What about banks and REITs that are passthru entities for the same folk above ?
What about SV out-of-staters that don't pay state taxes but work remote at places like LV, Salt Lake, or Boise ?
You want to fleece your own... but others you let just... walk in ?
I don't recall the person you replied to mentioning that. Why is it impossible to levy property taxes on real estate in your own state from people who live somewhere else?
10k year in property tax is a pittance to a Sheik, a shenzen factory owner, an indian tech entrepreneur, your average venezuelan govt bureaucrat, or a REIT.
10k is not peanuts to the average wage earner in the US.
The former all buy in USA to keep their wealth safe from confiscation and leverage the US justice system and FDIC. Because back in their home countries they are 1 election away from communism or a bank collapse.
We have no adequate means to raise the cost of entry for them, and mentioning change to favor local purchases, is almost taboo.
Meanwhile, we say "tax the rich" here. Yet foreigners keep loading up on real estate and US citizens end up renting forever..
That can be fixed - namely, via land value taxation, at a rate as close to 100% as possible.
This literally describes 2 people I know.
Grandma didn't do anything to you or me.
Why would you punish granma who just want to live out her retirement ?
Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?
For every "retired grandma who happened to buy a house in a forgotten part of town that suddenly became a bohemian mecca", I can show you dozens if not hundreds of grandmas who already got pushed out of town because of skyrocketing rents - thanks in no small part to your homeowning grandmas stubbornly insisting on living in a single-family home in the middle of Downtown, on a lot that could and should be housing dozens or hundreds of households.
And I haven't even begun to dig into the socioeconomic safety nets like citizens' dividends that a land value tax could readily fund, thus producing a negative tax burden for all renters and the vast majority of homeowners.
Why would you punish those hundreds of grammas who just want to live out their retirements? Not to mention the thousands of working Americans who just want a place to live that doesn't entail multi-hour-long commutes?
> She can't move because she doesnt know how to drive and can't take a bus in the suburbs
There are these things called "moving companies" which would be happy to move her and her stuff into an apartment nearby. With the hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars in equity she's accumulated due to her property appreciating in value, she can almost certainly afford to hire such a company to move her and her stuff. With LVT motivating the construction of said apartments to amortize said LVT across as many tenants as possible, she will have no trouble finding a new home - and the denser urbanization would mean that the grocer and pharmacist and GP and such would be right around the corner instead of involving a half-hour bus ride through sprawling suburbia.
> Why not just go after the foreign demand to hide cash, making housing expensive for everyone else ?
Because that is far from the only cause of housing shortages. You could play whack-a-mole with ad hoc taxes specifically targeting foreign investors and domestic investors and property management companies and Old Money billionaires and wannabe AirBNB moguls and agricultural conglomerates and commercial/industrial landlords and everyone else directly profiting on the very land speculation driving costs of living through the roof... or you could just tax land value, and thus address all that in one fell swoop with a tiny fraction of the bureaucratic overhead and with countless social and economic benefits on top of that.
If it weren't for foreign "investment" in real estate, there would still be housing in the U.S. It would just be cheaper.
Real estate is a finite resource. More people showing up and bidding just drives the price up for the people who were already at the auction.
No reason for me to be happy about it.
Right. Which is why the person you replied to specifically mentioned supporting efforts to change those policies.
0: https://www.nar.realtor/newsroom/annual-foreign-investment-i...
A non-us citizen real estate tax (in the style of NZ) is like the 3rd rail of politics. God forbid anyone daring to mention a ~200% FV tax on any residential property purchase by a non-us citizen.
> but others you let just... walk in ?
My guy we can do both, we can fleece all the third and fourth home owners, foreign and domestic, it’ll be glorious, join us
Sorry for the late reply...
No, I don't want these people to just "walk in."
I support BTFO'ing all of the above people with punitive taxes.
I might give the SV bros a pass if they only have one house that is their primary residence or maybe one other place. It's the people (and organizations) who have many properties who frustrate me.
Presumably they are living in a HCOL area, so definitely not indicative of life in America in general.
I know a few folks who live in the mid-west (typically derided as "fly over country") who have blue collar jobs making $70,000 who bought a house in their twenties.
You're not going to get too much sympathy from them when you're making 3-5x their salary and complain you can't afford a $1.5M single family home in the most expensive cities in the US.
Why not? That someone makes much more than someone else and endures a higher cost of living does not establish anything other than that the people who work those kinds of jobs want to live in those kinds of places (or the companies want to be there but it is hard to disentangle the two). Lack of sympathy because someone is in a different situation seems somewhat course considering that there are problems which either party does not experience but are objectively bad and should be remedied. Because they are different does not mean they are less impactful to quality of life.
No, sorry.
Both might be "struggling", but there is a massive difference between "I make $500,000 per year and can't buy a $3M home" and "I make $60,000 per year and can't afford a $300,000 home."
The person making $500,000 per year in another stratosphere of economic wealth that someone who makes $60,000 can't even fathom.
It's like someone who makes $1M per year complaining they can't afford a private jet. Sure, they are experiencing an "impact to their quality of life", but no, it's nowhere close to the same situation, hence they get no sympathy from people who have actual financial difficulties.
I have little sympathy for someone who is in the top 1% of income earners in the US not getting what they want.
You said it yourself:
> the people who work those kinds of jobs want to live in those kinds of places
In other words, rich people get to live where they want. They get to live in the cool places with good schools and nice houses far from the freeways and toxic waste dumps and with lots of interesting things to do. Poor people have to make do with whatever is left over.
There is happiness and fulfillment to be found in a very reasonable dedication range. I work, like WORK work barely 5 hours a week from home and make $300k a year. My company is over the moon with my contributions.
I didn’t graduate last year. I put in the work, learned the craft and I have valuable contributions to give from my experiences. You will too someday. But right now you need to learn.
This is exactly his point. If he can't make it with what he has going for him, who can?
> You only options are to accept that and adjust your budget/income/location appropriately, or opt to rent forever, which is not at all a bad thing since owning a primary residence is never an investment. (Although there is room for nuance here that I won't get into.)
You only list two options: (1) budget better, (2) give in to renting forever. I agree that, if the above poster wants a better shot, he should do his best to budget well. However, he should also help support policies that tax the dickens out of people who own more than their primary residence and maybe 1-2 other properties. There is more at stake here than just his own situation.