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Comment by futun | Hacker News Reader

Be very careful of the word "home ownership". It means different things to different people.

Much like the weasel-word "affordability" (which means better access to credit, and not cheaper prices) "home ownership" means "mortgaged, bank-owned properties". Both terms mean debt slavery and a preservation of the status quo (ie: property owners stay rich. buyers, mortgagers and prospective buyers remain poor).

What is needed is cheaper housing.

Not "affordability" or easier-to-access debt.

The way to get cheaper housing is to destroy housing as an investment class. And the way you do that is by taxing 2nd and 3rd properties at increasingly higher rates.

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> And the way you do that is by taxing 2nd and 3rd properties at increasingly higher rates.

And then those taxes end up getting passed on to renters, who are on average poorer than their home-owning counterparts.

This would be the case in an efficient market, where the risk-adjusted economic profit of renting out homes is close to 0. This is not the case because San Francisco artificially restricts supply of housing. This causes rents to be determined solely by (small) supply and (large) demand. Increasing taxes would not decrease supply of housing or increase demand for it, so it would just serve to decrease the excess economic profits landlords are making.

You can't really say that without knowledge of how high those additional taxes would be. If the costs rise to the point that a reasonable profit for the level of risk involved can't be made then prices would certainly have to rise irrespective of demand. I suspect given the nature of ever rising taxation in most municipalities that introducing this tax even in a modest form would increase perceived risk[0] of property ownership enough to increase average rents.

[0]If the cost of an unoccupied property or a nonpaying tenant goes up, rents will likely go up in response.

I don't know if you're ever going to "destroy housing as an investment class", but I certainly agree that Prop. 13 should never have applied to anything but the taxpayer's primary residence.

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