[tut-urut-utut]

One step forward would be to just disallow any tax deductions for renting. Next step, increase taxes on rented or empty housing.

In a few years, the market would settle with much more affordable prices for buying. But we still would have a problem that building new houses would stop to a halt due to low ROI, and renting market would heat again. For that, I'm not sure how to solve this.

[pmorici]

Wether a house is rented or owned by the person occupying it doesn’t effect the basic supply/ demand dynamics of the market. Punitive taxes on landlords isn’t going to cause housing prices to come down because the cause of high prices is a housing shortage. There is no indication supply is being artificially depressed by people letting houses sit unoccupied.

[BizarroLand]

There are more than 40,000 vacant homes in San Francisco, report says:

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/how-many-vacant-homes...

Took me less than a minute to search this.

[pandaman]

The report [1] the article is referencing is talking about housing units so it's not just homes but apartments (and possibly rooms that can be rented as a unit?). Furthermore, the very same report gives the distribution of the vacant units, of which only 21000 could be possibly considered "hoarded" (this is assuming nobody does repairs and renovations, all rentals go up for rent as soon as the previous tenants move out, there is no corporate housing, no housing is involved in legal proceedings and the buyers move to the new house on the closing day), which makes 5% of total housing in SF. Does not look like a huge hoarding problem to me.

[1] https://sfgov.legistar.com/View.ashx?M=F&ID=10441217&amp...