There’s always talk about tax breaks for home owners…
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
That’s what would fix it. Tax them out of the housing market slowly and.prices will go down as they get out of the business.
Indeed. Nothing about this addresses rental markets and general extreme cost of living. Rather, it finds new ways to prop up severely overvalued housing markets.
Housing costs are so high because it’s become an investment over a necessary place for a human to live. A correction is severely needed and long overdue, but the government works hard to keep values artificially high from zoning laws at the bottom to preventing corrections at the top.
That and most people just do the standard deductions.
So tax breaks mostly help the wealthy in mansions.
It’s like how conservatives want to move income tax to sales tax. The wealthiest make a lot more than they spend. And when they spend it’s usually thru some shady shit where they don’t pay sales tax. Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a “company car” from a company they own.
It’s way of dressing up expenses to fit our criminally low corporate tax structure.
It’s a special kind of fucked up that the government is paid for by the poor to serve the interests of the wealthy.
Like claiming seven figure personal vehicles as a “company car” from a company they own.
My parents did this kind of stuff. :/
Gas, restaurants, cars, insurance, etc. Probably so much stuff I don’t even know about. The company pays for it and they pocket the wages they pay themselves. All this while the people that work for them work part time with no benefits, and predictably have unstable financial situations.
But my parents view themselves as financially responsible and their workers as financially irresponsible. They worked hard to build their company but the rewards far exceed their work relative to their workers.
idk what I’m trying to say. I’m ashamed of the way my parents became successful but at the end of the day they played the game how it was meant to be played. Our society is fucked up on every level.
Not really, because the rental market does not behave like commodities do. Generally, you have to live within a reasonable distance of employment. For this and other reasons, renters are much more vulnerable and tend to get exploited far beyond the cost of the service.
Basically, if tenants had any more money to exploit, they would already take it. Rents are maximally high wherever possible to extract maximum money from people who need a place to live.
Consider the common joke that I pay this much in rent every month but the bank says I can’t afford a house where the mortgage would be substantially less.
Agreed, and this would be solved by sufficiently high land value tax - if wasn’t profitable to be a landlord nobody would do it and the price of land would decline sharply. Henry George saw all of this coming a long time ago.
That’s why you set it exponentially based on units owned by parent company, maybe break it down as a tax paid by shareholders for huge corporations landlords.
They could try to pass it on to consumers, but smaller landlords wouldn’t have to pay it.
Making the biggest get out of the game first
At the very least, they should raise real estate taxes on empty units. This will penalize people for owning several vacation homes, as well as incentivize landlords to lower rates in order to fill the unit.
Difficult to enforce, but send a few people to jail for real estate tax fraud and the rest will fall in line.
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
Canada passed this law in 2022 addressing that:
The issue with this figure is that it comes from the Census Bureau, and their definition is broad and simple that it doesn’t into account for example. Here’s the definition they use:
Vacant Housing Units. A housing unit is vacant if no one is living in it at the time of the interview, unless its occupants are only temporarily absent. In addition, a vacant unit may be one which is entirely occupied by persons who have a usual residence elsewhere. New units not yet occupied are classified as vacant housing units if construction has reached a point where all exterior windows and doors are installed and final usable floors are in place. Vacant units are excluded if they are exposed to the elements, that is, if the roof, walls, windows, or doors no longer protect the interior from the elements, or if there is positive evidence (such as a sign on the house or block) that the unit is to be demolished or is condemned. Also excluded are quarters being used entirely for nonresidential purposes, such as a store or an office, or quarters used for the storage of business supplies or inventory, machinery, or agricultural products. Vacant sleeping rooms in lodging houses, transient accommodations, barracks, and other quarters not defined as housing units are not included in the statistics in this report. (See section on “Housing Unit.”)
https://www.census.gov/housing/hvs/definitions.pdf
As you can see this definition doesn’t really take into account a lot of genuine factors. For example, a lot of units are in really poor condition and require renovations in order to be livable again, but they’re counted as vacant because they still have their exteriors in place. Same goes units. They’re also counting units that are not entirely completed, units that are occupied but just temporarily like vacation homes, and mobile homes. We do have a lot of vacant units in this country, but it’s not as much as this figure would lead you to believe. In reality, we need new units, we need a lot of them, and we need them ASAP.
There’s always talk about tax breaks for home owners…
Because governments want housing prices to stay sky high. The canadian prime minister openly said he doesn’t want housing prices to drop because too many people are using their houses as a retirement strategy. That’s why there are so many government programs that support buying a house but none that support renting.
Yeah, the first time I learned about our current vice president, she was trying to allegedly give renters similar tax breaks in California.
I don’t know what happened to that, but I was an immediate fan. Seeing as it never happened, smeh… Not sure what to think. But it’s a very popular idea amongst those of us who can’t afford to buy (most people in California.)
My piece of total shit landlord just took 4 months to fix my bathroom then raised rent an absurd amount. I’m enraged.
This is something I’m currently struggling with. I rent a house and the roof is leaking in two different rooms. Problem is that last time I had the landlord do any repairs he increased my rent by $300 a month. I know that having a leaky roof is damaging his property, but it’s only a minor inconvenience for me at the moment.
I’m not about to spend an extra $6,000+ a year just to preserve his property when I can keep it from bothering me with a tack, some string, and a pitcher for the water to go into.
I’ve never understood the need for a downpayment to purchase. If you can make the monthly payments that’s all that should matter.
In theory I guess it protects against the costs of dealing with defaults or having people walk away from underwater mortgages. But on the other hand, all of that stuff could be insured against.
But on the other hand, all of that stuff could be insured against.
Thats exactly what PMI (Private mortgage insurance) covers. However if the insurance company doesn’t think you’re a good risk, then you might not be able to get that either. I have never looked at what criteria they use to grant or deny PMI. I’ve also never known anyone personally denied PMI.
The downpayment requirements are much looser now then they used to be. Pretty much anyone in the US can get as low as 3 to 3.5% down, which means the down payment can easily be less than all the other home buying expenses (closing cost, inspection, title insurance, loan origination, moving, transfer taxes, …). You also typically have a month before you need to make your first principle repayment, which helps offset the down payment.
Veterans, active service members, and people buying in qualified rural areas can get 0 down mortgages.
Depending on where you live, there might be further assistance available. Around here, the county offers (means tested) down-payment assistance loans that cover 100% the minimum down payment, and has an interest rate that is at least 2% lower than that of the main loan. They also wave all transfer taxes for all first time buyers.
Why don’t they just buy homes? Are they stupid?
Build. Social. Housing.
Its not a difficult concept. The “market” is not going to build anything that lowers the price. The market is not going to build anything fast enough. The market is absolutely not going to give a flying fuck about building to create communities.
That’s stupid, we already tried social housing and it didn’t work. The market is the one and only thing that can reverse the situation, and it has done so before too, we just need to put in place the right incentives
Not in my back yard! Think of all the poor and homeless. Crime rate always goes up around them! This is a nice neighborhood!
Where I live the people in the towns with 5 million dollar home think those of us in the 1 million dollar homes are a criminal element that will invade their town.
The meritocratic, capitalist way, would be to to put a property tax on it and to increase that tax, until
- rents increase so much that people can’t afford to live in cities anymore
- cities lose essential employees
- society shuts down
- THEN property loses value
- then it can be bought cheaply again
- and also rented for a low price, because the tax on the low value property is also low
Let’s go people!
