If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%

That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market

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

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

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

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

Im a homeowner and I want my property value to plummet.

I have no intention of selling this place in the foreseeable future, so all those unrealized gains just makes my insurance and taxes cost more.

Meh I wouldn't go exponentially. I would go 1=1. 2=5-7 depending on size and availability, 3 = 20-150. 4=1500+

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.

All too true - laws are for people who can't afford lawyers.

Or just ban mega corps from buying housing stock. It’s not difficult to enforce.

When the mega corps own the legislature and the courts it's pretty difficult, when they own the executive branch then they de-facto will not have anything enforced upon them.

Me too! I’m in Austin

pass it down to renter

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

Few random gun shots into the ground... Random grafetti... Invite some black/brown friends over...

Get creative and you can lower your property value

What’s a mega corp? Lots of billionaires don’t have all their money in one big company, they spread it out over many small companies. They have friends and family members and trusts to spread the ownership around.

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…

Um, no.

That could be easy to stop too. Just make sure that it's not legal to be compelled to own a house for a corporation or any human you can't demonstrate a close relationship with (relative, friend, partner), and any benefits you get (financial or other) for acting as a proxy owner can be demanded back and reappropriated by the gov later.

Enforcement doesn't need to be perfect, just enough that people aren't interested in taking the risk at a notable scale.

That's not a bad idea.

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

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 say do it on square footage. One 4000sqft house counts the same as 2 x 2000sqft homes

There is no reason any single family home to be owned by a corporation. Just ban that entirely. Companies can own apartment complexes, but they also need to be required to provide a percentage of “affordable” units that are capped at 1/4th of the states minimum wage.

Is it troubling that this was my first thought?

Maybe companies shouldn't be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.

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.

No way, it needs to go exponential.

No, it shows you know how the world works

Even better idea: Companies owning homes must be non-profits with publicly visible finances.

Companies shouldn't be able to own homes.

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

Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?

Landlords shouldn't be able to own homes.

Oh these 2000 people own 2000 completely unrelated companies! They all make business with each other because the market is so healthy! All the houses are offered at the same prices because the market works so perfectly by forcing companies to compete with each other so the real value is reached!

Why not?

Imagine going to another city to attend university. Can't just rent for a few years, gotta have initial capital to BUY an apartment first.

That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:

Being a "landlord", that is, very specifically, an "owner of houses you don't live in, but rent to people for profit", is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.

You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it's not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:

"Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I'm calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out"

It's a way of making money, where the owner doesn't do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.

That works well as a thought terminating slogan online. Less so as a practice in the real life.

Landlords should be prevented from breathing.

Imagine houses that don't cost nine and a half fortunes, because they are not considered one of the most profitable ways to invest, for the richest people in the world.

Housing doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive, whether temporary or permanent residences.

It's not about temporary living in a place not existing, it's about forbidding the ways that rich people go about making housing scarce, and corner markets.

I'd hope it was a thought commencing slogan, maybe giving people curiosity as to think:

"How could another sapient person believe something so different from my own beliefs? That person is even making it a joke, therefore they must have had it bouncing around in their brain a bunch, so they must believe it and think about it a lot. Huh, maybe there is something more to know, and think about."

I even made a comment with a small answer, to the other person, who asked like a human.

Clearly didn't work on you though.

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.

When people drop these one-liners that perfectly align with the popular view of the platform, my first assumption is that they in fact have not thought about it and instead are just saying the popular thing for applause.

Perhaps that's a cynical view but in my experience it seems true more often than not. You too walked back on your original statement after being questioned on it. I can't learn from people who don't say what they mean or mean what they say.

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.

Your plan would never work in the U.S. No one would know what a square meter is.

Oh sorry I forgot, anything but metric.

So tax free at 1 Oval office, 100% at 2 Oval offices, 110% at 3 Oval offices, and so on...

Hm, I see your point about clarity.

My original comment "landlords shouldn't be allowed to own houses" was a joke, in the sense that it is an impossible paradox, with the implied statement being "landlords shouldn't exist".

That is indeed the prevailing view on this platform, because it's a leftist/marxist/anarchist platform, mostly.

I might not be the right person to give you a pointer directly into the theory of those, but I have a number of YouTubers I really like, that talk about these issues, and make incredibly good explanations.

Two I'm really into, lately, are NonCompete, and Unlearning Economics, that have some great video essays, the first one about communist perspectives, the second going in depth against things that are considered "common sense" in capitalist economics, and their real results when actually looked at.

I'd say you can click on their channels and click whatever interests you most (NonCompete has a video on thought terminating clichés lol), but I can also recommend a couple specific videos:

On NonCompete, there's a video that contains a pretty good explanation of what is called the class war, that is, what tools the rich use, to keep the poor working. Housing costing so much, is one of those tools.

On Unlearning Economics, there is a personal favorite of mine, Free stuff is good actually. It's more about the adjacent philosophies, but you can easily extrapolate from it, to housing, if you like spending an hour listening to a guy talking about economics lol.

Internet comments are so bad at conveying rich ideas, and so easy to not notice the humanity behind people, that it's refreshing to have people like you answer, with the honest intent behind what they wrote. I hope what I sent interests you!

Companies should pay 10x more.

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

This Vacant Property tax

How would that apply on derelict properties?

I think this is the right idea but there should be focus on certain things. Like say car washes. At this point we know it's a stake to flip the land as prices go up. I live in a place where it's not uncommon to see a car wash within walking distance from another. May as well be the car wash capital of the world.