Millionaire? Nice. Billionaires should follow suit, but 1000x
(With ~800 billionaires in the US, that’s 79,200,000 homes)
How many homes do we actually need?
Funny story, we actually have enough housing for everyone. It just isn’t always where people want to live, and corporate landlords would rather leave a space vacant to drive up rents than make all of their inventory available, so there is a shit ton of residential (and commercial) property that is basically abandoned.
What we need is tax on vacant property. Make it a ladder system so its worse based on number of vacant units and value.
It would have to take into account how long it’s been vacant though.
I don’t want to punish property owners the literal second someone moves out, and it’s technically vacant. I also don’t want to punish them if they need to make repairs or updates to the property in between tenants.
So lets call it a tax forgiveness period of 1 year. I figure thats enough time to get the property renovated, and advertised as being available for rent.
And yes, I’m sure theres going to be someone who abuses the rule by just keeping it vacant for 11 months, and trying to rent it that last month. But here’s the thing. Those minded people will get burned. Because it takes time to rent properties. They’ll find it may take 2 or 3 months to find a tenant. Or maybe on the 11th month, they’ll realize they can’t rent it because in the time the property sat abandoned, uninspected, rats infested the property. Now it needs extermination services and renovations which will take 5 months. Oh well. There’s always SOME delay if you wait until the last minute. Which is why I gave it a generous year. Honest landlords won’t get burned with that grace period. Scammers will.
I’d say 3-6 months vacant is considered empty. Especially in high COL areas.
This forces property owners to lower rent to get the property filled if they can’t get a tenant. Thus bringing down rates.
The problem with that is, sometimes renovations take longer than 6 months. I don’t want to punish honest landlords, because then that incentivizes honest landlords to seek out ways to cheat the system, because the system cheated them.
It’s the same reason piracy is so popular in times when the official sources are either too convoluted or expensive to follow the official way.
Most customers would be happy to follow the rules, but if you want to watch 1 single NFL team through all 17 regular season games, my local team would require you to have access to an OTA broadcast tv source, and 5 different paid subscription services. Most of which are only broadcasting 1 game.
And now the NFL is seeing a MASSIVE rise in piracy. Yeah. No shit.
Same concept here. If you punish the honest landlords for undertaking a major renovation, then you push them to seek out other ways to cheat the system. And once they start, theres nothing saying they’ll stop.
If it were to actually roll out it’d start as a full 1 year with no leased tenant.
And eliminate corporate ownership of residential property. Tax the shit out of anyone owning more than three residences, and bring property values back down to earth. Bail out homeowners who owe mortgages for more than the value of the properties, and let the market self-correct.
Some estimates say there are as many as 12 vacant homes per homeless person
this countryin the United States.
Edit: millionaire in OP is from Canada
Yeah, we were gonna do that anyway. After covid, I lost faith in humanities ability to be decent.
Took you that long? Wow. I had lost faith by the late 80s. For context I was only born in the early 80s. Once I went to kindergarten I realized society was awful and this planet sucks.
Unfortunately I haven’t found another planet that hosts life I can move to.
Well, I wasn’t alive in the 80s, so hard to lose faith in humans pre-emptiness. Lol
You weren’t alive in the 80s? Oh man. You missed out. There was cocaine EVERYWHERE!!! Just in the air.
I see no reason to believe that letting this guy make unilateral decisions is somehow better than taxing him appropriately and using the revenue to build public housing.
Did anyone say that it was better this way? He could just go buy another yatch instead.
Dont let perfection be the enemy of better
millionares($) wouldn’t be able to afford multiple yachts, or even so large of a yacht. billionares, those who offshoring wealth makes sense for, are the problem.
not the docter nor lawyer, but the whale.
millionares pay about 48%-49%, at least where im from.
There’s a lot of negativity from armchair experts in this thread but this seems like a genuine case of somebody putting a lot of thought and a lot of effort into actually helping the homeless. It’s not just dropping a bunch of tiny houses and saying “job done”.
Are there better, more efficient ways to accomplish this? Yes. Am I glad they at least did something though? Also yes.
Just want to remind everyone that we don’t have a housing shortage, we have a cost of living crisis. Everyone deserves a place to live and we have plenty. The will is the only thing. Fight YIMBY traitors. We can do it!
“YIMBY traitor” – isn’t that just a NIMBY?
YIMBY traitors typically call decent folks NIMBYs, so I’m never keen on using that term.
Two things can be wrong. We can (and should) dispose of landlords and build more housing.
Traitor YIMBYs want to build more market rate housing. Unnecessary. If after controlling costs there is an actual demand for housing, we should build government housing. Absolutely.
Not sure what you’re talking about, but here in the UK we need over 4m houses to be built to house the current population. That’s quite a lot for a country of 68m.
Ahaha! Wtf is this shit? Bloody think tanks…
Well, can you provide some context to your +4m new houses figure?
Then we can discuss where the difference comes from.
Do you understand what the word “household” means? A household is an entity which pays council tax. The amount of households cannot be higher than the amount of houses, it’s just impossible.
Some examples of households:
- A single person living in a flat.
- A family of four living in a house.
- A group of unrelated five people living in an HMO.
First of all, households do not include homeless. There are at least 354k homeless people in England according to Shelter. That’s 354k houses needed. Homeless don’t live in a house, they don’t pay council tax, they are not counted towards household number. Your bullshit think tank has decided that homeless are not humans and do not deserve a place to live.
Second - a family of four has two kids, kids need their own place. That’s two more houses needed for this example household. ONS census indicates that at least 4.9m adults live with their parents. That’s 4.9m more additional houses needed. Your bullshit think tank has decided that kids should live at parents’ house until they die and dropped them from their statistics interpretation.
And last, but not least, HMOs are a temporary accommodation. People living in them - they all need their own place. There are around 480k living in HMOs in England, that’s an additional 480k houses needed. But your bullshit think tank decided that these people don’t matter.
The difference comes from statistics manipulation to fit the agenda to keep the houses growing to please landlord donors.
Do you guys have room for that?
There’s loads of space. We just need to mow down terraced houses and get rid of aristocracy, which owns 40% of land in England.
Yo
Idea
What if ALL the houses we build are for reducing homelessness?
At least think about it
The government should have done that. At least Trump will build homes for the homeless veterans at least. This guy is doing his charitable work. Good for him. Even if it isn’t his responsibility just because he’s wealthy.
Trump ain’t doing shit
He only just signed an executive order stating as such lol
https://veterans.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=6702
