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Well shit. Now the solution seems so obvious.
this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2023
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A massive tax on owning multiple homes that goes to funding housing the homeless.
Oh no we couldn't do that! What we're just going to do something Singapore already does, and has been shown to actually work?
Is that coupled with public mental health care or? I can only image what a schizophrenic homeless person straight off the street could do to an apartment in a day or two.
Look at the average rent price vs average salary these days, "normal" people are now becoming homeless. I can't even imagine what people going through a divorce right now are going though.
Homelessness used to be *much *harder to slip into than it is now.
I guess it depends on where you live. I can rent a 2 bed house for $550 within a 20 minute drive to a major state university. Although that small town kind of sucks, but cheap housing though!
I like the idea, but no good way for this to work out.
Small time landlords with a few properties will get fucked out of existence while massive corporations will get their overpriced lawyers to find a loophole and not pay a dime in taxes despite owning thousands of properties. Then they will just buy up the rest of real estate that small time landlords can't afford now because of taxes.
There's a 0% chance gov can implement this tax correctly, but even if by some random chance they do, corporations will simply pass it down to renters.
Seems like the excess housing may not be where the homeless people are. Like it's great that there are 110 vacant houses for every homeless person in Detroit, but how is that helpful to Los Angeles's homeless population?
They mention that both Syracuse and Detroit have a ton of extra housing and then say that Los Angeles has the highest percentage of homeless people. No mention of how many vacant houses there are in LA compared to homeless people. Unless they are suggesting we ship the homeless from California to Michigan, I'm not sure what they are suggesting in this article.