There are probably easy loopholes to get around your suggestion. Just form another LLC and purchase the property under that LLC instead of you as an individual, then each entity owns only one property, so they get the standard tax rate instead of what you are proposing.

Of course this would be a giant pain of a workaround to scale, but for the non-mega corporations it'd probably work. I'm sure that the huge corporations owning large swaths of residential properties would figure out scaleable loopholes.

Just tie the "first home" tax exemption back to a person by making business entities a pass-through to the registered agent (or some other single officer). i.e., an LLC can't claim the exemption, but the agent can pass their exemption through the LLC to a property.

That's a good stick, yep.

They could also add in a carrot, to reduce capital gains on sale of non-primary residences.

There are too many incentives currently to hoard properties like the damn monopoly man, so you need to start clawing away at them. Taxing the eventual sale just encourages people to not ever sell, so tax them for hoarding directly.

This is an interesting idea! Some graduated tax rate for the number of dwellings + properties that way a second home or small time landlord can own say a dozen properties before the marginal taxes take too much of the marginal profits. What efficiencies are we giving up in this model?

This has a dependency on the government actually enforcing the law though, in Canada when it comes to real estate, it has been well demonstrated that they will not. Hopefully for the US it is different.

>our politicians are just too cowardly to decommodify housing

I'll be 90% or more own multiple houses.

Make it 5 houses per person (10 for married couples), then.

Plenty of families out there own rental houses as an investment, which I think is a good thing. It allows people an alternative to investments like the stock market if they aren't into that, and it gives a path to turn labor into wealth through DIY maintenance, repairs, and improvements.

Plus it allows individuals to better manage situations like parents dying and leaving them a house that they may not want to sell immediately.

Why tax, just make it illegal? Isn't that what you really want to achieve?

In California this would be framed as a repeal of Prop 13. Not sure why you think that is easy to legislate away.

You don't think that cost would just get passed along to the renter?

No, there's competition from landlords who own fewer properties

Won't that just mean less investment in new housing, so over time less housing stock, resulting in (delayed) price rises and more people excluded from the housing market.

I mean in general the only possible solution is more housing ... which would mean

1) zoning up neighborhoods

2) make it financially interesting to convert properties and make them denser