I’ve said that taxes should increase drastically after you own two residential properties. Allow two for the people who own things like a home and some separate farmland, or maybe a lake house. The point is that companies shouldn’t be able to buy and sit on vacant properties, just to drive up costs. We’re not targeting the people with two houses, we’re targeting the people with two hundred.

After those two allowed properties, taxes increase at a scale, so nobody will want to sit on dozens of homes for long periods of time. And (here’s the important part!) if an owned house is vacant for more than 4 months (120 days) in the calendar year, the taxes on it skyrocket. Hell, make it exponential. This Vacant Property tax should fucking hurt. It should be the thing that keeps Zillow executives awake at night. This will encourage people/companies to sell or rent their vacant houses, instead of sitting on them indefinitely and passing costs onto the few people who they’re renting to. And that “owned property” count used for the property tax calculation should also include residential properties owned by subsidiary companies, shell corporations, etc… Don’t allow companies to spin up a thousand shell corps just to hold two properties each.

This will drive down purchase prices and rent prices, because it would be financially smarter to have a cheap renter when compared to paying the exorbitant taxes on a vacant property.

And then take the funds collected from these additional property taxes, and put it towards firsttime homebuyer incentives, rent assistance programs, homeless/displaced/battered/etc shelter funding, etc…