there isn't a housing (significant) shortage though, it's people wanting to live in overcrowded hellholes instead of the middle of nowhere.

Sure dude. Everyone is lying about not having enough places to live.

THANK GOD YOU WERE HERE TO INCORRECTLY MANSPLAIN SHIT TO US.

Interesting statement, any non-crazy pointers where I can read about that?

Where I live (relatively upscale Philly suburb) the absolute magnitudes of the assessments are irrelevant -- all that matters is what your assessment is relative to everybody else. For example, my house is assessed at $93K, but I bought it three years ago for $142K and its current sale estimate is about $215K. Everybody's assessment is way below market value, but what happens is the school board decides what their budget is going to be every year and then they set the millage rate to whatever it needs to be in order to generate that much property tax revenue (the school tax is about 85% of our total property taxes). So it doesn't really matter how up-to-date the assessments are since it won't affect your tax bill.

if said friend had debt (or is likely to get in debt) it makes mire sense to rent the house to them for a penny a year so it can't be taken

almost every piece of land is owned already, if not by a person, then the government, a buisness, or a trust.

I'm buying to live there and house my family and I get no exemption because the moment I declare the renovation it triggers a revaluation by the tax and income state department. And I should not get it. It is a property and it has intrinsic value. Deductions should apply if by some reason a person can't pay the taxes - unemployment, sickness, low income - but never an exemption. Even less if we're talking in flipping houses, where renovations can push up the value to ludicrous levels. Never. Ever. It's unfair.

This sort of radical thinking about economics needs to become the norm. The old ways just aren't good, and would lead us back to here even if we somehow reset capitalism.

Bad or good, we need to try out a lot of seemingly weird ideas to get to a truly better place.

You usually just own a unit

If there's that sort of cost disparity between the homes they might as well build new instead of purchase. The rules are easy to craft if you want to actually increase housing stock and lower cost of living.

Also, if they have HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS they can afford single digit extra millions for side projects.

Dancing around rich people's feelings is absolutely keeping this problem alive and destroying people.

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!"

Where are you getting the statistic of 2/3 of housing being kept empty for speculation? A quick look outside tells me that is utter bullshit.

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

There is and there always will be as long as capitalist have the political control.

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

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'm not watching YouTube shyte.

Scummy non-profit with publicly available finances tend to get under media/political fire pretty quick when they are providing basic services. If you have an actually functioning democracy (aka not the US) or large enough masses on the street (aka also not the US, but mostly not because people don't care; they are struggling too much to make ends meet, but have just enough to keep them content - but i see this balance slowly slipping) these things can be fixed.

Can you guess why some want to live near there work and their kids' school rather than in the middle of nowhere?

Wealth taxes are necessary, but with offshoring and hiding accounts, I'd say they're bureaucratically complicated rather than elegant.

(I think that was the joke)

Ok, not sure if you really wanted a response here. Always feel awkward responding to a one-sentence comment with an essay, but to answer your question, this is required. Or TL:DR: companies exist for limited liability, and limited liability is grossly inappropriate for rental housing.

We've really lost the plot with what corporations and limited liability were invented for. The original idea behind incorporation was that it allowed people to invest in something with many other people, and to limit individual investor losses on risky megaprojects.

The early corporations were for things like major canal projects or overseas trading ventures. Let's say a canal would be a good idea somewhere, but the cost will be enormous. The only way to fund it is to have thousands of people pool their investments for it. Those thousands of people aren't going to be involved in running the project. Maybe they're just investing the equivalent of a hundred or a few thousand dollars today. But without limited liability, if the canal project goes under, every investor is fully responsible for the debts of that venture. You may invest only a thousand, but if the canal goes under before it finishes, without limited liability, you could be on the hook for many times your original investment. Limited liability allowed for the democratization of investment. Without it, only the rich are able to truly invest in things.

Historically, this was a huge barrier to investment and economic development. Rome for example didn't have anything like our modern finance system; most things were produced in large family businesses. You couldn't just go buy stock in a venture to invest in it. If you weren't willing to fund the entire thing, run the entire thing, and be responsible for the entire thing, you couldn't invest in it.

This is what corporations were meant to solve - the problem of funding large risky projects beyond the ability of single investors to reasonably afford. Historically, you couldn't just go and register a corporation on a whim. Often they required acts of legislative bodies to create them. They were seen as morally dubious in many ways - after all, shouldn't everyone be responsible for the consequences of their own actions? Limited liability gets away from this. The bargain was made that though limited liability sacrifices some amount of fairness and justice, the prosperity the projects it allows will produce will be worth it on net.

But that isn't how incorporation is used today. Today, landlords will open up dozens of LLCs. They'll put a single property into each LLC. If a tenant is seriously injured due to the landlord's neglect, the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent. The landlord could own a hundred properties - the most you can ever sue them for is the one you're renting. In a serious injury, you could be on the hook for millions in lifelong medical expenses, and your landlord may be sitting on a fortune of a hundred million of dollars, but you can only ever sue them for the few hundred thousand the property you rent is worth. The company you're renting from doesn't own any more assets than that.

Rent seeking is not the type of risky moonshot venture that incorporation was invented for. Incorporation for landlords is not about encouraging moonshot investments, it's just a state subsidy for landlords. It's not like we wouldn't have rental units without incorporation. Most of the citizens of Rome rented. The concept of renting is likely as old as the concept of a city. The rental market worked just fine without limited liability.

This type of liability risk should not be handled as a subsidy by the state. Landlords can already purchase liability insurance. And that's how they should have to handle all the risks of being sued by their tenants. Someone with a dozen rental units can get a $5 million liability policy if they don't want to put their entire net worth on the line in the event one of their tenants being seriously hurt.

And crucially, such a system would much better protect tenants. We currently just give the subsidy of limited liability to landlords as a gift. We ask for nothing in return. Insurance companies aren't so generous. If you want a liability policy for your rental units, the insurance company is going to want to have a say in how those units are operated and maintained. The insurance company doesn't want to insure a dilapidated death trap of a rental house.

I don't think landlords should be able to put rental houses into LLCs, because I think we've completely lost the plot on what corporations were meant to achieve. Hell, I would set the minimum number of owners for a corporation to be a hundred people (with limits on how much a single individual can own.) Incorporation was meant as a tool for crowd-sourcing daring and groundbreaking infrastructure, research, and other ventures. It was never intended to be a gift to rich people operating ordinary businesses that they have complete individual control and ownership over.

I don't think the UK sales tax has an exception for primary residences, is that correct? That is the key ingredient that is missing: regular people should be able to buy and sell their homes to each other without a tax penalty, it's only when corporations buy and sell that it should apply (well, individuals, too, if they buy more than one or two).

Or you know, actual upkeep of the property instead of doing absolutely nothing until it is literally falling apart like most landlords.

Ok

15 million or about 10% in 2024, I have no idea where they are getting that information from.

https://usafacts.org/articles/how-many-vacant-homes-are-there-in-the-us/

If I wanted to give benefit of the doubt, maybe they mean that 2/3 of vacancies are caused by being held empty for speculation. Even that doesn't make snes to me, though. It's not like you are unable to sell properties that have tenants.

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

Perfectly legal.

I love youtube and use it every day.

Even I refuse to watch a YT video as a source. It takes 50x longer than reading, that's unacceptable.

The real wealth are the NFTs we made along the way.

Every hurdle makes it more expensive to run and less profitable

They often do that already.

It reduces the liability when sued. If you do something dumb and owe someone $100,000,000. You just abandon that one property and make that company bankrupt, you don't lose all your other properties too.

Well sorry dude, you all couldn't bear the land transfer tax.

Why he didn't give you a zero dollar 99 year lease and put it in his will for you to get, I have no idea.

There are other methods for individual to individual transfers and use of property, I'm not going to make a tax avoidance exception because you aren't creative enough.

their fault for being employed and having kids

easy way to solve all problems (while not resolving any)

because of that reading government anti-corruption investigations can cause vertigo - just getting through the tense web of shells and shells of shells and mothershells and whatnot - there was one case in which the company had like 50 entities removed from the culprit

Looks like Ken's love language is bribery with real estate .

The black mould is structural

But like on ALL their properties not just the excess ones

Companies shouldn't be allowed to own housing

In the US property taxes are paid to the county. Some if not most charge more in taxes if it's rental income.

They're elegant in terms of limiting wealth hoarding. It's just like estate tax that's already implemented. Anyway, good to have more government jobs too.

As a company cannot "reside", a company cannot own any residential property or land.

So he's altruistic enough to give it to you for free, but once it's worth something he'd fuck you over for it?

So is he intending to give it to you or not?

Now it just sounds like you couldn't figure out altruism between the both of you and you are blaming the government for taxes.

This shouldn't be news, but you all need taxes.

Or other companies.

To hold the landlord personally responsible for the homes they own.