Grandma is on her own
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Buy 25 homes, get a free homeless person.
Gotta catch them all
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So you're saying granny would be fine with a 100% return on her investment at $36 for an offer? No? Shocked I say, shocked.
Granny is part of the problem. Not the biggest part of the pie, but still guilty.
Inflation is a thing that exists. Saying that someone is bad simply because they want to update the value of their property is dumb. Also, let's say granny wants to downisze. Should she sell her home for a value way below market and then be unable to buy a smaller home for herself?
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Most people aren't homeless because there is no house available
It's amazing how I can add the word "affordable" to your statement and you're suddenly wrong.
You see this as wanting to tax second homes while ignoring that tons of people are homeless because they can't afford to live somewhere because of shitheads holding onto empty housing as an investment at the expense of the common person.
So yeah, let's tax any house left unoccupied for more than half the year. If you can afford to have 2 houses, you can afford to pay more for the one you don't live in so maybe we can free up some of them and lower the cost of housing.
There will still be a lot of people homeless even with affordable houses since they most likely cannot afford a house.
Social housing doesn't have to be affordable, it just needs to be there, but that has little to do with the availability of houses and more the amount of people that can be processed by the system. At least in NL.The issue all around the globe is people owning more than one house. You can only live in one so they rent them out. Generally asking way to much since they took a mortgage for it, costs are deductable against the profit. So you always end up paying the mortgage rate for the house you rent + a profit margin for the owner.
If you stop people having 2, 3 or more houses or at least make it a lot less likely for people to own more than one. In NL some people are also debating if we should remove the deductibility of mortgage rates.
Houses costing 1m or more being empty doesn't do anything for the homeless, they will not be able to afford that. A lot of the houses in the empty house statistics are include houses being built/renovated/destroyed etc. Heck in the US (and other countries) you have some ghost towns, are those counted as well? Or houses that are rented out for tourists? How many of them where empty for more than 6 months?
Taxing empty houses is fine, don't get me wrong, but the not building medium density houses, places where you can walk and/or bike and actually want to live, the lack of social security and people owning 2 or more houses are issues as well.
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The problem that there are many homeless outweighs the problem that somebody wants to have a holiday home. Soliving the homeless problem by not solving the holiday home problem is valid.
I think many people (USians in particular) need to have it described to them this simply.
It’s just assumed in so many situations that somebody’s right to enjoy their legally-acquired property supercedes any concerns about the life or suffering of others living in the same system.
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I'd sacrifice your family's hunting cabin if it helps house more people. Find a sixth person or something.
It's an edge case that shouldn't hold up societal progress.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]No, it shouldn't hold up societal progress. But not being aware of how your policies actually affect people is just plain bad. I agree with progressive taxes on multi house ownership, but you also need to understand that will mean people who are less rich than you think losing them, it's not just people that can afford them. And it's not as far an edge case as you think, I believe
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I've said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn't occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.
At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they're better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.
"But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?" If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.
"But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!" Doesn't matter. If they're vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.
Been shouting this for fucking ages.
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Ngl, $950K for a house sounds like a steal. Can’t buy a tear-down starter home around here for that cheap…
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Nah, I'm not opposed to the proposition, and understandably any such tax law (if legislated with due consideration) should take into account cases where the effect may be otherwise than intended (or be amended with further subsequent legislation). Corporate squatting is a literal travesty.
I was just a bit baffled at the gall of supposing that the cost/benefit calculation of this kind of lifestyle choice could be up for second-hand proscription.
I certainly don't want to decide for your family how to live their lives, but five parties just so scraping by doing the payments on a hunting lodge seems miserable for everyone involved. Wouldn't it be possible to rent one instead / buy one in a cheaper area / rent out the lodge when not in use?
I also wouldn't consider a lodge in the middle of nowhere a residential building that should fall under those taxes when kept empty to drive up the rent.
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I've said this before (and caught flak for it) but I think the solution to this is to apply a heavy additional tax to vacant homes (as defined as any home that isn't occupied by a permanent resident for more than 6 months a year), and increase the tax exponentially for each residence beyond the first owned by the same company or individual.
At some point, you make it so expensive to keep unoccupied properties that they're better off letting people live there for free than continuing to let them go unoccupied. Use all of the proceeds from this tax to assist homeless people or build new dense housing developments.
"But Kobold, what about soandso with their summer home?" If you can afford a second home, you can afford to pay a bit more tax on it to benefit the public good.
"But Kobold, a lot of those homes that are vacant are run-down, or are in places nobody actually wants to live!" Doesn't matter. If they're vacant, tax them. Use the money to build dense housing in the places where people do want to live. If the place is too run-down to be occupied, the owner can tear it down and do something else with it.
Neither Republicans nor Democrats would do something like this. It would be siding with the people over the stockmarket/Billionaires.
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So you're saying granny would be fine with a 100% return on her investment at $36 for an offer? No? Shocked I say, shocked.
Granny is part of the problem. Not the biggest part of the pie, but still guilty.
Yeah this is honestly just an incredibly short-sighted and stupid take on the issues. Granny is in the same bucket with the young man in that they are both getting played by billionaires. Being mad at her is an incredible waste of energy compared to campaigning for fair taxes on corporation and billionaires. Anyone with less than 10 million net worth isn't really your enemy. Stay focused on winning the class Warfare and not dividing regular people.
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If you were any smarter you wpuld inherit the house from your grandma and flip it yourself for big gains
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Nah, I'm happy to bag on anyone that benefits from a system and then pulls the ladder up behind them.
Oh yeah Granny's really in control. It's definitely not the billionaires and oligarchs that run everything.
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If you were any smarter you wpuld inherit the house from your grandma and flip it yourself for big gains
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Surprise surprise, you only inherit a bunch of debt because that generation lived by "you can't take it with you".
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Grandma is not the problem. It’s the ~800 billionaires in the US controlling sizable portions of single-family residences through private equity, artificially controlling market prices for maximum profit per sale. Blackstone alone owns 300,000 residences.
Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide. That’s 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Guess what that generation bought into and voted for for decades.
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Grandma is not the problem. It’s the ~800 billionaires in the US controlling sizable portions of single-family residences through private equity, artificially controlling market prices for maximum profit per sale. Blackstone alone owns 300,000 residences.
Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide. That’s 28 vacant homes for every unhoused person.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]Grandma is not the problem.
You can't go blaming the institutions for the high cost of living when it is very clearly this one anonymous old person who isn't giving this other anonymous young person a sweetheart deal out of misplaced nostalgia.
Fun Fact: There are 16 million vacant homes nationwide.
Okay, but a bunch of them are in the Rust Belt, where de-industrialization eviscerated the economy and caused a mass exodus to the Gulf Coast and the Mountain West in pursuit of lower wage service sector and sales employment.
I suppose you're going to claim that the wholesale restructuring of the manufacturing economy was the fault of a handful of 90s-era Wall Street bankers and Corporate Executives, rather than millions of Boomer-era suburbanites with pocket change in their retirement accounts 40 years ago?
Likely. Fucking. Story. This is just bigotry against the 1% is what it is.
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It seems like that is more of an asshole problem than an age problem
That generation was heavily exposed to leaded gasoline.
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So you're saying granny would be fine with a 100% return on her investment at $36 for an offer? No? Shocked I say, shocked.
Granny is part of the problem. Not the biggest part of the pie, but still guilty.
wrote on last edited by [email protected]If you can provide her with 1960s health care and living costs, she might be willing to sell you her house for 1960s real estate prices.
Would you be replacing her hip for an authentic 1973 mint edition Jefferson Nickel?
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My extended family in Michigan keeps a hunting cabin that they split costs between 5 people on and can still barely make the mortage... Is that clearly able to afford more taxes?
Or if housing costs were reigned in via this measure would the costs they are burdened with that make it barely feasible for 5 families to split the mortgage cost on a hunting cabin in a remote rural area be alleviated. Granting them more financial freedom, benefiting society all while still keeping the place thats becoming nearly untenable for them due to outrageous real estate markets?
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The added tax revenue would also make the rural places these vacation home are in more sustainable for regular residents. And probably keep local governments and even small hospitals solvent.
It might even alleviate the financial burdens that are making that situation almost untenable for them now as real estate markets are corrected and added tax revenue gets allocated into public benefits that could reduce the cost of living. They may benefit from the proposal even if tax rates get increased on subsequent properties.
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Guess what that generation bought into and voted for for decades.
Is one really real responsible or one's choices of they were not aware of their consequences? (I personally do think so)
But what if they had wrong information?
And what if they were purposefully misinformed by a third party for that third party's gain?
