• chiliedogg@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        30
        ·
        1 month ago

        Property tax should be 100% for third houses (there are legit reasons to own 2 houses - especially when helping a family member finance a home or inheriting property) and for any houses not owned by an actual human.

        Give developers building a house 3 months to sell after completion. If it doesn’t sell in that time, it gets auctioned off to the highest bidder with no minimum price.

        Also give a maximum construction time of like 2 years to keep them from leaving a door off or something and calling it unfinished until it sells for their inflated bullshit value.

        Land zoned residential must be developed or sold to an individual human within X years. Empty land that’s zoned residential should be platted with a maximum lot size appropriate to the area to keep them from developing 1 house on a thousand-acre tract and selling it to someone who is trying to sit on the land as an investment.

        Essentially, developers need to be forced to build and sell houses at a fair market rate they’re prohibited from manipulating.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          13
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          also 100% rent tax for second rent and beyond.

          you ask rent for one house, fine. maybe you invested in it, inherited it, whatever. maybe you have one house but don’t want to live in it so you have renters in it while you rent another apartment yourself, cool, you do you. you’re paid rent from one source, you pay regular rates. you put a second place for rent, sorry, all of it goes to subsidizing affordable (if not free) housing.

          and because I’m a gracious and benevolent pretend lawmaker, you get to choose which single place you get to pay the regular rates for. all the rest of your places get 100%.

          market rates can also be enforced with flexible tax rates:

          if the market is 100 and you ask for 100, you pay X.
          if you ask for 200, you pay X + 100.
          if you ask for 300, you pay X + 250.
          if you ask for 400, you pay X + 400. and so on.

          the government can easily make sure you get not only zero benefit from inflating prices, but actually take losses. if the rich cunts can pay negative taxes, they can handle negative net gains.

          • spongebue@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            4
            ·
            1 month ago

            My one question with this is, what do you do for multi-unit apartments and such that aren’t condos? Yes, it’s corporate-owned. Yes, that has its own slime that needs to be cleaned up. But it’s also a reasonable way to increase housing density (meaning more housing and, if done correctly, less reliance on cars). Housing rentals do have their place in the world, especially when people only plan on living somewhere for a few years (college students, military, medium-term jobs)

            How do you free up the housing market from landlords and investors while not screwing things up for people who would actually be better off renting?

            • pyre@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              3
              ·
              1 month ago

              simply decommodify housing, either by force or with aggressive taxation that makes it effectively poison to try to collect houses like these leeches do. once all the extra houses become poison, the government buys them for a reasonable price.

              reasonable for the people, btw, not for the owners. then you provide affordable housing that pretty much acts as a rent, except instead of pouring money into the bank account of a random fuckwit you pay a little extra tax for it.

              because it’s super affordable and always available, losing your home is now no longer a big concern. imagine the kind of power this gives people in the workforce alone. let alone general public health and mental stability.

              you could have it as rent-taxes as long as you stay, where you can move out whenever, move in to another government housing or maybe buy your own and move there. or you could have the option to rent-until-you-own, where you pay taxes to live in a house until you completely pay it off, and then it’s yours, so long as you don’t own another home. basically like mortgage/credit but without banks and much cheaper installments and overall price.

              • spongebue@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 month ago

                Ehhh… Your first word was “simply” and that was followed by a 4-paragraph paradigm so different from what we have it’s bound to open many more cans of worms. I’m not sure it’ll be that simple

                • pyre@lemmy.world
                  link
                  fedilink
                  arrow-up
                  1
                  ·
                  1 month ago

                  I’m sorry, we were knee deep in a situation already completely different than what we have and then you asked what about the benefit of renting. this is only one step away from what we were saying before. we already established that taxes should make owning homes untenable. next step is the government buying those extra homes and making them available for rent.

          • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            3
            ·
            1 month ago

            I think this is maybe a tad extreme. There should definitely be diminishing returns for each additional single family home rented, but I propose something like an additional 20% per. So, 20% for the 2nd, 40% for the 3rd, 60% for the 4th, 80% for the 5th, etc. Nobody needs to own more than six single family properties.

            My proposal, however, also includes that when we catch some asshat inevitably inventing shell corporations and LLC’s attempting to evade this, as if we couldn’t see that coming a mile off, we don’t tax or fine them.

            Instead, we put them in jail.

  • Waveform@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    41
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    enforce fair housing laws

    Hopefully this includes not kicking out people who can still pay rent, just so the landlord can have themselves a weekend vacation cabin or higher-priced rental. And there should be a law forcing landlords to offer a rent-to-own option. Also, how about recalculating inflation to account for every expense that has gone up, so that the percentage a landlord can raise rent each year isn’t so damned high. While we’re being fair, of course :|

    • bitjunkie@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      ·
      1 month ago

      Her campaign so far has been a masterclass in trolling. Can’t wait for the next Truth meltdown to drop.

  • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    21
    ·
    1 month ago

    Vice President Kamala Harris will call for the construction of 3 million new housing units in her first four years in office, as well as a new tax incentive for builders that construct properties for first-time home buyers,” the Wall Street Journal reports.

    “The housing initiatives are part of Harris’s emerging economic plan, which she is expected to address in a speech in Raleigh, N.C., on Friday. Rising prices have become a point of intense debate between Harris and former President Donald Trump.”

      • Rapidcreek@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        15
        ·
        1 month ago

        The US built 30 million single family homes after WWII, and some people still live in them. Post war has its own architectural styles. The split level ranch came from that era.

            • curiousaur
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              1
              ·
              1 month ago

              There won’t be quality regulations than mean anything. There are going to be a lot of profiteering developers lining up to build tanks housing as cheap as possible. If an inspection shows it’s too low of quality are they going to miss the target to rebuild or just let it through?

              I’m not saying this isn’t good. Just saying it’s going to be “the projects”.

        • aesthelete@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 month ago

          Many of those same “shitboxes” built during that era are now on the market here in California for over a million dollars. 😆

      • confusedbytheBasics@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 month ago

        Compare owning some land and shitbox you can live in to being homeless or watching all the money you earn be taken and horded by landlords.

        I’ll take the shitbox please.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 month ago

      This is what kills me among many things about Republicans. Trump’s pitch is “BiDeN RuInEd EvErYtHiNg!” and his only policy is “deport everyone and give the heritage foundation whatever they want.”

      Democrats actually have plans to attempt to fix the issues we have, whether self inflicted or not. Whether they can actually accomplish those plans is something else, but at least there’s a plan other than bitching “the other guy sucks so vote for me!”

      Magoos act like we are the same with Trump, but that’s because it’s all fox news tells them and their feelings get hurt when we say how horrendous Trump actually is so they get defensive and rely on BoTh SiDeS!

  • hate2bme@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    19
    ·
    1 month ago

    Somehow it won’t get done in her first term but vote her back in and she promises it will get done in her second term. How do I know? Because every single president does the same exact thing.

    • booly@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      14
      ·
      1 month ago

      Because every single president does the same exact thing.

      What are you talking about?

      Biden got about as much as he could get through a Republican controlled House and a filibustering Senate: a major COVID relief bill, a major infrastructure bill, and a major environmental reform bill.

      Trump did a shitload in his one term:

      • Replaced 3 Supreme Court justices and a lot of lower court judges who went on to overturn Roe v. Wade and Chevron, deliver a shitload of conservative decisions, and block a bunch of Biden executive actions (including student loan forgiveness, all sorts of COVID policies, and a bunch of economic regulations).
      • Major tax cuts in 2017 for corporations and high earners
      • Withdrew from the Paris accords and rolled back a lot of Obama EPA regs
      • Made shifts towards privatization of k-12 education, including towards religious private schools.

      Obama signed a bunch of stuff into law his first two years:

      • Obamacare
      • Universal healthcare for children under S-CHIP
      • Student loan reform, creating public service loan forgiveness and much better repayment plans while cutting out private lenders who took all the upside with none of the downside.
      • Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act
      • Repealed Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
      • Passed Dodd Frank, including the creation of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau
      • School lunch reform

      Bush campaigned on tax cuts and got them, and then got a bunch of other stuff in from his first term related to 9/11 and the aftermath: The Patriot Act, authorization for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, etc.

      If anything, presidents are far less effective their second term than their first term.

      • hate2bme@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        1 month ago

        What a terrible reply. I never said presidents don’t get anything done in their first term. Just pointing out how a lot of shit they campaign on doesn’t get done so they campaign on the same shit again.

        • USSMojave@startrek.website
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          1 month ago

          And they’re telling you you’re wrong. Biden campaigned on getting stuff done and he got stuff done. Don’t project your pessimism onto everyone else, it’s not helpful

          • hate2bme@lemmy.world
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 month ago

            Well of course there are things that get done. I feel like I’m talking to a child right now. I thought when I switched to lemmy I wouldn’t have to explain every single detail in my comments, boy was I wrong. You guys do not understand and you’re arguing like you do.

            • 4lan@lemmy.world
              link
              fedilink
              arrow-up
              2
              ·
              1 month ago

              Don’t be obtuse.
              They provided you a ridiculous amount of counter points.

              Please go back to Reddit.

              • hate2bme@lemmy.world
                link
                fedilink
                arrow-up
                1
                ·
                1 month ago

                Counterpoints to something I wasn’t even talking about. I never once said presidents don’t get stuff done in their first term. They just listed stuff they did in their first term.

      • hate2bme@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Only comment that makes any sense in reply to mine. This is true. I’m just saying they always campaign on the same shit that they can’t get done in their first term.

        • VinnyDaCat@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          Yeah Walz is the kind of person I really want up there. It’s not just that he’s liberal(as far as our country’s standards go) but also the fact that he has a great track record on delivery.

          I’d still vote anyways to keep DT out but you know how it is. It’s hard to be excited given how it feels that the Dems have a habit of wiggling their way out of delivering on important issues.

    • OutsizedWalrus@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      1 month ago

      This is how politics work. This is neither new nor a deep critique.

      Most people have too much mental load in load in their life. Politicians tie things to election years because people would forget what they did otherwise.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      17
      ·
      edit-2
      1 month ago

      You’re getting downvoted, but it’s true. They aren’t obligated to stick to campaign promises. And often don’t, or get hamstring by legal hurdles and/or congress.

      • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        6
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yep. And the further feasibly left we vote the more likely we are to see those kinds of things happen. It has to be consistent and it has to be the furthest left that can actually win.

  • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    15
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    Don’t protect “renters”. The entire concept of “renting” needs to die in a fucking fire.

    Instead, we need to jack up taxes on residential properties. Send them to the moon. $2000/yr? Fuck that: $2000/month.

    But nobody actually pays these exorbitant rates, because we create an “Owner Occupancy Credit”. The tax rate is only high if the owner doesn’t live in the home.

    What happens to renters? Do landlords jack up their prices to cover the increased property taxes? Or do they offer their tenants a private mortgage or a land contract, so they don’t have to pay the hiked taxes?

    When they can make more money as a lender than as a landlord, they aren’t going to be renting anymore. Establish an owner occupancy credit, and “landlords” will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants into buyers.

    (The actual tax rate should target an 85% owner occupancy rate. When more than 20% of the population is renting, the non-occupant tax rate is increased 1% per year. When less than 10% is renting, the non-occupant tax rate is dropped 1% per year. )

    • porous_grey_matter@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      15
      ·
      1 month ago

      Nah, nonprofit state-run landlords (in countries which have them) are great, and strong protections for renters are good. I don’t want to buy a house, I move around a lot, don’t wanna deal with lawyers every time I move, don’t wanna be responsible for maintenance, I just want some basic level of security and not to be completely ripped off.

      Why is 85% the magic number? Just because you say so? I do agree that increased property taxes are important, but there’s no reason not to also make rental contracts less exploitative.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        Nah, nonprofit state-run landlords

        We have those. They run “Section 8” housing, which, in my area at least, is substandard housing in high crime areas, because those areas have the cheapest housing, and that’s what the state buys. They also currently have a 6-year wait-list in my area. You only have a fixed time you can live there. There is means testing, and strict rules on who can come and go.

        The problem isn’t actually the “state run” part, though. The problem is the market in which the state is operating. Whatever approach we take, we need to fix that market first, and that’s what I’m talking about.

        I don’t want to buy a house, I move around a lot…

        I don’t think you understand what a “land contract” is. It gives you the flexibility you need from a rental agreement, without imposing rent on long-term residents of a property.

        If you are only going to be living in the property for less than 3 years, it is a rental agreement. It is an agreement that happens to be recorded with the county, like a deed, which allows them to consider you an “owner occupant”.

        The real differences are if you decide to stay there longer than 3 years. Your monthly payment was calculated by assuming principal, interest, taxes, and insurance on a 30-year mortgage, which is usually what you’re going to be paying in rent anyway.

        If you stay at least three years, the agreement becomes a sale contract; you become the deeded owner; your equity becomes the down payment, and your former landlord becomes a private lender with those pre-existing terms.

        If you leave before 3 years, you forfeit your equity, and the agreement functioned identically to a rental agreement.

        You still get to live like a tenant, and move around as you like. You can unilaterally abandon the contract for any reason during that 3-year period. For you, nothing changes other than the words at the top of the agreement. Words that are important to your “landlord” as it saves him a lot on taxes, but that are completely irrelevant to you as a “tenant”.

        But, if you do change your mind during that three year period, and decide you do want to become a homeowner, you’re already well on your way.

        Alternatively, Duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes are all single properties, where the owner of that property can live on site, making the property eligible for the owner occupant credit. The other 1-3 units on the property are available to rent out. If you really want an actual rental agreement instead of a land contract, that is one option.

    • N-E-N@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 month ago

      How would you handle apartment buildings?

      Making them all Condo’s possible I suppose but, there’d be a lot of poorly maintained buildings no one would want to actually own part of

      • BallsandBayonets@lemmings.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Landlord has to live on-site. In what I fondly call “face-punching distance.” And can only collect a monthly salary equal to 3x the median rental price of all of the units in that building. Any surplus profit after paying utilities, taxes, and maintenance cost (to maintenance people who either also live on site or are at least paid 3x the rent of a median unit), gets refunded to the tenants.

        • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          1 month ago

          I would strongly discourage landlording of more than 3 units by extending the owner occupancy credit only to 1-4 unit properties. Apartment complexes could be divided into multi-unit condos, with the extra units able to be rented out by the owner.

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        edit-2
        1 month ago

        Duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes could all have an owner living in one of the units, making the whole property eligible for the owner occupant credit, while the other units remain available for rent.

        Bringing this back to your comment, suppose instead of dividing a complex into individual units, we divided it into a “quadplex” condo. A single property consisting of 4 units. The owner of that property occupies the quadplex, making the quadplex-condo eligible for the owner-occupant credit. 3/4 of the apartments are still rentable.

        there’d be a lot of poorly maintained buildings no one would want to actually own part of

        Somebody is making money off of those poorly maintained apartment buildings now. Better that somebody be someone who is actually part of the community (and thus motivated to improve the property) than a hedge fund manager living on the other side of the country.

      • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        The owner of the building lives in the building and leases apartments to tenants who live in the same building as the owner.

    • andrewth09@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      6
      ·
      1 month ago

      NY has this. What you have described is the STAR tax credit. This credit only applies to school taxes (2-3k a year)

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        1
        ·
        1 month ago

        Yeah, many states have similar credits or exemptions for various purposes. From my brief research, it seems the STAR credit is not available to new homeowners. It’s only available to people who are grandfathered in. But, it works much like I describe: a credit for owner occupants.

        Ohio has a “Homestead Exemption” allowing disabled and elderly homeowners to deduct $25,000 of the market value of their residence.

        We can do the same thing for purposes of discouraging corporate and investor ownership of residential property, and encouraging occupant ownership.

        • andrewth09@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          1
          ·
          edit-2
          1 month ago

          it seems the STAR credit is not available to new homeowners. It’s only available to people who are grandfathered in.

          You might be looking at the enhancement STAR which has more complex requirements. Here is the PDF for new homeowners and here is the actual eligibility page.

          edit: OH you are looking at the STAR exemption vs the STAR credit. Yeah it’s basically the same thing. One is applied to your taxes before you receive your tax bill (and is being phased out since 2015) and the other is a direct deposit you receive. Same amount.

          • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
            link
            fedilink
            English
            arrow-up
            1
            ·
            1 month ago

            Ah, I see. Yes, I only did some very brief research to verify the concepts matched; I didn’t delve into the specifics.

  • nifty@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    3
    ·
    edit-2
    1 month ago

    Maybe that helps, in general private equity or owners need a cap on purchasing rental housing units