What's madness is the state allowing property owners to leave vacant, dilapidated buildings to blight the neighborhood. Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.
In germany, if you see such a abandoned property, you cannot even ask the authority who owns it, if you have the plans to buy it (you would have to rely on local people knowing and telling you).
There are quite some neglected properties around here and the owners are away, do not care anymore and the authorities do not care as long as the low property taxes are paid. There was a case close by, where a buisness wanted to get rid of the old rotting building next to them, but could not. It went on for years. Only after the building burned down (no idea if someone helped with that), the space could be finally cleared.
So yeah, exproptiation should only ever be the last resort, but in some cases it really makes sense.
The solution is actually simpler, set a property tax that would hurt if the buildings became vacant. For example if you pay 1% of the buildings value as property tax each year, it would make enough incentive to rent it out or sell if you don't need it. The proceeds can be used for building public housing projects or helping the homeless. Property tax was invented for this very reason.
Something like this yes. But the devil will be in the details.
"pay 1% of the buildings value as property tax each year"
A old rotten building might be worth just 10000€. And 100 € a year ain't that much. One would have to tax the property - and who will set up the rates in a fair way in a process that is not vulnerable to corruption?
And old rotten building sitting anywhere in a city is worth way more than 10.000€. Even if the building is not in good shape, the land is still valuable.
Right, and then the 80yo people living in a centenary house in a gentrified neighborhood suddenly get a 10x tax increase because the next door building got sold to be remodeled as a luxury condo, and drove property values through the roof.
That's good, because if they can't pay, their house is up for remodelling too. /sarcasm
I'm open to being wrong but I believe the data shows, old people in the UK are living in houses that are too large and receiving pensions that rise with inflation whilst "young people" are paying huge rents, can't afford to buy and are stuck with huge student debt. Why shouldn't the old couple move to let 10x apartments be built? Or does the data show differently?
"Why shouldn't the old couple move to let 10x apartments be built?"
Imagine you worked all your life and now you just want to enjoy your peace in your home for your last years. You really would not want to move and I am very against driving old people out of their homes, even though I am one of those young people with a small apartment also seeing empty and unused space everywhere.
If the property tax goes up by 10x, then that 80 year old couple has seen a 10x return on their real estate investment. They can easily take out a reverse mortgage to pay the property tax for the rest of their lives.
"They can easily take out a reverse mortgage to pay the property tax for the rest of their lives."
Not everyone can do that easily. I would not know how that works and where are the downsides. I can learn it, sure, but for an 80 year old this would be real stress, having to figure unknown contracts out - and not getting cheated. Old people are a prime target for frauds for a reason.
The reality is that the same thing, in effect, happens if you stop paying property taxes. The tax builds up and then when the house is sold after passing the government collects the tax before the descendants receive the sale proceeds.
This is why complaining about rising property taxes is almost never about the elderly people who actually live in the house. It's about their children that want to inherit the house without paying off their parents' property taxes.
Not really. By definition if your property value rises by 10x you have enough money to pay the property taxes by leveraging your home. Sure, it means you'll have to sell when you die and won't be able to pass on the house to your heirs. But the meme, "elderly homeowner becomes homeless because his home became super value" is just a fiction. It's not that the homeowner can't pay the property taxes - he's got plenty of value in his home. It's really the children that want to inherit a valuable home but don't want to cover the tax back payment.
Yes, we are discussing a hypothetical, from a few parents up: "set a property tax that would hurt if the buildings became vacant"
The definition of vacant is something that would have to be figured out, but it's not impossible. For example, you could do a generous 6-12 months of the year occupation without taxation, and then a sliding scale from there. (So you pay 0% of the new tax at 12 months yearly occupation, 0% at 6 months, 50% at 3 months, and 100% at 0 months.)
It seems to me that we could start with a conservative approach and adjust from there. For example, define a property as vacant if it isn't occupied for 1 continuous month or a total of three months out of the year.
That is the very problem we are facing in Turkey :). The municipality determines the value of housing in a neighborhood each year. That is taken as a basis for property taxes and transaction taxes. The municipality assessed value is somewhere near 1/20th of the value of an average flat. So, almost no tax gets collected :(.
Having a building vacant is already incredibly expensive; costs and interest add up and the building can get severely damaged (a building has to be heated in winter, ventilated properly and issues like broken pipes have to be found quickly by tenants etc.). Common reasons for vacancies are probate disputes, owners that are house rich but cash poor and can't handle maintenance, issues with building code and permits and similar. Apart from some truly dysfunct situations a scheme that involves vacancy doesn't make much sense. Why not take even a modest rent for a bit?
In general, everything you could propose that puts pressure on landlords leads to transfer of ownership from your (maybe friendly) landlord with 2-3 units, to larger, more professional companies who can handle the paperwork and regulations, with a tendency to tear down and rebuild something that is more expensive to rent or buy.
In countries with high inflation purchasing real-estate and keeping it vacant is an inflation hedge. Plus, you also benefit from low interest rates and get free money if your government allows it.
I live in Turkey. We had 80% p.a. inflation, where the government decided to lower the interest rates even further. Our president said Interest rates are the cause of inflation and if we lowered interest rates inflation would go down. State banks gave out house loans with 12% p.a. interest where the inflation rate was above 80% p.a.
A lot of Turkish people got their free money from the bank and invested in real estate. In Turkey, everyone evades tax and property taxes are not really collected. This in turn fueled inflation even more, sky-rocketed inequality and caused the worst housing crisis.
That is why I am convinced that property taxes are a must.
I live somewhere with ~3% property taxes on properties, including the one you reside in. Not so long ago mortgages were cheaper than that, and mortgages at least end someday. At the same time, short term rentals like airbnb are illegal. Combined, this leads to most landlords either being companies large enough to keep extremely high occupancy rates, or families that flout the law to rent a second property owned due to marriage or inheritance and become vulnerable the whims of neighbors.
I think allowing short term rentals, and giving owners strong eviction rights for damage, illegal activity or non-payment (which we have) need to be paired with property taxes to prevent all landlords becoming large inhuman entities.
It should also be noted that if you tax everything at the value it could make, you distort the usage of valuable locations to exclude housing.
Its probsbly hard to reliably enforce it since hard to figure out if bulding is occupied or not. You can have someone registered at the residency but still not live there.
You could maybe try to figure out based on water usage but then someone could just leave water tap slightly leaking since water cost is not that expensive
Probsbly squatters are those cheap solution that can enforce it in the most efficient way
You don't need to know if people live there, just raise tax enough so that the owner feels like renting or selling the building is better than paying the taxes out of pocket.
This also forcess poorer people (including retired people) to sell off the house they are actually living in. This is especially true if the tax is based on the current estimated value which may be much higher than what the house was bought for.
There are ways around this. For example set a property tax from second home on. Do not tax the primary residence. Or set income brackets. If poorer people live in their own homes they don't pay property tax.
This is not true. You can query the Grondbuch and it will give you all the necessary information of the owner.
Edit: sorry, havent been living in Germany for long. Thought it was the same as the Dutch kadaster. Turns out, it's not and my dealings with it have been unusually easy until now.
The reason why expropriation isn't used a lot is because it costs a lot of resources.
Surely, before considering expropriation, we should tell people who owns a property so that they can offer to buy it. If that's too much a privacy concern, the government could simply relay the offer.
Oh for sure. In the specific case I meant, the owner was known, but lived somewhere else around the globe and did not care, but it was his property. (where stones were falling off from the roof to the street)
Those are cases where I think expropriation would be warranted.
And if it would be easier to buy obviously unused land, less properties would end up in that rotten final state, so less need to even discuss forcing something.
Yes it is. You can request information, but I was told "wanting to buy" is explicitely excluded as a valid reason. (The usual solution is knowing someone inside the office, or paying someone who knows)
The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property? This is an extremist view.
Who defines what “maintained” means? Beyond safety concerns about the structure (and even then, they shouldn’t be able to tell me anything as long as I post a danger unsafe structure keep out sign and lock the doors), why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
>> What's madness is the state allowing property owners to leave vacant, dilapidated buildings to blight the neighborhood. Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.
> The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property? This is an extremist view.
It is not an extremist view. It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that. Squatters rights can be a solution to that (e.g. in the US, squatters can actually get title to the land in cases of long-term abandonment).
> Who defines what “maintained” means? Beyond safety concerns about the structure (and even then, they shouldn’t be able to tell me anything as long as I post a danger unsafe structure keep out sign and lock the doors), why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
This is actually the extremist view, private property rights do not trump all other considerations.
For a very clear example: if you're surrounded by starving people, and you own a warehouse full of food that you plan to let rot because you can't be bothered, the government absolutely does have the right to tell you what to do with that food.
>> It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that.
Then the government should buy the land.
>> For a very clear example: if you're surrounded by starving people, and you own a warehouse full of food that you plan to let rot because you can't be bothered, the government absolutely does have the right to tell you what to do with that food.
Let’s not use other examples and argumentation by analogy when we already have a very clear fact pattern. You own a building and the building is not currently occupied. The building is unsightly but structurally sound. Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
>> It's a public policy failure for land to sit vacant like that.
> Then the government should buy the land.
No, I don't think so.
> You own a building and the building is not currently occupied. The building is unsightly but structurally sound. Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
Yes. The legal principle has a long, long history across many different legal systems.
And I think you're thinking about it wrong: the government didn't "make you surrender that building," you chose to surrender it by leaving it unoccupied and unused to the point someone else could occupy and use it without a timely challenge.
In the US, adverse possession is a takings by a third party, not the government. And it’s not permitted when a land is unoccupied since one of the central tenets of adverse possession is open and notorious occupation. And, as you know based on your prior replies, adverse possession has a time component. The GP’s post is about merely leaving a property unoccupied. They don’t list a timeframe but we can pretty easily assume that if one exists in their mind it is less than the >5 years required for adverse possession based on the context.
I am not a commonwealth lawyer, but my understanding is that they have a similar modern rule in the UK and other commonwealth countries. I am not a continental lawyer, but my understanding is that civil law is similar with respect to government takings.
I will give you credit here because you may have interpreted the GP’s statement of “or forfeit the property” to mean generally lose possession of the property (including to a third party) rather than in the context of the prior sentence that references “the state allowing.” So, some backwards ancient legal principles that have been rejected or severely limited in modern times MIGHT support the contention that a third party can take someone’s land due to it being unoccupied and no modern legal principles support the contention that the government can make someone forfeit their land to the state merely for it being unoccupied.
The answer to my question (Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?) is then “Maybe to someone that is occupying the unoccupied building (however that works) but not to the government.” Got it.
And it’s clear we both know that I have been talking about GOVERNMENT takings (“The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?”).
> Does/should the government have the right to make you surrender that building without compensation (because that’s what forfeit means) simply due to it being unoccupied? Why?
Because homelessness caused by artificial scarcity is violation of a basic human right, and a public order nightmare. Putting private property above other human rights is the root cause of so much problems in today's societies.
(Disclaimer: I don't own a house, and I'm not even earning minimum wage with my freelance work.)
Question. If I owned a house, and went on a long vacation outside the country (e.g. because maybe I like travelling or something), how long would I be able to stay on vacation before the government yoinked my house due to it being empty?
Even if you're not in it, the house is full of your possessions. I'm not seeing how this is comparable to properties that have been actually empty for decades.
If a property is fully decorated (photos of my family, toothbrush I've used, etc), is that still considered empty?
If the answer is "yes", then based on your post, the answer to my question of how long can I take a vacation for, is "decades".
But if that is indeed considered empty, then what if in addition to that, every month I email someone my travel expenses and tell them to print them and to put them in some drawer in that property (maybe locked with a key or something), and also mail some cheap souvenirs and tell them to put them as decoration somewhere, is that still considered empty? (Since it has my stuff, and is continuously storing more stuff I'm purchasing.)
If that is allowed, then the next question is what if my vacation is in the same country.
So yeah, what kind of activity, and with what frequency, does that property have to have in order for it to not be considered empty, without leaving some kind of loophole?
It's funny because most of your argument assumes setting some kind of threshold would be a problem, as if it was not exactly how fiscal rules worked already.
For instance, you are paying income taxes in your “country of residence” and not in your country of vacations (unless you are an American citizen living abroad, in which case you pay it to both your country of residence and to the US), and there is a threshold that makes one country qualify as “country of residence” versus your countries of vacations.
> It's funny because most of your argument assumes setting some kind of threshold would be a problem, as if it was not exactly how fiscal rules worked already.
But it is the crux of the problem.
When establishing things like "country of residence" (or, here in the US, to which state(s) you owe taxes), the second order effects aren't the same. It's the difference between "you owe a few extra percent of your income for one year" versus "you lose your home permanently".
As public policy, it is important not to expropriate someone's home simply because they had to be away for extenuating life circumstances like caring for an ailing relative for a few months. Because otherwise, you will disincentivize that behavior (and create a greater burden for the state).
It's easy for you to come back with "Oh, well the competent bureaucrats in my government will simply write an exception for those who leave for a few months of eldercare because that is clearly a legitimate reason to leave your house vacant for a few months." But that is just a bandaid on an artery which creates an explosion of exceptions and exceptions to the exceptions.
What happens if I need to care for my grandmother, and then something else comes up? Do I get to have two exemptions to expropriation? Can they be consecutive? What sort of documentation do I need? What if the exemption allows n days, but I need n+3? What if I had planned an m-1 days vacation (for the m vacation days exception) right before I need n days to care for my grandmother?
Very quickly you will have 10,000 pages of rules that nobody understands. And you will get perverse outcomes when someone hits an edge case that wasn't quite accounted for.
Or maybe you will say "put the case in front of a judge and let them exercise discretion". But now we have the problem that it is no longer really rule of law, and people with connections will always get exceptions while people without don't. So that increases the class divide because people with connections are usually rich, and middle-class people usually don't have connections.
First of all, there's no need for a complete expropriation all at once. Having a significant property tax that scales with time would do the trick too. Start with 5%, next year the tax is 10% of its original price, then 15%, etc. After 4 years you lost half of your property, so I'm happy with that, and since it's all about percentage like other taxes you should be happy too.
And then, all this argument is basically a straw man, because there no need for the state to guess anything or to set threshold, at all: all you need to do is mandate people to declare their primary residence, and in fact it is the case in many fiscal system already! If it is your primary residence, then fine, you can leave it empty for as long you want, as long as you are not lying on the fact that this is in fact your primary residence (and if you're lying, then the state must gather the evidence and win against you in court, which is what the rule of law is).
Yeah I'm dumb when it comes to legal stuff, but my guess is that defining a threshold with a good balance while also not inconveniencing the common citizen wouldn't be as easy as it might first appear, at least without causing some unintended consequences that people might not think about when proposing "'just' do X".
But like I said, I'm dumb when it comes to this topic.
If it's your main place of residence [1], I don't have issues with making it protected against the kind of mechanism we're talking about.
Because you know the problem doesn't come from people going for long vacations, but from landlords hoarding houses and holding in order to never let the price go down.
«Owning a house» can mean two very different things. It's either:
- I'm living in a place and I don't depend on anyone for hosting me.
- I hold some piece of paper that says that this particular place in the country belongs to me and if the people living there don't pay me I can call the police to get them evicted.
The first one is basic human right and should be protected as such, the second one is just something enforced by the power of the state in favor of the upper class against the working class.
[1] which, in many countries you need to declare to the government already, so that they know where to get you should they send the police to arrest you.
> tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?
I suspect it would make more sense to do so via tax policy, i.e. high property taxes (or LVT) with a deduction for each occupant.
> why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?
For one thing, governments have a vested interest in not being overthrown. If a sufficiently large percentage of the population believes that their living standards are declining (including not having a place to live) then an increasing number of people will arrive at the conclusion that revolution or terrorism has a positive risk/reward ratio.
I've worked in a country where the previous government had allowed this to occur; apparently it happened gradually and then suddenly. Beyond a certain point you can only consider something "my building" if you have the means to defend it against anyone who might wish to make it their building. In that case, the possession of a piece of paper which you once used to outsource the enforcement of your property rights to the previous government isn't very useful.
(Edit: To be clear, I think allowing squatting is a poor solution to the problem of reducing homelessness and better tax and housing policies are more sustainable and equitable, I'm just explaining why the government has a substantial interest in what private landowners do with their properties.)
>> I suspect it would make more sense to do so via tax policy, i.e. high property taxes (or LVT) with a deduction for each occupant.
Vacant land use taxes do make sense to me. That is not what GP advocated for: “Owners should be required to maintain their structures and keep them occupied, or forfeit the property.” Increased taxation is not forfeiture, and being forced to sell because taxes are prohibitive is different from the government taking your building.
>> governments have a vested interest in not being overthrown
This is a tortuous chain of logic to go from unoccupied buildings to overthrown government concerns.
> Increased taxation is not forfeiture, and being forced to sell because taxes are prohibitive is different from the government taking your building.
That's a distinction without a difference, at least not a difference in the area we're talking about. Both mechanisms cause title to be lost if certain obligations are not met (in one case, an obligation to occupy, in the other, an obligation to pay taxes).
Well if we zoom out to the moon so that everything looks the same “in the area we are talking about” then I guess there are no distinctions between anything, are there? A person that gets robbed is the same as a person that forgets their wallet on a train, they both just failed to meet their obligations (in one case an obligation to not let someone have their wallet and in the other their obligation to remember where they put their wallet).
Maybe government won't be overthrown, but you can easily loose the election.
European cities are dense, and there is limit to their growth, as they are often surrounded by tight circles of villages. Sure, you can build a few buildings there, but those villages are often fighting against high buildings, and residents often fight against urbanisation of the area. So you can't build suburbs like in USA and this makes the already problematic situation (high prices, big funds buying whole apartment complexes to rent them, many people buying apartments as assets and being afraid of renting due to protections towards tenants) even worse. So every building is worth it's weight in gold. And whole abandoned buying is going to be a daily reminder for many people that cannot afford to buy 1 room apartment about how unfair current situation is.
I don't want to argue about what to do with situation, just adding a perspective.
Right, that's why before I responded to your question ("why would the government have any right to tell me what to do with my building?") I tried to make it clear that I think there are better approaches than what the GP was advocating for i.e. directly seizing vacant properties.
> This is a tortuous chain of logic to get from building with squatters to government overthrown.
Can you be more specific about what part you disagree with?
To be clear, I'm not arguing that squatting results in overthrown governments, but that the acceptance of widespread squatting is sometimes a (shortsighted) policy response to a housing crisis. Squatting is a symptom but what can actually topple governments is sufficiently high levels of homelessness. Any government that allows a sufficiently large percentage of residents (especially young people) to become homeless will eventually be replaced by anarchy or a new government.
To reiterate, I'm just trying to answer your question of what right the government has to tell you what to do with your property -- I'm not specifically defending the GP's suggestion.
Land is a scarce resource, and society agrees to enforce artificial restrictions on access and use because in many instances it is beneficial, but that does not mean society should automatically be required to extend unlimited support for property claims when an owner behaves in ways detrimental to society as a whole. No jurisdiction on earth grants property rights without limitations.
Even if I am the owner of an apartment, I don't have the right to do a metal concert in my living room some Saturdays at 1 am... or don't have the right to paint my frontage the way I want... cause it creates negative consequences for other people.
Having vacant apartments and houses for long time in places where there is an housing shortage create much bigger negative consequences than few metal concerts...
You do have a right to do a metal concert in your living room on Saturday at 1AM. You don’t have a right to violate the local noise ordinance or, because your example has you as an apartment owner and not a building owner, the condo association rules.
You do have the right to paint your frontage the way you want with respect to the GOVERNMENT.
But more importantly, the GP wanted the government to TAKE VIA FORFEITURE any building that is merely vacant. Your examples are limits on use, not relinquishment of property. They are not the same.
There isn't a government on the planet which doesn't place limits on how you can paint your property. Try painting a death threat against a government official on it for example.
The notion that property rights is unlimited is an extremist view that doesn't match the legal situation in any jurisdiction on the planet with a government.
> The government should tell property owners that they are required to keep their property occupied otherwise the government should seize their property?
No, but they have to keep it in good condition, which includes keeping it secure.
The government literally tells you what to eat and wear. And thank god... since without those laws we would eat the worst and toxic foods and wear toxic and low quality clothes.
uhm...that might be a bad example. winks towards shein, temu, fast fashion in general
and thinking for a bit longer - corn syrup/sugar in general is not toxic but it certainly is not that healthy either, and it's got big lobbies and large amounts of money behind it to influence the government.
