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Building more homes and offering subsidies will only put more money into the builders’ pockets. We already have too many homes. The issue is companies owning hundreds or even thousands of homes, only to refuse to sell or rent 75% of them so they can charge 400% more for the 25% they do sell or rent. It’s blatant market manipulation.
Begin a vacant property tax, (based on having more than 30 days in the calendar year with the property empty) which ratchets up as you own more vacant properties. So people can have a summer and winter home if they want, without their tax increasing too much. After all, it’s only one vacant home. But when you own a dozen vacant properties, you’re gonna get fucked hard by the IRS.
It will incentivize companies to actually rent or sell their vacant properties, instead of letting them sit vacant for years at a time. And that 30 days of vacancy should be any 30 days, so people who rent are incentivized to offer longer lease terms and change tenants less than once a year. Meaning short term rentals (AirBnB) will also be less attractive, because they typically only operate at ~50% occupied, as they’ll typically have a few days between rentals. Since short term rentals have been cannibalizing the long term rental markets recently, (lots of landlords have moved towards having properties be full time AirBnBs, which means there are fewer places left for actual tenants,) it will also help correct the rental markets which are overvalued.
Property tax should already ratchet up based on how many properties owned, regardless of if they are occupied or not.
All the data I've seen in the last 5-10 years suggests that we don't have enough homes. Even with vacant homes accounted for and how much burden that would relieve.
That's one of the reasons why there's a growing push to bring back the missing middle housing and businesses into our population centers by removing zoning laws that got rid of them in the first place.
That's not to say that we shouldn't also be doing away with corporate ownership of housing and taxing individuals with 3/4+ homes, especially if they're vacant.
We need a multi-pronged attack on resolving the housing issue, including the 3m planned homes from a Harris admin.