No way, it needs to go exponential.

A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.

I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.

After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.

This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.

And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…

I think there should be an absolute cap on liquid wealth and assets. Stocks, bonds, houses, vehicles, properties, all part of the asset pool.

IMO, we should rework the economic system outright - to ensure no one can be wealthy, and to take away incentives to be rich beyond a point. For example, arresting people who have too much wealth, and confiscating their wealth heavily, leaving them with up to half of the wealth caps.

We should aim for a society where everybody is within the same ballpark of agency. Not too poor, nor rich. Just able to live a good life, without trampling on humanity.

Companies that own homes should pay a higher rate per house in general.

Also, I’m voting to raise my property taxes this year. I get the benefit of living in a house AND making sure that public schools can keep feeding and helping kids. Fucking yes please.

Luckily for the billionaires they don’t own any homes, their homes are part of a complex companies, or some bullshit.

Home owners would complain about property values because they care about unrealized gains more than a working economy.

I’d go further (current flat rate)^(number of houses owned -1)

They would use proxy owners to stay at 1%. Maybe every employee of the corporation could be “an owner” for taxation purposes.

That’s not a bad idea.

we should break out the guillotine while we’re at it and solve the rich cunt problem

To an extent “Homestead Exemption” can do this, if the exemption is a significant chunk of the taxable value - which it has been at some times (my first house’s HX was 50% of its taxable value), and not so much at other times (we’re at about 10% now)…

So, if you’ve got 50% homestead exemption, you only get that on your first home and you pay double taxes on others. But, if you’re playing in the 10% bracket that’s basically in the noise.

pass it down to renter

Or just ban mega corps from buying housing stock. It’s not difficult to enforce.

That being said, at least where I’m from, the biggest cause for expensive housing was bad zoning laws + suddenly increased demand due to immigration.

The government laxed zoning laws while (seemingly) temporarily reducing immigration. This has caused housing prices to drop quite a lot