5 ms·

How would that be done? If an address wasn’t claimed for a personal tax return for an owner or tenant, it gets a big tax bill?

cogman10 6y ago
This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".
- sokoloff 6y ago
  At what point do they become apartments though? When the Certificate of Occupancy is issued? "No problem; those units aren't finished yet. [They need a smoke alarm to be legal units and somehow we haven't found the time to get around to it yet.]" Or whatever the threshold is between "this is a vacant lot" and "this is a taxable unoccupied unit", you're just providing incentive to stay on one side of that line if there is a glut of builders using this strategy.
  - cogman10 6y ago
    IDK, probably have to do some research into how much time it takes to finish a unit to say when the clock starts ticking. For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock. You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
- twblalock 6y ago
  > This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.
daniellarusso 6y ago
So, in Florida, you declare your primary residence, and it is taxed at a much lower rate than other property. See ‘homestead exemption’. Other states use this term, but it means different things. WV, for instance, only allows the exemption for people above a certain age.
- yebyen 6y ago
  Same in Indiana. But the proposed idea was to tax more heavily all unoccupied properties, not merely "all properties other than one's primary residence."

cogman10 6y ago

This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. Presumably, the building company would be the owners for all the empty apartments which would make it easy to find and tax. It would be more difficult to detect someone buying a home/apartment as an "investment".

sokoloff 6y ago
At what point do they become apartments though? When the Certificate of Occupancy is issued? "No problem; those units aren't finished yet. [They need a smoke alarm to be legal units and somehow we haven't found the time to get around to it yet.]" Or whatever the threshold is between "this is a vacant lot" and "this is a taxable unoccupied unit", you're just providing incentive to stay on one side of that line if there is a glut of builders using this strategy.
- cogman10 6y ago
  IDK, probably have to do some research into how much time it takes to finish a unit to say when the clock starts ticking. For example, obviously a smoke alarm is something that takes 15 minutes to install, so that wouldn't be when you start the clock. You might be able to base it on when any single unit is sold in the block. That is "You sell 1 apartment, you've got a year to sell to rest or you are going to start seeing vacancy taxes".
twblalock 6y ago
> This would be specifically to fix the problem of a builder making a bunch of apartments and slowly letting them into the market to artificially inflate home values. That isn't the reason rent is high in SF.

daniellarusso 6y ago

So, in Florida, you declare your primary residence, and it is taxed at a much lower rate than other property. See ‘homestead exemption’. Other states use this term, but it means different things. WV, for instance, only allows the exemption for people above a certain age.

yebyen 6y ago
Same in Indiana. But the proposed idea was to tax more heavily all unoccupied properties, not merely "all properties other than one's primary residence."