To unlock housing, Tahoe program pays $24,000 to homeowners who rent to locals | Hacker News Reader

To unlock housing, Tahoe program pays $24,000 to homeowners who rent to locals

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10 pointsMilnerRoute14 comments

Kinda gross we have to pay people who have so much money that they own houses they don’t even live in, to convince them to rent.

Sounds good in theory i guess, it’s odd to subsidize housing this way but not sure what the other options are. Have never been a Tahoe/truckee local or anything but traveling through there can be stressful - last visit in some grocery store parking lot overheard two people get into a shouting match along the lines of “yeah well I’m a local!” responded to by “Well yeah I’ve lived here my whole life!” kind of thing. Wish this area the best but it’s certainly not the only place facing this problem, of course to varying degrees

They could reverse it from a subsidy that rewards the property owners for their past anti-social behavior to a fine the punishes their bad behavior.

Fine the owners $2500 each month that a house is vacant. Add a $2500/mo tax on short term rentals like Airbnb too-- Airbnb has a very negative impact on availability of long term rental properties. Adjust fine and tax amounts until sufficient long-term rental housing stock becomes available.

Give the revenue from fines to the long-term renters as a subsidy to encourage the workforce to stay.

Or, you know, they could build more housing and build more transit so local workers and tourists can commute in. But, I guess that will "ruin the character" of the place.

America will never ever do that sadly

If you haven’t attended local city council meetings and workshops, could be worth going to see why this will not work at a local level. State or national level could be more promising, but in current form proposal is highly punitive and would need some refinement.

You are correct. I have no illusions that anything like this would be passed by property owning council members.

I live in a coastal California town that is a tourist destination. Houses on either side of me are Airbnbs. Long term rentals are in short supply and rents are insane. Council members own Airbnb rentals and will never do anything to harm their cash cow-- what limits they have put into place exempt their own with grandfathering clauses.

> Fine the owners $2500 each month that a house is vacant.

What's "vacant"?

Is my house "vacant" if I'm there on weekends?

How about one weekend a month?

How about two months out of the year?

If I have to rent during the other ten months, can I evict when I want to be there? (Those two months happen to be the high-demand time for housing.)

Yes, your house is vacant if nobody is there during the test period (in the case of this example, a month). You could choose to keep your vacant house off the market by paying the fines or you could choose to add it to the long-term rental pool / sell. Nobody is forcing you to do anything, just providing incentives for you to do the right thing.

If you force your tenants to sign an e.g., 1 year lease, then you too are bound by those terms. If you rent month to month to preserve flexibility (you should inform prospective tenants of your intentions), you take on the elevated risk that your property will have periods of vacancy during the year and you will need to pay fines.

Keep in mind that if the workforce left because they are priced out, your vacation paradise would no longer have shops / fueling stations / paid activities, as there would be no one left to provide those services. Driving down the mountain every week for groceries and gas will probably become tedious. Want pizza? No one is going to deliver with X hours round trip.

> Yes, your house is vacant if nobody is there during the test period (in the case of this example, a month).

What does "vacant during [a month]" mean?

As I said - I'm there on weekends. Is the house vacant? How about if I miss a couple of weekends because I'm in the hospital? Or, because the plumbing is out while I have some work done.

If I have a house-sitter, I'm good, right?

> Keep in mind that if the workforce left because they are priced out, your vacation paradise would no longer have shops / fueling stations / paid activities, as there would be no one left to provide those services. Driving down the mountain every week for groceries and gas will probably become tedious. Want pizza? No one is going to deliver with X hours round trip.

You really don't understand how vacation houses work.

Moreover, folks with vacation houses use very little of the infrastructure that you're so concerned with.

I find it "interesting" that you're so concerned with whether a "rich person" can get a pizza or has to travel to get things. You don't care about their other needs, so why do you care in this situation?

The answer is that you don't - you're just flailing around for an argument.

So the owners can not only take what they want from renters by going higher and higher together with the other owners around. Now they even get tax money if they rent to locals xD

Crazy world

Yes. Give landlords more money. Wonderful idea. Great way to reduce property 'investment' and make building dense housing politically tenable.

Sounds like a very regressive tax.

Why not tax vacant homes?

Monopoly money

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