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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

#191

Post by rorykoehler »

amarte wrote: post #179

I'm surprised no one has mentioned China here. I was recently able to travel to China for the first time and was fascinated to learn about their housing market. Apparently the Chinese government doesn't have a property tax. For men in China, owning a home is already incredibly important. It's practically a requirement for getting married, to the point where a woman's family would almost certainly disapprove of a marr…

>There are "tier 3" cities in China with populations the size of LA and NY where you see clusters of dozens and dozens of 40-50 story apartment buildings shooting up.

Same thing is happening in India. Frightening pace of urban development.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#192

Post by lazyasciiart »

lallysingh wrote: post #180
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The aim of laws is compliance. If the low and medium fines of previous years have failed to achieve compliance, and fines eventually escalate to high, I'd argue it's far from excessive. If it were excessive a much lower amount would have achieved general compliance with that particular law, would it not?

Our regular human ideas for excessive don't count. There's a legal standard there. I don't know it.

Nobody does, really. It has to be defined in context of the 'gravity of the offence'. I'm sure someone could make a good argument that 1% of the value of a property is reasonable.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#193

Post by ramshorns »

conanbatt wrote: post #182
refurb wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In places with rent control, having a tenant reduces the value of the home. Sometime substantially if their rent is locked at a low rate. It’s not unusual to buy tenants out in SF before putting the home on the market. Spend $50k to get them to leave and the value of the home goes up $200k. If you know you’re going to sell in a few years, basically the value of the rent (adjusting for buyout) is way less than the inc…

Then the problem is rent control, and the solution is not to tax empty homes.

Rent control is the solution to a different problem. Without it, landlords have the power to make people homeless.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#195

Post by zanny »

amarte wrote: post #179

I'm surprised no one has mentioned China here. I was recently able to travel to China for the first time and was fascinated to learn about their housing market. Apparently the Chinese government doesn't have a property tax. For men in China, owning a home is already incredibly important. It's practically a requirement for getting married, to the point where a woman's family would almost certainly disapprove of a marr…

Policies like that are going to backfire in the long run though. If the wealth being generated by productive exports is being hoarded in unutilized housing there are long tail effects that will slow down the economy - the housing sitting idle isn't productive, and when the investors try to capitalize on their property in the future they will just be rent seeking the difference between the construction price and their sale price.

Its happening around the world. The rich realize that one of the scarcest resources is space and land and are powerful enough to manipulate governments into just letting them hoard their money in housing. Because for the states where this happens everyone loses except the rich - housing becomes prohibitively expensive for the working class, rising property values leech productivity and growth and stall out consumerism, and all the money that created the situation could have better been used creating productive business rather than rotting in a cyclic property investment bubble.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#196

Post by supernova87a »

I'm curious about the legal grounds for such a tax or fine.

If local zoning already governs what may be built or operated on a property, what principle allows a government to levy fines for lack of use of a property that has been built and maintained to the required zoning? (if to all other requirements, the property is not derelict, in poor condition, a blight or public nuisance?)

I didn't think that you could be compelled to be a landlord.

(By the way, Oakland also is attempting to put in place such a regulation, but to my knowledge, they have dumbed it down with so many exceptions -- elderly, destitute, social justice, etc. etc. that it's meaningless)

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#197

Post by TomMckenny »

cycrutchfield wrote: post #181
TomMckenny wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the leasor finds the business too difficult to do within the law then they should change businesses. That's how a healthy market works. In a normal, healthy industry, they would simply go bankrupt selling to those who can. But in this case, it's possible to sit on land with out utilizing it and actually gain wealth solely because of flaws in that market were land price raises due to other forces than their product…

If the law is written in such a way that it disincentivizes people from conducting business (to the point where they would prefer instead to cease conducting business and lose money), then perhaps the law should be reconsidered because it's a bad law? Tenants rights laws in a lot of Europe are just plain ridiculous, and I can fully sympathize with property owners that would prefer to leave their property vacant inste…

There are many thousands who make a considerable profit with the law as is. The vast majority of units in fact. Those who knowingly loose money by closing a profitable business out of resentment for their customers should not be in that business anyway.

At any rate, there are people that could enter say, the medical field or restaurant business if regulations are relaxed.

The difference is there are not thousands of restaurants siting empty because the owner can't profit under the current regulations or refuses to on principle or out of petulance. And just as they would quite properly go bankrupt, so too must the owners of un-rented units, presumably selling to those that know how to run them.

No one is forced to be in a particular industry and if one person can't profit in the same circumstances that thousands other do, then rather than blaming the government or voters or the tenants the don't have, they need to take responsibility for the own inability. Barring that, the best policy is taxation and fines on those who refuse to rent going to subsidize those who do.

Likewise those who consider every tenant to be an imminent tenant-squatter are neither temperamentally nor clear minded enough to run a rental business. And, far from getting sympathy, are likely to be resented. Which is probably not going to help. I imagine Barcelona's policy is going to become pretty wide spread.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#198

Post by bobthepanda »

amarte wrote: post #179

I'm surprised no one has mentioned China here. I was recently able to travel to China for the first time and was fascinated to learn about their housing market. Apparently the Chinese government doesn't have a property tax. For men in China, owning a home is already incredibly important. It's practically a requirement for getting married, to the point where a woman's family would almost certainly disapprove of a marr…

There are two huge reasons why China has so much investment in property; it is very hard for Chinese to invest outside of China, and the domestic financial market is extremely cyclical and untrustworthy. Money that in the US would be in 401ks, IRAs, funds, bonds, and general brokerage accounts is all shoveled into anything that looks like it could maybe result in any return. It's why China has had big bubbles in financial fads; yesterday it was P2P lending and today it's crypto.

China restricted capital mostly because it learned from the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis that rapid capital inflow and outflow is extremely destabilizing. The problem is now Chinese capital is basically a pot boiling over, and if you crack the door open enough capital will flow out that could destabilize the global economy and pop the Chinese bubble. The hangover would eclipse the previous big deflation of the Japanese economy.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#199

Post by nostrademons »

supernova87a wrote: post #196

I'm curious about the legal grounds for such a tax or fine. If local zoning already governs what may be built or operated on a property, what principle allows a government to levy fines for lack of use of a property that has been built and maintained to the required zoning? (if to all other requirements, the property is not derelict, in poor condition, a blight or public nuisance?) I didn't think that you could be co…

The article addresses that:

"The law the city is using, which gives it scope to fine negligent landlords after two years of leaving a property vacant, has in fact been in place since 2007 (before Colau’s election) but wasn’t implemented until during her tenure."

If a law's enacted by voters, and no law of a higher political body contradicts it, then that's what the government is allowed to do.

Re: Barcelona Fines Landlords Who Let Buildings Sit Empty

#200

Post by Taniwha »

smnrchrds wrote: post #120
phamilton wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We do the same thing in NZ - property tax (rates) is partially made up with a user pays service component (garbage etc) and a valuation component - you pay v/V (v is your valuation, V the total valuations of all the properties in the city) of the amount the city has decided to raise.

It means that if the valuation of all the properties in the city double you continue to pay the same property taxes because you pay the same percentage of the whole

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