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Landlords should have to pay income tax on their rental properties regardless of whether they're rented out or not. (gothamist.com)

submitted 1 year ago by Blaze@discuss.tchncs.de to c/personalfinance@lemmy.ml

376 comments fedilink hide all child comments

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/12162

Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there's still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.

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[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

so the discussion should be on what we actually want and what changes we need to make to get there

Come now, that's far less entertaining than tribalistic shitfling on the Internet, and isn't that the real objective here?

Joking aside, a big solution that should absolutely be on that list is abolition of single-family zoning and a general reduction in the amount of red tape involved in building more housing. There are, and I am not kidding, multiple examples of middle-density housing being blocked because some local NIMBYs tried to have a laundromat protected as a historical landmark. In California, endless demands for environmental reviews can be weaponized such that the legal fees and wasted time make the financials for new housing fall through. And that's even assuming you can find land that isn't exclusively zoned for single-family homes. San Francisco has one of the worst housing markets in the country, and despite that, on 38% of its land, it is illegal to build housing that isn't single family homes. At the end of the day, if you have a million people looking for housing and only a third as many units available, you can either build more, or you can accept that only the richest third of them will get housing. One of those options is much more enticing if you're claiming to care about the poor.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

abolition of single-family zoning

I disagree, we should just make it less attractive. This can happen in a few ways:

improve mass transit, and encourage higher density along transit arteries
make vehicular traffic less convenient by routing it around city centers instead of through - i.e. encourages mass transit use
increase property tax and reduce sales tax - basically encourage using less space and using more services (i.e. rely on the local shop, not your own food storage room)

And so on. The benefits here are varied, such as:

less traffic in city centers
more green space, since the space isn't occupied by as many SFH
less road maintenance because you need fewer roads
healthier people since using a bicycle or walking would be more convenient than driving

But as you noted, the above gets blocked by NIMBYs. But it is possible, as we can see in the Netherlands, which has largely reduced its vehicular traffic and improved the residential density. It wasn't always that way, but they made a big push for it and people now don't want to go back.

[–] BraveSirZaphod@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I totally agree that those are all good things, but I still see no real reason why the government has any business telling a homeowner who wants to split the building into a duplex that it's illegal, because reasons.

The political cost of actually abolishing SF zoning is definitely high though, and proposals to make SF homes less attractive are definitely more politically palatable.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 year ago

Yup, it's really dumb. SF should have virtually no SFH-exclusive zoning since they're very much space constrained, they should have a lot more mixed zoning (i.e. shops at ground level, housing above).