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
How about the good ol’ “nobody gets seconds until everyone’s had firsts” rule
They’d just make 2,000 shell companies, each with one house.
Perfectly legal.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to own housing
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.
Or other companies.
I always thought “if corporations are people, then why can they own other corporations”
What about LLCs to represent polycules that can’t get married because for some reason Christianity norms are law?
No. Polycules should also be allowed to own homes. If we are changing the rules then let’s fix this as well
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.
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
Every hurdle makes it more expensive to run and less profitable
Luckily for the billionaires they don’t own any homes, their homes are part of a complex companies, or some bullshit.
All too true - laws are for people who can’t afford lawyers.
A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.
Maybe companies shouldn’t be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.
Companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
I wonder what happens in that case? 🤔 Oh, totally forgot. Venezuela, Cuba, USSR, North Korea. Not sure I want to end up with something like that. How many more times people need to repeat these horrible communist experiments to learn that this is not the good way to live?! Speaking from experience growing up in USSR in the 80s. Yes, capitalism sucks, but other options are often worse.
Edit: keep downvoting, it’s much easier than writing a factual argument.
Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?
Landlords shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Imagine going to another city to attend university. Can’t just rent for a few years, gotta have initial capital to BUY an apartment first.
Imagine houses that don’t cost nine and a half fortunes, because they are not considered one of the most profitable ways to invest, for the richest people in the world.
Housing doesn’t have to be prohibitively expensive, whether temporary or permanent residences.
It’s not about temporary living in a place not existing, it’s about forbidding the ways that rich people go about making housing scarce, and corner markets.
That is true, but not what was pointed out. Who rents out homes then, it not companies or landlords? I fully agree companies should not own homes. And also believe rent should be pinned to purchase price value +x% per year something. And landlords should not be able to own more than a certain number of dwelling units.
But then who rents out the temporary homes, or homes for people who just don’t want to own for a reason
I hear this argument all the time. I reject it. There are alternatives.
A “Land Contract” functions very similar to a rental, but it is a purchase agreement. You are a buyer, not a tenant. If you walk away in the first 3-5 years, it functions exactly as a rental agreement, with the only exception being that the monthly payment was fixed for the duration instead of hiked annually.
If you stay longer than this initial 3-5 year period, the agreement automatically converts to a 30 year mortgage with the same payment.
So, you take out a “land contract” on your college apartment instead of a rental agreement. You can return it to the landlord after you graduate, or stay put and gain some equity for a few years.
Why would landlords offer such an arrangement? Simple: we’re providing owner-occupancy exemptions to property tax hikes. If you live in the house you are paying taxes on, you are entitled to the exemption, and pay a low rate. But If you don’t live there, we’re going to send your property tax rate through the fucking roof. You’re going to be begging your tenants to take a land contract instead of a rental agreement.
When we do this, small-time landlords who live in one of the units of a duplex, triplex, or quadplex will be able to rent out the other units while retaining the owner-occupancy credit. They are occupying the taxed parcel; the additional units are not separately taxes. Corporate landlords won’t have the same capability. Corporations may be people, but they don’t have a “residence”. You’ll be able to rent one of these onsite-landlord units, if you really want to rent.
Publicly owned apartments you can rent. No need for a landlord who just takes money. That money could go to funding public services instead.
Or you know, actual upkeep of the property instead of doing absolutely nothing until it is literally falling apart like most landlords.
Bingo !
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With the current trend of 2/3rds of housing kept empty for speculation, you’d probably buy and sell a house for uni (and probably make a profit instead of spending like 200k).
And also university already requires a shit load of capital? That’s kinda the whole point, so poor people are poor for a “reason”.
Also it’d be simple for university residences to explode it quality and quantity without the insane competition of the landlord market.
Where are you getting the statistic of 2/3 of housing being kept empty for speculation? A quick look outside tells me that is utter bullshit.
Nope, university is free.
That works well as a thought terminating slogan online. Less so as a practice in the real life.
I’d hope it was a thought commencing slogan, maybe giving people curiosity as to think:
“How could another sapient person believe something so different from my own beliefs? That person is even making it a joke, therefore they must have had it bouncing around in their brain a bunch, so they must believe it and think about it a lot. Huh, maybe there is something more to know, and think about.”
I even made a comment with a small answer, to the other person, who asked like a human.
Clearly didn’t work on you though.
When people drop these one-liners that perfectly align with the popular view of the platform, my first assumption is that they in fact have not thought about it and instead are just saying the popular thing for applause.
Perhaps that’s a cynical view but in my experience it seems true more often than not. You too walked back on your original statement after being questioned on it. I can’t learn from people who don’t say what they mean or mean what they say.
Why not?
That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:
Being a “landlord”, that is, very specifically, an “owner of houses you don’t live in, but rent to people for profit”, is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.
You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it’s not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:
“Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I’m calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out”
It’s a way of making money, where the owner doesn’t do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.
How is it not helpful to society to allow others to live in your house? And it’s not landlords who are looking for tenants, it’s the other way round.
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To hold the landlord personally responsible for the homes they own.
Ok, not sure if you really wanted a response here. Always feel awkward responding to a one-sentence comment with an essay, but to answer your question, this is required. Or TL:DR: companies exist for limited liability, and limited liability is grossly inappropriate for rental housing.
We’ve really lost the plot with what corporations and limited liability were invented for. The original idea behind incorporation was that it allowed people to invest in something with many other people, and to limit individual investor losses on risky megaprojects.
The early corporations were for things like major canal projects or overseas trading ventures. Let’s say a canal would be a good idea somewhere, but the cost will be enormous. The only way to fund it is to have thousands of people pool their investments for it. Those thousands of people aren’t going to be involved in running the project. Maybe they’re just investing the equivalent of a hundred or a few thousand dollars today. But without limited liability, if the canal project goes under, every investor is fully responsible for the debts of that venture. You may invest only a thousand, but if the canal goes under before it finishes, without limited liability, you could be on the hook for many times your original investment. Limited liability allowed for the democratization of investment. Without it, only the rich are able to truly invest in things.
Historically, this was a huge barrier to investment and economic development. Rome for example didn’t have anything like our modern finance system; most things were produced in large family businesses. You couldn’t just go buy stock in a venture to invest in it. If you weren’t willing to fund the entire thing, run the entire thing, and be responsible for the entire thing, you couldn’t invest in it.
This is what corporations were meant to solve - the problem of funding large risky projects beyond the ability of single investors to reasonably afford. Historically, you couldn’t just go and register a corporation on a whim. Often they required acts of legislative bodies to create them. They were seen as morally dubious in many ways - after all, shouldn’t everyone be responsible for the consequences of their own actions? Limited liability gets away from this. The bargain was made that though limited liability sacrifices some amount of fairness and justice, the prosperity the projects it allows will produce will be worth it on net.
But that isn’t how incorporation is used today. Today, landlords will open up dozens of LLCs. They’ll put a single property into each LLC. If a tenant is seriously injured due to the landlord’s neglect, the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent. The landlord could own a hundred properties - the most you can ever sue them for is the one you’re renting. In a serious injury, you could be on the hook for millions in lifelong medical expenses, and your landlord may be sitting on a fortune of a hundred million of dollars, but you can only ever sue them for the few hundred thousand the property you rent is worth. The company you’re renting from doesn’t own any more assets than that.
Rent seeking is not the type of risky moonshot venture that incorporation was invented for. Incorporation for landlords is not about encouraging moonshot investments, it’s just a state subsidy for landlords. It’s not like we wouldn’t have rental units without incorporation. Most of the citizens of Rome rented. The concept of renting is likely as old as the concept of a city. The rental market worked just fine without limited liability.
This type of liability risk should not be handled as a subsidy by the state. Landlords can already purchase liability insurance. And that’s how they should have to handle all the risks of being sued by their tenants. Someone with a dozen rental units can get a $5 million liability policy if they don’t want to put their entire net worth on the line in the event one of their tenants being seriously hurt.
And crucially, such a system would much better protect tenants. We currently just give the subsidy of limited liability to landlords as a gift. We ask for nothing in return. Insurance companies aren’t so generous. If you want a liability policy for your rental units, the insurance company is going to want to have a say in how those units are operated and maintained. The insurance company doesn’t want to insure a dilapidated death trap of a rental house.
I don’t think landlords should be able to put rental houses into LLCs, because I think we’ve completely lost the plot on what corporations were meant to achieve. Hell, I would set the minimum number of owners for a corporation to be a hundred people (with limits on how much a single individual can own.) Incorporation was meant as a tool for crowd-sourcing daring and groundbreaking infrastructure, research, and other ventures. It was never intended to be a gift to rich people operating ordinary businesses that they have complete individual control and ownership over.
This was a great read, thank you.
“the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent” - why?
Because the landlord, i.e. the LLC, only owns that property, and nothing else
Is that how LLCs work?
Because companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Landlords should be prevented from breathing.
Good luck
Landlords should not exist. Hope that clears it up for you.
Oh these 2000 people own 2000 completely unrelated companies! They all make business with each other because the market is so healthy! All the houses are offered at the same prices because the market works so perfectly by forcing companies to compete with each other so the real value is reached!
And that ONE human making the money should also be responsible for any damages his company makes!
You know we could call it “Accountability”, sounds good to me I don’t know why it’s not so already.
Is it troubling that this was my first thought?
No, it shows you know how the world works
Okay, now pay business registration taxes on every single one of those subsidiaries.
AND business upkeep taxes on each of tjem too. These increase exponentially too. By the time you own or your comopany owns three homes? Youre being taxed well over 15 million per a year in taxes alone.
And youre not allowed to give control of these living areas or branching companies to one of your relatives, friends, or coworkers UNLESS they themselves do not have a registered living quarters of some type on file.
No, it needs to multiply every time a new property is added
Agreed. And multiplied again for property owned by a corporation. Especially residential.
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.
Everyone dances around the fact that the government should be building low income housing themselves. We should not be begging the for profit house building industry to fix the problem they’ve made.
I’m not watching YouTube shyte.
I love youtube and use it every day.
Even I refuse to watch a YT video as a source. It takes 50x longer than reading, that’s unacceptable.
If only the people that would make these laws were not the ones profiting from it.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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
The real wealth are the NFTs we made along the way.
There is and there always will be as long as capitalist have the political control.
Wealth taxes are necessary, but with offshoring and hiding accounts, I’d say they’re bureaucratically complicated rather than elegant.
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.
Hear me out: we also count all the subsidiaries company as the same entity of the owner company, now we have less exploits too
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.
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.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.
Vacancy tax
That + legalize squatting, we’ll fill up these empty units real fucking quick.
I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.
After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.
This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.
And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…
There is no reason any single family home to be owned by a corporation. Just ban that entirely. Companies can own apartment complexes, but they also need to be required to provide a percentage of “affordable” units that are capped at 1/4th of the states minimum wage.
Even better idea: Companies owning homes must be non-profits with publicly visible finances.
Do you mind sharing why this might be a better idea? I’ve seen pretty scummy non profits.
Scummy non-profit with publicly available finances tend to get under media/political fire pretty quick when they are providing basic services. If you have an actually functioning democracy (aka not the US) or large enough masses on the street (aka also not the US, but mostly not because people don’t care; they are struggling too much to make ends meet, but have just enough to keep them content - but i see this balance slowly slipping) these things can be fixed.
Why the exception for apartment complexes? Just buy and sell the units as condos.
Because I do think there is value in mid term, affordable, rentals. And coordinating that with a bunch of individually owned units and ensuring that some of them remain affordable seems like a near impossibility.
Might also be nostalgia for earlier days when not every apartment advertised “luxury units” and renting was way cheaper than buying. It’s what kids just out of high school did, or recent divorcees while they got back in their feet financially. Some oriole even preferred it so they didn’t have the responsibility of owning. Companies used to be decent stewards of multi family housing, I’m probably over optimistic that they could be again.
This Vacant Property tax
How would that apply on derelict properties?
I
don’t get how vacant property tax works with two houses, if I have two there is no way I can live in both for longer than 4 months.am bad at math, that’ll only start being a problem from 3 housesAnd some summer houses where I’m from are built in such a way that you will really struggle to live there outside the season. I’m not sure this should be universally applicable especially in case of house used for living in it, and not renting out
This would be great, but it’s not feasible as described. Property taxes are assessed against the property, not the owner. The county can determine whether someone has paid the tax on a particular property, but they are greatly restricted on details about the owner of that property. There is no reliable mechanism to determine how many properties a single person owns. A county auditor would be able to determine how many properties you own in that county, but the auditor of Alameda County in California has no conclusive way of knowing if you also own property in Anne Arundel County in Maryland.
The county auditor does have access to your income tax records, drivers license records, etc. They can easily and reliably determine your claimed county of residence when you pay your tax bill.
If you were to claim residence in Anne Arundel, the Alameda auditor could determine that you do not qualify for an owner-occupant credit available only to residents of Alameda County.
We already have “homestead exemption” and “second home” property taxes in most of the country. These give some small credits or exemptions for various purposes for the property where a homeowner resides. What we need to do is expand the scope of these owner-occupant exemptions. They need to automatically match future property tax hikes, so owner occupants are explicitly protected against them.
And then we increase the property tax annually until the owner occupancy rate is above 85%. We run it through the fucking moon, actual homeowners don’t see any increase. Corporate landlords will be fighting tooth and nail to issue land contracts and purchase agreements rather than leases.
I say do it on square footage. One 4000sqft house counts the same as 2 x 2000sqft homes
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
My mayor lives off the rent of 8 houses. I don’t think he’ll do anything to fix it
And even that is small time compared to the corporate landlords who own hundreds/thousands of homes. AHhhhhhhhhhhh
Fucking disgusting parasite
Like no wonder he had time to campaign for office, he doesn’t work 😂
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.
Looks like Ken’s love language is bribery with real estate .
Cool. Never going to happen because it will fuck with basically the friends of every country’s leader.
