Washington Needs to Tax Empty Homes. and Its Cities Should, Too
thestranger.com
thestranger.com
Citation needed. Unless the house is a total dump, why would said firms pass up on the revenue from renting the place out?
>in 2021, [Seattle] had 33,100 vacant homes
How many of these houses were vacant for legitimate reasons: in between owners/rental tenants, or under renovation?
It doesn't go into a ton of detail but it shows it's very common. One reason is that there's a cost to renting a place out with maintenance and dealing with tenants. If you just let the place sit, it's an investment like the many paintings rich people own that they never see, it's just a place to park money for later.
The main example in the article,
>the East Side bounded by Fifth and Park Avenues and East 49th and 70th Streets
is literally the most expensive zip code in the US: https://www.nynesting.com/news/america-s-most-expensive-zip-...
Perhaps there is merit in taxing vacant $10M condo investment pieces, but it wouldn’t do anything to address housing shortages.
Property management companies are colluding to jack the prices up: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33224502
I live in Miami. My building is 55-60% occupied at best during peak season (October/November through March). The building is over 5 years old yet 10-20% of units are literally unfinished, and another 10-20% are used so infrequently (less than 8-10 weeks a year)......yet we have a ton of homelessness and it seems developers are too poor to build anything but "ultra-luxury" (their words) developments.
Something doesn't add up.
You can have exclusionary low-density zoning and homelessness, or you can have abundant affordable housing but residential areas are a mix of building types (SFH, MFH).
How about just reform land use and take away the NIMBY/city-level veto over denser forms of housing? This is a far larger and far lower-hanging fruit than trying to tax 2-3% of units onto the market. After the housing construction industry collapsed after 2007-2008, we underbuilt several million housing units and are now suffering the results of low vacancy rates. You can't redistribute your way out of a shortage, but you can build your way out of one.
What does that have to do with NIMBY/city-level veto over denser forms of housing? I don't see how your argument flows from the 1st sentence to the 2nd and then the third.
And look. More regulation = more cost = false scarcity. People never learn.
It won't be your property forever, and future tenants have a right to live in a place that was constructed safely. I'd rather not find out that the wiring of the house I bought was installed by an unlicensed amateur when it burns down the house. That house fire could also spread to your neighbors, so it's not just your property that's at stake.
I agree that some permitting requirements can get out of hand; for example, some jurisdictions require a permit for repairs as simple as replacing a kitchen tap. But I'd rather the law be too stringent in this regard than too lenient, and it’s easy enough to flout the law for simple things like a kitchen tap.
The third amendment?