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You're making it too complex. Enforce owner-occupancy aggressively. You can own two housing units untaxed, as long as you can produce evidence you spent at le
by hakfoo 3y ago
You're making it too complex. Enforce owner-occupancy aggressively.
You can own two housing units untaxed, as long as you can produce evidence you spent at least 30 days a year in each of them. This doesn't disrupt non-speculators-- even the modest rich with a single vacation home, or the snowbirds who have a home in Minnesota and a winter place in Arizona don't see an impact.
Anything beyond that? Annual tax of 70% of its appraised value.
Nothing appreciates fast enough to justify holding it at that cost, so you'd see a fire-sale on housing. Add some cheap state-backed credit to lubricate the transition period, and unoccupied units glut the market while renters become owners.
Multi-family structures might create some interesting situations. With the landlord effectively forced to divest himself of properties, he has to reinvent himself as a service contractor, bidding for the maintenance contract on the buildings he once owned. This would be a great moment for karmic feedback against the ones who had neglected quality and safety-- who'd contract for $200/month maintenance from the same firm that never fixed anything when you paid $1500/month for maintenance-plus-land-access?
- carom 3y agoDo you just hate renters? This sounds like everyone and their child will own a single family home while running an apartment becomes too expensive. Spoiler, the apartments will just become single family homes. LVT only works if it is applied uniformly and with zoning reform. It will actually be a tax break for landlords because they are utilizing their property near the limit of its value.
- ethanbond 3y agoWhat you’re describing is far more complex than an LVT. Interstate records of property ownership and interstate reconciliation of “presence?” Do children or family members using a property for 30 days count?
- hakfoo 3y agoWe already have a fair amount of that infrastructure: * Land ownership is generally public record, or at least orchestrated at local government levels for property tax assessment, school enrollment eligiblity, and other similar local services. * Some states already have concepts of presence-- different tax regimes for part-year residents versus full-year. I'd expect that this would end up being relevant in only a very narrow set of cases. Most cases are slam-dunk clearly "owner occupier" versus "investor-owned", and hopefully they'd put more than a HN post worth of effort trying to define rules that handle the ambiguous cases. I tend to be a bit suspicious of the LVT, because it can create toxic consequences for individual landowners. Sure, if I have an empty lot and a new Job Factory opens next door, a rising LVT creates incentive for me to build. But if I already had a house there, my LVT has tripled and my house is no longer affordable. Locking the LVT to the current owner might prevent that toxicity, but it also encourage all sorts of evasion strategies.
- ethanbond 3y agoPeople have tried this. It’s extremely extremely hard to do in practice even when you’re only trying to measure whether a unit is vacant and don’t need to know where else they’ve been or what else they own.