Wells Fargo to pay $3.7B for mistreating customers

Because they can claim that expense on their tax report and dynamically downsize or upsize if they are growing or shrinking fast?

You literally can not compare private homeownership with large companies owning their offices.

> When you buy a home you have to pay mortgage interest, property taxes, maintenance costs, HOA dues, and you have the opportunity cost of not being able to invest your mortgage principal instead of locking it up in your house.

All negligible compare to the fact that you own actual property, you have the freedom to do what you please and the value of your home is one of the best assets against inflation, because housing is always needed.

If owning a home was not worth the trouble, how come gigantic corporations like blackrock are buying homes 30% over asking price as soon as they can?

Of course it‘s not true that only losers don‘t own their homes, but in the last 30 years, if you do own yours you‘ve automatically won. Housing prices are so astronomically high that suburbian property beats anything else.

For every "retired grandma who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca", I can show you dozens if not hundreds of grandmas who already got pushed out of town because of skyrocketing rents - thanks in no small part to your homeowning grandmas stubbornly insisting on living in a single-family home in the middle of Downtown, on a lot that could and should be housing dozens or hundreds of households.

And I haven't even begun to dig into the socioeconomic safety nets like citizens' dividends that a land value tax could readily fund, thus producing a negative tax burden for all renters and the vast majority of homeowners.

Why would you punish those hundreds of grammas who just want to live out their retirements? Not to mention the thousands of working Americans who just want a place to live that doesn't entail multi-hour-long commutes?

> She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs

There are these things called "moving companies" which would be happy to move her and her stuff into an apartment nearby. With the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in equity she's accumulated due to her property appreciating in value, she can almost certainly afford to hire such a company to move her and her stuff. With LVT motivating the construction of said apartments to amortize said LVT across as many tenants as possible, she will have no trouble finding a new home - and the denser urbanization would mean that the grocer and pharmacist and GP and such would be right around the corner instead of involving a half-hour bus ride through sprawling suburbia.

> Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?

Because that is far from the only cause of housing shortages. You could play whack-a-mole with ad hoc taxes specifically targeting foreign investors and domestic investors and property management companies and Old Money billionaires and wannabe AirBNB moguls and agricultural conglomerates and commercial/industrial landlords and everyone else directly profiting on the very land speculation driving costs of living through the roof... or you could just tax land value, and thus address all that in one fell swoop with a tiny fraction of the bureaucratic overhead and with countless social and economic benefits on top of that.