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Comment by bsder | Hacker News Reader

The solution is actually an "occupancy tax". If you aren't renting out a space within some number of months, you start owing tax on what your financial agreement says is your "rent". The longer you go unoccupied, the higher that tax should get since your unoccupied front winds up contributing to "blight".

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> If you aren't renting out a space within some number of months, you start owing tax on what your financial agreement says is your "rent"

This cascades into consolidation in crisis. Small landholders can’t afford to ride out the trouble. Large ones can.

Thresholds are a thing.

What is the problem with removing landlords from an area if their property isn't being utilized?

You mind if I remove some money from your bank account that I dont think you are properly utilizing?

That’s precisely what our current inflationary monetary policy does.

You can argue whether that’s good or bad but we have governmental policies that encourage productive use of assets so it’s not out of bounds to suggest other policies for land assets.

Companies aren't people.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_personhood

Companies aren't people, but they are started by people, run by people, employ people, and owned by people.

What do you call a "people" that doesn't have to be responsible for their actions? Sociopath?

My bank account isn't preventing you from living in a space.

I readily admit I have no idea if this would be feasible in practice, but what's to stop landlord ABC, Inc from skirting the law by setting up shell company XYZ, LLC, and then leasing the vacant space to that company? In this scenario, XYZ would essentially just pay themselves rent causing ABC to avoid the vacancy tax.

Is that not fine? You are collecting tax on rental income so there is still a strong incentive to put someone else in there.

And, if you have a financing agreement, you will have to shuffle around (and pay tax on) the rent that you officially declare in the financing agreement. You can't just put a nominal rent on it or that violates the financing agreement.

The overall point is simply to make reducing the rent to attract a tenant more attractive than leaving the place empty for multiple years.

By leasing at $10/mo to your shell corp?

Then you would violate your financing agreement as the rent would be below the capitalization threshold and you would have to cough up money to the bank.

I don't think you understand the issue.

The issue here is that many of these financing agreements specify a minimum rent and if you fall below that you are in violation of the capitalization requirements and you owe the bank money. By contrast, missing rent is considered a temporary condition and can be tacked onto the back end of the financing agreement.

So, zero rent does not cause capitialization issues, but lower rent does. Thus, landlords have a perverse incentive to leave a place unrented rather than lower the rent.

An occupacy tax breaks that perverse incentive.

The goal isn't to grind up landlords. The goal is to cause rents to come down when they should. Right now, the back end financing agreements are keeping rents artificially inflated.

Hmmm... how many of these financing agreements specify a minimum rent? I've never seen this or heard of this (but this is way outside my wheelhouse, so I'm 0% confident I would've). My initial searching doesn't give me the impression it's common.

Very common that’s why many places would rather have high occupancy than lower rent.

There are plenty of other reasons too, and I can’t find any evidence of minimum rents being common in financing agreements, so without that this reasoning looks really flawed.

Just institute a high LVT so it’s economically infeasible to keep real estate off the market. No need to assess what’s occupied or not.

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