SF is latest city to consider tackling its housing crisis by taxing empty homes

AFAIK the theory is simple. If there’s only a single available property in an area and someone needs it, the landlord can charge whatever they want. If there’s 100, the landlords are forced to compete. At a metropolitan scale, having 5% of apartments vacant guarantees a few will be available in any given area and prices cannot be excessive as someone will undercut them.

If tenants stay in a property for an average of 2 years, a 5% vacancy rate means the gap between tenants is 4-5 weeks.

This is normal in many cities (source: have personally been on both sides of this many times), because it takes time to negotiate terms with a new tenant, perform minor repairs, and have them move in.

In this case, since the vacancy rate is a dramatic overstatement of actual units that are likely rentable, the impact of vacancy taxes on supply will be low. A much more fruitful avenue to increase supply would be construction.

Suburban sprawl is the law. These subdivisions off the side of the highway full of large lot single family homes aren’t even what developers think people want. They are prescribed by the building and planning codes of nearly every jurisdiction. Developers do sometimes build new places in the urban style but every element of that is a hard-fought battle against the government for variances, zoning changes, special permits, etc.

The New Urbanists have an interesting approach to this: “open source” planning codes that prescribe urbanism rather than sprawl, which they try to convince municipalities to adopt as their default. They don’t seem to have much uptake though. The postwar sprawl style is what was popular when the regulatory regimes as we know them today came to be, and there’s a lot of inertia behind that, whether or not people actually like it.

https://youtu.be/NMvwHDFVpCE

Places can be built like SF, but they won't have the same access to the same opportunities. People don't realize that a lot of inequality is driven by where you live or are forced to live. SF needs more affordable housing. It needs more housing period.

even with that loophole the trend of buying 20 units will evaporate

semantics, point is taxes should be harsh to disincentivize buying/holding housing as an investment than residence. Which governing body should do it is not the point. Let me bid 150% on all 50 units of housing this year but no problem, I'll just rent it at 200% more so that will cover the increased mortgage payments, as long as I can hold it for the next 10 years, and given govt has decided inflation is always a good thing prices will definitely 2x in a decade. It's a fail-safe strategy to get rich while partaking in vicious decentralized grand scheme that robs the poorest.

Imagine a city with 1000 families and 1000 housing units, investors come in bid against each other, buy up all properties at inflated prices then rent it out at inflated rent. Now all 1000 population is paying 50% of salary in rent, banks are richer, investors also make few bucks along the way. People who actually live on the land and work, end up as biggest losers. Sure their house prices also appreciated, but they can't sell house they live in? If they do sell where would they move? prices have increased everywhere else too?

The population isn't growing fast enough or housing supplying isn't short enough to cause such inflation adjusted increase in value as we have seen in last 10 years. It's all driven by 'investors' retail and institutional. Why worry about the cost when it can be offloaded to renters? What are the renters gonna do? Leave? Go where? it's same story in every city! This has detrimental effect on health, education, mental well being, economic prosperity, quality of life, economic mobility, and everything that is affected by money... like the entire economy.

I don't think it's ethical to own 10 units and milk renters to pay inflated housing prices which are inflated due to the very fact that this is possible. The progressive increase in taxation allows for small time retail landlords to exist but really breaks the ROI when you are managing 20 units. Housing just isn't the commodity that should be investment, or speculation. Housing is for living, people who live in a place, work there, shop there, etc should be the ones owning the houses there and should be the one to benefit from economic activity they are generating in their neighbors.