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Landlords should have to pay income tax on their rental properties regardless of whether they're rented out or not. (gothamist.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Why? Because apparently they need some more incentive to keep units occupied. Also, even though a property might be vacant, there's still imputed rental income there. Its owner is just receiving it in the form of enjoying the unit for himself instead of receiving an actual rent check from a tenant. That imputed rent ought to be taxed like any other income.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Or they'll just raise rent further like they already do. Landlords already want empty units filled because in their eyes they are losing money on it being empty. They already have incentive to fill the units.

Thinking that'd they'd lower rent to fill more units rather than just raise prices further for current and future tenets to compensate additional expenses is frankily naive.

It's not like landlords are gonna run out of people to charge more money for. It's not like people won't just lower their standard of living further to compensate for the increase like what happens already.

The only solution to high rent and the housing crisis is to loosen zoning laws and allow the building of both more affordable government housing and general housing and apartments in cities and high population areas to have supply meet or exceed the demand. We know from studies and real world examples that this approach works and is very effective.

Imposing a tax on vacant units would make it more risky for potential investors and companies to build more housing and thus the rate and speed of new homes being erected would slow even further due to this tax.

On paper this tax makes sense, but it ignores the reality of how landlords and multinational companies that build houses and apartments currently operate

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I get what you're saying. I agree that there's no new tax policy that will fix the landlord problem on its own. Ideally, it would have to be combined with a massive build out of publicly owned housing and supporting infrastructure, especially transit.