No person should be allowed to own more residential property than they’re realistically need for living.
I’m just curious how we’ll define “realistic”, because someone who’s into just software programming might be satisfied with a studio apartment. I can’t live without my basement workshop however. I like to make stuff.
That’s valid. But, for example: You don’t need a dozen of different houses.
Would a handyman who is fixing up several at a time need that many?
How many houses can a person fix at once? Do you need to own them while fixing them? Why?
Does the handyman permanently live in all of them?
Either end of the scale is clear. Less clear in the middle 😞
Do you allow couples to own two houses then? How do you prevent two people living together from not owning a second house to rent?
Also, you’d be surprised just how little a person needs to live in lol.
I don’t think we need to make this literally true - we can put in a lot of wiggle room, because we just need to restrict doing this at scale
Say, no more than 2 homes per household, 1 extra for each additional adult. You want a vacation house, or a place near work? Fine. You want to buy another house and take your time moving? Fine. You want both? Make some compromises.
Or we could make the limit 5 per household - that would be excessive, but if they couldn’t rent them out it would still decomodify housing, because it’s people buying homes at scale that really is killing us
From there, you’d crack down locally - if you want to live in the boonies, I don’t care if you have 5 acres. If you live in a city with a housing shortage, maybe you only get a certain square footage per person, maybe certain areas are primary residence only, or however you want to slice it
This is it right here. Housing is a right, not a commodity. Landlords shouldn’t exist.
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You could have just stopped at “allowed.”
My friend owns three houses, the one he lives in and two he rents. He incorporated for tax purposes. Your saying he can’t own the rental property because he’s now taking advantage of the tax laws?
Limit it to corporations of a certain size then. It’s not people like your friend that are doing the bulk of the damage. It’s large corporations buying up entire neighborhoods to rent them forever.
That’s one persons opinion, but yes that’s what they are saying
You mean to say your friend incorporated for tax purposes because owning three houses would’ve been resulted in being taxed at a higher rate? That should be evidence enough.
Unrelated but related: shell companies for the purposes of evading taxes should also not be an acceptable practice.
That and as a real estate agent in Southern California it helps with his tax burden when selling houses near 1M. If the commission goes to his corporate account pays himself a taxed salary it’s less than the taxes for the full amount. The rental is more of a long term investment than a profit from rent.
Huh, I thought this was about corporations tearing down apartments to build offices, but apparently that’s not what everyone else was thinking.
Because that’s not the driving cause of minimum rent ballooning past the “30% of income” guideline for median earners in nearly every city in the US, while home prices are getting too high for someone spending more than 30% of their income on rent to save enough for the down payment necessary to be able to afford buying a home.
THIS is the housing crisis. Not a lack of residential buildings for people to live in, but rather people being priced out of home ownership at every step of the game.
The thing causing such price increases? Corporate ownership of residential buildings, because when they’ve bought out all the housing in an area they can set the price at whatever they want to make that money back. They have far more money and credit to buy up these homes than 999,999 out of a million individual owners, and they can use that to strong arm us out of the market. If you’re not already in the game, you’re barred from entering.
Yeah.
is is basic leftism. if you think that statement is wrong, you’re not a fucking leftist
Hmm, I think large corporations should never be allowed to purchase residences though anyone is allowed to create a corporation in the US you’ll just need to declare a CEO, COO, and a treasurer. This could be a simple mom-and-pop family business with 3-4 people/employees, this could prevent a lot of normal people/small business owners struggling to create a profit from purchasing workspaces, their own home, work equipment.
yep
Easy solution in my opinion:
- only humans can own residential buildings
- you must live in the building you own
I have extended family that fall into “lower-upper class” but also know their income has an end date (comes from a lucrative career). They saved up and every time one of their kids turned 18, they bought a house to use as a rental property with a “just in case, my child will never end up homeless” gameplan. Not a huge cash expenditure for them and not a huge profit center, it bought them peace of mind a WHOLE lot cheaper overall than adding an apartment to their house for him to move back into as an adult.
I always found that reasonable, and it did in fact keep them from ending up with a basically homeless 30-something.
I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently. There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest. The kids would be able to buy the houses themselves at 18 and the parents would have the same outcome, just bad actors would not be able to buy up the market.
To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.
I understand the idea and its great if they were able to do that but the world would look a lot different if they would actually do it differently
I don’t think anyone has demonstrated that’s true. If everyone but megacorporations stopped owning property other than the one they live in, I don’t thin housing prices or rent would go down. In fact, it would have unexpected side-effects like increased rental rates (since you’d have to jump through even more hoops). Imagine if you will, the pre-flip car lease market. Owning cars was the way of the poor, leasing a new car every few years was the way of the rich. If only owner-occupied could be rentals, rent would skyrocket and the MANY people who want to rent would have to fight with each other. Consortiums would find a legal way to buy luxury rental buildings and have a dedicated “owner” live in them. As you implied, supply and demand. A lot of people don’t want the liability of property ownership for reasons other than “being too poor to buy a house”.
There would be more houses to buy and they would be cheaper, their money would need to be put in other things to collect interest
Yeah, it would collect more interest. So long as nothing happened to them (which it hasn’t), they’d end up a lot richer. But it’s a lot more risk because if something did happen to them, it would be harder for that money to be earmarked into a trust in the kids’ name like the houses are. So they would have had to live with the real risk that their son would end up homeless, but yay they’d have a lot more money.
The problem with a lot of people suggesting real-estate reform is that they don’t understand why individuals (not big businesses, that’s different) buy rental houses. It’s rarely about maximizing profit, it’s about minimizing or mitigating risk.
To be clear: your extended family is not the problem imo and would not suffer from a law like this.
Except, it sounds like you just said they would not be allowed to do what they did, and would be stuck with riskier propositions. Those houses were purchased under little LLCs so that if they got sued into bankruptcy their kids would still have a home (they themselves are under Homestead protections like most homeowners in my state). Not that they expected to be sued, but it’s called “doing anything to make sure my kids don’t end up on the street”. That’s what happens when you grow up in poverty. And there really is no better, simpler, and more reasonable way to make sure your kid won’t be homeless than to buy them a house. And if you’re not filthy rich, that doesn’t mean buying it cash and handing it to them on a silver platter. (technically, I think that silver-platter method would still be allowed under the plan I’m objecting to because the kids would have an owner-occupied house in their name… yay rich people I guess. My family isn’t rich enough for that)
I think you made valid points there. I‘m not familiar with any of the anti bankruptcy measures you just named. Sounds like your family did their research.
To be honest, I still dont think your family is the problem but I dont feel like this is a fair discussion among equals.
I said my piece and you questioning my motives kind of unnerves me. Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.
But I‘m still not after families that try to secure their childrens future. As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.
I’m not questioning your motives directly. I’m suggesting that the changes you’re looking for are still going to cause more harm than good to most people.
Is your family privileged? Absolutely! Is it fair to the others that they are able to buy homes and even keep them if they fucked up financially while most other lose everything? Not in my opinion.
Have you ever read Harrison Bergeron by Vonnegut? I’m not a capitalist, but I still firmly believe you need to show your work when you want to take action that hurts the lower 99% to “even the playing field”.
As a privileged person, you might want to add some empathy to your answers in the future.
You just wrongly accused me of not having af air discussion among equals, and then you pull this? The only thing you know about me is that someone in my extended family has made enough money in their life to buy two rental properties. They don’t owe me anything. How does that make me privileged?
Further, you’re accusing me of lacking empathy. Why? I have the same problem with preventing them from buying a house as you would have if I said we needed to kick EVERYONE out of their homes because somebody out there is homeless. It’s the same thing to me. It’s obviously not the same thing to you. Do I get to say you lack empathy because of it? Because I don’t plan to. Instead, I like to engage as to why that’s a bad idea.
No more vacation homes/apartments?
Good question. I didnt think of this. Maybe one needs to make an exception for hotels or something? Obviously this would need to be restricted so residential homes dont get transformed to hotels en masse.
Corps can’t own houses
People can only own a few (say, 2) houses (Marriage, death, inheritance, etc. This makes things easier in the long run).
Multi tenant buildings must be majority owned by a tenant co-op, where all tenants have equal say in all building related things and share in the profits This makes sure landlords can’t raise rent without convincing the tenants that it’s worth the price, incentives the tenants to either maintain the property or hire professionals, and makes their rent an investment in their property, just like a home owner
I’m sure there’s holes all over this plan, but I (and some friends) have put thought into this one a bit.
And this happens if people interested in the matter start discussing. Thank you for this great addition.
- And you may own one cabin but it must be used by you and cannot be rented out
Sounds great. When do we announce our international party to our voters?
You do what you want, it’s your cabin
I think there should be some leeway for people who own one home, but want to temporarily live in another city, so they rent their home while living in another rental property at the other city.
I think that is something that could be discussed but we‘d need to make sure peeps wouldn’t just search for a way to circumvent the law (which is always a problem).
True, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be easy to do. If you own more than one home, BAM, penalty tax that is equal to 100% on the rent on that property. If your second home is empty, BAM, quadruple the property tax. You’ve just made owning a second home impossible to profit from.
Okay! Bold but I like it.
We need folks to run with this for political offices though.
Funnily enough, between the time I wrote the comment you replied to, and the time I saw your response I thought of a loophole capitalists could exploit which needs to be addressed.
If corporations aren’t allowed to own residential properties, and a person is only allowed to own a single home, a capitalist could find a person who doesn’t own a home in that territory, buy them a house with the condition that they will manage the property and get 99.9% of the profit it generates. That way, a corporation could go business as usual while technically being compliant…
The proposed law needs to include a section that addresses these sort of loopholes.
I already thought of this as a potential loophole but chose to ignore it since there will be a ton more. Imo, the law should be made as vague as possible and include something like „if a company by any means gains the ability to own or control residential buildings, they should pay twice the amount of revenue (not profit) they make of it. In repeating cases, all people involved with the transaction as well as all directors of said company face up to 10 years in prison.
I think laws should be as clear as possible, not vague. By making a law vague, you’re leaving it for the courts to interpret, and there are plenty of Florida judges who would absolutely stretch their interpretation of the law in a way that conforms to their beliefs.
But I completely agree that making it a criminal act to attempt to circumvent this law would be a key here. Maybe even forcefully dissolving the company entirely for repeating offenders.
Corporations shouldn’t be allowed, period.
Corporations don’t have to be about making tons of money. They can be about organizing people to accomplish things that they couldn’t individually. You then make money just to give those people a living wage and keeping the lights on.
This doesn’t even need to have a legal framework. Just a couple of people who agree to take up certain tasks is a company.
Fine but they shouldn’t be considered as people, lobbying should be illegal, fines can’t just be part of the business plan, money is not free speech, and if a corp is caught doing illegal activities it should go to jail or be broken up like the rest of us.
At least 20 corporate shills have seen this post
no real estate taxes for the first house owned, heavy and progressive taxes starting on the second, is an idea
companies get called people all the time, i’m starting to believe it, but i still think they don’t need shelter, so they shouldn’t be able to aquire a basic human need
I have a feeling they’d just pass those taxes onto the renters.
A co-op is another form of corporation. Dense, multi-family structures should be done that way.
What we don’t want is for housing to be a speculative investment. Remove the profit motive of holding a house that’s empty and reselling.
Up until very recently most housing in Finland was co-ops, and it’s still extremely common although many new developments are built and owned by corporations which then rent them out.
I live and own shares in a new housing co-op (proportional to the size of my apartment), and all of us together own and run the building and we’re renting the property from the city (although you can buy your share of that property off from the city if you don’t want to pay that rent.) It’s not a perfect system by any means but it’s better than corporations owning everything; ideally the people who live in a building are the ones who decide how it’s run, but of course that’s sort of gone out the window too with rich people just buying properties speculatively and to rent them out. If enough of the shareholders in a building are rent-seekers, upkeep of the building is going to go way down because they don’t live there themselves and don’t give a shit about whether it’s a nice place to live in, they care about making a profit.
Damn. Someone that actually understands how things work and isn’t just painting absolutes across the board.
This just results in larger complexes being owned exclusively by the ultra rich. This idea outlaws the very concept of a co-op.
While I agree, if that were a law, they would just get all residential property (except for their neighborhood) rezoned.
Edit: Man, you guys really missunderstood my comment. I wasn’t saying we should roll over and die, I was just saying that wealthy shitheads cheat and steal.
I guess corporations are just our rulers and and we shouldn’t even try to restrict them because it might make them mad at us.
Did you know that unlike a corporation, you actually have a say in what your government does?
If they try to get an area rezoned, people can actually just say “no”.
This isn’t some weird fantasy either, it actually happens all the time if you pay attention to your local government activity.
Rezoned to what and how?
