• Let's Go 2 the Mall!@lemmy.worldEnglish
    80·
    1 year ago

    I live in a small town in the SE US. I bought my house for $89,900, 12ish years ago. There are 3 vacant houses on my street and they are all listed for $250,00 or more. My house is bigger than all of them. They have all been empty for over a year.

    • Honytawk
      795·
      1 year ago

      They really should tax empty houses at 100%. You’ll see how fast they will sell, and how low the price will go to achieve that.

      • Let's Go 2 the Mall!@lemmy.worldEnglish
        372·
        1 year ago

        absolutely agree. It’s insane that we allow corporations to hoard housing and artificially jack up the price. I’m just outside the city limits and I see soooo many homeless people now. A lot of them have jobs too, they just can’t afford a place to live. Some local churches have opened up their parking lots for people to sleep in their cars.

      • BastingChemina@slrpnk.net
        17·
        1 year ago

        Agreed, if no one is resident in the house then the taxes should go way up.

        This way any house where the owner isn’t living there and it’s not rented would see the taxes increase quickly. We can even add a multiplier according to how many years the house has been sitting there empty.

        • malloc@lemmy.worldEnglish
          7·
          1 year ago

          In a way, some states do have this. Texas for example has the “homestead tax exemption” which puts a cap on the tax burden increases when prop evals 📈. This is only applicable to one home for the family and they must reside in it. You can’t claim this exemption if you are renting it out or have a summer home in this state.

          This is what I understand anyways.

      • mayo@lemmy.today
        8·
        1 year ago

        We do that in Vancouver and it’s good. The fines are steep.

        But it’s opened a mini industry of people being paid to visit homes so they aren’t ‘empty’.

    • AstralWeekends@lemm.ee
      4·
      1 year ago

      I just bought a house in the eastern part of the Midwest in the US. The tax assessment in 2021 for the house was about 193k. In 2023, it’s 275k. That is a 30% increase in 2 years. During those 2 years, nobody lived in the house, and no improvements were made in that time. Neat! My mortgage is still about the same as my rent for a 2br apartment in Oregon earlier this year. I suspect the Midwest is about to start hating Oregonians as much as Oregonians hate Californians soon!