this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
147 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
44152 readers
1066 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not quite that simple though. What do you mean by "residential property"? Single-family homes? A duplex? Okay, that sounds fine, but what about an apartment high rise? That's a residential property, and there's not a great way to have it all be rental property without being owned by a corporation of some kind. Even when you talk about renting far few units--such as an owner-occupied apartment building with 4 units in total (these are fairly common in Chicago, which is the rental market I'm most familiar with)--a "corporation" may be something like an LLC in order to shield the owner from personal financial liability in case of catastrophic loss. (And yes, I'm aware that incorporating as a small business can and does get abused. In theory there are checks against that, in practice they don't help in many cases since there's too much going on for any municipality to go after every single case of business fraud.)
Of course, you don't want individuals owning vast tracts of residential properties either; that takes all the problems of corporations owning property, and concentrates them into the hands of one person.
I think that there might be a way to regulate and incentivize behaviour through tax policy, but I'm not sure what it would be. Perhaps a system that put a hard cap on profits, and required certain percentages of rent to always go into maintenance and improvements? You'd probably also want to exempt corporations that owned or had control over 6 or fewer units.
This would be a fun (read: complex and challenging) area of public policy to get involved in, because you want to make housing affordable, but you also don't want to disincentivize development.
Ninja edit: I'm saying all of this not because I'm pro-corp, or pro-gov't, but because any time you try and fix a problem, you're going to have bad actors that are going to try and break your system in order to get as much personal profit out of it as they can. Trying to find the weak points and then reinforcing them makes it harder for good ideas to be abused to a negative end.
Then not all of them have to be for rent. In my country at least you can buy individual apartments.
Also you could allow them to own the property they build, but once sold off, they or another corporation (or individual with too many properties, maybe the limit can be 3 or 4) cannot buy them again.
Obviously I'm not a lawyer and this was just a quick suggestion. I expect people more familiar with the law can word this better.