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.
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.
Wouldn’t a tax hike only get passed through to the renter?
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.
Never talks of raising taxes on landlords and empty units tho.
Canada passed this law in 2022 addressing that:
What a terrible article. The solution is throwing more subsidies? Of course it's not! The solution is making it illegal to own more than a few properties. It really is that easy.
Why is the for profit house building industry involved in solving the problem they had a hand in making?
Reform the CPA and just build ourselves. Or use the army core of engineers. They are getting paid either way.
Don't be stupid. How else an I going to make money by doing nothing? Get a job? That's for people who don't pull themselves up by their bootstraps!
Raise property taxes 500% for property that is not registered as the owners primary residence.
That should do it
The solution is to build more housing where people want to live.
Don't get suckered into their blame game. This just results in everybody pointing fingers while the prices continue to soar.
Prices only go up because there's competition to buy them.
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.
Not in my back yard! Think of all the poor and homeless. Crime rate always goes up around them! This is a nice neighborhood!
Decommodify housing along with every other human necessity, like water, food, utilities, and healthcare. There's no way that any of these problems will be fixed permenantly otherwise.
My piece of total shit landlord just took 4 months to fix my bathroom then raised rent an absurd amount. I’m enraged.
I mean he had to pay for the repairs somehow /s
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.
We don't need tax credits.
We need Private equity out of the housing market.
We need better safeguards for tenants.
Financial moves like tax credits and incentives always end up benefitting the haves.
How would people here feel about a tax that increases in rate per-property owned? People and organizations can still own as many properties as they want, but at some point they're going to be taxed so much it'll be impossible to profit off of them.
Until we actually remove republicans and republican lites from the legislature I highly doubt we'll see any progressive tax reforms, like actually taxing the rich. You could probably find more support for expanding house buying programs. Stuff like lowering the down payment requirements, and or give a large grant for a portion of the house value if it is high and it could be clawed back at sale.
Could that be because those homeowners are charging rents high enough to cover both mortgage and insurance and more on the rented property?
Correct. In capitalism one must profit off the necessities of life.
Also, when you buy a house, the cost of the mortgage is locked in...assuming you don't do an adjustable rate mortgage which were never designed for long term homeownership.
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.
It's risk mitigation for the banks. You don't have to put 20% down, but generally you'll have to pay an additional insurance (PMI) if you don't.
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.
Its to keep us uppity poors on the down low
When they say "the housing crisis", is that what the poors call the record profit boon?
Of course they are, landlords are buying the house for what you would and doubling the mortgage payment as your rent. It should be illegal for people/corporations to rent out more than one single family home.
Why don’t they just buy homes? Are they stupid?
It's so bad, I would happily accept the mega cities from judge dredd being built.
Ban corporations/private companies from holding empty residential housing. Problem solved. Not complicated. Our system fucking sucks and is designed to protect land owners which is why we're in this situation. This is fucking up our entire society, slowly bringing us down, we're losing to China. This change needs to happen soon otherwise we're going to see the working class get milked hard enough that our real economy will collapse.
A partial solution is to remove nimby laws that prevent accessory dwelling units, duplexes, and medium and high density housing. Then you use the tax laws to heavily punish corporate ownership of low and medium density housing, and make it progressively more expensive for mom and pop landlords after a reasonable number of properties.
Hopefully this would lower the cost for single family housing, while increasing supply and variety of rentals. But somehow you'd have to prevent end stage capitalist collusion from fixing prices so competition could actually work to drive down prices.
If I could, I would pass a law saying that no corporation could own more than two dwelling structures. That still allows them to own things up to apartment high-rises. But only two.
No. You make it so that they cannot hold single family dwellings period unless for the purpose of listing and selling them to non-corporate individuals.
they'd just make nesting doll structured holding companies with all profits going to the top but any losses being contained within each branch
actually this sounds like a great idea BRB gotta register some LLCs in Delaware
my rental office rose my rend $200 and I couldn't afford deposit on a new place. am fucked.
What frustrates me is there doesn't seem to be anyone in a position to promote change to this problem that is really talking about it. They may pay it lip service but nothing beyond that.
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