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Comment by msh | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if the simpler solution would not be to require residence, for homes in popular locations.

It can be difficult to disprove residency, especially if you can say you travel a lot for your work. I've uh...heard of people that are residents of Nevada for tax purposes. They have a tiny furnished apartment and their car is registered there, and they're registered to vote there, but let's say they aren't home very often.

Well it will not solve everything, but two things:

- It will make it impossible for people without permanent residency to buy property. - It will prevent people from owning multiple homes in the country.

You could also define a minimum number of days a year where they had to prove that they occupied the property, maybe at least a quarter of a year.

This quickly becomes problematic and starts requiring government tracking of travel, etc to "prove" residency.

It's actually a moderately complicated thing to prove, even though it seems it should be simple.

In economics, in general it's usually better to tax than to ban.

In this case, you could just tax foreigners for owning property. Or you could tax non-residents for owning property.

A land value tax would be a good idea in general. But if it's politically necessary to restrict that to people from far away, that's still better than a ban.

The people who buy these properties are often looking to put their money somewhere safe from government seizure (i.e. 100% tax). A tax is not going to be much of a deterrent unless it is really very big.

Funds from the tax could be used to incentivize new construction.

As the sibling comment said: that's a good problem to have.

Taxes give you a behaviour change and revenue. If the behaviour doesn't change, you can jack them up to get more revenue.

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