[pc86]

Taxes on vacant rental units means they'll be sold sooner, and increases the odds they'll be sold to an occupant instead of a speculator. I am a capitalist above basically anything else but that sounds great to me (and I already own a home and will likely never move again).

> Almost everyone I know who purchases houses/apartments to rent them would get out of the business if vacancies were taxed

Yes, you've successfully articulated the point. In an actual free market where supply can be added easily with minimal headache, buying an asset to rent it back is perfectly fine. In something like the housing marketing, buying a home specifically to rent it out is bad whether it's one unit or one thousand because supply is already artificially constrained. The end of that line is BlackRock buying up thousands of homes and materially hurting Americans. The fact that some random person with a few million in inheritance can make money in the interim is irrelevant.

> but a lot of houses would also go out of circulation, because these people often buy distressed homes that banks won't give a loan on - and they renovate them, bring them up to code, etc.

It's pretty easily to exclude vacant homes with open permits that are actively being renovated or with 203(k) loans, or to provide revenue-neutral tax breaks. This is a legitimate criticism but it means you address the criticism, it doesn't mean the original goal is bad or impossible.

> There are ways to do this that may not be popular. The main one would be to remove fixed interest mortgages.

We should definitely remove fixed-interest mortgages for non-owner occupied purchases.

[colechristensen]

>> Almost everyone I know who purchases houses/apartments to rent them would get out of the business if vacancies were taxed

>Yes, you've successfully articulated the point.

And the goal. Why raise taxes on vacancies? To push out owners whose primary goal is to leach out a few percentage points above loans they can get or to sit on property while it appreciates in value (while harvesting tax benefits on the depreciation of the structures they maintain to a minimum because _margins_)

There just shouldn't be a class of people whose business is harvesting tax benefits and arbitrage of trust by banks.

[BeetleB]

> We should definitely remove fixed-interest mortgages for non-owner occupied purchases.

Just as with single payer health care: While it works very well in other countries, people in the US will insist it will fail here. :-)

[pc86]

There are legitimate concerns or arguments against a single national government-run healthcare system covering 330 million people in 50 different states (medicare/caid notwithstanding, basically all healthcare is regulated state by state and not federally).

I don't know anything arguing that adjustable-rate mortgages will "fail" in the US (we have them already), especially focused specifically toward/against non-owner occupied properties, just that it would negatively affect them and they don't want to do it.