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

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

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 .

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

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.

No way, it needs to go exponential.

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

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.

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.