Same in the US. It’s called a homestead exemption

still sounds like you don't understand altruism and apparently also contractual land use and estates.

Just put in wealth caps

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

"the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent" - why?

People have a right to invest.

Yes but housing is much more expensive than healthcare. The government can't afford to provide it for free.

This would be great, but it's not feasible as described. Property taxes are assessed against the property, not the owner. The county can determine whether someone has paid the tax on a particular property, but they are greatly restricted on details about the owner of that property. There is no reliable mechanism to determine how many properties a single person owns. A county auditor would be able to determine how many properties you own in that county, but the auditor of Alameda County in California has no conclusive way of knowing if you also own property in Anne Arundel County in Maryland.

The county auditor does have access to your income tax records, drivers license records, etc. They can easily and reliably determine your claimed county of residence when you pay your tax bill.

If you were to claim residence in Anne Arundel, the Alameda auditor could determine that you do not qualify for an owner-occupant credit available only to residents of Alameda County.

We already have "homestead exemption" and "second home" property taxes in most of the country. These give some small credits or exemptions for various purposes for the property where a homeowner resides. What we need to do is expand the scope of these owner-occupant exemptions. They need to automatically match future property tax hikes, so owner occupants are explicitly protected against them.

And then we increase the property tax annually until the owner occupancy rate is above 85%. We run it through the fucking moon, actual homeowners don't see any increase. Corporate landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to issue land contracts and purchase agreements rather than leases.

We're saying that maybe, just maybe, basic human necessities shouldn't be the object of speculation.

Because the landlord, i.e. the LLC, only owns that property, and nothing else

Agreed but we shouldn't prevent people from buying or selling houses.

Is that how LLCs work?

Nobody's saying that.

We should however prevent the hoarding of residential buildings

I wonder what happens in that case? 🤔 Oh, totally forgot. Venezuela, Cuba, USSR, North Korea. Not sure I want to end up with something like that. How many more times people need to repeat these horrible communist experiments to learn that this is not the good way to live?! Speaking from experience growing up in USSR in the 80s. Yes, capitalism sucks, but other options are often worse.

Edit: keep downvoting, it’s much easier than writing a factual argument.

Limited liability is a legal status in which a person's financial liability is limited to a fixed sum, most commonly the value of a person's investment in a corporation, company, or joint venture. If a company that provides limited liability to its investors is sued, then the claimants are generally entitled to collect only against the assets of the company, not the assets of its shareholders or other investors.

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

Nope, university is free.

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

It's significantly less than what it is in most places.

Dorms I can live with. The minimum wage thing might encourage an increase in it, but more likely it just encourages them to get money from their donors. More so than they already do. Only the rich would be able to do the job. It would be untenable for the AOCs and Mamdanis of the world to serve in public office.

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

I always thought "if corporations are people, then why can they own other corporations"

That + legalize squatting, we'll fill up these empty units real fucking quick.

And even that is small time compared to the corporate landlords who own hundreds/thousands of homes. AHhhhhhhhhhhh

Like no wonder he had time to campaign for office, he doesn't work 😂

Agreed. And multiplied again for property owned by a corporation. Especially residential.

This was a great read, thank you.

There's a reason "rent seeking" is a derogatory term.

No, what the government actually can't afford is to have homeless people overutilizing public services (ambulances, police, hospitals, and jails) because they don't have stable housing. It's way, wayyy cheaper to provide people free housing than let them be homeless, Finland has proved this with basic arithmetic, our culture is just really into performative cruelty for some reason.

Housing can be affordable or an investment, not both.

People can invest elsewhere, in markets not necessary for survival.

Why the exception for apartment complexes? Just buy and sell the units as condos.

And these higher taxes are then... passed on to the tenant 🙃

I'd add a couple short-term exceptions: Construction companies may own housing during construction and for the amount of time it takes for newly built homes to sell to resident owners. Banks, credit unions and such should be able to foreclose on defaulted mortgages and take possession of the property for a certain amount of time, if it's not sold within that time it goes to government auction.

They should not be allowed to retain ownership over mass amounts of occupied dwellings.

Denser housing like apartment blocs may need to work like condos, residents either outright own their portion of the building or become stakeholders in the building's corporation, how to do that without inventing the turbo HOA will require further research and development.

Bigger pockets = bigger taxes, proof. Every vent you have should go towards multiplying your liability.

And no loophole for multiple bank accounts, or offloading ownership into LLCs or some BS like that (no idea what the correct terms are for that, but I'm not an accountant). If you have any legal right to be able to touch money, that money counts.

Maybe separate personal and business accounts, since if you're running a business correctly and aren't getting obscene profits vs your workers, then having a big business shouldn't necessarily increase your personal liability, but if you are hogging with profits, then it bleeds over. But tax the business more and more according to the money (in all accessible accounts (including savings) it has access to, same with people.

Also, we need to remove the possibility for money to make money. Maybe that would just be a side effect of making excess money too expensive to have, but if not it needs to be addressed too.

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.

Excuse me sir, I'm sure that multiple massive corporations would disagree with you on housing being a right!

What about LLCs to represent polycules that can't get married because for some reason Christianity norms are law?

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.

There's a good chance that they chose the simplest method where "simple" means the easiest to understand change set, not the easiest to understand overall system. People usually have an easier time understanding small changes.

You mean the taxpayers can't afford it, and you're wrong. Trillionaires exist, we could afford anything we want to if we had people in charge willing to tax them fairly.

Regardless, the potential cost difference doesn't negate my previous point, no one has ever "looked for a landlord".

Because I do think there is value in mid term, affordable, rentals. And coordinating that with a bunch of individually owned units and ensuring that some of them remain affordable seems like a near impossibility.

Might also be nostalgia for earlier days when not every apartment advertised “luxury units” and renting was way cheaper than buying. It’s what kids just out of high school did, or recent divorcees while they got back in their feet financially. Some oriole even preferred it so they didn’t have the responsibility of owning. Companies used to be decent stewards of multi family housing, I’m probably over optimistic that they could be again.

Does each apartment in a high rise count separately

Fully agreed

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.

I always said this.

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

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

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

No. Polycules should also be allowed to own homes. If we are changing the rules then let's fix this as well

Yes.

Pay up or sell it as condos.

Zero homes = zero percent.

How many houses are permitted before it's considered hoarding?

Sounds ripe for fraud