Asifall

I’m going to vote but damn can we at least acknowledge how depressing it is to be stuck in this position to begin with? If 2016 wasn’t a wake up call I really don’t know how we can snap the Democratic Party out of this corporate controlled mediocrity.

Yeah, that does feel like it could help reduce housing prices. There is no such tax in most parts of the US, but San Francisco passed a vacancy tax that just went into effect this year. If that works out hopefully other municipalities look into a similar scheme.

Are corporations more likely to be slumlords? Pretty much everyone I’ve ever known who owns a rental property has been a complete asshole, but I’ve only known a few.

Owning part of a larger building is actually much more complicated than simply owning a house. I’m not sure everyone would actually want that even if they could buy the unit they live in at a low price.

Generally it’s not destroying undeveloped land, but fixing up dilapidated houses so that they are livable.

Having a progressive tax based on number of homes owned may work, but you would need to rewrite quite a bit of real estate law to make it actually effective. Obviously corporations would not be allowed to own houses to avoid people owning through shell companies, but you would also have to draw a line so corporations could own larger apartment complexes and mixed use buildings. You also do want builders to be able to temporarily own houses for the purpose of building and selling them as well as corporate flippers.

Frankly, I think it’s too complicated to expect on a national level.

I feel like banning corporations from owning housing isn’t the panacea people expect it to be. It’s pretty impractical when you start talking about larger buildings and mixed use housing, and I’m not convinced it’s really a big driver of the problem.

I think a steep land value tax is a more workable solution. It incentivizes anyone who holds non-productive property (vacant homes in this case) to either make better use of the land or sell it. This also has the benefit of impacting individuals who own second homes or have mostly empty airbnbs.

Property taxes are insufficient for this purpose because they are generally based on the value of the home rather than just the land, so not only are they easier to game, but it disincentivizes improving the property.

I have three drives in my computer. So they’re labeled C:, D:, and E:

That’s the default configuration but there’s actually no guarantee that those drives map bijectively to physical devices.

He has been a terrible candidate though. If the polling is accurate and trump has a slight lead in popular vote, Biden has less than a 5% chance of winning the election (according to Nate Silver’s models). Unfortunately, this is probably optimistic as polling has overestimated the democratic vote in the last 2 presidential elections including the one that included these same two candidates.

True, but I feel like people have been talking past each other about this.

On the one hand, you have people saying Biden’s cabinet would do a better job than Trump, which is true. On the other hand, you have people saying Biden is going to lose to trump unless he somehow makes a dramatic turnaround in the next couple months, which is also true according to all available data.

The real question isn’t whether Biden is better than trump, it’s whether Biden would serve the country better by stepping down.

And he’s been saying for weeks that Biden is unlikely to win and should drop out

Demand includes every person currently housed as well and only a small portion of the population is homeless, so the supply really isn’t 30 times higher than the demand.

Yeah that’s an excellent point. Older generations still prefer phone calls but I imagine increasingly the only people who want to call will be the people who can’t fix their issue via an automated system.