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Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

citylab.com

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Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#111

Post by refurb »

lsiebert wrote: post #56
Pirolita wrote: post #18

People should be able to do whatever they want with their properties

No, they shouldn't. There are externalities that effect others, and the free market. For example, you don't want people doing things that poison groundwater for the neighbors, right? Anyway, letting property sit idle benefits the landowner but causes issues for neighbors, local government and the free market. It means businesses in those locations get less customers, and local governments less sales tax. If the prope…

Problem is, every “tweak” of the market causes ramifications, often unintended.

A great example is rent control. Sure it helps current tenants, but it distorts the rental market such that it disincentivizes putting new homes on the market, and the exact opposite of what you want - higher rents.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#112

Post by alanlamm »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #100
xenadu02 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People need homes to live. Shelter is essential in the way very few things are.

How about you start paying fines for all that unused food in your pantry?

Yes, or even better, for all that surplus lard on your body!

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#114

Post by echlebek »

phamilton wrote: post #106
tareqak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city of Vancouver has the Empty Homes Tax. Quote from [0]: Each year, one owner of residential property in Vancouver is required to submit a property status declaration to determine if their property is subject to the tax. Properties deemed empty will be subject to a tax of 1% of the property’s 2018 assessed taxable value. Most homes will not be subject to the tax, as it does not apply to principal residences or…

What's property tax in Vancouver? Is this essentially a doubling of property tax? (1% is a fairly common property tax amount)

Much, much less than 1%. The low tax rate has been cited as one of the reasons for housing market inflation.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#115

Post by chriogenix »

CydeWeys wrote: post #48
Pirolita wrote: post #18

People should be able to do whatever they want with their properties

That's not true in the modern world and never has been. There's plenty of things you can't do with your property, and indeed the total universe of what you can do is much smaller than the universe of what you cannot do. Cities are (necessarily) very tightly regulated, because when people and property are packed in so tightly together the possibilities for negative externalities are severe. It's important to optimize…

in a very wealth neighborhood of Honolulu, think where the average home is 4-5+ Million USD, a japanese owner of many houses 20+ wanted to build a gallery for his art. the wealthy neighbors didnt want it so what he did instead was rent all of his houses to low income hawaiians and put the art out on one of his vacant lots. they were mainly weird statues. naked greek gods etc. Just goes to show what people can do when sufficiently motivated.

for anyone that wants to read further his name is Kawamoto and he was recently arrested for Tax evasion in japan and was forced to sell his Kahala Homes Portfolio

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#116

Post by bloomca »

pbiggar wrote: post #35

Does anyone know why is it that seemingly every major city is having an affordability crisis at the same time?

I think it is a consequence of globalization. I don't have any statistics to prove it, but I think that people in general are not very keen to dig very deep, therefore everybody knows about certain number of "cool" cities, which everybody travels to and tries to move.

So, all popular big cities experience this influx of people moving there; expats have more and more options nowadays, so they also move to only cool places, therefore, it creates this problem. Not only it raises rents, expats can bump them a lot! They earn a lot of money, so for them extra $100 is not a big problem.

And urbanism – I guess more and more people move to cities nowadays, so it brings even more people who want to live there. Nobody really wants to live in the outskirts (unless it is USA), so major hubs, subway stations, downtown gets huge demand.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#117

Post by TomMckenny »

cellularmitosis wrote: post #101
lsiebert wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they shouldn't. There are externalities that effect others, and the free market. For example, you don't want people doing things that poison groundwater for the neighbors, right? Anyway, letting property sit idle benefits the landowner but causes issues for neighbors, local government and the free market. It means businesses in those locations get less customers, and local governments less sales tax. If the prope…

"letting property sit idle benefits the landowner" Can you help me understand this? I've never understood why any property sits idle -- the property would need to increase in value fast enough to counteract property taxes, just for the owner to break even. And that's ignoring the opportunity cost of not filling the property with tenants. To me, it seems that it would always make more financial sense to try and hit 10…

In here are two reasons[1].

Another is this: a building nearly full rented has an easily calculable valuable based on its income. A building with a higher price but not trying to rent can, incredibly, claim to have a higher value. Especially if there are several building nearby claiming the same value.

If there is a debt associated with the building, it is especially in the owner's interest to keeping the supposed value of the building high even if they are loosing revenue at the moment.

If a few organizations own a large number of units they can strongly influence a market both of rental rates and building values by doing this. Undoubtedly to a net profit or they wouldn't be doing it.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19427243

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#118

Post by bloomca »

parthdesai wrote: post #105
l4yao wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this argument a lot whenever Airbnb is mentioned. Do you have a source available? Rent has increased significantly in Toronto recently. How do you know Airbnb is a significant factor?

Here, according this[0] report Toronto has around 6200 entire units as airbnb units. That's at the very least 6200 less rental units in the market. And you know very well how supply and demand works. Anecdotal, but the couple in my neighbouring unit recently bought a condo and moved out. Guess what happened to that unit. It's a full time airbnb unit now. My floor has 12 units, and out of it 3 are full time airbnb uni…

> I still haven't started to list all the problems that airbnb tenants bring to the building.

It might be crazy, yeah. I guess buildings receive "abuse" in the same way as rental cars get more abuse, except that here regular tenants suffer.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#119

Post by TomMckenny »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #43
devindotcom wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FTA "The problems the fines are intended to combat began in 2007, when the financial crisis brought an epidemic of foreclosures on homes across Spain. After a nationwide wave of repossessions, banks found themselves the owners of newly vast portfolios of housing whose tenants had been evicted. Put off by the cost of renovations and wary of their potential obligations to rental tenants as landlords, many banks simply…

So isn’t the more salient point here that tenants’ rights are apparently so strong here that the owners would rather leave the properties vacant (and lose money) than rent them out to a new tenant? Perhaps if they would remove some of the more pernicious and abused “rights” for tenants, more property owners would put their property up for rent?

>vast portfolios of housing whose tenants had been evicted

Apparently not that many rights.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#120

Post by smnrchrds »

phamilton wrote: post #106
tareqak wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The city of Vancouver has the Empty Homes Tax. Quote from [0]: Each year, one owner of residential property in Vancouver is required to submit a property status declaration to determine if their property is subject to the tax. Properties deemed empty will be subject to a tax of 1% of the property’s 2018 assessed taxable value. Most homes will not be subject to the tax, as it does not apply to principal residences or…

What's property tax in Vancouver? Is this essentially a doubling of property tax? (1% is a fairly common property tax amount)

In general, municipalities are not allowed to run a deficit in Canada. Since high taxes which would result in having a surplus are politically unpopular, usually municipalities get just enough tax to fund their programs. That is when they are writing their annual budget, they define their total expenditure E, the total assessed value of all properties within their municipality V, and set the tax rate for the year by dividing E/V [1].

Because of how inflated the values of homes in Vancouver are, V is huge. So E/V is much smaller than the rest of the country. In 2018, the tax rate for residential properties was 0.246826% [2]. A 1% surtax would more than quintuple the amount of taxes owed.

[1] It's a bit more complicated than that. Residential and commercial properties have different tax rates for example. But not too much more complicated. Municipalities are not allowed to charge sales or income taxes like they do in some other countries.

[2] https://vancouver.ca/home-property-development/residential.a...

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