If you pay 1% for one house, someone with 2 houses should pay 2%, and a company with 2000 homes should pay 2000%
That would make it increasingly difficult for mega companies to buy up everything and torture the housing market
A company would just fire up 2000 subsidiaries to own the homes.
Maybe companies shouldn’t be able to own companies. It just allows to much fuckery. Maybe only real human beings should be able to have ownership stakes in companies, llcs, etc.
Companies shouldn’t be able to own homes.
I wonder what happens in that case? 🤔 Oh, totally forgot. Venezuela, Cuba, USSR, North Korea. Not sure I want to end up with something like that. How many more times people need to repeat these horrible communist experiments to learn that this is not the good way to live?! Speaking from experience growing up in USSR in the 80s. Yes, capitalism sucks, but other options are often worse.
Edit: keep downvoting, it’s much easier than writing a factual argument.
Why should a landlord be prevented from registering his property under his company?
Landlords shouldn’t be able to own homes.
Why not?
That was a kind of aggressive way for me to express that, but, in all seriousness, the reason is that:
Being a “landlord”, that is, very specifically, an “owner of houses you don’t live in, but rent to people for profit”, is a way to live that is inherently abusive to the people you rent to.
You have ownership of a basic good people need to survive (housing), which is effectively scarce (because it’s not allowed for just anyone to build a house without incredible amounts of money, even homelessness is fairly illegal in many places), and you say to people:
“Either give me a monthly fee for me to allow you to have a roof over your head, or I’m calling the police (the only people allowed to be violent in the country) to kick you out”
It’s a way of making money, where the owner doesn’t do anything helpful to society, except find people who are desperate to survive, and milk them of what they make.
How is it not helpful to society to allow others to live in your house? And it’s not landlords who are looking for tenants, it’s the other way round.
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Ok, not sure if you really wanted a response here. Always feel awkward responding to a one-sentence comment with an essay, but to answer your question, this is required. Or TL:DR: companies exist for limited liability, and limited liability is grossly inappropriate for rental housing.
We’ve really lost the plot with what corporations and limited liability were invented for. The original idea behind incorporation was that it allowed people to invest in something with many other people, and to limit individual investor losses on risky megaprojects.
The early corporations were for things like major canal projects or overseas trading ventures. Let’s say a canal would be a good idea somewhere, but the cost will be enormous. The only way to fund it is to have thousands of people pool their investments for it. Those thousands of people aren’t going to be involved in running the project. Maybe they’re just investing the equivalent of a hundred or a few thousand dollars today. But without limited liability, if the canal project goes under, every investor is fully responsible for the debts of that venture. You may invest only a thousand, but if the canal goes under before it finishes, without limited liability, you could be on the hook for many times your original investment. Limited liability allowed for the democratization of investment. Without it, only the rich are able to truly invest in things.
Historically, this was a huge barrier to investment and economic development. Rome for example didn’t have anything like our modern finance system; most things were produced in large family businesses. You couldn’t just go buy stock in a venture to invest in it. If you weren’t willing to fund the entire thing, run the entire thing, and be responsible for the entire thing, you couldn’t invest in it.
This is what corporations were meant to solve - the problem of funding large risky projects beyond the ability of single investors to reasonably afford. Historically, you couldn’t just go and register a corporation on a whim. Often they required acts of legislative bodies to create them. They were seen as morally dubious in many ways - after all, shouldn’t everyone be responsible for the consequences of their own actions? Limited liability gets away from this. The bargain was made that though limited liability sacrifices some amount of fairness and justice, the prosperity the projects it allows will produce will be worth it on net.
But that isn’t how incorporation is used today. Today, landlords will open up dozens of LLCs. They’ll put a single property into each LLC. If a tenant is seriously injured due to the landlord’s neglect, the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent. The landlord could own a hundred properties - the most you can ever sue them for is the one you’re renting. In a serious injury, you could be on the hook for millions in lifelong medical expenses, and your landlord may be sitting on a fortune of a hundred million of dollars, but you can only ever sue them for the few hundred thousand the property you rent is worth. The company you’re renting from doesn’t own any more assets than that.
Rent seeking is not the type of risky moonshot venture that incorporation was invented for. Incorporation for landlords is not about encouraging moonshot investments, it’s just a state subsidy for landlords. It’s not like we wouldn’t have rental units without incorporation. Most of the citizens of Rome rented. The concept of renting is likely as old as the concept of a city. The rental market worked just fine without limited liability.
This type of liability risk should not be handled as a subsidy by the state. Landlords can already purchase liability insurance. And that’s how they should have to handle all the risks of being sued by their tenants. Someone with a dozen rental units can get a $5 million liability policy if they don’t want to put their entire net worth on the line in the event one of their tenants being seriously hurt.
And crucially, such a system would much better protect tenants. We currently just give the subsidy of limited liability to landlords as a gift. We ask for nothing in return. Insurance companies aren’t so generous. If you want a liability policy for your rental units, the insurance company is going to want to have a say in how those units are operated and maintained. The insurance company doesn’t want to insure a dilapidated death trap of a rental house.
I don’t think landlords should be able to put rental houses into LLCs, because I think we’ve completely lost the plot on what corporations were meant to achieve. Hell, I would set the minimum number of owners for a corporation to be a hundred people (with limits on how much a single individual can own.) Incorporation was meant as a tool for crowd-sourcing daring and groundbreaking infrastructure, research, and other ventures. It was never intended to be a gift to rich people operating ordinary businesses that they have complete individual control and ownership over.
This was a great read, thank you.
“the most they can ever sue the landlord for is the value of the property they rent” - why?
Because the landlord, i.e. the LLC, only owns that property, and nothing else
Is that how LLCs work?
Landlords should not exist. Hope that clears it up for you.
To hold the landlord personally responsible for the homes they own.
Landlords should be prevented from breathing.
Good luck
And that ONE human making the money should also be responsible for any damages his company makes!
You know we could call it “Accountability”, sounds good to me I don’t know why it’s not so already.
Is it troubling that this was my first thought?
They’d just make 2,000 shell companies, each with one house.
Perfectly legal.
Companies shouldn’t be allowed to own housing
Or other companies.
I always thought “if corporations are people, then why can they own other corporations”
What about LLCs to represent polycules that can’t get married because for some reason Christianity norms are law?
No. Polycules should also be allowed to own homes. If we are changing the rules then let’s fix this as well
I’d add a couple short-term exceptions: Construction companies may own housing during construction and for the amount of time it takes for newly built homes to sell to resident owners. Banks, credit unions and such should be able to foreclose on defaulted mortgages and take possession of the property for a certain amount of time, if it’s not sold within that time it goes to government auction.
They should not be allowed to retain ownership over mass amounts of occupied dwellings.
Denser housing like apartment blocs may need to work like condos, residents either outright own their portion of the building or become stakeholders in the building’s corporation, how to do that without inventing the turbo HOA will require further research and development.
They often do that already.
It reduces the liability when sued. If you do something dumb and owe someone $100,000,000. You just abandon that one property and make that company bankrupt, you don’t lose all your other properties too.
because of that reading government anti-corruption investigations can cause vertigo - just getting through the tense web of shells and shells of shells and mothershells and whatnot - there was one case in which the company had like 50 entities removed from the culprit
Every hurdle makes it more expensive to run and less profitable
Everyone dances around the fact that the government should be building low income housing themselves. We should not be begging the for profit house building industry to fix the problem they’ve made.
Some places do this. I have heard a few Welsh areas have gone for much higher council tax (approximate equivalent to a shitty property tax) on second homes. They are allowed to charge up to 4x the normal rate.
If you are renting it out as a holiday rental you can be exempt from the normal council tax but they are now requiring you to actually rent it out. It must be available for at least 252 days of the year and actually used for at least 182 days so you can’t just set rent to unaffordable amounts.
Hearing the crying about it has been great.
Hear me out: we also count all the subsidiaries company as the same entity of the owner company, now we have less exploits too
It should be illegal to have dozen of houses to begin with and if you don’t like this you can go fuck yourself because we live in a society
My mayor lives off the rent of 8 houses. I don’t think he’ll do anything to fix it
Fucking disgusting parasite
Like no wonder he had time to campaign for office, he doesn’t work 😂
And even that is small time compared to the corporate landlords who own hundreds/thousands of homes. AHhhhhhhhhhhh
Two policies would make a huge impact on this.
An additional tax on nonresident ownership and a punitive tax on vacancies based on occupancy rates.
Those two would be enough to discourage hoarding, scalping and ghost neighborhoods .
But like on ALL their properties not just the excess ones
First one should be free. Let the property investors pay the property taxes. Apparently they can afford them.
Seems like the simple and logical conclusion to the homested exemption.
I’d go further (current flat rate)^(number of houses owned -1)
Meh I wouldn’t go exponentially. I would go 1=1. 2=5-7 depending on size and availability, 3 = 20-150. 4=1500+
How about the good ol’ “nobody gets seconds until everyone’s had firsts” rule
Companies that own homes should pay a higher rate per house in general.
Also, I’m voting to raise my property taxes this year. I get the benefit of living in a house AND making sure that public schools can keep feeding and helping kids. Fucking yes please.
No way, it needs to go exponential.
This is essentially a square increase. If one home is one dollar, two home would total $4, three homes would total $9, etc.
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I’d go further and cap the number of home one should be able to own, to like 2.
How would that work for apartment buildings or 4-plexes?
You usually just own a unit
- there is zero need to own two homes.
When people think of two homes the second is usually a cottage or other seasonal property that you can’t really live in while participating in society. So it’s not really taking something away. Sure an argument could be made, but here in Canada if you put homeless people in cottages you’d just have a bunch of people frozen to death by spring.
That’s a big thing at least in the US when people talk about occupancy rates for homes, they often are talking about vacation homes, which are seasonal in nature and in general wouldn’t be able to be lived in year round to begin with. I like the idea of simple higher taxes on assessed value for each additional home you own, with the highest assessed value home having the highest tax rates.
no. “cant really live in” means “needs work to go from 3 seasons to 4.” and then be sold to someone who needs a home.
otherwise it’s a campsite not a “2nd home.”
I assume they didn’t mean seasonal as in “can only be used in certain seasons”, rather that you occupy it for vacation or summer or whatever. Not sure if you are from a non-mountany or very populated country, but where I come from, mountain “hüttes” are a thing and do not contribute to the housing crisis - or at least not in the usual way I can think of. Some people choose to live in those areas, I am very envious of their courage and peace :) But 99% do not make this choice, just use it for winter/summer long get-aways.
again - a huttie or small camp site type thing is not a second home that im talking about. i would not consider that a 2nd home.
a place on the mountains in a vacation town on a culdesac with a hoa that you visit for a month each year is what im talking about. far far diff.
