If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
I agree in principal, but it’s impossible to implement it in this manner.
What you can do is establish an “owner-occupant” exemption to future tax hikes, then hike taxes through the fucking roof for everyone else.
Landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants to buyers. They’ll be issuing “land contracts” (which strongly favor the tenant/buyer) rather than rental agreements.
You can create a statute to target 85% owner occupancy. Any year the owner occupancy rate is lower than 80%, the property tax rate will be automatically hiked 2% (for non-owner occupied properties only). If the owner-occupancy rate exceeds 90%, the property tax rate is lowered by 1%.
Oh, I like that a lot.
The idea of charging owner-occupants a different tax rate than an investor is fairly common. At least 28 states already have some sort of general “homestead exemption”, “second home tax”, or similar policy.
The changes that need to happen are 1. the exemption needs to be increased at the same rate that the tax is increased; 2. The exemption and tax rate increases need to be tied to a specifically targeted owner-occupancy rate; 3. Federal and state governments cannot be allowed to overrule local authorities on issues of property tax policies.
It’s not a complete cure, but it will convert investors from parasitic landlords to parasitic investors. They’re going to keep ripping us off as best they can. But no matter how badly they will be exploiting us, we will be gaining equity in the process. Going from “zero equity” to “any equity whatsoever” is an infinite improvement over the current degree of exploitation in the housing market.