Comment by jmyeet

So many of our current problems can be traced back to ever-increasing house prices. Homeowners who are voters have been duped into creating a society that allows the hoarding of land and turning your home into an "investment". This hurts everybody in three ways:

1. No matter how high the value of your house, you still own one housing unit of wealth. If you sell it, you still need to live somewhere else. So the only way to "get ahead" is to buy "investment properties", which is hoarding housing;

2. Housing costs are an input into everything you do and buy. Food more expensive? Well, if housing is more expensive then the workers who produce your food need higher wages to survive. The place where your food is made or sold has a higher rent. So higher housing prices decrease real wages even if you own your own home; and

3. When land becomes the best investment, which it has been for years, then it destroys any productive use of capital. It's competing for the same dollars. Why invest in a factory that makes widgets? That might fail. But a housing estate? Banks give you good collaterization. Governments create policy to make sure you will never fail. Demand is inelastic.

Ever-increasing house prices is just stealing from the next generation. That's all it's doing. Yet so many government polices are designed to enshrine and protect increasing house prices as an explicit and implicit policy goal.

The problems with property taxes are:

1. They don't go up fast enough. So it acts as a tax break to market incumbents. If property taxes properly reflected market value, it would act as a brake on increasing house prices.

2. Property tax increases are often capped (eg Prop 13 in CA); and

3. On an investment property, higher rents should increase property values because you've increased the value of the housing and land. This too would act as a brake on ever-increasing rents.

It should be essentially impossible for non-residents to own housing somewhere they don't live. Owning more than one or two properties should be punitively taxed if not outright impossible.