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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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There's always talk about tax breaks for home owners...
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
That's what would fix it. Tax them out of the housing market slowly and.prices will go down as they get out of the business.
Indeed. Nothing about this addresses rental markets and general extreme cost of living. Rather, it finds new ways to prop up severely overvalued housing markets.
Housing costs are so high because it’s become an investment over a necessary place for a human to live. A correction is severely needed and long overdue, but the government works hard to keep values artificially high from zoning laws at the bottom to preventing corrections at the top.
That and most people just do the standard deductions.
So tax breaks mostly help the wealthy in mansions.
It's like how conservatives want to move income tax to sales tax. The wealthiest make a lot more than they spend. And when they spend it's usually thru some shady shit where they don't pay sales tax. Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a "company car" from a company they own.
It’s way of dressing up expenses to fit our criminally low corporate tax structure.
It’s a special kind of fucked up that the government is paid for by the poor to serve the interests of the wealthy.
Is not that the standard tho?
My parents did this kind of stuff. :/
Gas, restaurants, cars, insurance, etc. Probably so much stuff I don't even know about. The company pays for it and they pocket the wages they pay themselves. All this while the people that work for them work part time with no benefits, and predictably have unstable financial situations.
But my parents view themselves as financially responsible and their workers as financially irresponsible. They worked hard to build their company but the rewards far exceed their work relative to their workers.
idk what I'm trying to say. I'm ashamed of the way my parents became successful but at the end of the day they played the game how it was meant to be played. Our society is fucked up on every level.
At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.
Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.
Wouldn’t a tax hike only get passed through to the renter?
Not really, because the rental market does not behave like commodities do. Generally, you have to live within a reasonable distance of employment. For this and other reasons, renters are much more vulnerable and tend to get exploited far beyond the cost of the service.
Basically, if tenants had any more money to exploit, they would already take it. Rents are maximally high wherever possible to extract maximum money from people who need a place to live.
Consider the common joke that I pay this much in rent every month but the bank says I can’t afford a house where the mortgage would be substantially less.
Agreed, and this would be solved by sufficiently high land value tax - if wasn't profitable to be a landlord nobody would do it and the price of land would decline sharply. Henry George saw all of this coming a long time ago.
First time I’ve heard of the idea of a separate land value tax… Frankly it seems like an awesome idea, especially for cities.
I imagine it would make dense housing more profitable than McMansions, and punish the NIMBYs who keep standing in the way of affordable housing. Maybe we could make the tax increase significantly with the number of properties an individual owns and start it at the highest rate for things like shell corps and LLCs.
That's why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
They could try to pass it on to consumers, but smaller landlords wouldn't have to pay it.
Making the biggest get out of the game first
They will just split the units owned on more companies then.
That might not have been clear.
Set it at the parent company level so it's not easy.
If they have X amount invested in rental real estate, that can just be taxed then
Believe me, the tax code for the wealthy is already complicated, they can handle this
Then there is no parent company...? Just another random company. It does not need to be complicated and this is far from it. It needs to be such that they can not easily avoid the taxes.
Canada passed this law in 2022 addressing that:
Underused Housing Tax
Need a Land value tax and the ability to build medium/high density housing.
Because governments want housing prices to stay sky high. The canadian prime minister openly said he doesn't want housing prices to drop because too many people are using their houses as a retirement strategy. That's why there are so many government programs that support buying a house but none that support renting.
Yeah, the first time I learned about our current vice president, she was trying to allegedly give renters similar tax breaks in California.
I don't know what happened to that, but I was an immediate fan. Seeing as it never happened, smeh... Not sure what to think. But it's a very popular idea amongst those of us who can't afford to buy (most people in California.)
Or you know, just build more houses?
We've got 15 million vacant homes in the US.
The issue with this figure is that it comes from the Census Bureau, and their definition is broad and simple that it doesn't into account for example. Here's the definition they use:
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf
As you can see this definition doesn't really take into account a lot of genuine factors. For example, a lot of units are in really poor condition and require renovations in order to be livable again, but they're counted as vacant because they still have their exteriors in place. Same goes units. They're also counting units that are not entirely completed, units that are occupied but just temporarily like vacation homes, and mobile homes. We do have a lot of vacant units in this country, but it's not as much as this figure would lead you to believe. In reality, we need new units, we need a lot of them, and we need them ASAP.