That won't fix anything. Many rentals are apartment buildings and are built/owned by large companies. You would effectively make the situation worse because individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing if they're only allowed one unit.
Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide. They also have different tax treatment.
> individuals wouldn't be able to build high density housing
Who exactly has (a) enough money to build an apartment block and (b) not enough to put it in a corporate wrapper? (Admittedly the wrapper problem is a serious issue for any kind of rationing!)
> Controversial opinion, but corporate landlords tend to be better than individual landlords because it's impersonal and it's harder to hide
Best of both worlds: cooperative rental companies. Renters control everything collectively as a non-profit. They employ the custodian(s) and vote on what to invest any excess capital into. With this it means you're only paying as much as needed to maintain the buildings, your utilities, and saving up for larger renovations.
I've lived in multiple apartments organized like that, and frankly it beats every corporate/individual landlord I've been attached to.
The world has survived most of its existence without needing holiday lets.
Because it has hotels.
Hotels that do not take up residential properties and pay appropriate taxes, etc. and prevent overtourism whixh has become one of the biggest issues in most tourist places.
You can eliminate holiday let’s and the world will do just fine. Any legitimate loss will be minor.
Exactly. There are some places in the world that only rich people able to purchase multi million dollar houses should be allowed to be. We'll allow a few proles in to work for us and put them in subsided housing away from us so they know their place.
The only problem is these pesky single digit millionaires thinking they can somehow come here to our neighborhood for a month. I paid good money to live here so I wouldn't have to be around those upjumped peasants, but now airbnb rentals are letting them in by the thousands and ruining it. If you can't pay $1000 a night for a hotel, you're not the sort that belongs here. We'll call it "overtourism" to make it seem like they're the problem and not our own insufferable snobbery.
I do think we still need to build more (correctly sized) housing, counteract urbanization, provide social housing, and I'm in favor of rent control in general. So don't get me wrong, I don't think progressive tax will solve the problem on its own. That being said:
Higher taxes could lead to higher rents, but that stops working once the supply of people willing to pay said higher rent is exhausted. At some point landlords won't be able to rent out their place with a profit, at which point you have 2 options: Leave it empty (which should also be illegal, IMO) or sell it (to people who would otherwise have to rent).
It could be that there is a potential never-ending supply of rich people wanting to pay rent to live in a place with ever-increasing rent and the gentrification that comes with it, but it seems unlikely to me.
In the Netherlands there were recently a set of tax changes increasing taxes on house ownership, which caused companies to sell apartments en mass. Housing prices dipped for a little bit, rent (in the private market) went up, but more people own their own place now. This is the direction you want to go, I think.
...or just build enough housing, that whoever wants to buy it, can buy it at some normal percentage above construction costs, and enough rental properties exist, that landlords have to lower the prices of rent to get someone to live there.
If you're stuck at a "pay way too much for rent" or "commute for 3 hours every day" choice, and if you don't take the too expensive apartment, there are 10 other people interested in it, it's a pretty shitty situation to be in... and here in Ljubljana Slovenia this is happening just now (college starting soon, students looking for apartments).
Leaving apartments empty is not worth it, since you still have to pay for monthly costs (power, water, heating, even if empty), and the only way to be worth it is, if the price of the apartment rises higher than the monthly costs.. and that is only true if (almost) no new apartments are being built. If we built enough new apartments the prices of used one would go down, making apartments a bad investments for speculators.
Yes let's trap people in apartments they can never move from and force newcomers to pay excessive rents to cover it. Also let's give landlords an incentive to try to make it as unpleasant for those long term tenants as possible.
And of course we will need an expensive and unaccountable bureaucracy to manage all the inevitable conflicts of interest. But it's a small price to pay to avoid the horror of building enough housing units to match population growth.
If you have enough realestate, there's no need for rent control, because landlords will have to lower prices to get anyone to stay in their apartments, and empty apartments are still a huge cost to the owner. High costs of rent and (buying) houses is because there's not enough supply in the first place.
That policy has been tried for 50 years and all we've seen (and the topic of this thread) is prices gone higher and higher, and properties become more and more consolidated under megacorporations.
50 years ago, this place where I live was a socialist country and we built HUGE apartment building neighbourhoods (literally thousands of apartments) + all the infrastructure needed (schools, kindergardens, stores, parks,...).
After 1991 all of this has stoped.
I don't know where you are from, but when was the last time you guys built a new neighbourhood for 10, 20 thousand people to live in? Because i've been all over both always-capitalist and former-socialist countries (mostly europe), and most of them are old with just a few newer buildings, mostly replacing the demolished old ones. It really doesn't matter, slovenia (my home), or germany... you see a bunch of large apartment blocks built in the same style, for many many people to live in, and you just know it was built somewhere between 1960s and late 1980s, and not after.
it should be noted that until the 1990s the population of vienna has actually been slowly declining (from 2 million more than 100 years ago to 1.5-1.6 million) and most projects before then were more likely needed because a lot was damaged in the world wars. but in the last few decades vienna has seen unprecedented growth, now reaching almost 2 million inhabitants again. consequently in the last 20 years several new building projects have been initiated. the ones i linked are just a few examples. i keep finding out about more as i search.
You're assuming the market will bear the higher rents. If that is true, why aren't rents already at that higher level? Not all costs can simply be "passed on to customers" if they won't bear the increase.
Single-payer. One government agency is permitted to purchase construction of additional units, and also manage the long-term rental (pricing set at auction) of those units in a rent-to-own model, where "own" means the right to live in that unit rent-free until you die, at which point control reverts to the government agency, combined with laws that forbid owning/renting multiple residences. Add in some allowances like giving neighbors right-of-first-rent so that rich people can combine units, some carveouts like keeping short-term hotels private, but basically, yeah, single-payer.
This is sort of how social housing used to work in the UK ("council houses"), but with additional restrictions on private ownership that are politically very hard.
> right to live in that unit rent-free until you die
This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees.
> This is very bad for labour mobility. It's a hukou system for retirees.
This is unfortunately a political requirement for passage. There are very, very few people 60+ who have lived in the same place for 20+ years who are willing to leave their houses, and most who do are dragged into nursing homes only because they are no longer physically capable of taking care of themselves.
The rent-to-own period can and should be quite long, like 30-40 years, similar to a mortgage. But the quality of "nobody can take my property away from me" is quite strongly felt, and not one that you can really take away from people. Any radical housing reform must respect that.
Wow! That's worse than the CCP. I thought that all these other ideas on this thread to basically make everybody buy instead of rent were bad. But to force everybody to rent from the government is literally the worst housing arrangement idea I have ever heard.
