[jasonkester]

Why?

I have two houses: one in England, one in France. I live in one during the year and one in The summer. Neither one is an investment. They’re both our home. Combined, they would sell for less than a cheap house in Southern California.

Why do you want me to pay extra property tax because my home is split in two?

It sounds like hold this view that anybody who owns anything is necessarily evil. But most of us are just people living their lives as best we can.

[ncallaway]

> Why do you want me to pay extra property tax because my home is split in two?

This is like asking why I want to make sure everyone gets a slice of cake before you go for a second slice.

I absolutely have nothing against you having two properties, but while homeless people exist in these societies, I absolutely think it should be expensive for you to do so. If we get to a place where homelessness doesn't exist, then I'd absolutely want you to be able to own a second property at no financial penalty.

> It sounds like hold this view that anybody who owns anything is necessarily evil.

I never said any such thing. I described adding taxes to a behavior that I think leads to a bad social outcome.

There are lots of things that I think we should tax as a means of changing behavior without saying someone who engages in those behaviors is evil.

Frankly, I don't know why you'd have this perception from my comment, but it's certainly not accurate. I own things! I don't think it's evil. There are lots of activities that I personally do that I think should be taxed at a higher rate.

I own a home, and think my property taxes should be higher. I own a business, and think my business taxes should be higher. Just because I advocate for higher taxes on things I personally do, doesn't lead me to believe I'm evil.

[magicalist]

Land is finite, desirable land even more so. You can summer in France but you can pay more to do so than if you lived there year round. Call it an incentive, not a punishment, if you want.

[jasonkester]

But I do pay more. I had to purchase an entire house and pay taxes on it.

There is no shortage of houses here in farmland France or up in rural north England[1], which explains why houses are cheap enough that you can buy two of them. That’s the housing market working like it’s supposed to. Why does it need punishing or incentivising?

[1] there are towns within a few miles with hundreds of boarded up row houses that you could get for a few thousand pounds if you like. Our village in France is surrounded by fields as far as you can see in two directions. If you want to come live here, you can (and people often do) buy a small piece of that land and build a house.

[magicalist]

> But I do pay more

More per house. There's no natural law saying taxes need to be equal per house, or that they need to be commensurate with services consumed by those living in them. Taxes (and tax breaks) are also used to incentivize behavior, which is the answer to your original question of "why".

[taneq]

Your home isn’t split in two. You have two homes, one of which stands empty at any given time. That’s what they’re arguing against, some people owning multiple houses while others are homeless. They’re not saying it should be impossible, just more expensive.

[jasonkester]

But anybody with a spare bedroom is doing the same thing by your logic. Nobody is in the kitchen right now. You monster.

The solution isn’t to stick homeless people in every available space. It’s to build places for them to live.

In your case, if your hypothetical homeless person wants to live on my street, he can buy one of the three homes currently for sale there, for the same price mine would sell for. How about we at least wait to see if he buys one of those before you go kicking me out of mine?

[smileysteve]

You jest about the kitchen and rooms, but the 80s saw a shift away from communal boarding options while reducing mental health treatment. There's a portion of the housing market that should have a communal kitchen, bathroom.

San Francisco has started building these again as startup incubators, but that's not the only target market

[taneq]

The slope isn’t that slippery. It’s not unreasonable to consider a home as an indivisible unit.

> if your hypothetical homeless person wants to live on my street, he can buy one of the three homes currently for sale there, for the same price mine would sell for.

Haha oh those silly homeless people, they should just buy houses, right?

[alexvoda]

Exactly, the effect of such a law would be to incentivize building mansions. And the savvy owners may even go the route of forming collectives of mansion owners.

Therefore each owner only owns one massive house that friends can use part of and spends most of the time at other friends massive houses.