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I think the solution to this is an incremental shift towards property taxes + away from income taxes. Doing so would nullify the investment arms race that’s turning home ownership into a sick financial game.

If you’re paying 6%/year in property taxes, a home is no longer an “investment”, and the house hoarding (especially by the likes of investors buying single-family housing) will cease. People will buy homes to have a place to live, and the market will cool off.

This comes with the additional benefit of progressively taxing wealth instead of solely income. Wealth discrepancy is orders of magnitude worse than income discrepancy, and currently we’re doing almost nothing about that.

The even better variation on this is land taxes (see Henry George's Progress and Poverty, or the summary here: https://gameofrent.com).

There are heaps of advantages to this approach, like no capital flight (can't take land overseas with you), no economic inefficiencies (taxing land doesn't get rid of land, whereas taxing pretty much anything else reduces the supply of that thing, taxing land doesn't reduce house-building the way property taxes do).

Nonono, no more of these halfbaked tax reform ideas.

There's nothing in society that says we need to "compensate" new taxes by getting rid of older ones. If we as a society decide that someone's speculative actions are harmful, there is no good reason not to tax them into oblivion

There is no "we as a society decide". No one in their right mind would argue that the government widely acts in the favor of those who elect it, especially in terms of revenue collecting and spending. The government decides and the government mostly has its own agendas.

Yet now the correct choice is supposed to be made in regard to property ownership social "harm", using taxes as the specific tool to correct it?

If the government, or "we as a society", can't directly justify their goal being enforced via restrictive law then enforcing the goal via taxation isn't democratically justified (ie: an incentive provided for the tax collecting gov).

>no more of these halfbaked tax reform ideas.

Why would US citizens be in favor of tax reform? What a crazy idea that has zero historical precedent.

How should the government decide which taxes to implement, then?

I have an even crazier idea, what if we just voted for straight up expropriation?

But I don't feel like having this discussion with someone who by all likely hood wouldn't be affected by this issue since they don't own any rental properties to begin with, wouldn't be affected by this in any way, and is just making an argument from an ideological reflex

Not every country is a corrupt failed state and plenty of western representative democracies have acted on behalf of their constituents best interests

If you dont make a good faith argument but instead throw your hands up saying "they're all crooks anyway" then what's the point of even trying?

I'm all in favor of progressive property taxes than ratchet up with the more properties you own. Generational home ownership is a good thing, and blanket taxing everyone basically ensures that poorer people who inherit properties can't afford to stay in them when prices go up.

> If you’re paying 6%/year in property taxes, a home is no longer an “investment”, and the house hoarding (especially by the likes of investors buying single-family housing) will cease.

It wouldn't accomplish that. The big investors would just shrug, keep buying houses and renting them out, passing your 6% to the renter to pay. Meanwhile regular people would be priced out of their home by taxes, reducing home ownership even further and those big investors would snap up those homes. Repeat cycle until those corporations own 100% of all properties.

You want to incentivize owning and living a home, so I would do 0% tax on primary residence (up to some value limit), maybe 5% on a second home and ratcheting steeply up from there on each additional property owned by a person or entity.

That would wipe out the corporations owning hundreds of homes since they would not be able to profitably rent them out if they're paying 100+% tax on each. Meanwhile regular people can live in the only home they own without tax.

Check out land value tax: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-book-review-progress-a...

I have, many times, since it always comes up. I'm still convinced LVT hurts the small individual homeowner the most, so it's basically the opposite of what I'd want which is to incentivize owning and living a single home instead of corporations hoarding them to rent out.

I would be happy extending these incentives to single homeowners, if we also extend similar or greater incentives to people living in condos or apartment buildings.

100% agree on this.

Can’t just property tax a fixed amount.

We want most people to affordably own a primary home (their primary address) may be have a vacation or side rental at higher property tax and heavily discourage investors sitting on an array of homes primarily for rent seeking.

You have the right idea of fixing the problem of housing appreciating faster then inflation and being an investment but you are proposing the wrong solution.

The correct solution is crush nimbyism and zone land and speed permitting to fulfill need rather than to create artificial scarcity. Japan and Germany, among other provide various flavors of this working. I prefer japans method of moving zoning to a national body (in north america this would be at stae or province level) and zoning for national interest, which means allowing lots more density than we have now and allowing substantially faster, easier, and cheaper permit approval. On the demand side we can get rid of subsidy programs like cmhc that provide a naive backstop to allow 5% or no money down buying.

> We're approaching a Neo-Feudalism society where the only people who will be able to afford to buy homes are those whose parents and grandparents were able to buy homes.

Prices of homes vary greatly. If your parents owned an apartment in a unappealing town, that won't pay your bay area house. Conversely, you may not be able to afford a house in the bay area while working there, but save enough in one year to buy a house somewhere else.

And even this story mentions Zurich, Geneva, and Bern that I notices. Switzerland is expensive overall (and home ownership is low overall) but that major thriving metros in countries are expensive hasn't exactly been a surprise for a long time. I suspect it's easier to live in cheaper areas--even relatively nearby some metros--that may just not be a convenient daily commute to those metros. The Bay Area is somewhat unusual in that living 60-90 minutes away from the city mostly doesn't help you much.

That's why I think remote work could be a great equalizer. While understanding that not everyone can work remotely, it should be employer's obligation to prove that work must be done on-premise (factory workers, most service workers and so on). The rest could spread into areas that have not been considered attractive from the employment point of view for the past 20+ years. This raises valuations of property in those areas, brings in businesses, while at the same time reducing valuations of metropolitan areas. If only elected governments felt any kind of responsibility to make equality a priority.

> In their 70s, Swiss homeowners are 11 times wealthier than renters their age,

This doesn't mean anything. It just states the obvious, which is that people who can afford super expensive houses tend to be rich.

The problem is also compounded by the fact that "Bricks and Mortar" are considered a middle class investment. And most of that investing class aren't really ok with accepting that a loss of money can also be part of having an investment. So consequently they create pressure with their political mass to stall all changes in policy that may be for the better.

I don't see a crash coming, I see stalling economies as all the well just locks itself up in housing for a generation.

> We're approaching a Neo-Feudalism society where the only people who will be able to afford to buy homes are those whose parents and grandparents were able to buy homes.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised if the parents and grandparents lived more frugally. Spending more than you earn will make you poor regardless of income.