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> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. I don't follow at all. The

> You can’t argue that more housing supply is the answer to affordability problems and also argue that vacancy taxes are pointless. I don't follow at all. The argument that vacancy taxes are pointless is that there just aren't many vacancies compared to the enormous housing shortage. We could tax vacant apartments 1M$/day and not move the needle on pricing.

whatshisface 4y ago
That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.
- LordDragonfang 4y ago
  Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    >by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Unfortunately, the vacancies I am describing are unavoidable, because people do not rent apartments forever and empty apartments cannot instantly be leased. >there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands And pay the vacancy tax themselves? They'd be in the same position as the previous owners.
    - LordDragonfang 4y ago
      If the taxes are not the obvious hyperbole of 1M/day, there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out - and even accepting that ridiculous premise, there is the escape hatch for giving it the federal government the day-of, who obviously don't care about paying taxes to themselves. The point is that there are logical paths where even punitive (or intentionally ridiculous) levels of vacancy taxes result in a decrease in real prices.
      - whatshisface 4y ago
        >there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out Yes, but they are that the tenants pay the taxes. Capitalists are free to move their money anywhere they want to keep the return on investment up, but people must live somewhere.
        banannaise 4y ago
        An owner-occupier would naturally not have to worry about vacancy taxes. If you are a landlord, can't afford the vacancy tax, and would lose money on tenancy, eventually your most efficient option is to simply give away the home to someone who will happily take it.
  - ajmurmann 4y ago
    Sounds like a great way to make owning and building apartment buildings let's attractive.
    - LordDragonfang 4y ago
      Owning buildings, yes. In this hypothetical and ridiculous scenario, the only people buying would be those who intended to live there. This would decrease prices (it is no longer a speculative asset) and increase home ownership rate. Functionally no one would own a whole apartment building just to rent it out. Individual units would end up being sold the way condos are. Building "apartment" buildings would still be attractive, because they could be sold as condo units. With no one willing to rent, there would a more direct demand from actual buyers. Let me once again reiterate that the 1M/day vacancy tax is an obviously ridiculous proposal, and any real-world policy would have many more caveats and be orders of magnitude less radical. But even something so obscenely and grossly unrealistic has potential for solving the supply issue, so we should be considering the more moderate solutions.
      - abofh 4y ago
        Even then no, I build a 30 unit building, covid 22 hits, nobodies buying, I'm on the hook for 30mm / day. Nobody would even build with that risk. You'd have low density housing, single unit homes and massive traffic/pollution issues often associated with suburban sprawl. Yes, 1m/day is hyperbolic, but if you put the constraint on the suppliers (builders, owners), and the demand is inelastic (you've got to live somewhere), then the outcome is to constrain supply for maximal benefit.
        LordDragonfang 4y ago
        1) Buyers can be arranged during construction 2) A builder can hypothetically continue "building"/renovating the units indefinitely until they have a buyer. Alternatively, nothing about this hypothetical scenario requires the original constructor to even pay the $1M in the first place - it could be deferred, or be another rate entirely. Side note) Landlords/owners aren't suppliers, they are speculators.
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  Rents are price-inelastic and are determined by the economic opportunity of the land. Translation: landlords eat taxes. (Landlords also eat pay-rises.)
  - whatshisface 4y ago
    >determined by the economic opportunity of the land. That makes sense for agricultural land that is being worked as well as it can be, where there are already roads for tractors and no improvement could help it become more productive, but in a city the same square feet of land can support anywhere between one and a thousand residences depending on what is invested in to it. If rent was really inelastic, anywhere that it was profitable to build housing would be a free infinite money opportunity, because no matter how high you stacked the apartments they'd all rent for more than it cost to build them. You'd be able to build a skyscraper with 100 floors of penthouses in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood, if increased supply really did nothing to reduce rents.
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      David Ricardo, Law of Rent. The rent of a land site is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use, relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal (i.e., the best rent-free) land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/rent/ricardian-theory-of-rent/the-ricardian-theory-of-rent-with-diagram/12612 https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/rent/ricardian-theory-of... Income is income ---doesn't matter if that's ag, manufactures, retail, commercial, or wage or salary of a residential tenant. The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases. There's a great, highly readable, 1930s take on this in "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", Bernhard J. Stern. See the section title "Building". https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... https://rentry.co/szi3g https://rentry.co/szi3g
ajmurmann 4y ago
Further, a vacancy tax creates a risk that if too much housing gets build I end up holding the bag. So it creates some amount of disincentive to build or own housing. Just think about owning an apartment building in Detroit in 2008. Everyone moves away. Now I have no tenants and get punished by a tax. I'm already paying a mortgage or opportunity cost for not having my wealth in another form.
- stormbrew 4y ago
  So.. sell or lower your rent? If you’re saying that what you’d do otherwise is sit on a bunch of empty housing hoping for a market correction, it seems like you’re just violently agreeing that such a tax would have a net effect of reducing vacant housing by disincentivizing overly speculative development and holding. In other words, maybe if you’re not holding the bag (that is, your bad investment), that just means everyone else is instead.
  - nybble41 4y ago
    > So.. sell or lower your rent? Say you're already charging the lowest rent that makes economic sense (i.e. at cost) and you still can't get tenants? What then? It's not like anyone is going to want to buy the place from you under those conditions. Your best bet would probably be to tear the place down in hopes that without an actual inhabitable residence on the property it will no longer qualify as vacant for tax purposes. Perhaps even get the land rezoned from residential to commercial. This certainly won't do anything to improve the availability of housing when demand eventually picks back up, but then that's an entirely predictable outcome of attacking "speculation".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
nullc 4y ago
Scarcity prices are determined mostly by the last units available. Imagine demand is just below supply: then very little of the price is driven by scarcity. Now imagine that demand is just above supply: it's not hard for prices to increase dramatically, because every item is being competitively bid on the price will increase until demand at that point is below supply again. The only time you don't expect small improvement in supply to have an effect on price is when you're far from being supply limited.
scotty79 4y ago
Better than vacancy tax is progressive real estate tax. The more properties you own, the higher tax rate on them you have. This would force largest estate owners to drop their properties onto the market like hot potatoes. Then people who own just a few or none could buy them and make better use of them.

whatshisface 4y ago

That would move the needle on pricing... Upwards. By a lot. The only way landlords could afford that would be to get the tenants to pay for insurance against that kind of disaster, and also to include clauses against leaving until a new tenant had signed to replace you.

LordDragonfang 4y ago
Alternatively, they could cease to become landlords, by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Obviously 1M/day is ridiculous, but even in that obscene case there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands - or you can gift it to the federal government, which can sell it to someone who actually wants to live there rather than contribute to the constriction of supply.
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >by ceding the properties to someone who will actually rent out the units, or buy it and actually live there. Unfortunately, the vacancies I am describing are unavoidable, because people do not rent apartments forever and empty apartments cannot instantly be leased. >there are conceivably financial institutions that would be willing to take the real estate off your hands And pay the vacancy tax themselves? They'd be in the same position as the previous owners.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    If the taxes are not the obvious hyperbole of 1M/day, there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out - and even accepting that ridiculous premise, there is the escape hatch for giving it the federal government the day-of, who obviously don't care about paying taxes to themselves. The point is that there are logical paths where even punitive (or intentionally ridiculous) levels of vacancy taxes result in a decrease in real prices.
    - whatshisface 4y ago
      >there are equilibrium options which result in the scenarios I laid out Yes, but they are that the tenants pay the taxes. Capitalists are free to move their money anywhere they want to keep the return on investment up, but people must live somewhere.
      - banannaise 4y ago
        An owner-occupier would naturally not have to worry about vacancy taxes. If you are a landlord, can't afford the vacancy tax, and would lose money on tenancy, eventually your most efficient option is to simply give away the home to someone who will happily take it.
- ajmurmann 4y ago
  Sounds like a great way to make owning and building apartment buildings let's attractive.
  - LordDragonfang 4y ago
    Owning buildings, yes. In this hypothetical and ridiculous scenario, the only people buying would be those who intended to live there. This would decrease prices (it is no longer a speculative asset) and increase home ownership rate. Functionally no one would own a whole apartment building just to rent it out. Individual units would end up being sold the way condos are. Building "apartment" buildings would still be attractive, because they could be sold as condo units. With no one willing to rent, there would a more direct demand from actual buyers. Let me once again reiterate that the 1M/day vacancy tax is an obviously ridiculous proposal, and any real-world policy would have many more caveats and be orders of magnitude less radical. But even something so obscenely and grossly unrealistic has potential for solving the supply issue, so we should be considering the more moderate solutions.
    - abofh 4y ago
      Even then no, I build a 30 unit building, covid 22 hits, nobodies buying, I'm on the hook for 30mm / day. Nobody would even build with that risk. You'd have low density housing, single unit homes and massive traffic/pollution issues often associated with suburban sprawl. Yes, 1m/day is hyperbolic, but if you put the constraint on the suppliers (builders, owners), and the demand is inelastic (you've got to live somewhere), then the outcome is to constrain supply for maximal benefit.
      - LordDragonfang 4y ago
        1) Buyers can be arranged during construction 2) A builder can hypothetically continue "building"/renovating the units indefinitely until they have a buyer. Alternatively, nothing about this hypothetical scenario requires the original constructor to even pay the $1M in the first place - it could be deferred, or be another rate entirely. Side note) Landlords/owners aren't suppliers, they are speculators.
dredmorbius 4y ago
Rents are price-inelastic and are determined by the economic opportunity of the land. Translation: landlords eat taxes. (Landlords also eat pay-rises.)
- whatshisface 4y ago
  >determined by the economic opportunity of the land. That makes sense for agricultural land that is being worked as well as it can be, where there are already roads for tractors and no improvement could help it become more productive, but in a city the same square feet of land can support anywhere between one and a thousand residences depending on what is invested in to it. If rent was really inelastic, anywhere that it was profitable to build housing would be a free infinite money opportunity, because no matter how high you stacked the apartments they'd all rent for more than it cost to build them. You'd be able to build a skyscraper with 100 floors of penthouses in the middle of a rich suburban neighborhood, if increased supply really did nothing to reduce rents.
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    David Ricardo, Law of Rent. The rent of a land site is equal to the economic advantage obtained by using the site in its most productive use, relative to the advantage obtained by using marginal (i.e., the best rent-free) land for the same purpose, given the same inputs of labor and capital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_rent https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/rent/ricardian-theory-of-rent/the-ricardian-theory-of-rent-with-diagram/12612 https://www.economicsdiscussion.net/rent/ricardian-theory-of... Income is income ---doesn't matter if that's ag, manufactures, retail, commercial, or wage or salary of a residential tenant. The restriction of new housing increases rent on the remaining lots. NIMBYism, architectural codes, zoning, etc., serve to restrict what can be built, so that the rent on what can be built increases. There's a great, highly readable, 1930s take on this in "Resistances to the Adoption of Technological Innovations", Bernhard J. Stern. See the section title "Building". https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/page/39 https://archive.org/details/technologicaltre1937unitrich/pag... https://rentry.co/szi3g https://rentry.co/szi3g

ajmurmann 4y ago

Further, a vacancy tax creates a risk that if too much housing gets build I end up holding the bag. So it creates some amount of disincentive to build or own housing. Just think about owning an apartment building in Detroit in 2008. Everyone moves away. Now I have no tenants and get punished by a tax. I'm already paying a mortgage or opportunity cost for not having my wealth in another form.

stormbrew 4y ago
So.. sell or lower your rent? If you’re saying that what you’d do otherwise is sit on a bunch of empty housing hoping for a market correction, it seems like you’re just violently agreeing that such a tax would have a net effect of reducing vacant housing by disincentivizing overly speculative development and holding. In other words, maybe if you’re not holding the bag (that is, your bad investment), that just means everyone else is instead.
- nybble41 4y ago
  > So.. sell or lower your rent? Say you're already charging the lowest rent that makes economic sense (i.e. at cost) and you still can't get tenants? What then? It's not like anyone is going to want to buy the place from you under those conditions. Your best bet would probably be to tear the place down in hopes that without an actual inhabitable residence on the property it will no longer qualify as vacant for tax purposes. Perhaps even get the land rezoned from residential to commercial. This certainly won't do anything to improve the availability of housing when demand eventually picks back up, but then that's an entirely predictable outcome of attacking "speculation".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

nullc 4y ago

Scarcity prices are determined mostly by the last units available. Imagine demand is just below supply: then very little of the price is driven by scarcity. Now imagine that demand is just above supply: it's not hard for prices to increase dramatically, because every item is being competitively bid on the price will increase until demand at that point is below supply again. The only time you don't expect small improvement in supply to have an effect on price is when you're far from being supply limited.

scotty79 4y ago

Better than vacancy tax is progressive real estate tax. The more properties you own, the higher tax rate on them you have. This would force largest estate owners to drop their properties onto the market like hot potatoes. Then people who own just a few or none could buy them and make better use of them.