Why not crop off the reddit advertisement
Wouldn’t that just drive rents up? Landlords would instantly pass the cost onto renters.
Not every tenant in every market can raise rents unless landlords collude which is supposed to be illegal.
You wouldn’t really need collusion to figure out what your new tax liability was and raise rent by that much. Just like how the cost of an EV goes up by the exact amount of any new tax rebates you’d qualify for by buying one.
You need collusion to make sure all the landlords raise rents by the tax increase. Not every landlord is undercapitalized and lose money over a tax increase so they could not raise rents and steal rents from other landlords.
You still don’t need collusion…it’s got nothing to do with undercapitalization. The IRS would publish a new rule, the underwriter would increase the escrow payment to cover the new tax liability (meaning the amount the property owner pays the bank monthly would increase) and the owner would increase the rent by that same amount. You would only need collusion if you wanted to raise the rates higher than the tax increase. If you wanted to, for example, increase rents by 2x the tax increase, then collusion could be helpful…but its still super risky. It only takes 1 landlord to not be OK with it to expose the whole thing.
You do need collusion to keep the more profitable landlords from just taking the increased taxes out of their profit. Regardless landlords are proven to be colluding via RealPage so your point is moot.
Tax empty properties owned by corporations.
Ban foreign investors from buying up properties.
Increase taxes on non-primary, non-secondary properties dramatically (so if you own a home and a vacation house, you’re fine, but you’ll pay way more in taxes if you own more than that).
Release federal funds earmarked for subsidizing the mass construction of low and middle income properties that must be sold at below market rate in order to qualify for the subsidy.
Re-evaluate zoning laws nationwide to make it easier for residential housing to be built into areas that it currently makes sense but is forbidden due to draconian zoning laws propped up by NIMBYs.
Sorry if any of the above hurt your bottom line in the end, but it’s more important to ensure that everyone has a place to live than it is to protect the “ownership as a means of passively generating wealth” model we are currently living under. The line cannot go up forever.
Or just ban Landlording of housing and problem solved. The homelessness crisis immediately ends and houses become so cheap that everyone can afford them.
So you wish to and can afford to buy a home right now? Are there even enough homes? If not, where will you live? How will such housing be provided for you and what will you offer in exchange?
Personally I’d like to see housing provided as a basic human right along with health care, income and a few other things but I’m guessing that’s not happening any time soon. Interested to hear what you think of how this will work.
“The United States boasts approximately 15.1 million vacant homes, a staggering number that accounts for 10.5% of the country’s total housing inventory.”
There are enough homes for everyone
Ok, that’s great. So are we confiscating them? Or are we forcing the owners to rent them out, and if so who’s paying? I’m serious - how would you approach this?
Landlords get 2 years to sell and after that if they still haven’t sold they go to auction and get whatever money comes from that.
And to counter your 2nd argument I don’t give a fuck how bad they get screwed. They should have thought about that before they decided to become leeches on society and profit from basic human rights.
Landlords get 2 years to sell and after that if they still haven’t sold they go to auction and get whatever money comes from that.
Are these just empty houses or all rental properties? Who are they selling the homes to? How will those people pay for them? Could those buyers, say, then rent out a room to help with the mortgage payments? And you say you don’t care, but should people who put their money into a home and left it empty, say because of a divorce or some medical problem be penalized too? What about people who rent out a home that they inherited and don’t want to sell because it has sentimental value? I assume in your mind this is a blanket forcing of people to sell or even forfeit an asset they paid for?
They should have thought about that before they decided to become leeches on society and profit from basic human rights.
I’m curious if your “leeches” characterization applies across the board. Logically if you think people who rent out physical spaces this should apply to anyone who rents out something of value… say their labor or a taxi driver or has a business where you pay to borrow something. Wouldn’t those be “leeches” too?
I agree that housing is a basic human right, but unfortunately most of the rest of the world doesn’t. And that means we don’t have mechanisms for dealing with this and I’m troubled with some aspects of your ideas - it would be unfair to many. I know quite a few people who could only afford to buy a house by renting out a room or by creating an in-law apartment, backyard apartment and so on. They are landlords but I’m struggling to think of them as leeches. Would you call them all leeches?
I’ll get the trains ready to forcibly move the unhoused to where to where an empty house is…you wanna start rounding them up, or are you still busy finding them a job they’re able to do so a bank will let them buy one of those houses?
Edit: the situation isn’t as simple as you’d like it to be. If it were, it’d been solved already.
Found the landlord
There is a need for renting, so there has to be some balance to avoid all that capital being driven toward forcing renting to be the only option while still allowing some housing stock be available for renting (eg people who know they won’t be there more than two years)
That’s what apartments are there for
Oh man, I sure would have loved to live nowhere near my job and forgone most of my hobbies for nearly 3 years. There’s definitely no reason why anyone would ever need to rent a SFH ever.
Don’t tax anything remotely to do with building and owning property. Tax the fuck out of owning empty property
Doesn’t address some issue of how every time a house goes up for sale in my neighborhood, it’s immediately sold to some company, usually hundreds of miles away. Property isn’t empty, but there’s no chance of an average person to manage to own a house, and rental rates are largely at the discretion of a handful of companies.