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Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-tax.aspx https://vancouver.ca/home-property-developme

Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-tax.aspx https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

cgh 7y ago
How would that help? The article is not about empty homes.
- alexfromapex 7y ago
  "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."
  - chejazi 7y ago
    Yes, but that's definitely not the main point here. There is a seemingly huge money laundering operation at play. And either FinCEN is not disclosing so it can get to the point of making charges or it's providing cover for those in power. Probably a combination of both, honestly.
    - api 7y ago
      What I've read and heard is that things like KYC/AML laws made real estate the preferred vehicle for money laundering. This coincides with the first housing bubble quite nicely and also explains why housing reinflated to bubble values after the financial crash. Politically it's very hard to address this problem because it benefits existing homeowners (especially those who bought long ago) and developers. Those are two extremely powerful constituencies.
  - dehrmann 7y ago
    So much biased language in that quote. Could just be "Many entry-level single-family homes are now corporate-owned, while luxury condo towers have owned but unoccupied units."
3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago
This makes me the most sense to me. Choose a vacancy period and a reasonable tax rate. It’s simple and easy to implement.
grawprog 7y ago
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-kids-are-living-like-kings-in-vancouver-s-empty-mansions https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/college-k... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-vancouver-empty-units-evade-new-tax-amid-fuzzy-definitions/article38309993/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-van...
- scottlegrand2 7y ago
  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.
  - DevX101 7y ago
    Unlike software, legal bugs are often by design.
    - jka 7y ago
      Somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously: I wish that laws and changes to them were organized and published like repos and pull requests on github. It'd be such a lead forward in transparency if 'bugs' (loopholes), authors, and proposed changes were out in the open -- and the history and reasoning behind them equally public. In theory I think this is the way many countries legal systems already work: the case law and regulations are technically public. But it's generally only accessible (in both the sense of retrieval, and also in the sense of understanding the language) to subject experts.
      - sk0g 7y ago
        Software bugs and proposed changes _are_ accessible only to subject experts, or people keen enough wrt. software to be of above average technological competence. The only difference is, were the subject matter experts in the domain where GitHub and the likes rule. At least where I live, court records are accessible to the lay person (after clearing some hurdles). Will anyone look at them aside from lawyers and law students? Probably not... Greater transparency in lawmaking and governance is always a good thing, though, and most government's don't achieve it to any great extent.
Consultant32452 7y ago
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 7y ago
  I also agree that affordable housing is adorable.
- kiliantics 7y ago
  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.
bradleyjg 7y ago
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 7y ago
  As proposed by Tom Davidoff. Yes.
innagadadavida 7y ago
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.
vanniv 7y ago
Is there some inherent evil in buying a property that you don't live in that requires the use of force to prevent?
- harshreality 7y ago
  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).
  - vanniv 7y ago
    There's no inherent reason why "job opportunities" have to be in only a very few places. I'm not sure anyway that local workers are fundamentally more entitled to be allowed to buy property than other groups of people who might want to spend money to acquire real property.
    - Twixes 7y ago
      Okay, but these opportunities still are in only a very few places and housing is a necessity. A human right, if you will. So the issue of housing needs to be addressed in all ways possible, including making sure that properties aren't left off the market.
  - anonymoushn 7y ago
    Seems like it's mostly stuff like bans on multifamily buildings, mandatory wasted space between the home and the sidewalk, mandatory parking spaces, and multi-year permitting processes that drive up housing costs.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- ibeckermayer 7y ago
awinder 7y ago
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 7y ago
  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-the-shadows/article31802994/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of-... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadian-banks-mortgage-guidelines-favour-foreign-home-buyers/article31869946/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadia... http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-secret-operations-in-b-c-to-hunt-allegedly-corrupt-officials-and-laundered-money http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-...
  - ficklepickle 7y ago
    The primary residence scam is popular. Pretend to live there, pay no capital gains. Especially lucrative if you tear down and old junker and build a fourplex and laneway house.

Just charge a vacancy tax like Vancouver does. https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-tax.aspx https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/empty-homes-t...

cgh 7y ago

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

alexfromapex 7y ago
"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."
- chejazi 7y ago
  Yes, but that's definitely not the main point here. There is a seemingly huge money laundering operation at play. And either FinCEN is not disclosing so it can get to the point of making charges or it's providing cover for those in power. Probably a combination of both, honestly.
  - api 7y ago
    What I've read and heard is that things like KYC/AML laws made real estate the preferred vehicle for money laundering. This coincides with the first housing bubble quite nicely and also explains why housing reinflated to bubble values after the financial crash. Politically it's very hard to address this problem because it benefits existing homeowners (especially those who bought long ago) and developers. Those are two extremely powerful constituencies.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  So much biased language in that quote. Could just be "Many entry-level single-family homes are now corporate-owned, while luxury condo towers have owned but unoccupied units."

3fe9a03ccd14ca5 7y ago

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

grawprog 7y ago

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-kids-are-living-like-kings-in-vancouver-s-empty-mansions https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-04-16/college-k... https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-vancouver-empty-units-evade-new-tax-amid-fuzzy-definitions/article38309993/ https://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/in-van...

scottlegrand2 7y ago
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.
- DevX101 7y ago
  Unlike software, legal bugs are often by design.
  - jka 7y ago
    Somewhat jokingly, somewhat seriously: I wish that laws and changes to them were organized and published like repos and pull requests on github. It'd be such a lead forward in transparency if 'bugs' (loopholes), authors, and proposed changes were out in the open -- and the history and reasoning behind them equally public. In theory I think this is the way many countries legal systems already work: the case law and regulations are technically public. But it's generally only accessible (in both the sense of retrieval, and also in the sense of understanding the language) to subject experts.
    - sk0g 7y ago
      Software bugs and proposed changes _are_ accessible only to subject experts, or people keen enough wrt. software to be of above average technological competence. The only difference is, were the subject matter experts in the domain where GitHub and the likes rule. At least where I live, court records are accessible to the lay person (after clearing some hurdles). Will anyone look at them aside from lawyers and law students? Probably not... Greater transparency in lawmaking and governance is always a good thing, though, and most government's don't achieve it to any great extent.

Consultant32452 7y ago

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 7y ago
I also agree that affordable housing is adorable.
kiliantics 7y ago
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.

bradleyjg 7y ago

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 7y ago
As proposed by Tom Davidoff. Yes.

innagadadavida 7y ago

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.

vanniv 7y ago

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

harshreality 7y ago
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).
- vanniv 7y ago
  There's no inherent reason why "job opportunities" have to be in only a very few places. I'm not sure anyway that local workers are fundamentally more entitled to be allowed to buy property than other groups of people who might want to spend money to acquire real property.
  - Twixes 7y ago
    Okay, but these opportunities still are in only a very few places and housing is a necessity. A human right, if you will. So the issue of housing needs to be addressed in all ways possible, including making sure that properties aren't left off the market.
- anonymoushn 7y ago
  Seems like it's mostly stuff like bans on multifamily buildings, mandatory wasted space between the home and the sidewalk, mandatory parking spaces, and multi-year permitting processes that drive up housing costs.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
ibeckermayer 7y ago

awinder 7y ago

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 7y ago
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-the-shadows/article31802994/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/out-of-... http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadian-banks-mortgage-guidelines-favour-foreign-home-buyers/article31869946/ http://www.theglobeandmail.com/real-estate/vancouver/canadia... http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-secret-operations-in-b-c-to-hunt-allegedly-corrupt-officials-and-laundered-money http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/chinese-police-run-...
- ficklepickle 7y ago
  The primary residence scam is popular. Pretend to live there, pay no capital gains. Especially lucrative if you tear down and old junker and build a fourplex and laneway house.