
Got you agent. Vacant homes are most often un maintained and very dangerous…often hundreds of thousands of dollars away from being safely habitable. Google vacant home picture.
Even if 92% of vacant homes are as you describe, the remaining 8% would be enough to house every homeless person.
Try 95 to 99%.
And not really, even if you have a vacant airbnb property in west virginia. That is far away from an unhoused person’s community… Where they get food, support, income and social services.
And the idea to lock up the poor in their “own” community has been tried many times before, in very unsuccessful ways.
I had a homeless outreach team under me in a big east coast city for the last five years. What they need is substance abuse treatment, mental health treatment, and a big social network that supports them… Or they will become unhoused as quickly as we house them.
I was wondering what the actual underlying reason is.
Nah. The actual reason is greed.
If you owned a house you wouldn’t let a homeless person live in it for free. That doesn’t make you greedy.
Except they eventually start paying rent. Statistically if you just give a homeless person a couple months of free rent (and rehab if they need it) they become productive members of society.
The problem is Americans are too fucking greedy to help someone that doesn’t benefit themselves
That’s not really true. A couple months free rent don’t fix schizophrenia, or meth/opiate addiction, or illiteracy, or any of the other serious issues keeping them on the streets. I’ve paid close attention to wet shelters, transitional housing projects. There is some success there, but only when there are TON of focused resource an people are given warm referrals (i.e. their case manager drives them to their appointments). Otherwise they just end up on the streets again.
Well adjusted, sane people who are on the streets generally take advantage of the programs, charities, and churches there to help them get back on their feet. The ones who are chronically homeless, it’s not so simple.
It is an issue of greed, but I don’t think it’s landlords refusing to let homeless folks in for a few free months. It’s that we’ve ripped away every resources meant to keep people from falling down that far to begin with, in the quest for Bigger Billionaire Bonuses.
(and rehab if they need it)
Rehab doesn’t magically solve people’s problems.
Nobody is willing to take on the risk to help their neighbors 🤷🏻♀️
If I had an empty home that I was paying a mortgage on, I’m not sure the bank or insurance company would be too happy with that either, which doesn’t help.
Some systemic change would be required
have you ever worked in a helping profession?
i have. and i know many people who have.
there is a huge burnout rate because human beings are fucking awful. your desire to help people disappears pretty quick when they assault you, threaten you, and steal your shit. go work at a homeless shelter and get stuck with a few needles by peoplyou want to help and i bet your attitude would change really quick.
you make the false assumption that people need/want/appreciate help. many of them do not. many people are rotten to the core.
no amount of sytematic change can make the 10-20% of shitbird human beings into better people. hell, just look on this site how many shitty trolls there are.
I feel like most people in this thread have never interacted with the homeless people they want to offer houses to.
If you own something necessary for survival, that is in short supply, that you don’t need and isn’t being used, and you don’t sell it to someone who does need it because it will be worth more if you continue to hoard it unused, that is greedy.
Sure ok. By that definition every human since the dawn of time is greedy. Well done.
How’s that?
Pretty much every product meets that definition.
People have been trading things needed for survival since the first stick was used to dig a hole.
