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Comment by kasey_junk | Hacker News Reader

Why not just pass a law saying only individuals can own property and they can only own one?

Because that means apartment buildings become illegal?

Homeownership is all well and good, but sometimes you really do just need a place to live for a year or two, and having to do a full-fledged real estate transaction at each end of that period is a lot of friction.

The tax the poster proposed was a de facto ban which was my point. But even then it wouldn’t work because some land is more desirable than others and by encumbering land ownership you encourage those that own the more desirable land to extract as much value as possible.

The thing we are dancing around in this thread is do landlords largely determine the housing prices. I think not. I think it’s supply constraints and government subsidized mortgages. These are largely issues driven by regular home owners not landlords.

How so? It's a fairly common model for each individual apartment to have their own owner, and a body corporate run by the owners manage common areas.

I like a system whereby individuals can own between one and a bit and three somewhere (including provision for commercial property where large facilities need to rent many people's fungible extra-property rights in some way). Mentioning 100% tax is just to head off idiotic straw men about passing the tax on to renters.

Also allowing benefiting from or even rent seeking on only the increased value of very recent property improvements (like taxing at the value it held 5 years ago with some buy-or-sell challenge type provision to prevent undervaluing).

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