• Honytawk@lemmy.zip
    795·
    1 year ago

    They really should tax empty houses at 100%. You’ll see how fast they will sell, and how low the price will go to achieve that.

    • Let's Go 2 the Mall!@lemmy.worldEnglish
      372·
      1 year ago

      absolutely agree. It’s insane that we allow corporations to hoard housing and artificially jack up the price. I’m just outside the city limits and I see soooo many homeless people now. A lot of them have jobs too, they just can’t afford a place to live. Some local churches have opened up their parking lots for people to sleep in their cars.

    • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
      17·
      1 year ago

      Agreed, if no one is resident in the house then the taxes should go way up.

      This way any house where the owner isn’t living there and it’s not rented would see the taxes increase quickly. We can even add a multiplier according to how many years the house has been sitting there empty.

      • malloc@lemmy.worldEnglish
        7·
        1 year ago

        In a way, some states do have this. Texas for example has the “homestead tax exemption” which puts a cap on the tax burden increases when prop evals 📈. This is only applicable to one home for the family and they must reside in it. You can’t claim this exemption if you are renting it out or have a summer home in this state.

        This is what I understand anyways.

    • mayo
      8·
      1 year ago

      We do that in Vancouver and it’s good. The fines are steep.

      But it’s opened a mini industry of people being paid to visit homes so they aren’t ‘empty’.

      • MajorHavoc@lemmy.world
        3·
        1 year ago

        Nice.

        Maybe the landlords will get really clever and start paying homeless people to live in their units, so they can pay a rock bottom price to avoid the tax …/s