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?
simply decommodify housing, either by force or with aggressive taxation that makes it effectively poison to try to collect houses like these leeches do. once all the extra houses become poison, the government buys them for a reasonable price.
reasonable for the people, btw, not for the owners. then you provide affordable housing that pretty much acts as a rent, except instead of pouring money into the bank account of a random fuckwit you pay a little extra tax for it.
because it’s super affordable and always available, losing your home is now no longer a big concern. imagine the kind of power this gives people in the workforce alone. let alone general public health and mental stability.
you could have it as rent-taxes as long as you stay, where you can move out whenever, move in to another government housing or maybe buy your own and move there. or you could have the option to rent-until-you-own, where you pay taxes to live in a house until you completely pay it off, and then it’s yours, so long as you don’t own another home. basically like mortgage/credit but without banks and much cheaper installments and overall price.
Ehhh… Your first word was “simply” and that was followed by a 4-paragraph paradigm so different from what we have it’s bound to open many more cans of worms. I’m not sure it’ll be that simple
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.
