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

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

Perfectly legal.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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…

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

Exponential*

If it were 2% on the first, it'd be 4% on the second, 8% on the third...

I think Ken Paxton, man of the people, family matters, wears $40K watches, has 15 homes on a 150K salary.

So 32,768% sounds fair for inhuman scum like him. That's 14 more homes on the market hopefully.

I don't even know what it would be for Blackrock, the largest homeowner in the market. They own more homes than individuals do in the country.

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

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.

But like on ALL their properties not just the excess ones

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.

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 .

I always said this.

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

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%.

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

Just put in wealth caps

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

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

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

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