I have bought, lived in, and sold several houses over my adult life. Never in those transactions was I “homeless” in the colloquial sense. Here is the trick in case you are interested and unsure how to do it—after your closing date is set…you go find another place to rent, you move all the stuff in the home that you are selling to the place you are renting. Then you perform the transaction to sell your home. Go home to your rental place, pour all the cash on your bed you earned from the sale of your home, and roll around in it.
To steel man property taxes, land is immobile and requires certain government services even when it is unused (perhaps even more-so). Taxing that property is a direct an efficient(from a taxation perspective) way to fund the government services associated with that property.
- you make $100k a year
- you pay $20k in taxes
- one year, you buy a house for $400k
- in the next year, its value doubles to $800k
- I say "your income (including unrealized gains) last year was $500k. You only paid $20k in taxes. That's only a 4% rate! How unfair!"
Among other things, I find the whole thing silly because of course it'll only be used to criticize the low tax rates of people who have unrealized gains. If Amazon crashes and Jeff Bezos's net worth goes down by $20B and he pays $100M in taxes, no one will write an article about how unfair it is to tax the poor guy $100M on his incredibly low income of negative $20B. Poor guy, he'd probably be the lowest-income person in the whole country!