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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

The "problem" is that we let people claim the "rent" is X for certain people and "Y" for other people--both at the same time. Just stop that.

The "solution" is that you should have to pay tax on what you claim the rent is after a small grace period (Less than 24 months certainly. Probably less than 12 or at least prorated starting before that.).

If your financial agreement requires and claims that the rent is $5000, no problem! Then the tax authority should expect to receive the tax revenue they would expect if someone was actually paying $5,000 in rent to you. If you want to leave the space vacant even after paying the tax on the revenue--have a blast.

That would short circuit all the financialization shenanigans.

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The article touches on vacancy takes, and I think this has a similar effect. As the article says, the even if you apply a tax like this, lowering the rent would still lead to foreclosure, so won't happen. So piling a tax on top might make some revenue, and it might make some operators go bust but it won't actually directly* get the property to be occupied.

* maybe if the operator goes bust, the rents on the building can be lowered with a new property value for future loans. Then perhaps it can be occupied. But that's very uncertain, especially if this happens to a whole city at once.

If the property is devalued, the property taxes lower accordingly. Portland, Oregon has been facing this problem recently. The devaluations caused the tax revenues for the city to drop, which in turn has caused budget issues.

For example, "Big Pink" is an office tower in downtown Portland. It's last sale was for about $370 million. Out of desperation in a saturated market, the owners sold it last year for about $45 million. No one - the owners, the city, or the citizens - wants to have the vicious downturn of values, and there is no easy solution. Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.

Adding taxes in a downturn obviously adds additional friction. One might ask, what happened to the tax revenue of that $370M transaction, where is it now when the city needs it.

It's gone. So are many services that the city provided.

As citizen I might prefer downturn of values. At least in medium term. Yes there is lot less tax income. But on other hand lowering values would mean lower rents which would mean lower overheads and potentially cheaper prices or more business being viable.

I'm with you there, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't impacted residential prices.

> Adding a vacancy tax just exacerbates the problem.

The point of the vacancy tax is also to prevent the over speculation before it happens. If the operators know that they are looking at having to cough up more cash than they expect in the future, they might reign in the rampant real estate speculation. If the bank knows that they might have to start coughing up cash, they'll be more inclined to actually just drop the property into bankruptcy.

Georgism FTW

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