Ratcheting taxes for unoccupied houses and apartment units. Allow a grace period of one year, to allow for flips. But after that, every home you own after the first is considered unoccupied if it is vacant for more than three months of the year. And taxes on vacant homes become increasingly expensive as you own more and more of them. Then take the proceeds of these taxes, and put them towards first time homebuyer assistance programs. This would solve the three largest issues with the housing market right now.
First, it solves the “sitting on vacant houses to drive up the price of rent” problem. Actively force landlords to keep their apartments and houses full, driving down the price of rent.
Second, it solves the “buying a dozen houses and only selling one of them” problem. Corporations do this to be able to game the market and drive up prices on the few they do sell. But by making it prohibitively expensive to sit on vacant houses, you preemptively wreck any kinds of profits they would make by sitting on them.
Third, it would allow for more low interest loans for first time home buyers, and could even be used to offset the potential downpayment costs.
But of course, this will basically never be implemented, because the lawmakers are all bribed by the corporations that own thousands of vacant homes.
billwashere@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Don’t let corporations own single family homes. Drastically increase the tax rate for more than 3 houses by any single person. A landlords income is not producing anything useful, it’s stealing income from people actually providing society with something useful.
pelespirit@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I would say that it should start building the tax after one house and go drastic like you said on the 3rd.