Real estate investors, both individual and institutional, bought one-third of all single-family residential properties sold in the second quarter of 2025.
In my magical Christmasland hypothetical scenario, it would be something like $10 ^ [number of qualifying properties] per year, for each property.
Mom and pop have a vacation home, or a property on the market? $10 / year. No problem. Got 5 vacant homes? That’ll be an extra $500,000 per year. Get a tenant or sell.
Would need some sort of limit such that the tax ceased when homelessness reached, say, 0.01% of the population or less, because right now there’s about 26 vacant homes in the US per homeless person; the point is to reduce homelessness, not to bankrupt everyone, of course.
Nah, keep it going even when homelessness is low. If you own three vacant properties, you’re paying 3,000 a year. It would be cheaper to give one of your homes away to a poor person who only has one, so they get to have a vacation home too. The poor person only has to pay 10 dollars a year.
In my magical Christmasland hypothetical scenario, it would be something like $10 ^ [number of qualifying properties] per year, for each property.
Mom and pop have a vacation home, or a property on the market? $10 / year. No problem. Got 5 vacant homes? That’ll be an extra $500,000 per year. Get a tenant or sell.
Would need some sort of limit such that the tax ceased when homelessness reached, say, 0.01% of the population or less, because right now there’s about 26 vacant homes in the US per homeless person; the point is to reduce homelessness, not to bankrupt everyone, of course.
Nah, keep it going even when homelessness is low. If you own three vacant properties, you’re paying 3,000 a year. It would be cheaper to give one of your homes away to a poor person who only has one, so they get to have a vacation home too. The poor person only has to pay 10 dollars a year.