91–100 of 173 posts
"“The government cannot compel a property owner to rent his or her property to third parties without violating” the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit said." A vacancy tax no more compels someone to rent their property than an income tax compels me to be unemployed. Feels like the kind of lazy argument you'd lob up just to give your fellow rich people an opportunity to bail you out in a hyper undemo…
"“The government cannot compel a property owner to rent his or her property to third parties without violating” the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit said." A vacancy tax no more compels someone to rent their property than an income tax compels me to be unemployed. Feels like the kind of lazy argument you'd lob up just to give your fellow rich people an opportunity to bail you out in a hyper undemo…
A landlord can’t unilaterally opt out of the vacancy tax though. It takes a tenant to agree to rent it and if society has done a shit job collectively to make the area viable for tenants (due to lack of crime or amount of foot traffic or tenants working from office) then the landlord is penalized with taxes for something the landlord can’t control. Paying income taxes is the “cost” of having income. You can opt out u…
Becoming a landlord is going into business, and there are regulations and risk. Sometimes you go bust. That's life. If you picked up a property that's somehow unrentable in SF you should sell tickets, I'm sure a lot of people would love to see what kind of insane hellhole you couldn't get someone to rent for even $1 to avoid the tax.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A landlord can’t unilaterally opt out of the vacancy tax though. It takes a tenant to agree to rent it and if society has done a shit job collectively to make the area viable for tenants (due to lack of crime or amount of foot traffic or tenants working from office) then the landlord is penalized with taxes for something the landlord can’t control. Paying income taxes is the “cost” of having income. You can opt out u…
All kinds of industries have regulations. You can't go into the medical devices industry and get super pissed at the FDA when they tell you you can't sell your stuff without their approval. You could argue "hey it's my property and I'll sell it if I want to", but that won't work and for good reason. Becoming a landlord is going into business, and there are regulations and risk. Sometimes you go bust. That's life. If…
It’s like taxing startups for not having found product-market fit and not making sales. Do you support that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People automatically equate taxation with fines and coercion, but they're separate concepts. The best example is the income tax. If we slap taxes on things we don't want people to do, then why do we literally tax work, a thing we want almost everyone to do? So taxes aren't fines or fees, and they don't force you to stop doing something you want to do or do something you don't want to. People still buy groceries despi…
[flagged]
(Sorry these textualist posts are just extremely tedious. 300m people in the richest country in history aren't governed solely by a document that is literally a pamphlet. There's case law and statutes. Your best bet here if this is a good faith question is to ask Google)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, housing is a fundamental human need and expensive guitars aren't. Call it the Shkreli principle.
> housing is a fundamental human need Not sure what that means in practice. If I pay for my own house, what percentage of my income should be set aside to pay for other people's houses?
But, my personal feeling is "at least some", because homelessness is fundamentally a housing supply problem and I think no one likes it, so it sounds like the kind of social ill that needs funding to address.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're making an argument against all laws here.
For sure but this would be a new one (law). The government telling you what to do with your property, else lose your liberty and go to jail.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's pretty coercive. Taxes are levied against transactions. A tax in the absence of a transaction is really just a fine. And fining people for not selling something violates most folks conception of basic property rights and privacy. I get that the city is looking for a way out of 50 years of systematic underdevelopment, but this just feels wrong. I don't trust government overreach to fix decades of bad governance.
> It's pretty coercive. Taxes are usually levied against financial transactions. Taxing not selling something violates most people's conception of basic property rights. First off, it isn't taxing "not selling something," it is taxing "buying a 2nd/3rd/999th home that nobody will live in and holding it vacant as an investment strategy." It is a financial transaction in that sense. Second, baseline property taxes have…
First, the implementation of the fine isn't so important as the fine itself. Most landlords are individuals that own a few units [1]. Maybe a couple decided to buy a second home or a duplex instead of investing in the S&P500. That's a lot more common than you'd expect. These are the folks navigating renters protections. Large companies don't have issues with them. They hire professionals to follow the rules. Or they build newer buildings so protections don't apply to them. We're not going to get even with some multinational real estate syndicate somewhere through a vacancy tax. We're mostly going to transfer wealth between varying shades of middle class. And really largely, we're transferring it from folks that saved for a downpayment and risked a 30 year mortgage and financially put their ducks in a row and those that spent years and years renting while knowing full well they were getting a comparatively affordable monthly payment in exchange for not building equity.
Second, I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd recommend the same to everyone.
Tenants are a liability for landlords in SF. You cannot end a tenancy, not with any amount of notice. That's a big deal and a huge policy mistake. Really messes up incentives. Let's say you and your partner have a duplex with two 2B/2BA units. You eventually decide to have kids and your parents are retiring. You want them to move into that unit so they can be close by to retire and babysit now and again. You could evict, but it's going to be costly and time consuming especially if the tenants are protected. Lawyers are going to tell you to buy the tenants out. Tenant buyouts in the city are usually mid five figures and they end up restricting some of your uses of the property in the future. It will take months (maybe more than a year) and may end up creeping up towards six figures. You would've been better off never renting it out in the first place.
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that most owners letting their properties sit vacant are probably doing it because of bad policy that deprives them of fair use of their property. Not because they don't already realize they're missing out on rental income and would see the light if they had to pay a little more tax each year.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/08/02/as-national...
"“The government cannot compel a property owner to rent his or her property to third parties without violating” the Takings Clause of the U.S. Constitution, the lawsuit said." A vacancy tax no more compels someone to rent their property than an income tax compels me to be unemployed. Feels like the kind of lazy argument you'd lob up just to give your fellow rich people an opportunity to bail you out in a hyper undemo…
I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd recommend the same to everyone.
Tenants are a liability for landlords in SF. You cannot end a tenancy, not with any amount of notice. That's a big deal and a huge policy mistake. Really messes up incentives. Let's say you and your partner have a duplex with two 2B/2BA units. You eventually decide to have kids and your parents are retiring. You want them to move into that unit so they can be near and babysit now and again. You could evict, but it's going to be costly and time consuming especially if the tenants are protected. Lawyers are going to tell you to buy the tenants out. Tenant buyouts in the city are usually mid five figures and they end up restricting some of your uses of the property forever. It will take months (maybe more than a year) and may end up creeping up towards six figures. You would've been better off never renting it out in the first place.
Landlords aren't idiots and they aren't evil, at least not more so than anyone else. Put yourself in their shoes and figure out how the incentives would cause you to act. IMO it's as simple as fixing the policy issue: Landlords can terminate tenancies in good faith with two years notice. Seems very fair for everyone and I bet you get reduced vacancies without needing to increasingly ratchet up heavy handed market interventions that are themselves prone to unintended consequence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most people don't think you should be able to buy up a precious thing and squander it. Locke--the guy who came up with life, liberty, and property, based the property right on the owner's ability and duty to improve. Leaving apartments vacant doesn't sound like improvement. Taxes also aren't coercive; even SCOTUS hasn't held that. They've held that benefits can be, but not taxes. That's a right-wing anti-tax talking…
> Most people don't think you should be able to buy up a precious thing and squander it. What does it mean to "squander" and who decides? I'm pretty familiar as a renter and property owner with tenants rights in SF. If I were to buy a duplex in the city I would never ever ever rent out the extra unit. I'd lie about tenancy, ask a friend to pretend to rent it, or pay this proposed tax rather than rent it out. I'd reco…
Your argument sounds like, "if you let landlords evict as much as they like, they would rent their places out rather than treating them like pure investment vehicles." But how does that help renters? Great they can now maybe rent that vacant place, only to maybe get evicted with little to no notice, for any reason?
I think where we want to get to is a place where people who rent homes have stability, and don't get kicked out because their landlord's in-laws want to move in instead. You're not lending a bike or renting out lawn equipment. Families live in these places. Going full "I should be able to do whatever I want with my property" is at best insensitive.
I'll also say that SFs problems seem to be 100% supply related. The vacancy rate is 3% [0]?? That's crazy low. I don't think this is a complex market that's beyond my meager understanding; they just need more supply.
[0]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/how-many-vacant-homes...