You're viewing a single thread.
Of course there's the best option which is an non-occupancy tax that goes up exponentially for each additional property you're sitting on for speculation.
That right there would be a hard counter to wallstreet hoovering in the housing market.
It's like you're not even considering the feelings of the millionaires and billionaires with 72 houses each and I for one just won't stand for it.
I can't wait for the "rational" peoples argument against taxing the rich. Will it be something like a slippery slope fallacy? Maybe it will be "it's unfair to thoses that only just recently got rich." I'm thinking though they will go with, "it's not going to make a meaningful difference" then try and sell us trickle down in some new way.
The only rational argument against taxing the rich is that if you do it piecemeal, they'll just move to a lower tax area.
They're working 1 000 000 000 000 times harder.
tweets racist shit all day
That on top of a tax that is highly progressive after x number of properties, regardless of occupancies.
I was thinking more non-occupancy just meaning "that you don't live in yourself", so that would mean filling your rentals with tenants doesn't save you from the tax.
Ah, then we are on the same page. I thought you were referring to:
According to the Census Bureau, there were approximately 15.1 million vacant homes nationwide in 2022. These vacant homes, which include rentals, represent 10.5% of the country’s total housing inventory. -source
which is just another fucking gut punch.
If a landlord who actually takes their job as servant to their tenants seriously gets some efficiency of scale - say enough units to justify a full time maintenance person who is available on call to support tenant issues - I don't want to punish them for that. Surely we can develop metrics to identify predatory landlords that are more accurate than number of properties.
Nah, number of properties is a pretty fucking good metric.
Being a "bad" landlord isn't the issue, the issue is taking properties off the housing market for rent collection, and driving up prices for everyone else in the process.
There are more empty units in this country than unhoused people to fill them, this housing crisis is one built entirely out of artificial scarcity created by letting speculators buy up supply basically for the purpose of scalping them to poor people who can't say no to the product.
It's the same kind of "market efficiency" that has ballooned medical costs, who can afford to compare costs on a kidney transplant? Nobody. Who can afford to shop around and wait on houses? Unless you're very lucky in today's economy, also nobody.
Housing does not abide the same market rules as designer T-shirts. Necessity goods will inherently have a hostage effect on the customers where you could in theory charge any price and just make the disinfortuned eat shit for it.
When "landlords" own 10k+ properties, it's 100% a numbers game.