Hacker News Reader

Comment by baggy_trough | Hacker News Reader

Definitely a nasty tax. Another example of why you should not locate your home or business in SF - the voters love to tax anything no matter what the harmful effects are.

View on HN

> voters love to tax anything no matter what the harmful effects are

I broadly share your view of San Francisco's civic culture. But what are the unexpected consequences of a vacancy tax? Practically every problem I think of, e.g. developers getting hit when the market goes down being forced to fire sell, has a simple solution (renting on short-term leases). The only failure mode is market breakdown, i.e. where homeowners trying to rent cannot find tenants at any price.

I can guess that if market breakdown occurs there are much larger problems to resolve. Some potential situations:

- social situation untenable (too much homelessness or crime?)

- earthquake or natural disaster making the area uninhabitable

- massive glut of housing available (lol)

When commenting on a law it's important to read the actual text because it usually has surprising effects.

https://sfstandard.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Empty-Home...

There are many, but I'll list just one for that great SF flavor. You can exclude a vacant residence if it is currently waiting for a building permit. But the exclusion only lasts one year, no matter how long SF takes to approve the permit. If there are multiple permit cycles, only the first year of any can be excluded.

Build a new large apartment, and it takes more than a year to lease out? As a nice thank-you from SF for your building contribution, you can now pay that vacancy tax.

There is a more general problem here though. This whole thing suffers from Smart Person syndrome, where Smart People will continue tweaking every little detail of life without realizing that they have created a system that is more and more complicated and more and more impossible to deal with.

I don't really know how they are going to be able to tell that these units are vacant. Maybe owners should just lie to avoid the expense and hassle of tracking this. That's also not great.

Shelter as a necessity for life that is artificial and cities being the main entry point for wealth in the world kind of make this a necessity. It's not like any of these business owners will stop being landlords because they will still make money. Making money without working for it should be hard. What is nasty about not allowing a select few to control a basic human necessity?

This wouldn't affect those who live in their homes, or even those who have a property with less than three units.

It’s sad because it’s true — politics and governing here seems far more insane than anywhere else I’ve lived in terms of a focus on bananas laws/taxes/regulations instead of just getting the core job done.

It’s a great place in a lot of ways, that could be great in a lot more.

(No particular opinion on this tax as I intend to leave regardless).

Seems?

Maybe because right wing media has constantly stated this opinion over years you think it's just a fact.

I mean, I lived here 12 years and in a Midwest city 10 years before that. There’s a big difference. Obviously for any 1 human the N will be small. So I used “seems” to indicate that while that’s my experience I don’t have like a study to prove it.

It might be helpful to have an opinion on this tax. Perhaps this is one of the more useful ones. Not all taxes are bad, but agreed that SF seems to miss the mark more often than not.

Because of Prop 13 and the various extensions passed by HJTA (eg Prop 218) the state needs to come up with increasingly bananas schemes to fund public services.

In a sane place we'd simply adjust property taxes but that's not possible in California.

I assume you've never heard about Prop 13?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com