Rental has its place, there have been plenty of occasions in my life where rental suited me better than ownership. Regulation and enforcement of said regulations would do a lot to protect people in this situation.
How do you handle situations where people want to live temporarily in houses? An example would be a traveling nurse that doesn’t want to be in an apartment building.
May people prefer to rent houses over owning one. Many of them I speak to tell me they want nothing to do with house maintenance and upkeep and they prefer to rent so that they don’t have to think or worry about any of the repairs. They like being able to just call the property manager when the hot water stops working or when their kiddo accidentally breaks a window.
Everything you are saying is true, and even with those facts noted, some people still prefer the convenience of renting and some like the carefree aspect of not having to be responsible for the upkeep.
Well that’s all well and good until every house rental in your area starts requiring you to either do the maintenance anyway, or pay for it. So you get to pay for the house, and you get to maintenance the house, but you don’t get to own the house.
I’ve watched things change in just the last 5 years where renting a house means you have to maintenance everything that isn’t structural, including lawn care, but you don’t own any stake in the house, and you can forget about putting up a shelf or a new coat of paint. And now that you’re paying the mortgage and taxes on this house, you’re paying for all the utilities for the house, and are fixing all the problems that occur with the house, the landlord gets to send people over whenever they want to that get to go inside your house and look around without you being home just to make sure you’re taking care of it the way they want you to. And then when you leave, either because you found a better deal, or the landlord just doesn’t feel like renting it to you anymore, you get the pleasure of walking away with nothing.
Why do you care so much how someone else chooses to live their life? Some people want to rent and it’s no one else’s business to make them do any different.
If you want to own a house and a buy a maintenance contract go for it.
I personally wouldn’t wish dealing with a home warranty company claim on my worst enemy. They are all scams geared to deny claims.
Maybe because corporate ownership of houses is taking over the market and driving people out of home ownership? Have you missed the news of the last many years? And because there is limited number of houses in reasonable distance (aka it’s not like selling widgets).
that’s significantly less bad of a problem than the current issue of no one being able to afford homes. that nurse might just have to go for the apartment… that’s really not that big of a deal.
I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.
As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people’s needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.
Not getting your home infested with bugs because of having a nasty neighbor
No loud honking at night
Not having your door accidentally knocked on to ask if your apartment neighbor is home when they’re not answering their door
Parking in your own garage
Having a yard for your dog/kids to play in
Apartments fucking suck in so many ways. I get that they’re pretty handy in City Skylines where everyone bases their urban planning experience from but there is a reason people prefer to live in house and it’s because it gives you separation from other people in a way apartments cannot.
How does a detached single family home prevent honking? Why haven’t you explained to my neighbors they have to stop honking? Because they definitely still do, and it is still a nuisance
Detached homes definitely have many benefits, but they’re incredibly expensive. If we didn’t subsidize them so much, we’d have a whole lot more people living in denser housing. The US has something like 85% single family homes compared to around 40% in Germany
It’s not that Germans are just so much better neighbors that they can put up with shared walls/spaces. It’s just not worth the cost of a detached home when it isn’t as heavily subsidized (they do still subsidize them compared to dense housing options)
TL;DR - Detached homes are fine, but we need to quit giving such massive subsidizes to them
I think I would rather die than live in an apartment again. Being told how you have to live, whether or not you’re allowed to have a pet and what kind, dealing with constant noise and odors from the many other people living around you against your will, no guarantee that you’ll be allowed to stay there this time next year, etc. Paying rent and not gaining equity in your home definitely sucks, but it’s honestly the last complaint I have against apartment living. In my opinion it’s a subhuman condition that nobody should be forced into.
Literally the first image in that page is a picture of Singapores public housing, and a claim that they have the highest home ownership rates in the world.
Using Singapore, which has the death penalty for drug use isn’t comparable.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that’s related to public housing policy in any given country.
I’m also gonna like, cite the soviet bloc style apartments, or china’s rapid urbanization in around the same time period that the US decided to make public housing be a thing. I know for the soviet lunchboxes, you had your standard complaints of, oh, long wait lists, subpar build quality, yadda yadda, and then of course towards the beginning of the program you had a large issue with people who had previously been unindustrialized farmers basically just not knowing how to live in an apartment, shit like having your pigs stay indoors and stuff like that. I think similar issues were/are probably a part of chinese publicly subsidized housing complexes. I think barcelona’s superblocks are also publicly subsidized but I don’t know to what extent, and they seem to be working out pretty good. Now those are all places that provide publicly subsidized housing and have provided it to those who were pretty impoverished at the time. They also had/have (again idk barcelona don’t even know why I brought it up) work programs and shit, which we used to have in america, so that might contribute to your point more, but I still think, you know, it is bad to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The projects were majorly flawed, but they are probably preferable to the whole like. rust belt suburban crime shit. I dunno, realistically it doesn’t really matter what context an apartheid ghetto scenario is happening in, because it’s going to have basically the same consequences on everyone involved.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that’s related to public housing policy in any given country.
Drug use is rampant among the poor because it provides escape for some and profit for others. But it is destructive to communities creating greater poverty.
Singapore has draconian crime laws where you will be whipped for graffiti and executed for drug use. It creates a safer culture but at what cost?
Rental property should be publicly owned. Landlords shouldn’t be a thing.
I can see there being exceptions if you say own a property but have to move swiftly elsewhere and can’t/don’t wish to sell it, in such a case letting it out makes sense.
No, no exceptions. Once there are exceptions people will abuse them. Even if you inherited your parents property if you already have one you should have to pay extra taxes on it from the day they die until the day you sell it, period. Any person, family, business, or corporation should only own one property, zero exceptions.
It can literally take years to sell a property even if you want to sell it. I don’t think it’s fair to penalize people who are unable to unload an asset and I also don’t think it’s fair to expect them to just give it away.
Even if you inherited your parents property if you already have one you should have to pay extra taxes on it from the day they die until the day you sell it, period.
This seems needlessly callous to me. At least give them a 6-12 month period to clean up, do repairs, and sell the house. Not everyone that inherits a house is making enough to pay increased taxes right out the gate like you’re proposing. Also, from personal experience, cleaning houses of deceased relatives tend to require a bit of work to get ready for selling and is incredibly emotionally draining. What you’re proposing is going to be extremely painful for the people at the bottom, and emotionally wracking, since as soon as a loved one dies you’re now under the gun to sell.
I agree though, second homes should be extremely heavily taxed. I just think we need to approach it with an even hand and make sure that we are targeting big corporate rental agencies and the very wealthy, and not some family that just lost their parents/grandparents. Something about targeting those people seems needlessly aggressive and not really the intention being discussed…
Yeah that’s not far off from some folks’ actual unironic opinions so the /s is unfortunately not obvious, lol. The Poe’s Law situation isn’t even hypothetical in this one.
Dude from Ukraine was telling me that most people own condos.
He was weirded out that the vast majority of people in the US don’t have a vested interest into their neighborhood simply because they believe they won’t live there for long.
Did he mention that a lot of the real estate that people own in most post-Soviet countries is inherited when (grand)parents die, this being first if not the only step towards the market for most people?
None of the people I know from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus bought their first apartments on their own through hard work or anything: it’s mostly apartments where your grandma died, apartments that you’re either massively helped with or outright gifted by parents when yuu have a significant other to move in with (so both families join funds, most coming from selling some dead relative’s apartment) or on a wedding day (a rarer occasion), or some mix of that.
Without any help or gifts, you’re lucky to be able to get a mortgage that you can pay off before you’re 60 (at least).
The real estate prices outside the US and the EU may seem nicer, but salaries and expenses sure don’t.
What do you imagine these “strict regulations” would be? I live in public housing right now and it’s fantastic. It’s also significantly more democratically run than private housing because it’s mandated to be that way. I also like knowing that nobody is profiting off of my need to live somewhere.
People who own second and third homes aren’t even the issue. It’s mega corps that literally own tens of thousands of homes each. A better way to go about it is to just progressively tax people more per home. That second home gets taxed at the same rate but any home after is taxed way way way more. If someone can still afford it then that’s fine, just more tax money coming in. That and don’t let corps own rental properties.
So what is your proposal? If anyone doesn’t get any second houses how it will help other people? Let’s say it will make houses cheaper. How is it any good? Lot’s of building companies will go bankrupt in days after announcing such law. Can you imagine what type of chain reaction it will start? Also, people can easily need second homes. 1- For where your work is at. 2- For where your homecity is at. 3- For where you are spending your holidays at. It’s nice of you to be thoughtful of poor people/people in need but socialist dreams are just what they are. Dreams. It’s much easier and logical to make another cake then trying to split a small cake to hundreds of pieces equally.
First of all, I did not suggest that we flip a switch tomorrow that enacts a law restricting home ownership. It’s something we can work towards.
But if you think that it’s reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don’t think we are ever going to see eye to eye.
But if you think that it’s reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don’t think we are ever going to see eye to eye.
I think there’s an “OR” there, not an “AND”. Or are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it? If that’s the case, why?
Also, if it could conclusively be shown that keeping people from having a second home wouldn’t affect homelessness (which I suspect is true), would you still want to prevent ownership of a second home? If so, why? Just want to stick it to the middle class?
I’m sorry, but considering the top 1% has more than twice wealth of the entire bottom 99% combined, it seems counterintuitive to pass radical reforms that have a larger effect on the lower 99% than the top 1%.
I mean, if I were filthy rich and that kind of thing passed, I would just deed out a single plot of land with a 100-mile or more strip between two 100-acre squares (probably work with other 1%ers to have a co-op of that thin strip of land) and I’d get away with having as many houses as I wanted.
But someone like you or me finds a good price on a little 800sqft second house close to work saving time, money, and environment on commuting? Banned?
are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it?
Yes.
If that’s the case, why?
I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.
I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.
Your first comment did not include a “why”. But you also don’t seem to want to engage. Just throwing out a horrific idea on purpose to troll? I think I’m going to presume you’re acting with self-awareness because I don’t want to insult your intelligence.
So you do you. I’m out. Not like what you’re suggesting will ever happen for people to lose sleep over it.
In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don’t own more than 1 though.
Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I’m going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.
At some point the taxes would be so high that nobody could afford to rent and the owners would lose money forcing them to sell. Which is fine. Just gotta make the taxes higher for more than x houses.
Not sure if you actually meant logarithmic or exponential. An exponential tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot more in tax, while a logarithmic tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot less in tax. See x2 versus log2(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x2) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.
We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.
Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.
Too bad. You need a centralized authority to manage territory and governments already do this for land, so they can combine land and the real estate on it and distribute it to people fairly.
If you think it’s problematic, then you need to take better control of your government.
It’s either that or corporations who don’t care hog all of the land and housing.
No one gets a second home until everyone has their first.
Rental has its place, there have been plenty of occasions in my life where rental suited me better than ownership. Regulation and enforcement of said regulations would do a lot to protect people in this situation.
Rent apartments. Own houses.
*Since some people really need every combination addressed: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.
How do you handle situations where people want to live temporarily in houses? An example would be a traveling nurse that doesn’t want to be in an apartment building.
May people prefer to rent houses over owning one. Many of them I speak to tell me they want nothing to do with house maintenance and upkeep and they prefer to rent so that they don’t have to think or worry about any of the repairs. They like being able to just call the property manager when the hot water stops working or when their kiddo accidentally breaks a window.
When the kids breaks a window, they still have to pay. They just don’t have to source it, which means they might not be getting the best deal.
Plus, most landlords leave things till the last minute or make it such hard work for the tenant to report it, they don’t bother.
The maintenance is built into the rent, so they’re already paying for it, just not getting the best deal and losing the option to do it how they want.
Everything you are saying is true, and even with those facts noted, some people still prefer the convenience of renting and some like the carefree aspect of not having to be responsible for the upkeep.
I don’t see why they can’t own the property and pay a property manager of sorts.
Well that’s all well and good until every house rental in your area starts requiring you to either do the maintenance anyway, or pay for it. So you get to pay for the house, and you get to maintenance the house, but you don’t get to own the house.
I’ve watched things change in just the last 5 years where renting a house means you have to maintenance everything that isn’t structural, including lawn care, but you don’t own any stake in the house, and you can forget about putting up a shelf or a new coat of paint. And now that you’re paying the mortgage and taxes on this house, you’re paying for all the utilities for the house, and are fixing all the problems that occur with the house, the landlord gets to send people over whenever they want to that get to go inside your house and look around without you being home just to make sure you’re taking care of it the way they want you to. And then when you leave, either because you found a better deal, or the landlord just doesn’t feel like renting it to you anymore, you get the pleasure of walking away with nothing.
Then buy a fucking maintenance contract, just like landlords do.
Why do you care so much how someone else chooses to live their life? Some people want to rent and it’s no one else’s business to make them do any different.
If you want to own a house and a buy a maintenance contract go for it.
I personally wouldn’t wish dealing with a home warranty company claim on my worst enemy. They are all scams geared to deny claims.
Maybe because corporate ownership of houses is taking over the market and driving people out of home ownership? Have you missed the news of the last many years? And because there is limited number of houses in reasonable distance (aka it’s not like selling widgets).
Thanks for your reply, I hadn’t really thought of it this way before
A maintenance company is not a home warranty company.
that’s significantly less bad of a problem than the current issue of no one being able to afford homes. that nurse might just have to go for the apartment… that’s really not that big of a deal.
We can’t solve the problem for 99.99% of people because of this 0.0000001% person. /s.
I understand your sentiment, but it took all of a half second to think of one scenario that would cause problems in the proposed system.
As frustrating as it is to hold off on a good-intentioned change, it is far more detrimental to charge headlong without considering the consequences. The systems that are in place now are there for a reason. Some of those reasons are greed and corruption, but others are because of they fulfill people’s needs. It would be stupid to build a new system to address the greed side without addressing the need side.
Houses are pretty terrible for a multitude of factors:
We should be building apartments that everyone can own, live and be happy in. It shouldn’t be reserved for home owners.
Houses are pretty great for a few factors
Apartments fucking suck in so many ways. I get that they’re pretty handy in City Skylines where everyone bases their urban planning experience from but there is a reason people prefer to live in house and it’s because it gives you separation from other people in a way apartments cannot.
How does a detached single family home prevent honking? Why haven’t you explained to my neighbors they have to stop honking? Because they definitely still do, and it is still a nuisance
Detached homes definitely have many benefits, but they’re incredibly expensive. If we didn’t subsidize them so much, we’d have a whole lot more people living in denser housing. The US has something like 85% single family homes compared to around 40% in Germany
It’s not that Germans are just so much better neighbors that they can put up with shared walls/spaces. It’s just not worth the cost of a detached home when it isn’t as heavily subsidized (they do still subsidize them compared to dense housing options)
TL;DR - Detached homes are fine, but we need to quit giving such massive subsidizes to them
It’s nearly as if there’s no single solution. Houses suck and apartments suck for completely different reasons.
(But tbh, nearly all of the reasons you mentioned apartments suck have been maybe an issue once 10+ years of living in apartments)
Yes you can also buy condos which are apartment style.
I think I would rather die than live in an apartment again. Being told how you have to live, whether or not you’re allowed to have a pet and what kind, dealing with constant noise and odors from the many other people living around you against your will, no guarantee that you’ll be allowed to stay there this time next year, etc. Paying rent and not gaining equity in your home definitely sucks, but it’s honestly the last complaint I have against apartment living. In my opinion it’s a subhuman condition that nobody should be forced into.
We tried that in the 50’s. They became known as “the projects”.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_housing
You end up quarantining the poor into small areas.
Literally the first image in that page is a picture of Singapores public housing, and a claim that they have the highest home ownership rates in the world.
It’s nearly as if public housing can work?
Public housing can work but not without addressing poverty. Using Singapore, which has the death penalty for drug use isn’t comparable.
Otherwise it only makes it worse by concentrating poverty into a ghetto.
I need you to draw a clear through line to why that’s related to public housing policy in any given country.
I’m also gonna like, cite the soviet bloc style apartments, or china’s rapid urbanization in around the same time period that the US decided to make public housing be a thing. I know for the soviet lunchboxes, you had your standard complaints of, oh, long wait lists, subpar build quality, yadda yadda, and then of course towards the beginning of the program you had a large issue with people who had previously been unindustrialized farmers basically just not knowing how to live in an apartment, shit like having your pigs stay indoors and stuff like that. I think similar issues were/are probably a part of chinese publicly subsidized housing complexes. I think barcelona’s superblocks are also publicly subsidized but I don’t know to what extent, and they seem to be working out pretty good. Now those are all places that provide publicly subsidized housing and have provided it to those who were pretty impoverished at the time. They also had/have (again idk barcelona don’t even know why I brought it up) work programs and shit, which we used to have in america, so that might contribute to your point more, but I still think, you know, it is bad to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The projects were majorly flawed, but they are probably preferable to the whole like. rust belt suburban crime shit. I dunno, realistically it doesn’t really matter what context an apartheid ghetto scenario is happening in, because it’s going to have basically the same consequences on everyone involved.
Drug use is rampant among the poor because it provides escape for some and profit for others. But it is destructive to communities creating greater poverty.
Singapore has draconian crime laws where you will be whipped for graffiti and executed for drug use. It creates a safer culture but at what cost?
Why? A co-op can own an apartment with occupants as co-owners. There’s no need for rent.
Sigh: Rent/own apartments. Own houses.
I ask again: why? What does renting accomplish that a co-op couldn’t? Other than making a landlord rich.
Sigh. I’m saying that corporations can own rental apartments if they want because there is enough room for both. Corporations should not own houses.
Rental property should be publicly owned. Landlords shouldn’t be a thing.
I can see there being exceptions if you say own a property but have to move swiftly elsewhere and can’t/don’t wish to sell it, in such a case letting it out makes sense.
No, no exceptions. Once there are exceptions people will abuse them. Even if you inherited your parents property if you already have one you should have to pay extra taxes on it from the day they die until the day you sell it, period. Any person, family, business, or corporation should only own one property, zero exceptions.
Edit: /S. Thought that was obvious
It can literally take years to sell a property even if you want to sell it. I don’t think it’s fair to penalize people who are unable to unload an asset and I also don’t think it’s fair to expect them to just give it away.
Added a /s. I should have in the first place. My b.
No problem. It’s often hard to tell because of Poe’s Law.
This seems needlessly callous to me. At least give them a 6-12 month period to clean up, do repairs, and sell the house. Not everyone that inherits a house is making enough to pay increased taxes right out the gate like you’re proposing. Also, from personal experience, cleaning houses of deceased relatives tend to require a bit of work to get ready for selling and is incredibly emotionally draining. What you’re proposing is going to be extremely painful for the people at the bottom, and emotionally wracking, since as soon as a loved one dies you’re now under the gun to sell.
I agree though, second homes should be extremely heavily taxed. I just think we need to approach it with an even hand and make sure that we are targeting big corporate rental agencies and the very wealthy, and not some family that just lost their parents/grandparents. Something about targeting those people seems needlessly aggressive and not really the intention being discussed…
Yeah that’s not far off from some folks’ actual unironic opinions so the /s is unfortunately not obvious, lol. The Poe’s Law situation isn’t even hypothetical in this one.
Yeah, I realized that I should have known better.
Dude from Ukraine was telling me that most people own condos. He was weirded out that the vast majority of people in the US don’t have a vested interest into their neighborhood simply because they believe they won’t live there for long.
Did he mention that a lot of the real estate that people own in most post-Soviet countries is inherited when (grand)parents die, this being first if not the only step towards the market for most people?
None of the people I know from Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine and Belarus bought their first apartments on their own through hard work or anything: it’s mostly apartments where your grandma died, apartments that you’re either massively helped with or outright gifted by parents when yuu have a significant other to move in with (so both families join funds, most coming from selling some dead relative’s apartment) or on a wedding day (a rarer occasion), or some mix of that.
Without any help or gifts, you’re lucky to be able to get a mortgage that you can pay off before you’re 60 (at least).
The real estate prices outside the US and the EU may seem nicer, but salaries and expenses sure don’t.
Everybody is screwed, everywhere.
So have apartments operated by the government with strict regulations.
What do you imagine these “strict regulations” would be? I live in public housing right now and it’s fantastic. It’s also significantly more democratically run than private housing because it’s mandated to be that way. I also like knowing that nobody is profiting off of my need to live somewhere.
People who own second and third homes aren’t even the issue. It’s mega corps that literally own tens of thousands of homes each. A better way to go about it is to just progressively tax people more per home. That second home gets taxed at the same rate but any home after is taxed way way way more. If someone can still afford it then that’s fine, just more tax money coming in. That and don’t let corps own rental properties.
Nope, I said what I said. No one needs a second home. Lots of people need a first.
So what is your proposal? If anyone doesn’t get any second houses how it will help other people? Let’s say it will make houses cheaper. How is it any good? Lot’s of building companies will go bankrupt in days after announcing such law. Can you imagine what type of chain reaction it will start? Also, people can easily need second homes. 1- For where your work is at. 2- For where your homecity is at. 3- For where you are spending your holidays at. It’s nice of you to be thoughtful of poor people/people in need but socialist dreams are just what they are. Dreams. It’s much easier and logical to make another cake then trying to split a small cake to hundreds of pieces equally.
First of all, I did not suggest that we flip a switch tomorrow that enacts a law restricting home ownership. It’s something we can work towards.
But if you think that it’s reasonable for someone to own a house where they work, where they originally were from, and where they want to vacation, then quite frankly I don’t think we are ever going to see eye to eye.
I think there’s an “OR” there, not an “AND”. Or are you refusing to see eye to eye with someone who buys a house somewhere because their career moved, then chooses to keep the old one because they were able to rent it? If that’s the case, why?
Also, if it could conclusively be shown that keeping people from having a second home wouldn’t affect homelessness (which I suspect is true), would you still want to prevent ownership of a second home? If so, why? Just want to stick it to the middle class?
I’m sorry, but considering the top 1% has more than twice wealth of the entire bottom 99% combined, it seems counterintuitive to pass radical reforms that have a larger effect on the lower 99% than the top 1%.
I mean, if I were filthy rich and that kind of thing passed, I would just deed out a single plot of land with a 100-mile or more strip between two 100-acre squares (probably work with other 1%ers to have a co-op of that thin strip of land) and I’d get away with having as many houses as I wanted.
But someone like you or me finds a good price on a little 800sqft second house close to work saving time, money, and environment on commuting? Banned?
Yes.
I will kindly direct you to my very first comment in this thread. Cheers.
Your first comment did not include a “why”. But you also don’t seem to want to engage. Just throwing out a horrific idea on purpose to troll? I think I’m going to presume you’re acting with self-awareness because I don’t want to insult your intelligence.
So you do you. I’m out. Not like what you’re suggesting will ever happen for people to lose sleep over it.
People who have different world views than you are not automatically trolls. You’d do well to consider that.
What about vacation homes? They are quite common in countries that used to be in the soviet block.
Or mountain huts
It helps other people because more units available leads to dropping prices.
I don’t think there is any data to back that up.
1st year econ says something supply demand curve something something price. But that’s not true in practice
In Texas, your property tax is already somewhat two tiered. Your first home is taxed as a homestead and you get an exemption on part of the property tax. If you own a second, third, etc you have to pay the full amount and the annual increases are not capped. Im not 100% sure on the specifics as I don’t own more than 1 though.
Your not homestead house will be ~$2,000 higher in taxes than if it were not homestead. Exemption is up to $100k I believe, so I’m going off roughly 2% of exemption for additional taxes.
And all that higher tax cost is passed directly on to tenants
At some point the taxes would be so high that nobody could afford to rent and the owners would lose money forcing them to sell. Which is fine. Just gotta make the taxes higher for more than x houses.
Bingo. Most of these tax schemes will hurt the renter, not the landlord.
basically tax it so much that anything beyond a third home is impossible to generate income from.
Logarithmic scale of increasing property tax rate
Not sure if you actually meant logarithmic or exponential. An exponential tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot more in tax, while a logarithmic tax rate would mean that the more you own the next unit of value would be a lot less in tax. See x2 versus log2(x) (or any logarithm base, really). The exponential (x2) would start slow and then increase fast, and the logarithmic one would start increasing fast and then go into increasing slowly.
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/7l1turktmc
We already do this with a homestead exemption in Texas. Problem is, all the rent houses don’t qualify for the tax break, so the tax burden is passed on to the renter market / the tenants.
Yup. Housing is for people to live in, not for speculation.
How would you move? Need to time the buying and selling just right?
Surely in the 21st century we can engineer a system in which the moving party is allowed a time period to settle in and sell the old property. We must have the technology and manpower to do this meagre task.
Just have a government agency be a middle man.
Oh so the government can own residential housing! Theres no way that could possibly go wrong
Too bad. You need a centralized authority to manage territory and governments already do this for land, so they can combine land and the real estate on it and distribute it to people fairly.
If you think it’s problematic, then you need to take better control of your government.
It’s either that or corporations who don’t care hog all of the land and housing.
Sure I will just go ahead and take control of my government, great suggestion.
Chop chop
I don’t see the issue with that, unironically