Property tax should be 100% for third houses (there are legit reasons to own 2 houses - especially when helping a family member finance a home or inheriting property) and for any houses not owned by an actual human.
Give developers building a house 3 months to sell after completion. If it doesn’t sell in that time, it gets auctioned off to the highest bidder with no minimum price.
Also give a maximum construction time of like 2 years to keep them from leaving a door off or something and calling it unfinished until it sells for their inflated bullshit value.
Land zoned residential must be developed or sold to an individual human within X years. Empty land that’s zoned residential should be platted with a maximum lot size appropriate to the area to keep them from developing 1 house on a thousand-acre tract and selling it to someone who is trying to sit on the land as an investment.
Essentially, developers need to be forced to build and sell houses at a fair market rate they’re prohibited from manipulating.
also 100% rent tax for second rent and beyond.
you ask rent for one house, fine. maybe you invested in it, inherited it, whatever. maybe you have one house but don’t want to live in it so you have renters in it while you rent another apartment yourself, cool, you do you. you’re paid rent from one source, you pay regular rates. you put a second place for rent, sorry, all of it goes to subsidizing affordable (if not free) housing.
and because I’m a gracious and benevolent pretend lawmaker, you get to choose which single place you get to pay the regular rates for. all the rest of your places get 100%.
market rates can also be enforced with flexible tax rates:
if the market is 100 and you ask for 100, you pay X.
if you ask for 200, you pay X + 100.
if you ask for 300, you pay X + 250.
if you ask for 400, you pay X + 400. and so on.
the government can easily make sure you get not only zero benefit from inflating prices, but actually take losses. if the rich cunts can pay negative taxes, they can handle negative net gains.
My one question with this is, what do you do for multi-unit apartments and such that aren’t condos? Yes, it’s corporate-owned. Yes, that has its own slime that needs to be cleaned up. But it’s also a reasonable way to increase housing density (meaning more housing and, if done correctly, less reliance on cars). Housing rentals do have their place in the world, especially when people only plan on living somewhere for a few years (college students, military, medium-term jobs)
How do you free up the housing market from landlords and investors while not screwing things up for people who would actually be better off renting?
I think this is maybe a tad extreme. There should definitely be diminishing returns for each additional single family home rented, but I propose something like an additional 20% per. So, 20% for the 2nd, 40% for the 3rd, 60% for the 4th, 80% for the 5th, etc. Nobody needs to own more than six single family properties.
My proposal, however, also includes that when we catch some asshat inevitably inventing shell corporations and LLC’s attempting to evade this, as if we couldn’t see that coming a mile off, we don’t tax or fine them.
Instead, we put them in jail.
