How is this not a defacto transfer of wealth from renters to owners? Rental supply will go down due to reduced profits, and therefore ultimately rental prices as a whole will go up once a new equilibrium with fewer rentals is reached.

These sorts of suggestions generally seem hugely biased towards buyers at the expense of everyone else.

Marginally higher and higher property taxes for non primary residences would deal with that.

I don't follow. If you make holding an investment property more expensive than owning, than fewer people will own investment properties, reducing supply and increasing rental prices.

Yes, the investor makes less, but the expected result is less supply so rents are higher, not the same supply but with strictly lower rents.

Renting homes and building and selling homes are two different business.

Higherand higher marginal property taxes for owners of non primary residences disincentivizes owning secondary residences, hence disincentivizes renting, hence decreasing supply of buyers wanting to buy homes.

There will still be first time buyers or people moving, so builders should still have incentivize to build homes, hence supply should not cease to come online just because there are fewer landlords.

Yes, any government that was serious about addressing this issue would take measures to decrease the incentives for property investment. Instead in most of the countries I mentioned property investment enjoys benefits that other forms of investment don't (tax, leverage, etc).

Personally, I think LVT would be the best approach.

People don't buy vacation homes in generic suburb #5 which is where most people statistically want to buy homes.

Vacation homes are in beautiful tourist areas. That can be a problem for local workers but I doubt this is much of a problem for most markets.

It's not about vacation homes. It's about rentals in generic suburb #5, primarily, but it's also the case that an increasing number of rental properties are being left vacant thanks to "algorithmic collusion" being used to drive up rents:

* https://www.businessinsider.com/real-estate-apartment-rent-p...

* https://www.propublica.org/article/yieldstar-rent-increase-r...

Thing is, rental buyers really only make out well because they can rent places for more than their purchase/mortgage equivalent. If supply were large enough, I'd think rental rates below the average monthly mortgage payment would be more widespread and tend to make rental property ownership less appealing.

The problem is that there’s enough demand out there—as capital seeking to be invested—to keep supply constrained.

Taxes on rental income are already more than capital gains tax rates.

Then they need to be at least doubled, and funneled into individual owner-occupied housing subsidies.

We tried subsidizing individual housing and caused the 2008 recession. It's better to let the homes be owned by those who will pay up whether their renter does or does not. A landlord provides a valuable insurance service in some ways.

Crushing the real estate business with taxes isn't going to increase the housing supply.

It will if every AirBNB becomes a place someone can buy.