Reverse Mortgages are usually predatory anyway, so more scrutiny and regulation isn't a bad thing.

Yes, this. Tax collateral as advance on capital gains and the whole incentive to dodge taxes with loans go away and it remains fair too

You could make exceptions for loans taken to improve the same asset (home improvement loans) but you'd have to pass strict audits to get the exception approved

I don’t know what the financial consequences would be. Taxing unrealized assets would also have to have limits because so many retirement funds and the like are unrealized gains, we don’t want to hurt people’s ability to retire. That’s why putting a tax on trying to sidestep paying capital gains makes more sense. We’re not going to figure out how that all works here today. People won’t sit on unrealized gains, they're going to have to use them in some fashion even if just as collateral, and we need to tax whatever workarounds they use to make those funds work for them.