When you're a billionaire all of life's basics are effectively free. And there are only so many houses, private jets, and super yachts you can buy.
In any case your first, second, third, and fourth home will be owned by a corporation based in the Cayman Islands and buried under an opaque list of shell companies, all of which you also own via cut-outs, one or two of which may be actual registered and regulated banks, which mortgage the properties back to you so you can play games with interest rate arbitrage.
And all of this will be handled by a small personal mini-corporation employing tens of tax experts, lawyers, creative accountants, and investment managers, so you probably aren't even interested in the details.
It's too easy for the ultra-rich to find loopholes in any rules. If there is a tax on homeownership, they will simply not own any home but will own some corporate entity that own the asset. See ? No secondary residence. Just an investment in a corporation that happens to home a bunch of houses.
Second homes being misclassified as non-residential property might be trickier to deal with, but a lot of jurisdictions already have laws around what is and isn't residential...
* in many countries, I don't know about the USA.
When railroad and heavy industry did this exact thing in the 19th century we called them robber barons and broke up their obscenely powerful and corrupt monopolies via antitrust legislation.
Another day older and deeper in debt
St. Peter don'cha call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store
- Merle Travis, "Sixteen Tons"
The TL;DR of why this is bad is that when employees are paying, or are indebted to, their employers, even in a roundabout way, it's really easy for that relationship to become very abusive.
The company towns also often payed in scrip, which was basically credit at the company store, and, gee, wouldn't you know it, the company owns all the land to the horizon, so there are no other stores in reasonable travel distance! And if you need a little credit because your pay's terrible after your rent (to the company) comes out, and the prices at the store are marked way up, why, they'll be happy to extend some....
That's the extreme version, but it's bad enough that even inching that direction is something worthy of concern. One ought be wary any time money's flowing from an employee to an employer.
The robber-baron version is basically the thing you see in capitalist-dystopia sci fi like The Outer Worlds, but it actually happened.
Also a significant portion of the country seems to be actively attempting to let it happen again. High school made them read The Great Gatsby and they all imagine themselves as Gatsby and the other obscenely wealthy people instead of the 99% of awful and perpetually dying lives most people experienced.
Even then, because we typically lack experience with a variety of ownership models, it will be difficult to dis-entangle the familiarity bias from our conceptualizations.
With government public housing you can lose it if you break the law (hope you never smoke weed) or if the populace elects a racist government and you’re a minority.
Commodifying housing helped black people in the South because they could actually buy prefab houses from Sears.
But what's the point? If they can't get money out then it doesn't matter. The only reason houses are worth holding as an asset is public bodies stopping the creation of more housing, driving the price up. You fix that with less state interference, not more.
In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values.
Countries stop doing this when policy is captured by neoliberal dogma. The UK is a perfect example. Housing was relatively affordable before a disastrous "right to buy" policy in the 70s, with extra enforced restrictions on state house building, destroyed the national housing market.
Now most housing is unfeasibly expensive. And hundreds of thousands of properties stand empty because they're owned solely as investments.
This is excellent for private landlords, property speculators, and older home-owners. It's an utter disaster for everyone under the age of forty because rents are unaffordable and ownerships is unimaginable.
The problem was not building more housing to cope with increased demand. That would've happened regardless of whether the Right to Buyers were renting off the council or had bought their property.
> In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values.
Public housing, but not housing. The state controls what can be built where, which can drive up demand enough that property becomes a valuable enough asset to let it stand empty. Giving the state more power on top of that to correct that incompetent use of power seems worth questioning.
It's society enforcing these restrictions, and we absolutely do not want to let go of them. Compromising at all on any of them is considered evil ...
As an analogy, we catch more dumb criminals than smart criminals - but overall it's still worth having police, even if a few bad guys get away.
Or prevent companies from holding real estate as an investment vehicle?
I'm not naive enough to argue that this is a definitively easy thing, but especially when it comes to housing, the poor and middle class are getting completely fucked right now; it's gotten to the point in the crisis where we absolutely need to do something urgently.
This has the added benefit of injecting a ton of extra transparency and sunlight into corporate dealings.
I think we should add very steep taxes on second+ homes and "investment properties", but that's to address the housing problem, not to address the massive wealth disparity.
The real problem is their ability to buy things like "lawyers" and "newspaper coverage" and "senators", and it's much harder to effectively tax that sort of thing.
Also corporate ownership of single-family residential property in the US should be forbidden.