"shifts the tax burden within the residential class from owners of moderately valued residential properties to the owners of vacation homes, higher valued homes and residential properties not occupied by the owner, including apartments and vacant lands."
https://www.mass.gov/doc/living-with-the-residential-exempti...
It hasn't seemed to help, but maybe it has a little.....
The best approach is to press for over-development of housing. It doesn't matter if someone owns 1 house, or 1000 houses, so long as there is more than enough homes for everyone.
Idea: have a property tax line item that's based on the ratio of population / housing units. The higher that ratio, the higher the tax. The tax revenue is used to cover the costs of constructing more housing units, which lowers the tax.
Want to really address the problem (and many other problem with today's economic system)? Prohibit interest bearing loans.
I do think credit scores are a scam (as are overdraft fees) and that rates should be reasonable, but no interest would make nobody lend money.
I like having a car loan - I was able to buy a car with current safety features. Without it I'd have to buy some unsafe (or unreliable) clunker in cash.
There's no reason why the car manufacturers won't be able to offer 0% interest on moderate term loans (a few years long). They already do today when they want to sell cars. This will drive prices down actually.
You can also have longer term leases without interest, effectively paying for depreciation and the company can profit from leasing the car.
Usually they have a maintenance staff that takes care of the property as well or add additional services.
Mom and pop landlords don't do any of that usually, and just hand someone a key w/ a call to the occasional contractor to fix something instead of an actual company. Most need a warm body to pay off their mortgage so they can sell it in the future and pocket the cash.
We need to fix the supply side, if the corp takes the properties that are broken down and fixes them that's a good thing. The problem comes when people who are around there now cannot afford the new rents they either become homeless or leave.
How far they have to leave depends on the supply of housing in the surrounding area, which b/c of the shortage is pretty low. With a huge supply of housing, it's possible to move next door or down the street and not much changes.
If we build more rents will go down, regardless of who the owners are. Prices to buy homes too for normal people.
Getting people to build more is the problem, high construction costs, zoning/permiting, local opposition etc.
Could it be the reason that those properties are too expensive for a regular Joe to fix up because of investors in the first place.