Raise prop taxes for non-rented vacation units by 150%
Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350.
Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500.
Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes.
And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.
- Make it illegal for corporations to own residential homes / any property in residentially zone locations
- Generate policies to eliminate real estate parasites (illegal to have percentage profits off of sales, open data, low friction technological avenues to remove those jobs altogether)
- Marginally increasing second / third / fourth property taxes on individuals (first home untaxed, second taxed at 20% market-rate valuation per year, third taxed at 50%, fourth at 100%, etc).
- Create avenues to easily demolish HOAs when they go off the rails
- Multi-unit housing can no longer be owned or managed by a for-profit entity (rent goes exclusively towards building upgrades and paying works for upkeep & administration, all transparently visible
- Limit Big Lumber's ability to export Lumber outside of the US -- trees grown in the US should stay in it to house people.
This would be a start to fixing the issue. The objective being, of course, to utterly collapse the housing market, and make houses homes again.
For what it's worth - you come across as completely unserious if your suggestion to fix housing shortages is genuinely to levy a $100k tax for property owners who aren't currently renting out their units.
I'll tell you what's unserious - people wanting to actually solve the housing crisis. Every solution is 100% idiotic. The way we currently operate is to build more housing, they are building a dramatic amount of housing, and the price of a house is still $400k medium. It is telling me they are not selling to families but instead to corporations, bnbers, rentals, foreign governments.
Maybe they still cost $400K, because the purchase of the land, the labor and the materials and the interest to finance the project eat up most of that $400K, not to mention some places charge you building permits that cost ten's of thousands of dollars - if not more.
Nobody is going to build houses and sell them at a loss or at break-even price, they need to cover their costs and make some profit as well to keep the business alive.
I was speaking to my house builder in the middle of 2023 and he noted that it had become impossible to build a starter house (2/3 bedrooms, 1.5-2 bath) for less than $450k CAD (~$300k USD) -- excluding land, utility connection, and financing costs.
He also mentioned that new requirements going into effect this year were going to add $10-15k per house.
People tend to have a poor grasp on what building a new house actually costs. They cost a lot to build with no gouging whatsoever.
Coming from a construction background, I can confirm all of this. Permits are out of control, material prices are nuts (not COVID nuts, but still at least 300% higher than the good old days), and subcontractors are both hard to find and more expensive. It's not crazy to build a decent 3-4 bedroom house and have it cost $400k all said and done, even in my small-big-ish town.
A lot of people in here arguing, bet there are very few of us that have actually built houses before :)
Raising property taxes on rentals increases cost to renters. Raising taxes on vacant units is a good idea though (but perhaps hard to enforce).
Remote work is solving the housing shortage already though, through opening up living to much wider geography (and locales that don't impede building, such as TX and FL). It will just take a decade or so to normalize.
In-person work forced people to compete over limited housing in small areas
I would say it is doing the opposite of solving the housing shortage right now. It is exporting it instead while also not doing much about the shortage at its origins.
All those cute picturesque towns in the Mountain West don’t have a large supply of homes to begin with, so it only takes a few wealthy Californians to seriously upend the local market with wages paid much higher than what locals can get for their skills.
I mean, landlords are going to pass on their costs directly to tenants. If you raise property taxes, then rents simply go up. None of these tax increases are going to magically make a 20% down payment appear in someone's bank account that they could use to purchase something outright. None of these tax increases are going to prevent people who legitimately want to rent from renting. (Some examples: apartments that are $30k a month for rich people that need to live in some city for 3 months of the year. $8k/month assisted living facilities for rich people that are now old and need access to care while still living alone.)
Probably the most realistic thing to do is to simply implement rent control. "You can't legally collect more than $X/month in rent" fixes the problem of rent being too high. If that makes owning rental units unpopular, so be it.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with allowing someone to rent a unit for $30k per month - even if there are thousands of them. If we're collecting 100k in property taxes earmarked for certain programs - that would effectively fund building an entire ADU on a property per year for that expensive rental to exist.
Couldn't agree more. I'm tired of the HN crowd that espouses the benefits of building more supply, yet consider the AirBNB and rental-afflicted homes to be totally untouchable. Even worse are the ones that seem to strongly believe in environmentalism, yet have no problem tearing down forests to build more supply on them...for AirBNBs and rentals.
There are so many people that think drugs or poor decisions are leading to the homeless tents all over the place. The drugs and poor decisions are things that come AFTER going homeless. The studies are showing that rising housing costs have directly caused the homeless crisis. WE neeed to do something fast.
On top of the house that took the space where trees previously were? There’s only so much space for trees. Seizing it for AirBNBs seems like a massive waste when we have hotels that use space much more efficiently.
Raise prop taxes for rentals by %350.
Raise prop taxes for airbnbs by %500.
Everyone will own a home, and home prices will plummet as people try to unload extremely expensive property taxes. And if it doesn't work, double my percentages. Or just make it 100k per year. Those people crazy enough to keep holding them, will fund the creation of homeless housing. DV's are just landlords and other types of bottom feeders.