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

        • SCmSTR@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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          6 days ago

          What about LLCs to represent polycules that can’t get married because for some reason Christianity norms are law?

          • Jarix@lemmy.world
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            6 days ago

            No. Polycules should also be allowed to own homes. If we are changing the rules then let’s fix this as well

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        6 days ago

        I’d add a couple short-term exceptions: Construction companies may own housing during construction and for the amount of time it takes for newly built homes to sell to resident owners. Banks, credit unions and such should be able to foreclose on defaulted mortgages and take possession of the property for a certain amount of time, if it’s not sold within that time it goes to government auction.

        They should not be allowed to retain ownership over mass amounts of occupied dwellings.

        Denser housing like apartment blocs may need to work like condos, residents either outright own their portion of the building or become stakeholders in the building’s corporation, how to do that without inventing the turbo HOA will require further research and development.

    • LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz
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      7 days ago

      They often do that already.

      It reduces the liability when sued. If you do something dumb and owe someone $100,000,000. You just abandon that one property and make that company bankrupt, you don’t lose all your other properties too.

    • BilSabab@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      because of that reading government anti-corruption investigations can cause vertigo - just getting through the tense web of shells and shells of shells and mothershells and whatnot - there was one case in which the company had like 50 entities removed from the culprit

  • Wilco@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    If only the people that would make these laws were not the ones profiting from it.

    • anon_8675309@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      This. Developers like to either get on city commissions or get their friends on them

      Be careful who you vote for. And it ain’t always just one side screwing this up.

  • JAPJER@mtgzone.com
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    7 days ago

    I firmly believe every home after your second (let retired people have their cabins) should be taxed exponentially.

    The third home should be taxed so heavily that it’s prohibitive, and the fourth should be taxed so highly that it’s impossible to profit off of.

    • The_v@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      Should be the same concept with rental units. Taxes should go up exponentially for every unit you own over a certain limit. Of course if there’s is a limit to how many homes or units a person can own, they will just create thousands of small corporations to own them.

      Have to ban corporate ownership of residential property as well or some other fix.

    • flandish@lemmy.world
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      7 days ago

      exponentially

      no. at 100% mil rate. ie: its value. every year.

      if you can’t afford it, then sell it to someone who needs a home. :)

  • dangling_cat@piefed.blahaj.zone
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    7 days ago

    This is why wealth tax is so elegant. It doesn’t matter if you own a bunch of houses personally, or you own shares of a company that own a bunch of houses, or you use the shares as collateral to borrow a bunch of money; your total wealth is the same. There is no way get around it :3

      • VAK@lemmy.world
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        6 days ago

        They’re elegant in terms of limiting wealth hoarding. It’s just like estate tax that’s already implemented. Anyway, good to have more government jobs too.

    • Urist@lemmy.ml
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      7 days ago

      There is and there always will be as long as capitalist have the political control.

  • brachiosaurus@mander.xyz
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    7 days ago

    It should be illegal to have dozen of houses to begin with and if you don’t like this you can go fuck yourself because we live in a society

  • Axolotl@feddit.it
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    7 days ago

    Hear me out: we also count all the subsidiaries company as the same entity of the owner company, now we have less exploits too

  • HerbGrower@slrpnk.net
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    7 days ago

    Some places do this. I have heard a few Welsh areas have gone for much higher council tax (approximate equivalent to a shitty property tax) on second homes. They are allowed to charge up to 4x the normal rate.

    If you are renting it out as a holiday rental you can be exempt from the normal council tax but they are now requiring you to actually rent it out. It must be available for at least 252 days of the year and actually used for at least 182 days so you can’t just set rent to unaffordable amounts.

    Hearing the crying about it has been great.

    • ulterno@programming.dev
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      7 days ago

      Nice.
      This gives me an idea.

      Additional tax for rooms marked as “for rent”, but going unrented for enough part of the year.
      Calculation will also take into account recent evictions.

      • Bytemeister@lemmy.world
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        7 days ago

        I’ve had a similar idea for a while. There should be a fine/tax for unrented properties proportional to the amount being asked for rent. Any money collected from this goes to housing support for low-income renters.

        This creates a market incentive to lower rents if you can’t get someone in a unit.

      • oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip
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        6 days ago

        Bigger pockets = bigger taxes, proof. Every vent you have should go towards multiplying your liability.

        And no loophole for multiple bank accounts, or offloading ownership into LLCs or some BS like that (no idea what the correct terms are for that, but I’m not an accountant). If you have any legal right to be able to touch money, that money counts.

        Maybe separate personal and business accounts, since if you’re running a business correctly and aren’t getting obscene profits vs your workers, then having a big business shouldn’t necessarily increase your personal liability, but if you are hogging with profits, then it bleeds over. But tax the business more and more according to the money (in all accessible accounts (including savings) it has access to, same with people.

        Also, we need to remove the possibility for money to make money. Maybe that would just be a side effect of making excess money too expensive to have, but if not it needs to be addressed too.

  • godsammitdam@lemmy.zip
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    7 days ago

    Exponential*

    If it were 2% on the first, it’d be 4% on the second, 8% on the third…

    I think Ken Paxton, man of the people, family matters, wears $40K watches, has 15 homes on a 150K salary.

    So 32,768% sounds fair for inhuman scum like him. That’s 14 more homes on the market hopefully.

    I don’t even know what it would be for Blackrock, the largest homeowner in the market. They own more homes than individuals do in the country.

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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    7 days ago

    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%.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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        7 days ago

        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.

  • Afaithfulnihilist@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    Two policies would make a huge impact on this.

    An additional tax on nonresident ownership and a punitive tax on vacancies based on occupancy rates.

    Those two would be enough to discourage hoarding, scalping and ghost neighborhoods .

  • fodor@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    Why 1% each? If housing is a human right, and it is, then we need strict limits around one per person. Companies should not be allowed to have long-term ownership at all.

    • mechoman444@lemmy.world
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      6 days ago

      Excuse me sir, I’m sure that multiple massive corporations would disagree with you on housing being a right!