6 ms·

> Buying a second, third, fourth home? It's too easy for the ultra-rich to find loopholes in any rules. If there is a tax on homeownership, they will simply no

• Yizahi 4y ago
  Make prohibitively expensive for corporations to own residential properties (cut off by square meters or land use type).
  • nomdep 4y ago
    They would create a separated business for each property
    • kelseyfrog 4y ago
      I see this loophole brought up a lot. Is there really no way to prevent it?
      • notahacker 4y ago
        Taxing businesses which own residential property at the same rate as second homes stops that particular wheeze entirely. If you wish to exempt certain types of business you believe have valid reasons to own residential property at low/no property tax rates then that becomes an exemption they have to demonstrate eligibility for, not the default. Second homes being misclassified as non-residential property might be trickier to deal with, but a lot of jurisdictions already have laws around what is and isn't residential...
• nmfisher 4y ago
  Those loopholes are trivial to eliminate, because those laws are already in place* for restrictions on foreign ownership. * in many countries, I don't know about the USA.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• bmitc 4y ago
  Why should corporations be allowed to purchase homes in the first place? Remove that or heavily tax it.
  • bawolff 4y ago
    I don't think its that unreasonable that big apartment complexes are owned by corporations.
    • feet 4y ago
      Is a large apartment complex considered a home? I've never lived in an entire complex, only one unit
    • tluyben2 4y ago
      I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in; that seems not to be reasonable. In fact, it became more reasonable with wfh; now his colleagues living farther away, who he wants in the office 3 months a year, can live for cheap for both sides and without any long term contracts. Definitely cheaper and more convenient than hotels in his area.
      • mikrl 4y ago
        >I have a friend who buys apartment complexes and houses on the company for his employees to live in When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.
        • tluyben2 4y ago
          Anything can be abused, but I don't know the history; I have heard of robber barons, but not in the context of housing and Google doesn't seem to give me more than just their own enormous mansions. It would depend on if it's abused or not, wouldn't it?
• robertlagrant 4y ago
  > Just an investment in a corporation that happens to home a bunch of houses. But what's the point? If they can't get money out then it doesn't matter. The only reason houses are worth holding as an asset is public bodies stopping the creation of more housing, driving the price up. You fix that with less state interference, not more.
  • TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    That's the exact opposite of what happens in the real world. In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values. Countries stop doing this when policy is captured by neoliberal dogma. The UK is a perfect example. Housing was relatively affordable before a disastrous "right to buy" policy in the 70s, with extra enforced restrictions on state house building, destroyed the national housing market. Now most housing is unfeasibly expensive. And hundreds of thousands of properties stand empty because they're owned solely as investments. This is excellent for private landlords, property speculators, and older home-owners. It's an utter disaster for everyone under the age of forty because rents are unaffordable and ownerships is unimaginable.
    • robertlagrant 4y ago
      Right to Buy didn't destroy the housing market. The same people who lived in council housing bought it under Right to Buy. The problem was not building more housing to cope with increased demand. That would've happened regardless of whether the Right to Buyers were renting off the council or had bought their property. > In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values. Public housing, but not housing. The state controls what can be built where, which can drive up demand enough that property becomes a valuable enough asset to let it stand empty. Giving the state more power on top of that to correct that incompetent use of power seems worth questioning.
      • candiodari 4y ago
        But you can't keep building ... that's not good for the environment! It's society enforcing these restrictions, and we absolutely do not want to let go of them. Compromising at all on any of them is considered evil ...
• oblio 4y ago
  KYC plus as people said, no/very limited corporate ownership of residential properties.
• manimino 4y ago
  Yes, there will always be workarounds, but those come with prices of their own (such as time spent getting around them, people to hire, etc.) As an analogy, we catch more dumb criminals than smart criminals - but overall it's still worth having police, even if a few bad guys get away.
  • CadmiumYellow 4y ago
    The cost of hiring people to get around regulations so you don't have to waste your own time doing it is trivial to someone extremely wealthy. Those things really are not deterrents at all. They'd only work on the upper middle class, meaning we'd end up in the exact same situation we're in right now. If you can pay someone to make a problem go away then the very rich are going to do that almost 100% of the time.
• pcthrowaway 4y ago
  Would it not be possible to then tax them on their ownership on that corporate entity, which gets assessed based on its holdings (including, yes, property)? Or prevent companies from holding real estate as an investment vehicle? I'm not naive enough to argue that this is a definitively easy thing, but especially when it comes to housing, the poor and middle class are getting completely fucked right now; it's gotten to the point in the crisis where we absolutely need to do something urgently.
  • quietbritishjim 4y ago
    There's always the next trick. What if that corporation is also saddled with a bunch of debt, such that its net holdings is roughly zero? What if it bought those houses for very little money (from some other friendly corporation) so that, on paper, their value is very low? etc.
• multiplegeorges 4y ago
  This is solved by a beneficial owner registry where you must register the actual human who owns and benefits from the assets of the corporation. This has the added benefit of injecting a ton of extra transparency and sunlight into corporate dealings.