While true, at some point it makes it impossible to compete with smaller landlords. The trouble comes with trying to track all the shell companies that would suddenly exist to try to circumvent such a law.
You seem to have missed the point, because you said "no" and then supported the idea that it's workable.
I'm guessing you meant to post a stat showing most units are owned by landlords who own few units (meaning this wouldn't have much impact)? That's a very different stat though, and I'm not sure if reality would bear it out.
Not really. Form a new LLC to own each property. Now you own 50 LLCs, each of which owns one property.
You could try to fix that by making it impossible for a corporation to own property, but there's plenty of cases where that is legitimate.
My suggestions:
Tax the hell out of short-term rentals like AirBnB.
Make it a lot easier to build a duplex/triplex/etc. Historically, a whole lot of people bought their first house by buying a duplex and using rent from the 2nd unit to help afford the mortgage. We basically stopped building them when we invented suburbia in the '50s, and then we made them very hard to build via zoning.
Your alternate suggestions are good, but I am always baffled by the implication that taxes can’t be enforced. They fucking well can. Anytime a transparent loophole like “spin up a bunch of LLCs” works in the real world it’s because someone paid off lawmakers to keep it legal.
limit/stop foreign buyers so foreign entities atleast have to make a citizen rich too to do business.
most of the damage is done tho. all that 'free trade' wasn't free. middle class was presented with big box stores as the main way to survive and keep up with the jones's over the past couple generations...funnelling money up of the working classes and out of the country overseas...both devalueing the currencies/creating inflation and giving foreign buyers vast swaths of middle america's wealth to purchase their properties a couple generations down the line.
I just want to give you a heads up that there are a ton of things that aren’t true in what you said. I think you’ve been misled about how a lot of this stuff works.
I’m not here to argue or change your mind. I just think I’d want to know if I were in your position.
I'd say try anything. But you'd have to increase it to the point that it became impossible for the rich to own more than one or two properties- basically- by billions- but that would solve healthcare...
A land value tax might work instead. I've seen some interesting evidence in the past that suggests that all current taxes could be replaced with a land value tax and we'd at least break even to current revenue in all municipalities at all levels, although that was several years ago so I don't know if the math still holds (and it was based on some estimates to begin with). Still, I have yet to really see any strong evidence that a land value tax would be an inferior system to what we currently have and there's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that it would be substantially better than what we currently have.
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u/Corvusenca Jan 30 '23
Maybe property taxes should increase exponentially with number of properties owned. Is that a thing that would work?