How Much Housing Will Be Built?

Re:How Much Housing Will Be Built? by kbenson on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @12:31PM (#11815777)

That's fairly easily dealt with. Require it be occupied for more than 6 months of the year, otherwise 1% (or 0.5%, whatever) of market value per month unoccupied. 80% of construction costs can be subtracted from any unoccupied housing fees applied. Any fudging on the construction fees paid/received is tax fraud on one or both parties.

I really like this idea, except that "market value" is vague, and would require a bit of work to determine accurately. Maybe the best you could do would be to have a by-block square footage to value chart to be used for these purposes (and you would want a definitive source anyways, to prevent gaming the market value side).

This could also help quite a bit with the property owned in New York as a way to launder money[1].

1: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2016/05/27/479717380/episo...

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Re:How Much Housing Will Be Built? by eru on Wednesday June 01, 2016 @08:28PM (#11819479)

It seems like a cute solution. But it's a bit unnecessary, and complicated.

Ie you probably would want to tax under-occupation as well. (Otherwise you just declare a bunch of apartments as a single unit, and have a single dude check in every once in awhile. They did that in Britain, because of different legal treatment of trespassing between empty and `occupied' buildings.) But how do you define under-occupation? Where do you draw the line?

Just use a land tax. It's simpler and harder to evade.

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