And Airbnb. Fuck that company and the people that buy houses and use them for this. My parents live in the mountains in a popular spot for vacations and camping. Nowadays they are the only house on their entire street that isn't an Airbnb.
this post was submitted on 26 Mar 2025
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Unused housing should be taxed mercilessly.
And single-family homes should have a 100% annual tax on them, unless they are owned by an individual human/family (none of this LLC bullshit) who own only 1 house. Make a 6-month exception for inherited houses just so they can be sold, but otherwise just tax the shit out of them.
Make hoarding housing a liability.
Disagree, my grandfather's home has set vacant for nearly 4 years now after his passing. The estate cannot be wrapped up due to my estranged uncle not believing the property is worthless.
The county keeps upping the tax assessment, and so he's convinced it's worth something and refuses to visit the preoperty.
On paper this is an unused house in reality the roof finally fell in about 6 months after my grandfather died. The county refuses to condem it because they want the tax revenue and my estranged uncle has held up the estate indefinitely with unrealistic expectations.
I wouldn't say my poor as fuck family deserve a 100% annual tax on the assessed value of a near worthless asset.
I imagine the options would be to pay the tax or just, I dunno, get rid of the property? You said it's worthless.
I mean, he plainly explained that there's a son bogging down the estate over the house. He might have said "worthless" but I'm sure it's more like some land value and essentially zero structure value, so they might want to get a few thousand, while he blocks that transaction holding out for ten-fold. He also asserts the county tax assessments are not consistent with market value, and I think most people who have dealt with tax assessments can relate to the disconnect between realistic market value and tax assessment, one way or the other.
Or even if they did say "fine, you know what, take the property and we'll take the rest and you can deal with trying to extract the value you think there is", if he doesn't agree to that you can't really force it short of fully disclaiming yourself out of the entire estate. So if the man had $200k in other assets, then that would be an expensive thing to forfeit for the sake of not dealing with a busted house on a bit of land.
It's a common problem with estates though even if 4/5 people want to sell it for whatever they can get, that 1 person can keep it in limbo for a very long time. If there wasn't a will or trust that explicitly gave someone power (and even if there is in some cases), a few years of nothing happening isn't actually outside the norm.
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The house is, the land does have some value even after demolition costs. Basically uncle thinks it's worth 200,000. In reality it's worth 40,000, maybe a bit less.
Also my parents have their trailer (does not belong to the estate) on the property. They'd love to settle it, but 1 party refuses.
This plan would actually make my parents homeless as they can't afford to purchase anything else or rent anywhere near where they live. If they could at least divide the proceeds of the land sale they might be able to afford something. This proposed tax would break them
Based on my experience, you managed to described like every rural estate situation I've ever seen. Household living in a trailer towed onto their parents land. That household probably doing a lot to take care of their parents. Then the parents die and suddenly some relative no one has heard from in decades comes along to really screw things up, often from an urban area with zero concept of the market realities of a poorly mantained house on rural land.
I get the whole "hoarding sucks" but it's really only an urban problem. Go to a rural area and you can find plenty of housing stock for cheap.
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6 months to offload a house is not always so easy.
I did a search around the area I grew up that is very rural and I checked 4 properties for sale, two of them under $100k and they've been listed for over a year. In urban areas there's demand, but rural areas commonly have houses just no one wants on land that no one cares about. No distant LLCs want them so they are available, but they aren't convenient to anything so no one wants them either.
That means they aren't worth 100k. Forcing people to sell them for their actual value will lower real estate prices nationwide.
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I don't like the idea of US government taking the property at below market value, since that would violate the takings clause of the Constitution.
What I would be in favor of is a real estate tax that increases if a property isn't permanently occupied. Something that would encourage people to either reduce rent or unload the property.
It should be a reasonably gradual increase so that landlords aren't penalized if they can't find a tenant in the first or second month the unit is vacant. However if it's been a year they should be approaching the point of owing more in taxes than the property is worth.
Then you can take it for back taxes.
It would also discourage air b2b type arrangements, unless you own and live in the property. No more buying a house so you can rent it out for exorbitant rates.
Annual land tax. The more you hoard - the more you pay.
There are specifically tax deductions for taxes paid on your primary residence, so theoretically there is a higher cost to owning multiple properties, however this cost is simply too low to be much of a deterrence
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Couple the increasing property taxes on vacant homes with an agreement that there are no property taxes on properties leased for free to qualified individuals (people who would qualify for government housing anyway essentially) and the government will pay for repairs. The government gets a cheaper place to house the homeless, having only to pay for repairs, the landlord gets an appreciating asset with no repairs to worry about, and the homeless get a place to live. Seems like a win all around unless I'm missing something.
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Honestly I would be okay with giving them 6-12 months of leeway. There's a ton of reasons why it could take 6 months or more to be able to find a tenant, especially if the previous tenant did significant damages or if there's wider economic issues in the area.
I'd be ok with them being able to appeal the increased rate, but they'd need to show that they are actively working to make it ready to rent.
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The current federal government? This is about the United States Federal Government?
LOL, nope don't trust them.
They'll seize the houses of "smaller" landlords and give them to the 1% rich landlords, and their houses would be exempt from the regulations. Then they will raise the rent even more, and this time, they will actually have good lawyers, and the tenants will lose every time.
The government needs to be fixed before we can even attempt to fix other issues.
This government would seize housing, then deny access to people of color, LGBT people, people with disabilities (yes the ADA exist, but fascists ignore laws), probably anyone who ever voted registered as a democrat, and anyone else critical of the regime.
This would have to be done at the state level anyway since they enforce most of the real estate laws.
As a current landlord about to extend a lease at exactly the same terms for 3rd year in a row (and I fix everything within 24 hours) - I agree with this too.
It's ridiculous that my largest store of value is a speculation bubble and a piece of paper with my name on it
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I’m a condo super, there’s one apartment in my building that has been vacant for 5+ years and the owners i think live in Hong Kong. If someone busted in there they could squat for years
Where I live there was a super-popular local bakery. The landlord tried to get them to pay a higher rent and then kicked them out when they refused. The building has now been empty for the last five years. I do not understand the economics of this shit.
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That's terrible. You should post the address and unit number so everyone knows to stay away from it.
Where I live, there's a bunch of abandoned squatter places where drug heads go to shoot up.
There's been countless court cases of the city government trying to sue the landlords who own it. 90% of the time, the lawsuit fails because of some clause where if the landlord isn't able to show up (because they live in a different state or a foreign investor), the court hearing gets postponed.
My city tried to pass an ordinance to remove that clause but it was shot down.
So random crack house owned by some rich asshole in California that's next to a school doesn't get any better for years.
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We need to strengthen adverse possession laws. Adverse possession, aka squatter's rights, were intended for this exact problem. Adverse possession laws were very popular in the 19th century in the American west. In western states, there was a problem. Speculators out east would buy up undeveloped parcels and hoard them for investment purposes. They might buy up a piece of land in rural Kansas. They would wait until homesteaders moved in nearby, worked and built up their own farms. Then the speculators would sell. This was a way for lazy speculators to profit off the hard work of yeoman farmers.
So states passed adverse possession laws. The idea was that if you cared so little for a property that you don't even notice someone openly living on it for 7 years or so, then really, you don't deserve to own that property. There is only so much land on this Earth. We need to be good stewards of our finite land; especially if we're taking that land from its natural state.
We need to strengthen and expand these laws. I would set adverse possession for condos and houses maybe to just three years. We have a severe housing shortage, we cannot afford to let units sit completely unused and wasted. If you own so much property, and care for it so little, that someone can live there for three years without you even noticing? Sorry. Use it or lose it.
Private property is a social contract. We agree to respect private property rights, because we have found through generations that a system based on private property produces a lot of benefits to society. But private property is not some absolute natural right. If you are going to own property to exclusion of everyone else, it is reasonable for you to be required to use that property productively. Why should we bother protecting the property rights of those who are using property in such destructive and anti-social ways like using vacant properties for speculation purposes?
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Ban corporations from owning residential properties. Houses shouldn't be held like stocks or cryptocurrency. Only allow individuals to own a maximum of two residential properties, which must be occupied by the owner at least 5 months out of the year or be surrendered to the government, to be sold to an individual who will live in the house.
In the Netherlands we have wooncorporatie, which are non-profit home rental companies. I think it's a reasonable model, although the center right government tried to get rid of them for years. (Now we have a coalition of far-right parties in power, and they don't even have anything like a consistent ideology much less policy so who can know what the future brings?)
I am a former landlord and I approve of this message. We are back in the house we rented out for 22 years after we moved across the country to a better job, in a place we didn't care for. We kept our house here so we could come back. We rented it out for 22 years at 30% or even less than market rate ($1600 a month in 2022 for a 3 bed two bath house near LA and a 10 m walk from the train) and we endured crooked and incompetent property managers, failed appliances and tenants who didn't pay rent. One became a bank robber after we evicted them for not paying rent. They could have started robbing banks earlier I guess so they could at least pay the rent. Anyway, it worked out very well for us. We are back in our house where we like to live. People and companies who buy a bunch of houses and don't rent them out to give people places to live shouldn't be able to profit from doing that.
Anyway, it worked out very well for us
This proves the point. This is the kind of story that should end "so, in the end we ended up losing money on the place". But, if an absent landlord can hire crooked and incompetent property managers, deal with deadbeat tenants, and still have it work out very well for them then it's an investment where you really can't lose.
I'm sure you're lovely people. I don't mean to criticize you in particular, just the game.
I don't know why you're getting disliked, it's straight facts. And you weren't even mean!
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Based I think the same thing should be done to retail stores. If you can't get people to rent it. Force a sale of the building
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Just apply a 300% tax on empty property. Empty houses don't contribute to the local economy by using local businesses.
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Well they could fix it in 2 years by this logic
That's assuming that there's no such buildings already. That assumption would be extremely incorrect.
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Even if we build cheap apartments for the homeless and fully fund it with tax payer money it actually saves tax payer money and gets the homeless out of the already over stressed healthcare system.
Most homeless are in and out of the hospital for easily preventable diagnosis that is a direct result of living on the street. This would free up a bed in the ED, free up a bed in acute care if admitted, and free up urgent care and other EMT resources.
This has been studied for YEARS. We know the answer to directly solving this without even trying to fix the other systemic issues at play here.
However, having a homeless population is good for capitalism. It's an area where an employer can point to and say, "If you don't work for pennies on the dollar, you'll end up there."
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Housing the homeless is a good idea, but doing it in a random, hap-hazard way is dangerous.
Govt takes over a block of brownstones, and throws a bunch of random people off the street with abuse/violence/psychological issues in them as fast as possible for six months, it's a recipe for disaster.
You have to be careful about housing people as a government, you become (at least partially) responsible for their actions. Somebody starts cooking meth on an end unit and all of a sudden you have a fire that kills 30 people.
When the govt plans housing they can take flammability, safety, and location into consideration. If you're just buying up slums to rehab, most of that goes out the window.
They need to invest in group homes for the people you are describing. One well paid housekeeper oversees 5-10 mixable homeless people. By mixable I mean not mixing those with mental issues in with drug users, etc. This is now impossible to hope for in the US with the horrifically cruel "religious conservative" party in control.
Why pay 40% market value?
How about this instead. If we continue to have rent and landlords, let's make a market incentive to lower prices.
Tax empty housing at a rate proportional to the advertised rental rate. Example, if a landlord has an unused unit listed for 1500 a month, they pay an empty housing penalty of, let's arbitrarily say 20%. Now they have an incentive to fill the unit at a lower price. They can no longer just price-gouge with their competitors to drive up rates. What do we do with the money we receive from those penalties? We provide housing assistance. So now the top and the bottom of the market start to balance each other out. Here's the real cool thing about this system, you can tie that penalty rate to the number of housing-insecure or unhoused people in the population. Now we can have a self-regulating system that provides an incentive to push rental rates down, but also gives low-income renters more money to rent with.
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