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Good solution is to tax land. The land value tax cannot be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice.
Plus, it’s just a super good tax. Progressive, hard to evade, super efficient, incentivizes density and disincentivizes sprawl. It’s so good that economists of all different ideologies agree, from free-market libertarians like Milton Friedman to New Keynesians and social democrats like Joseph Stiglitz.
We should be taxing land, not labor.
One I’ve heard is taxing vacant homes a higher rate as well
So basically if someone owns a home and it’s not their primary residence and no one currently lives there it’s taxed at a higher rate thereby encouraging people to either sell or rent it out
My main issues with vacancy taxes are three-fold:
- The cities with the worst housing crises are typically the ones with the lowest vacancy rates. This makes sense, as if vacancy rates are super high, potential tenants have a lot of negotiating power against landlords, so they can demand lower rents. When there are very few vacancies relative to the number of prospective tenants, landlords have all the negotiating power and can demand high rents.
- Vacancy tax focuses on shuffling ownership of existing units and doesn’t do anything to encourage densification and development. Own a detached single-family home right next to a metro station in the middle of Manhattan? So long as someone lives in it, you pay no vacancy tax, despite the fact it’s clearly a massive waste of some of the most valuable land in the world.
- It’s easier to evade and thornier to implement. For instance, there are a lot of “statistics” thrown about regarding “millions” of vacancies, but many on-paper vacancies aren’t what you or I imagine. For example, “vacant” technically includes student apartments where the student lists their parents’ address as their permanent address. Getting back to the point, if you can just on-paper claim a unit is occupied, you can evade the tax, which means the government then needs to actually go out and check if someone us actually living there at least 180 days out of the year, which is way harder to enforce.
Altogether, vacancy taxes are a pretty marginal solution, and I think our focus is much better spent on land value taxes and YIMBYism (e.g., zoning reform).
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A 2nd property should be taxed at a higher rate regardless.
how would you implement it though? if you just make it directly based off the land area, you’ll tax farmers and stuff unfairly, and if uou do it based on land area and population density, you’ll encourage suburban sprawl
This can probably answer your questions.
A key idea of land value taxes is it’s on land value, rather than land area. Urban land is faaaaar more valuable than urban land on a per-acre basis, so someone who owns 1 acre of land in Manhattan will pay vastly more than a farmer who owns 1 acre in rural Nebraska.
As for appraisal, we already sorta do this with property taxes, as property taxes tax the land value + improvement value. With land value taxes, we simply seek to tax just the unimproved land value. Why? Property taxes can disincentivize development and incentivize land-hoarding and speculation. In contrast, even a milquetoast land value tax has been shown to reduce land speculation.
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Property taxes can disincentivize development and incentivize land-hoarding and speculation
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Okay but farmers already get so many subsidies that it wouldn’t at all be hard to write exceptions already built into the lower for them? Hmm.
I recently was looking for apartments and got a lease which included a clause to pass property taxes onto tenants, including any new taxes introduced while you were a resident. The additional expense was counted as rent for non-payment purposes. Another clause placed a lien on the contents of your unit upon nonpayment. Absolutely insane slumlord shit in some nice new apartments. The landlords must be stopped.
Land value tax will get many surface level parking lots erased in downtown areas, returning density to downtown cores. It becomes a lot less profitable to stay a surface level lot the more the land value/land value tax increases. Put up new housing/workplaces in their place and be more space effecient by using underground parking/parking garages.
Every one of those people you just named are foundational economists of Neoliberalism. A system we tried and is part of the reason the world is so shit.
Enough with the old ideas already.
What about Henry George, then?
Henry George (September 2, 1839 – October 29, 1897) was an American political economist and journalist. His writing was immensely popular in 19th-century America and sparked several reform movements of the Progressive Era. He inspired the economic philosophy known as Georgism, the belief that people should own the value they produce themselves, but that the economic value of land (including natural resources) should belong equally to all members of society. George famously argued that a single tax on land values would create a more productive and just society.
I completely agree. In my utopia there’d only be property tax and consumption tax (sales tax). Everything else is tax free.
Another alternative is transaction tax, but that’s impossible to implement, even if everything seems to be pointing at governments going in that direction. All governments in Europe are trying to implement complete accountability for transactions, but I can assure you that if they tried to tax it, there’d be no transactions at all. Everything would bypass the concept of money itself and everyone would keep a private ledger.
It’s a classic philosophical discussion about holistic (tax the land) vs reductionism (tax the transaction).
I’m not a fan of sales taxes, because they tend to be more of a burden on the poor than the rich. I much prefer a marginal income tax to that.
Personally, I think our philosophy of taxation should be “tax what you take, not what you make”.
Because there’s finite land on Earth and nobody has created it, you occupying any parcel of it necessarily denies others from its benefit. Hence, a land value tax in proportion to the value of land you have taken from the rest of society.
Similar for finite natural resources. There are finite mineral deposits, finite oil deposits, finite phosphate deposits, etc., and anyone who extracts them takes something from the rest of society. Hence, we ought to have a severance tax in proportion to the value of the resource you have taken from the rest of society.
And also similar for negative externalities. When you pollute a river or the atmosphere or cause any other negative externality, you are forcing those around you to bear some of your costs, that is you are taking value from them to give to yourself. Hence, we ought to have externality taxes (aka “Pigouvian taxes”) in proportion to the amount of harm you have caused to society.
Further, I think taxing along this principle leads to the best overall outcomes, not just from an abstract sense of “fairness”, but from pragmatic economic outcomes.
Take land value taxes: economically speaking, LVT is just a great tax with great properties that has seen great empirical success.
Or severance taxes: Norway has used them brilliantly to solve the resource curse.
Or Pigouvian taxes: basically all economists agree carbon tax-and-dividend is the single best climate policy.
But yeah, absolutely everything else should be tax-free. The government shouldn’t even be tracking your income, much less taxing you on it. Tax the land hoarders and polluters instead.
This will do the opposite of what you want. All of these policies disproportionately cause poor people to remain poor.
It’s not intuitive and it sounds great till you realize that unless you tax wealth and income with a progressive rate well into the 90% at the highest levels.
People who are wealthy don’t give a single shit about consumption tax. They also don’t care about transaction taxes (unless it’s progressive). A person with a million dollars doesn’t care if milk costs 5 bucks or 6 bucks a gallon… But the person making the minimum wage absolutely cares.
Sales tax is deliberately regressive, taxing the poor more than the wealthy. Why would you have it, rather than income tax?
land taxes are circumvented by improvements building-height technology, by faster transportation (fast cars, wide highways, or faster trains), and by pollution of the surrounding environment.
I agree that taxing land is a good idea, but it’s really hard to do in practice. How you put a value on land?
Income tax is easy to put a value on, because it’s right there on your pay slip. But what’s the value of land?
http://gameofrent.com/content/can-land-be-accurately-assessed
The key downsides of income taxes, though, are it requires tracking everyone’s income, and it’s very easy to hide income by doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash. In contrast, it’s impossible to hide land.
The line between the wealthy and the rest is often a willingness to ignore the consequences their actions have on others.
It’s almost always exploitation, or being part of a system that already exploits.
IDK about you all, but renting out a property sounds like a gigantic pain in the rear.
I rented from an awesome landlord in college, he’s just a genuinely good dude. I’m still friends with him. While I was in college, I saw the treatment he got from my fellow renters, and how they treated the property we all shared. I didn’t appreciate it, since if they messed something up, I would have to deal with it until my landlord was able to fix it. He didn’t deserve to be treated like that, and I certainly didn’t appreciate how much shit I had to endure because they were stupid.
Everything from leaving windows/doors wide open in the middle of winter, idling a truck with a side exhaust in the driveway right next to the open side door, filling the house with carbon monoxide and setting off the CO alarm. Plenty more that I just won’t go into. My least favorite was one dickhead… I have no fucking clue what his deal was, but everytime his computer was online, everyone else would lose their internet connection; internet was included in the rent, so we couldn’t even tell him to knock it off because we were directly paying the bill for it… So he gave no shits at all about it. I offered to look at his computer to try to figure out why in the hell it was creating the problem and he actively refused. I ended up getting permission from the landlord to overhaul the internet router, I installed a dd-wrt capable unit and set per-IP throttling rules that meant each person could only use up to a certain amount. It was something like 60% of the rated speed, so, not slow, but it was enough to keep any one system from basically DOS-ing everyone else.
My landlord cut me so much slack from day one. No last month payment? no problem, you’re waiting on student loans, and won’t get the money for three weeks? Sure, I’ll see you in three weeks then. He didn’t even lock people into a minimum 1 year lease, so you could move out at the end of the semester and save the rent over summer. He even brought me booze to try out on a few occasions. He’d just randomly pour me a shot and be like, try this! Just a really good dude.
I saw how often he came to the house to fix the shit that my roommates damaged, and how much work he had to put in week after week to keep things going. I don’t want to fucking do that shit. I don’t even like having to do chores around my own damn house, nevermind cleaning up after some asshole tenants. Of all the things I learned while watching and talking to my old landlord, I learned that I don’t want to be responsible for someone else’s mistakes like that… Even if I’m charging them for the damages and they pay for it, and that goes smoothly (which, let’s face it, it usually won’t), I just don’t want the hassle and the headache.
I’m sorta in the same boat except my tenants are awesome. Old homes have old problems and I’m constantly changing or fixing. Honestly with all things said and done, with all the time spent and the cost of repair, if I would have just put the money in the S&P500, I would probably have broken even.
This past weekend one of the dryers broke. I sent a guy out there to repair it. He came back telling me the part cost more than the machine. Great. $250 wasted. Fine. I have to buy a new dryer. Take time off work to have it delivered. First one comes. It shows up broken. Fuck. Fine. Take another day off to get a replacement. Fuck second one comes damaged. OMFG! Just ordered a 3rd one from a completely different company. Gotta take another day off. Who knows on Tuesday if this won’t be the same issue.
Last I heard my old landlord/friend was massively renovating the place, he stripped it down to the studs and I think he even added another floor to the building. He was redoing everything. At the time he was waiting on a permit to continue the work. He was putting in the time and effort to modernize and reduce his efforts long term. Hopefully that works out for him.
I hope your Tuesday delivery is smooth and that the new unit arrives undamaged in working order.
All the best.
Thank you. Might be a good idea to redo the home at this point.
Yeah I don’t understand the landlord hate on lemmy. Some landlords suck, but lots don’t. Many people can’t afford to buy a home. Where are they supposed to live if renting doesn’t exist?
Then what about hotels? Are they also evil for buying and renting property? Should people have to buy a property while traveling for a week?
Where does Lemmy think we should draw the line?
I get it. I don’t agree that all landlords are bad, but many are.
I would support a raise in property tax that’s matched by a discount for primary residences. So most families will not see a difference, while people who own multiple homes and landlords need to pay more for taxes.
In addition, putting a cap on how much property a company can purchase in a year for the purpose of renting; as well as giving incentives for larger rental buildings like high-rises, since it can dramatically increase the amount of available units while preserving the amount of available property available for single family homes.
All of this would be to incentivize rental companies to build more large rental structures, instead of buying up a hundred homes and renting entire homes to people. IMO, renting an entire house should not be something that anyone can do (as in offering it as a rental). I know this has been what many do to try to reduce their overall spending, but bluntly, if instead, you can get an affordable home that you can mortgage for a similar monthly amount, then you’ll be far better off in the long run. If credit is a problem (poor credit, or a bad credit score, and/or no credit), then there’s rental units from high rises.
I just want to see the family homes given back to families to own… Not just rent and live in forever, never owning it and never having anything to show for it.
Unfortunately that view, if it ever came to be (and realistically, I don’t expect it will), would put my landlord friend out of business for renting, and bluntly, I would be unapologetic about it. Simply, the policies would ensure that homes are going to people who want/need them, and who will personally use them. I have every confidence that he would be fine since renting isn’t his only source of income. I believe both he and his wife have fairly well paying jobs. There was a time that they didn’t, and they needed the extra income from the rental house to make it, but I don’t think that’s really the case anymore.
Making it hard to impossible to maintain a rental property as an individual, and making it difficult for any business to buy such properties that they can then rent, while pushing the rental companies to build more high density apartment style rentals, IMO, could solve a lot of problems that we’re having with the housing market. It would force out a lot of would-be landlords, and make the whole endeavor unprofitable without significantly increasing rent. The increase wouldn’t be tolerated by the market because there would (hopefully) be plenty of inexpensive apartment rentals available.
If we can swing this axe just right, we can basically put these landlords out of business, and free up all their would-be rentals for single families looking to buy.
IMO, it would also crush a lot of the investment property people, who buy homes with no intention of living there or renting it out, and they just sit on the deed until the market value goes up. Now the holding costs of the house are far higher than their potential return on investment and they would cut their losses, flooding those homes into the market as well.
I’m not saying the plan is easy, or that it won’t backfire on us. I’m just saying that it’s better to do this than sit on our hands waiting for so many people to become homeless because they can’t afford rent that the landlords and investment property people no longer have anyone to sell to. That’s when I see property costs falling. When people have given up so thoroughly on having a place to live that they refuse to even rent anymore because the costs are simply too high.
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The game is the player, and I have more than enough hate to go around.
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The player does everything in their power to prevent the game from stopping.
I can hate both, thank you.
the game wouldn’t exist if no one played it
Some people can’t understand why there are individuals who don’t want to do anything to make a quick buck, including waylaying your morals.
Maybe we can use some of these taxes we’re paying to provide things like housing and healthcare instead of buying billion dollar bombs to kill brown children, or giving subsidies to the disgustingly wealthy. Radical thought, I know!
It makes me mad that people who argue this can’t answer the extremely simple and obvious question “so do you think everybody can do this? How does that work if everyone owns two properties, who’s renting?” Cause you need at least an equal amount of people renting as there are landlords.
Obviously, the answer is that some people are winners and some people are losers and if you can’t own that second property you’re obviously a loser who did something wrong to deserve it. But they’ll never cop to that, cause there are just so many easy ways to shut that down not to mention it makes them look like monsters. Not the least of which is that if the system necessitates that at least half the people are “losers” then it’s not based on merit.
One of the worst facets of capitalism is that in order to get richer, someone else has to get poorer, and its damn near impossible to stop that someone else from being someone who is already poorer than you. Its just how the system works. The more money you have, the easier it is to keep it, so anyone getting wealthier, even just climbing out of lower class is therefore indirectly pulling the ladder behind them without even knowing it. Capitalism is built upon ladder pulling.
To be fair you can be a landlord and live on a rented property at the same time. That way everyone can benefit!
But jokes aside, I agree.
An answer could be: You rent while advancing your career, and eventually become a landlord when you retire, renting to other young people.
Mind, this is not something I believe. Just a reasonable answer to your question I thought of.
Yearly inspection laws need to be passed. Where the government forces landlords to actually do work and keep everything up to code.
Landlords should have to be legally regsitered and certified, taking courses to stay up to date on landlord/tenant rights and responsibilities. They should also have insurance/financial proof they can adequately maintain their properties and cover unexpected maintaince costs.
The only counter argument against this, is that it would cause an increase in rent prices
However, landlords will gladly raise the rent for literally any reason at all, so the increase in rent will happen anyways.
Basically, there’s actually no reason this hasn’t already been passed other than that poor people don’t pay for elections.
My brother keeps trying to get me to do this when we move. Yeah sure let me just make my neighborhood shittier by turning my 100 year old home into a shitty rental.
“Passive income” is really other people’s income. I like how this term makes explicit that it is the owner class who don’t work.
Honestly I’m really torn on this one.
Not on the existence of landlords, eff them (that doesn’t mean either buy or be homeless, government owned complexes/developments can be a thing.)
I’m torn on the idea that this isn’t going to stop, there is always going to be a selfish asshole that will buy as much as they can to make as much as they can off of other people, so if you have the opportunity to do it and be a good landlord, then why not? I get that they are generally shitty, and the concept absolutely fucking sucks, but we live within this “game” and it’s going to be played by the worst actors, so why not benefit from it while still being a “good” landlord. Maybe to you that means cost +$50. Or cost +$100, whatever.
IDK, I don’t even have enough money to buy my own house let alone become a landlord lol
I manage a family flat. The price is pretty much the half of the region + if the person doesn’t own a car, the spot can be rented for 1/3 of the rent. Since I rented it, it has been passed down to friends. The other lady that rented it just told me if it was ok to let her friend live there, with a proper contract.
Being a good landlord isn’t profitable, because if you earn any profit off of exploiting a life necessity then you’re a parasite.
we have a few properties in the family, they’re basically all paid off so we can charge less compared to the big companies who just accumulate more just to overcharge again.
i don’t know the specifics, but we basically HAVE to take care of our rentors and their houses, or they can sue us.
the amount-of-owners/houses ratio seems to generally be higher in gerrmany as well.
(nothing of this is based on statistics, just on observations my dumbass made)
america continues to be a lawless wasteland.
I always felt that property taxes should be a federal thing… A wealth property tax so to speak. States get their normal cut, but extra fees in the form of taxes for home owners/businesses that have more than 1 (or 2) homes.
Bonus points for extra taxes on unoccupied residences. NO MORE EMPTY HOMES! Shit should be like some states have mandatory health insurance. Must have a full time resident for 9/12 months of the year or else you get NAILED with fees in the form of taxes. This would also help with that pesky “foreign people buying homes in the US and leaving them empty” issue as well as the AirBnB bullshit.
All proceeds from these new taxes go to creating affordable housing complexes.
okay good for you I guess