Personal Finance

There just should not be landlords

How are you supposed to keep them from passing on the cost of taxes to their tenants?

You have to realize that they still "own" a limited resource that lends them power to leverage over others. The only way you make this abuse go away is to have the people collectively own the land. Any accommodating regulations you place on landlords will only be temporary until they are worn down and removed.

Fuck cars

Fuck landlords

The amount of vacant units in cities where people actually want to live tends to be highly exaggerated (Manhattan is generally sitting somewhere around a 5% vacancy rate), but twisting income tax into some weird kind of tax on unrealized value is administratively messy and completely unnecessary when we already have much simpler solutions in the forms of land value taxes or even basic property taxes. Not to mention, increasing taxes on rental units just increases everyone's rent, which is a rather odd strategy if the aim is to make housing more affordable.

People really will propose literally anything except the wild concept of building more housing.

I don't know about this, but the non occupant owners should have to pay obscene property taxes and then reduce the rates for owner-occupants to a reasonable level.

The state should stop enforcing the legal rights of landlords to own property and exclude people from its use through physical force, and should organize the people enough that they can defend themselves from retaliation to this change.

So a less efficient and more complicated land tax? Is there any benefit to this compared to just taxing based on the value?

That's what property tax is for.

What are the unintended consequences of this proposal? It is amazing how many people replying to this topic have proposed something without considering what effect it will have. Sure there is a problem, but most solutions have serious negative downsides.

Many landlords don’t even pay taxes on the money they DO make.

They can depreciate a property to offset their income, even though the property is going up in value. The catch is that they have to pay taxes on more of the money they get from selling the property. But if they don’t sell, potentially no taxes for decades. And if they leave it to their kids in their will, no taxes there either and the kid’s cost basis in the property is the market value at the time they received it. So they can start the depreciation all over again.

This is how my non-expert self understands it anyway. It’s part of what draws some people into real estate.

In Denmark most apartments have “residence requirement” - if you own a unit and keep it empty the city will fill it with someone waiting for public housing.