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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

There really should be limits on who can buy residential property and how much of it one can own. Maybe property taxes that ratchet up exponentially the more residential property under one's ownership. Large anonymous property firms owning peoples' homes simply shouldn't exist.

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This has been done in Sweden.

The results are disastrous :

https://www.spglobal.com/marketintelligence/en/news-insights...

https://www.reuters.com/article/sweden-economy-housing/swede...

Stockholm, a fairly small city by global standards (~1.5M in the central area) is extremely hard to get a place to rent. It has been for 20 years.

The CEO of Spotify (based in Stockholm) told the government the housing shortage is a problem for their growth. I'm not sure which policies are to blame, but Stockholm's not an example of good housing policy.

https://qz.com/661319/sweden-must-change-quickly-spotify-thr...

This has been done in Sweden. The results are disastrous.

Is it useful to reduce a situation which clearly has multiple driving factors - to just one factor?

I disagree with the notion that large firms owning residential property is necessarily a bad thing. I remember it being surprisingly hard to find single family homes to rent in at least two metros I’ve lived in- you had a much larger variety of options if you were buying. Additional professionally managed SFH properties would have been appreciated in those metro areas. I see no reason to punish scale in and of itself.

The anonymity is a major issue though, as is the practice of having large numbers of properties sitting vacant (presumably because they were really bought to launder money.) The article suggests some solutions to the first. I feel like some form of “unoccupancy tax” could address the second, all though designing it to not just punish distressed areas seems tough.

As long as there are multiple (6+) corporate owners in a market, it should be fine for tenants, possibly better with the service standards the corporate landlords bring.

> The anonymity is a major issue though

The LLC have a name, it is an legal entity. It is owned by other people/financial structure just like Coca Cola, Alphabet or Amazon. Since it's private, you don't get to know. All of these are perfectly legal and to declare this case as illegal is opening a can of worm on the other side.

In some cases, those entities are a DoJ (Denial of Justice) attack. When you try to sue such a company, you find a chain of owners, each in a different jurisdictions - just figuring out the real owner for damages you may right fully deserve may take years.

The asymmetry in the costs of setting up such a structure vs decoding it works only for the “bad guys” as far as most society is concerned.

Buildings are often owned by an LLC that is created for the purpose of owning that one building. This would be difficult to implement.

This is easily solved if we had the will to solve it via Ultimate Beneficial Ownership registries. There's no good reason to allow anonymous ownership of companies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficial_ownership

Anonymous from whom? Anonymous from the government? Maybe I agree. Anonymous from anyone who is curious (or nosy, depending on your feelings about privacy)? I think it's none of your or any reporters' business how many shares of AAPL I own.

We're not talking about shares of Apple, we're talking about who effectively controls LLCs and other corporations that are primarily used to shield the owners of real estate.. Your 23 shares of AAPL don't grant you effective control over Apple so it's not relevant.

GP was talking about "anonymous ownership of companies". That's exactly what me owning shares of AAPL is.

(Parent post was substantially edited after this comment, so it makes less sense now.)

Land value tax.

This but make it progressive over the total value owned. Corporate or trust ownership structures etc pay top rate to prevent obfuscation.

Someone owning an investment property to help fund retirement seems reasonable. Someone owning thousands does little for society and likely hurts it.

LVT doesn't have to be progressive to make land hoarding unprofitable. It just needs to be appropriately proportional to land value.

The problem that the progressive tax solves is allowing small scale landlords while stopping large companies. An equal tax means that a person with an extra home they are renting out is just as unprofitable (or even more so, because of scale) as a large company.

As mentioned by topkai22 above, this might not actually be a problem, and is desired in some places.

Why is that a problem to be solved to go socratic about it?

A single extra home rental being less profitable will exist "naturally" as a matter of economies of scale essentially with fixed cost component redundancy.

Income inequality and imbalance of market influence (if one person owns 90% of real estate their high level of control can't even be called disproportionate because they actually do have that large of a stake) seem like issues better addressed by straightforward income taxation and antitrust respectively.

Why not progressive over total wealth or income, as opposed to restricting to just land holdings?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

There’s a name for that idea and it was quite popular in the past, with many famous people believing in it. Tolstoy, Huxley, etc.

That's not at all the same thing...

>(OP wants) limits on who can buy residential property and how much of it one can own.

>(Georgism is) an economic ideology holding that while people should own the value they produce themselves, economic value derived from land (often including natural resources and natural opportunities) should belong equally to all members of society.

> Advocates of land value taxes argue that they would reduce economic inequality, increase economic efficiency, remove incentives to underutilize urban land and reduce property speculation.

Maybe just outlaw the ownership of more than 3 houses? Landlords will throw a fit but they're a minority and I think they're doing fine if they have 3+ houses.

Keep in mind that most everything you do with the intent of harming landlords ends up also harming renters in some ratio.

Not if you transfer the houses to the renters.

How would you "transfer" them? Some people need places to stay in the short-term and don't want to own a house. Also, it's not the government's house to "transfer".

False. The renters would benefit from this or not be affected at all. They wouldn't even remotely be harmed by it.

I suspect that what you'd find is both slightly fewer houses available for rent and more disorganized, part-time, hobbyist landlords in the market. I believe both of these factors would tend to harm renters.

I lived in houses rented by these part-timers and they were pretty haphazardly managed compared to the [fewer] times I lived in clearly corporate-owned and managed properties.

Why don't renters own their own property? Lack of capital to build or buy. Guess who has the capital and uses it to establish the supply of rentals either directly by building or indirectly by paying someone who built it and enabling them to build more?

Even if you think the perpetuation of capital unfair the realities need to be acknowledged in order to even begin to think of a viable alternative.

Lack of capital isn't the only reason to rent. You might also choose to rent because you are not interested in investing a significant amount of your money in real estate, or because you don't want to make a long-term commitment to live in one place.

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