Luckily for the billionaires they don't own any homes, their homes are part of a complex companies, or some bullshit.

A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.

They'd just make 2,000 shell companies, each with one house.

Perfectly legal.

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 firmly believe every home after your second (let retired people have their cabins) should be taxed exponentially.

The third home should be taxed so heavily that it's prohibitive, and the fourth should be taxed so highly that it's impossible to profit off of.

If only the people that would make these laws were not the ones profiting from it.

Everyone dances around the fact that the government should be building low income housing themselves. We should not be begging the for profit house building industry to fix the problem they've made.

How Britain almost solved the housing crisis

Some places do this. I have heard a few Welsh areas have gone for much higher council tax (approximate equivalent to a shitty property tax) on second homes. They are allowed to charge up to 4x the normal rate.

If you are renting it out as a holiday rental you can be exempt from the normal council tax but they are now requiring you to actually rent it out. It must be available for at least 252 days of the year and actually used for at least 182 days so you can't just set rent to unaffordable amounts.

Hearing the crying about it has been great.

It should be illegal to have dozen of houses to begin with and if you don't like this you can go fuck yourself because we live in a society

This is why wealth tax is so elegant. It doesn’t matter if you own a bunch of houses personally, or you own shares of a company that own a bunch of houses, or you use the shares as collateral to borrow a bunch of money; your total wealth is the same. There is no way get around it :3

Hear me out: we also count all the subsidiaries company as the same entity of the owner company, now we have less exploits too

Home owners would complain about property values because they care about unrealized gains more than a working economy.

I'd go further (current flat rate)^(number of houses owned -1)

I agree in principal, but it's impossible to implement it in this manner.

What you can do is establish an "owner-occupant" exemption to future tax hikes, then hike taxes through the fucking roof for everyone else.

Landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants to buyers. They'll be issuing "land contracts" (which strongly favor the tenant/buyer) rather than rental agreements.

You can create a statute to target 85% owner occupancy. Any year the owner occupancy rate is lower than 80%, the property tax rate will be automatically hiked 2% (for non-owner occupied properties only). If the owner-occupancy rate exceeds 90%, the property tax rate is lowered by 1%.

No, it needs to multiply every time a new property is added

Two policies would make a huge impact on this.

An additional tax on nonresident ownership and a punitive tax on vacancies based on occupancy rates.

Those two would be enough to discourage hoarding, scalping and ghost neighborhoods .

How about the good ol' "nobody gets seconds until everyone's had firsts" rule

First one should be free. Let the property investors pay the property taxes. Apparently they can afford them.

But like on ALL their properties not just the excess ones

we should break out the guillotine while we're at it and solve the rich cunt problem

No way, it needs to go exponential.

Ah but my company doesn’t own a home, my company manages other companies homes, each company own 5 homes each.

A more sensible metric would be the surface area of real estate IMO. A person with a 50 square meters home should not pay the same tax rate as a person with a 5000 square meters mansion.

Everyone get 100 square meters tax free (just an example here, depends on country), 1 x tax rate for the next 100 square meters, 10% increase every additional 100 square meters.

I'd go further and cap the number of home one should be able to own, to like 2.

Why 1% each? If housing is a human right, and it is, then we need strict limits around one per person. Companies should not be allowed to have long-term ownership at all.

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.

I think there should be an absolute cap on liquid wealth and assets. Stocks, bonds, houses, vehicles, properties, all part of the asset pool.

IMO, we should rework the economic system outright - to ensure no one can be wealthy, and to take away incentives to be rich beyond a point. For example, arresting people who have too much wealth, and confiscating their wealth heavily, leaving them with up to half of the wealth caps.

We should aim for a society where everybody is within the same ballpark of agency. Not too poor, nor rich. Just able to live a good life, without trampling on humanity.

We also need to outright oppress and exploit companies the way current government does with minority groups and poor people.

Otherwise they just use legal technicalities to get away with it.

"Nooooo we don't own 2000 houses. You see, we are an investing firm, and we have 99.9% share in 2000 companies, and all of those companies own a house. It's perfectly fine!"

They would use proxy owners to stay at 1%. Maybe every employee of the corporation could be “an owner” for taxation purposes.

Just put in wealth caps

Nobody should be able to have of control over 10 million, for example

Cool. Never going to happen because it will fuck with basically the friends of every country's leader.

What if, instead of that, property tax was based on the assessed value of the property when assessed for its current use? But also by "current" we mean like 5-10 years ago and when we assess we don't look at recent neighborhood comps, we look at the previously assessed value.

I've often thought that the taxes should relate to whether or not the home is occupied.

If you live in it as your primary dwelling, with more than 50% of your time there, then you should pay the normal amount.

If you have someone leasing the house to live in it, then you should pay the same property taxes as if you were living in it yourself. Maybe a bit higher.

If you're using it as a full time Airbnb, the taxes should be much, much higher.

Unoccupied rental properties or vacation homes should be taxed at the much higher rate to encourage you to either lower the rent or sell it to someone who can live in it.

Man, property taxes are such a weird fucking thing.

Back in the day, they used to tax based on frontage, which was essentially how much width the front of your house took up. So naturally, people responded by building ridiculously thin, ridiculously long houses. You can still find them in older cities like Charleston and in some of the older parts of Atlanta.

Nowadays, I can't even figure out what the actual metric or system is supposed to be.

For example, the house I own is apparently worth around $500,000 now. We bought it for $220,000 in 2016. I can assure you that my house did not magically become twice as much house simply because Zillow or the county decided it was worth $500K. And yet, I'm being taxed according to that inflated valuation.

Some states don't even charge traditional property taxes. They have completely different mechanisms. Florida, for example, is doing some kind of financial black magic that I still haven't entirely figured out.

And honestly, why should my property taxes be based on the superficial market value of my house in the first place? If I bought the damn thing for $220K, why can't that be the basis for taxation? That's basically how cars work. You buy the car, pay your ad valorem tax when you register it, and then you don't get an annual bill based on how much some guy thinks your car is worth now.

Why do we have to pay property taxes every single year on an asset we already bought? At some point, I would like to stop paying rent to the government for the privilege of owning the property I supposedly own.

And here's another fun one: I drive an electric car. My annual registration isn't $20 like it is for a regular gas-powered car. It's around $250 because the state isn't collecting gasoline taxes from me.

So essentially, the government looked at my electric car and said, "Congratulations on driving an environmentally friendly vehicle. That'll be $230 extra."

I'm beginning to think the entire tax system was designed by a committee of people who were locked in a room with a calculator and told to make everything as unnecessarily complicated as humanly possible.

Humanity is not long for this world.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

pass it down to renter

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

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.

Cool. Can I get a tax rebate for being too poor to own a home?

I always said this.

Any home that is not a primary residence should be taxed four or five times normal rates

In my country, the primary residence is taxed way less.

That's not a bad idea.

Make it progressive. First $x is untaxed, $x+y is taxed at some percent, the next $x+z is taxed higher, and so on.

Also build more housing in general.

IMO it should be very low for 1 acre, but the amount of tax you pay per acre increases with every acre you own. Farmers would get an exemption for agricultural land, but only if they bring a crop to the market so it's designated as used farmland. This would prevent rich people with 1,000 acres from calling their private property a farm and paying next to nothing. Nope. Either grow a crop on it or pay uncle sam.

Fully agreed

There is one huge flaw with the idea, whose aims I fully support: banks regularly own hundreds and thousands of homes through foreclosures. They need to be able to take back a home, because that is what makes it possible to have cheap mortgages. Banks are in fact some of the largest home owners in the country.

What might work better is a sales tax. Everybody pays some godawfully huge amount of money, like 10%, when they purchase a home. You add a 0% sales tax for a primary residence (which of course needs a resident, which is a physical person), maybe a 5% tax for a secondary.

The main goal is twofold: make homes artificially expensive when purchase is not tied to occupancy and discourage short-term speculation. This saves the ability of banks to repossess a home (there is no sale here), and it allows for expansion of rental housing, since the tax is one-time and not recurring, meaning its impact is minimized with prolonged ownership.

Companies should pay 10x more.

I own two and I pay a percentage based off the property value.

I agree with the sentiment but should scale more exponentially.

I feel like two houses is ok’ish but when you start buying three or more is when you cross into commercial purposes.

I should be cost prohibitive to own 4 single family houses.

What constitutes a home? Does a property with multiple buildings mean multiple homes?

The rich will amalgamate all the lots together to avoid paying taxes.

That's not to say do nothing but that the issue is much larger.

Does each apartment in a high rise count separately

I agree with the spirit of this, but the one issue is that someone with a 40 room mansion pays 1%. I say make it simple and make second homes cost double. Third quadruple, etc.

Carve out some exceptions for narrow cases, like a congressperson who needs to maintain a separate home in DC.

Property tax should be like 1,800$ a year across the board, there should be a set rate by the federal banking system and it should go up and down based on income rates set by inflation.