Otherwise you're taxing the potential and new home-owners who might be on the edge of being able to afford a house.
I'd pretty much go for anything like this at this point that would stop the ever widening gap between average income and average house price - and I'm a landlord.
It is not through the benevolence of the property developer that we expect our housing, but from their regard for their own self-interest.
Live somewhere 35% or more of a tax year*(or if sold/bought)? Counts as a primary residence and the low tax bracket. OTHERWISE it's a rental and will be taxed _hard_. Even if unoccupied.
Also, raising taxes just raises costs for renters. The solution to housing affordability is building more housing. Align the market incentives to build more housing, don't try to fight against market forces.
Land taxes are not arbitrary, it's a way of generating revenue from the single most important shared resource.
> Also, raising taxes just raises costs for renters.
Landlords usually have more pricing elasticity than renters, therefore taxes will have a depreciating effect on housing prices.
> The solution to housing affordability is building more housing.
Don't disagree
> don't try to fight against market forces
Increasing supply and using supply more efficiently are both important
If you fund your schools with tax on property, the amount of money you need scales with the number of residents you have. So now you have to distribute those liabilities across land value rather than per occupied units, that could lead to some huge distortions (a 100 story apartment with 200 kids paying negligible taxes while a single family home paying for 200 kids while they only house 2).
Local councils do collect a "council tax", but it's basically a fig leaf to disguise a poll tax by just enough that people don't outright riot: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_tax_riots
And in practice, council tax is only about 55% of local council's funding, the rest coming from central government. And the councils do sometimes go (effectively, but not literally) bankrupt: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-66878229
There are other ways to game this, there are always arbitrage opportunities when a tax isn't aligned with its expenses.
Landlordism is an absolute scourge.
This is probably the dumbest thing I've ever read in my life. The real argument against yimby is that if the conditions for hold property is cheap, then landlords can afford to not be elastic with pricing thereby creating an inefficient market. The obvious solution is to increase property tax to force the hand of landlords. Another more radical way is to create legislation that gives the right to renters and/or gov to buy property at a certain price.