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Comment by josh_fyi | Hacker News Reader

What has London come to? Housing for horses and servants now serves as £10m money-havens for foreign oligarchs.

I live in an American city that is also popular as a piggybank for kleptocrats. It also has huge housing costs, and hence a huge homelessness problem.

I'd love to see some kind of "use it or lose it" law on unoccupied residences, where they would be subject to large tax penalties or worse. Unfortunately, the kind of people who would be hurt by this are also the kind of people who can and will hire experts to skirt, game, or flout the law. So there's your problem.

In many of London's more upscale boroughs, such as Westminster, there are council tax penalties which apply to properties that are unoccupied for more than 2 years:

  2-5 Years  - 100% Premium
  5-10 Years - 200% Premium 
  10 Years + - 300% Premium

Of course, even paying 4X council tax is nothing if you're a billionaire oligarch.

Though council tax rarely aligns with desirability or average property price of a borough. Funny you picked Westminster for the example, the one with the cheapest council tax of all.

Tell me about it. Currently paying way more council tax on a way crappier flat in Tower Hamlets (one of London's poorest boroughs) than we used to pay on a beautiful house in Hammersmith and Fulham (one of London's richest...)

Is council tax basically property tax? Or is that separate?

council tax is payed by the resident (even if renting), not the owner.

I don't think there is a property tax in the UK - not as a yearly recurring payment that (some of?) the US has. There's Stamp Duty though, which is paid when you buy a property

> "Is council tax basically property tax?"

Yes, it's basically a residential property tax as it's based (very loosely) on property value and is payed per-property, not per-resident. But it falls on the resident, not the property owner.

Called council tax because it funds council services like street maintenance and rubbish collection.

~A laptop.

If there are enough of these, if they actually pay the tax and if there is a will to do something within a given council - this in theory could help finance newbuild council houses. So it might not work as a deterrent, but could indirectly help those in need anyway. I don't know whether any of those conditions are true, or if the amount the greater taxes bring in would could even cover the cost of building any.

> Of course, even paying 4X council tax is nothing if you're a billionaire oligarch.

True, I was imagining (though I see I never actually said this) a situation though where money raised through these properties would go to making other housing cheaper. I'm not an expert in these matters, but it seems to me like using it for rent subsidies might be the way to do it.

Even in this case, it would still probably have to be much bigger penalties than in the current case of London that you mention, to actually make a significant difference to the perpetual housing crisis. Luckily, I am perfectly at ease with the notion of much bigger penalties.

it's only a tiny fraction of our houses like less than half a percent.

Yes, the rest are Dickensian hovels and shoeboxes.

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