Comment by JoshTriplett
3 days ago
One additional important detail: if this gets implemented at all, hopefully it does not affect the common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records; it is far too easy to link someone's name and address, and people at risk of doxing can do this to protect themselves.
Personally I feel people and especially corporations/REITs do not have the right to hide what real estate they own. Sure put it in a trust, but the public has the right to know who controls it.
Where do you stand on encryption? Do you feel like the "I have nothing to hide" argument has any merit? If you think people have the right to privacy, why should real estate be an exception? I personally find the fact that real estate ownership is public in the US to be quite bizarre.
Property is a physical thing in the real world that has been here long before anyone "owned it", and will be here long after all the "owners" are gone.
The public, i.e. the people on this planet, have a right to know who is claiming to own which part of the grass and soil that we all share.
2 replies →
> Where do you stand on encryption?
This is a really complicated and broad topic that I cant take the time to type out here. I do not stand on the side of "I have nothing to hide." I fully understand the risks of that position. People must keep some secrets to protect themselves from society. Especially as everything devolves into increasingly strict "purity" tests.
With that said, I don't think the right to obfuscate real estate transactions is the same as spicy personal beliefs/private conversations/etc. IMO there is nothing more public than real estate. I do not consider real estate transactions as protected speech nor one that can be legally hidden. We live in this world together.
I have a friend who has someone who has repeatedly threatened to assault her, and her primary protection is keeping her address hidden from him. Should she never be allowed to own a house at risk of being assaulted?
Maybe have a limited exception then, like rape shield laws. You don't need to gut the entire framework for this rare situation. (Plus it would be fun to watch corporate lawyers try to exploit this loophole.)
7 replies →
I think its pretty easy to separate investment properties from primary residences when it comes to transparency requirements.
This is pure whataboutism and made in bad faith. I feel for your friend (if they exist beyond you trying to make an argument), but there are various physical and legal ways to protect yourself from this situation in the US. This edge case is not a good enough reason help shield foreign oligarchs and large corps holding real estate in secret. There is probably a compromise somewhere between both extremes.
3 replies →
> common practice of having a self-owned LLC owning your home. This is common for the purposes of keeping your personal name out of public records
I have a hard time believing lots of people care to do that - not many take steps for privacy - or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.
> or have the resources or time to setup an LLC.
Costs about 200$ at most places and can be done online.
People who have been stalked or are uncomfortable having their details published for the world to find need privacy.
Privacy mechanisms aren't just what applies to your or my perspectives, there are millions of other situations. For example, most counties in Texas identify the full legal name(s), phone number(s), and mailing address(es) of every single property owner and their tax payment amount and status. That'd get really weird, real quick for celebrities if there weren't any concealment mechanism.
Privacy isn't a binary or continuous thing, but is possible to varying degrees and requires navigating government and business processes carefully.
I agree, but most people don't.
Owning your family home through an LLC, depending on your state, is often a bad idea.
There are generous protections in most states for your personal home that you lose if it's owned by an LLC. This includes things like a homestead exemption in bankruptcy protection.
In Florida, for example, there are better options to keep yourself anonymous. Florida has something called a land trust [1].
[1]: https://www.jimersonfirm.com/blog/2024/04/understanding-the-...
I feel like mortgage lenders should legitimately wonder why they’re lending to an LLC or a trust rather than an individual. I’m not sure there’s a good answer.
Houses are also put into revocable living trust to avoid probate when kicking the bucket.
There has to be some nuance. Companies are known to either rent of sometimes own housing for personnel who travel to other offices. Universities typically own housing as well. So maybe it’s something like it can’t be one of the main businesses of the corp to buy up residential housing as an investment tool.
I agree in principle, but companies (and individual very rich people) are amazingly inventive when it comes to finding loopholes in the "nuance".
I mean, the ideal amount of nuance is to not ban this in the first place"; right now we're talking about damage control for particularly critical subsets of uses.
> Universities typically own housing as well.
I'd expect that argument to carry negative weight with the folks trying to do this, given the hate they have for universities in general, and the love of privatization.
> critical subsets of uses
I don't consider rich people trying to hide their identity to be "critical" at all. Maybe having their address public will be a way to force them to act with consideration of the community instead of just themselves for once while they hide in some anonymous mansion.
9 replies →
> a self-owned LLC owning your home
Trusts are in the same boat. If you're using the LLC as a pass-through, these restrictions won't apply to you unless an orange cat is charged with drafting.
Is it not public in the US who owns a company?
https://legalclarity.org/how-can-you-find-out-who-owns-a-bus...
Why should you be allowed to create a corporation that has no actual purpose other than a shield for your own private concerns?
Ideally, it should not be possible for random hateful people to easily get name/address records from local governments, but that's unfortunately not the world we live in yet.
I completely agree, but this isn't the fix. Corporations should be expected to behave like corporations. Having said that, I wouldn't argue against keeping it until we had some better privacy laws and practices in this country(/world)
They could just buy it from data brokers.
3 replies →
You are right, it is completely absurd. And it's great! Anonymous companies and tax havens (domestic and international) are something completely contrary to how society at large is organized. And it is the best thing which has ever been invented. They are accessible to any person who has about a thousand dollars, no matter your race, sex, age, ethnicity, family name, political affiliation, or any other factors except that tiny sum. If you're not born into wealth or into a politically connected family, making an LLC is the only opportunity you have in life to not be a human battery in the Matrix. And it's easily accessible to anyone. Incredible.
You should be allowed to do whatever you want, by default. Preventing things only make sense if there's good reason to.
Otherwise everything you do, you have to first think about whether you are allowed to, like a slave.
There are lots of benefits to putting your home into a living trust. It just has one side effect of hiding your name on public GIS of tax parcels. One reason to do a trust is so that you can alter who benefits from it without amending a will.
Maybe they can just own one?
So basically you want to give a loophole for Wall Street to cosplay as regular people.
No thanks.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46532004
It costs relatively little to create an LLC. This is not an uncommon pattern for people in groups commonly targeted by hate-motivated doxing and similar attacks. This is not a "rich-person trick", and if you can afford a house, the cost of an LLC is a very tiny expense by comparison.
LLC annual registration is up to $800/yr in CA, including foreign LLC's. I don't think $800/yr for privacy is a "very tiny". Not to mention you would need to pay an owner of record, probably a professional, to have their name on the LLC.
EDIT: A quick web search shows that an estimated annual cost of $50-$400 for a registered agent in CA. So the cost is closer to $1k/yr.
4 replies →
I’d need to see numbers about how many such people cannot otherwise be found online. If we all pay higher mortgages and rent to subsidize those who use loopholes, it’s only possibly worth it.
hate-motivated doxing? That doesn't sound like a real thing except for maybe famous people, so we're basically back to rich people.
2 replies →