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Comment by aliston | Hacker News Reader

It's not just foreign money. Private equity firms, wealthy speculators and cheap Fed money are a big part of it as well.

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Might not a solution to both problems be high property taxes for unoccupied housing? If you are buying purely to park your cash, and effectively take those units off the market, some strong disincentive should exist.

The disincentive is the money that renting out your units would bring in. If they're so worthless (to everyone else) that they wouldn't rent for a noticeable amount, who cares if they're taken off the market?

The combined income of 50 families is probably not noticeable to an oil oligarch.

The housing isn't vacant because it's not occupied. It's vacant because the owners have their primary residence elsewhere. Or have several homes. London has neighborhoods where full time residency runs around 30% as well, leading to "ghost towns" - supposedly much of that is Russian or eastern euro money being kept outside of their home countries less as an investment than a value store. I have a friend who is about to close on a condo in LA - all cash - and already owns homes in Asia and New York. She views them as investments but having paid cash she has no interest in renting them out.

I wouldn't consider these investment properties occupied. And in fact, that's the point of my suggestion. Excess liquidity accumulated by the upper echelons of society is spurring this "housing crisis". Society has an interest in dis-incentivizing the kind of property-hoarding that you describe.

In addition to wanting to keep housing affordable for workers in cities and elsewhere, cities should be scared witless by the thought of "ghost towns" and neighborhoods with 30% residency. Cities are not collections of streets and buildings, they are made up of the people that reside in them, and without people, the economy of a city will collapse.

It's also worth noting that banks don't have to pay property tax on foreclosed homes, greanting them interest free investments.

Why don't they? It seems like local municipalities would be incentivized to seize them for unpaid taxes then.

Are they permitted to rent them out and not pay? If so it seems like it would be a great loophole for a bank to mutate into a quasi real estate management company. You could easily undercut any other local rents by the cost of property taxes.

This is a crime. How is this allowed?

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