[scottlegrand2]

Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does.

https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

[grawprog]

And then the owners can do what they did in Vancouver and rent the properties out to students for a couple months before tax time, claim the lots aren't vacant and avoid the tax, then jack up the rent so high they're forced to move.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/college-k...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-van...

[ttul]

A better variant was proposed by an economist at UBC (Tom Davidoff). There would be a high property tax on ALL properties, which you could reduce by the amount of income tax you actually pay in the province.

Whether the property is vacant or not, the tax must be paid. But if you actually pay taxes for working here, it’s cool.

[ninkendo]

Couldn’t you just tax based on a percentage of the year a house sits vacant?

[fredophile]

I quickly read the second link you provided and didn't see anything backing up your claim about landlords jacking up rents but I could have missed it. It's also worth noting that there are laws that prevent large rent increases in Vancouver.

http://www.housing.gov.bc.ca/rtb/WebTools/RentIncrease.html

[bparsons]

I live in Vancouver, and the vacancy and foreign ownership taxes have moderately improved the rental situation. It has also just encouraged the worst types of buyers to move onto other jurisdictions.

To be effective, they probably need to have the tax rates on an elevator until the market corrects though.

[scottlegrand2]

And if we started treating behavior like this as equivalent to the search for bug bounties, we could iteratively patch the law until it is no longer cost-effective to search for them.

[chaz6]

In the UK we have council tax which is a fee to local government paid monthly for services like road maintenance and waste disposal. In recent years the majority of councils have started charging double the rate on properties that are empty, even for just one month. I hope this will start to balance the disparity between empty houses and the number of homeless people.

[mcv]

Dramatic rent increases while someone is living there should be illegal. It's basically leveraging vendor lock-in.

[nickthemagicman]

Just jack up property tax for every home beyond the first one owns. That includes corporations.

[bradleyjg]

The best way to implement that is with a local income tax credit, at least for cities with an income tax.

That is, double the property tax but offer half of it as a rebate to, and only to, people paying the local income tax (i.e. residents)—-including owner-residents and renters on a pro rata basis.

[ttul]

As proposed by Tom Davidoff. Yes.

[Consultant32452]

I'd rather radically reduce building restrictions and crash the housing market so more people can find adorable housing and this houses stop being good cash sinks.

[sedatk]

I also agree that affordable housing is adorable.

[kiliantics]

How about massive social housing projects that provide high quality affordable housing to anyone who wants it? I'm sick of living in over-priced rentals that are hideous, cookie-cutter, stacked, shoe boxes, all built shoddily in a rush, filled with the same terrible finishings and appliances and never maintained by their owners/management. Force these investors to do a decent job by making them compete with actually good and reasonably-priced alternatives.

[awinder]

Maybe I’m dense and missing it but why are properties purchased just to sit? Seems like a wasted revenue stream regardless of the original intent.

[sedachv]

In the case of Vancouver specifically, it was a combination of Ponzi schemes, lending fraud, and money laundering:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of-...

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadia...

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-...

[innagadadavida]

How about bulking better train and commute options? This will give people to live far away from their work place, yet keep roads free and will reduce pressure on properties. At least in the Bay Area, Bart, Caltrain, VTA and the bus’s system is a joke, this forces people to move in closer. Another issue clogging the roads is they are now open to all EVs, car pooling should be 3 or more people.

[cgh]

How would that help? The article is not about empty homes.

[alexfromapex]

"Modest single-family homes, owned for generations by families, now are held by corporate vehicles with names that appear to be little more than jumbles of letters and punctuation – such as SC-TUSCA LLC, CNS1975 LLC – registered to law offices and post office boxes miles away. New glittering towers filled with owned but empty condos look down over our cities, as residents below struggle to find any available housing."

[vanniv]

Is there some inherent evil in buying a property that you don't live in that requires the use of force to prevent?

[harshreality]

Yes? It drives up housing costs for everyone else. Which may sort itself out in the very long term (on the scale of decades), with sane people moving elsewhere and siting companies elsewhere, but in the shorter term you have a finite number of job opportunities, and (except for remote workers, obviously) you have to live one of those places, and every unoccupied residential property forces you to live farther from work or pay more (reduced supply).

[ibeckermayer]

You should note that "owning" a property that you don't live in (or rent out) also requires the use of force -- state force to remove anybody attempting to actually use the space.

I suspect you're trying to make a pro-liberty / property rights point, in which case I think you should consider more carefully the basis of justified property ownership.

[3fe9a03ccd14ca5]

This makes me the most sense to me. Choose a vacancy period and a reasonable tax rate. It’s simple and easy to implement.