this post was submitted on 21 Mar 2025
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Here in the Netherlands, the government agency for housing has the figures on how many second homes people own, but refuses to publish it.
Journalists have estimated that the number is about equal to the number of people looking for a house. About 400K on a population of 18M.
The scarcity is artificial.
Artificial in a way that people don't want to give their houses for free to a complete strangers?
I don't think owning a second home per se is wrong or evil. Many people can't afford buying a house due to the upfront costs. But owning a second home and leaving it empty for years? Owning multiple homes to use as Airbnbs in residential areas? I really wish this was regulated. But it will never be because there's big bucks being made there.
I'm even ok with them owning a second house - but I think simple, easily understood answers are what's called for in this day and age (nuance is so easily corrupted) so here's my pitch
You have a second house? If it's empty for 6 months, your taxes start going up. By a year it should be more then the house value rises, and it should just keep going up
Same with apartments and any property opening companies. Honestly, I'd be fine saying it all starts when your household owns at least three homes
You can surrender the house to the government to be rented at cost, maybe for a tax write-off for the first 10 years or something, otherwise it should just keep rising to insane levels.
I want people begging for renters. Developers should slash their prices to move units quickly - it'll incentivize more affordable housing. Hell, I want landlords so desperate they pay people to inhabit them for a fixed time period.
And that's why I like 3 - you had to move and your house isn't selling? I don't want to screw over individuals, there's easier people to. You have a vacation house? Fine, but if you move you better get your empty house sold.
It'll cause all kinds of problems, but we have empty homes and homeless people - that's just uncivilized
Unfortunately this won't solve the housing problem. It'll just cause the demolition of perfectly fine houses to avoid increasing costs and new homes would only be built if there are people that signed a tenancy agreement beforehand.
The market would shift from readily available but empty homes to yet to build homes.
Why would they demolish homes? They'd have ways to make some money off them vs none - either they sell at a loss, take a tax write-off to surrender it, or they spend a significant fraction of the construction cost to tear it down to resell the land
It would definitely flip the current real estate development industry upside down, but I don't see that as a big negative - being a landlord is still very profitable, so investors will still want to do it. But you can't let units go empty, so they'll be going for affordable or in demand housing rather than highest profit margin (aka McMansions)
Plus, it's estimated that up to 1/3 of housing in the US is empty - the homes exist, they're just sitting empty. I'm not sure if that counts stuff like air BNB or not either.
Eventually, these buildings are going to age out and need to be replaced, which my plan would throw some hiccups into - but that gives us time to fix things without forcing people to die on the streets
Why would they demolish houses rather than selling them? Makes no economic sense.
Who would buy a house that would only cost you?
The homeless wouldn't magically have money for rent. So the homes stay empty. Nobody would buy them either because then they'll have to burden the ever increasing costs.
A nominal fee from a heavily discounted sale is still more than spending money on a demolition.
Not to mention demolition requires permitting. Municipalities don't just hand you a permit just because you asked. If you wanted to demolish a perfectly good house, they'd be asking questions.
Many second house owners use their second home as a pied-à-terre, a house they use to sleep in when they work in the city or a place to fuck their mistress when the wife sits at home in their mansion in the burbs/country side. So it rarely sits empty.
That's why I'd prefer starting at 3 - you can count as occupying 2 homes. Vacation house, house you're trying to sell, condo for work - whatever. You get the one, past that I think you should have to figure something out
This is somewhat tangential, but what are your thoughts on Georgism -- a land value tax?
I like it in theory, but I have a couple issuesn.
I feel like it's too complicated to make average people understand how it works, the idea is simple on the surface, but I think you'd have an endless parade of people asking "so if I have resources on my land, then what happens exactly?"
And in practice I feel like it would be a difficult transition from where we are. There's a lot of opportunity to sabotage it if they can muddy the waters, and I feel like lobbyists would end up carving it up in a way that puts corporate profits first... It depends on assessing value of many things, and if you compromise that portion of the process it all falls apart. They might even sneak in easier eminent domain or something
Systems like this can't be put in place through compromise, they have to be pure or it all falls apart. Maybe someday, I just don't know how to get from here to there without a lot of middle stages
Those are good points. Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I like your thinking. Personally, I prefer easier schemes that are difficult to avoid.
Schemes like yours, while good on paper, are often circumvented through shell companies and foreign residency.
I prefer a scheme where we just tax all real estate at a quite high rate, somewhere in the 1-5% range. Let's say that a simple apartment would then result in €5K tax. A family home €10K.
Every citizen gets to subtract up to €5K of property tax from their income tax. So a family might pay €20K income tax, but can subtract €10K.
End result is a progressive property tax, which actually decreases tax on normal people.
People with expensive homes, foreign owners of homes and people who own multiple homes would be paying significantly more tax without the possibility to subtract it
I have two problems with that - first, it doesn't directly address empty homes. Housing could still be commoditized, they just pay a larger tax - if they can make property prices go up even faster it would eat the difference
Second, messaging - people will hear that and ask "what does that mean for my property tax?" endlessly. It doesn't matter even if every individual would pay less, it's too mathematical and people won't do the math - they'll listen to their favorite voices tell them what it means
The nice thing about my idea is that it would crash the housing market, but it would do it by playing on a sense of justice. How is someone going to stand up and say "why can't I have a bunch of empty houses while we have homeless camps?". Many people would resist, but they have to do it while sounding like entitled assholes
Also, I think it would work for foreign investors and shell companies perfectly - see, it doesn't matter who owns the home, it matters who claims to live in it
A company doesn't live in a house. A foreigner can't say they're living their 6 months of the year when they're not in the country that long. A resident can claim a house and a secondary home (however that works out), but companies can't claim any - they need actual people to live in the home or it's vacant.
You put the fact the house is occupied first, then figure out who to tax and how much after - it doesn't matter what shell games you play, the only way around that is straight up fraud
Yes, people are sadly dumb and fall for bad messaging. I recognize that as a weakness.
The messaging should therefore be: lower property taxes for normal people by making it progressive and combating tax evasion by foreign investors.
My scheme significantly empowers normal people vs. speculators/investors. Speculators need a positive return to justify their investment.
Therefore, it will basically put a moat around the housing market that greatly benefits owner-occupiers.
I do. There's a full blown climate crisis. How much of an extra footprint is a second home? How much wilderness is destroyed by peoples desire to have a nice view while they sip their coffee? We all need to look inward and ask what we're actually entitled to.
Al Gore said it best; it's an inconvenient truth.
Hm, when I say owning a second home I don't mean building a second home. I strictly mean owning a second estate. I don't see how buying an existing estate to rent it out has anything to do with climate. It's just an investment to buy it and rent it out, even without planning on it increasing in value.
Don't farm people. It's a home not a financial instrument. If you want riches produce something of value. In that scenario you're just jamming yourself between someone and their basic need for shelter with your hand out. A different problem than climate change to be sure, but problematic all the same.
Hm I don't know man. I'm not a landlord, I don't even own a home. But I see renting as a useful service. Do landlords and estate companies abuse people? Absolutely. But I don't see renting as evil per se. Buying a house/flat is a huge personal investment and risk, and I'm happy to rent for the time being until I'm ready to buy.
We could have co-op's, instead we have profits. I wish you all the luck in buying your own home. But for me, where I'm at, I will forever pay rent to never own anything. Forever a second class citizen. All these apartments I've lived in with rents calculated not by necessity, but by what the market will bear. I'm pissed, and I think you should be too.
Your problem is with capitalism, not landlords.
The landlord would be the capitalist in this scenario, no?
Right?
Yup, it's pretty disgusting when rents are allowed to increase by inflation (or more) instead of the average salaries.
Co-ops do exist, but they are so rare. I wonder how hard it is to start my. Own co-op?
Idk the specifics, but I know the cards are stacked against it. It's tougher to find banks that will do business with you, and a lot of the tax breaks homeowners, condo owners too, get, aren't available to co-op's.
It makes sense because if you can't pay your loans, the bank will literally take your house, so it's win win for them. If you can't pay the rest of the co-op, they only get some shares of a building full of hippies 😬 gotta get rich first, then I can make my own co-op.
Counterpoint, I don’t mind people owning a second home on the basis of climate change. There are so many other bigger fish to fry in that realm rather than wasting resources limiting a small group of people with the means of affording a second home. I would much rather people with the means of owning a second home having to pledge to improve the carbon footprint of the second home through things like adding solar panels, smart landscaping, etc. That way when the house is eventually let go its more sustainable and environmentally friendly then when it started.
Poverty almost certainly costs more than all this ecologically, socially, and financially. The suffering and stress of the unhoused spills over into the lives of others who interact with or observe them, increasing our collective societal stress levels, increasing hospital visits, pushing people to earlier deaths (especially, of course, among the ultra-poor), and leading to expenses involving their unplanned funerals and messier aftermaths as opposed to cleanly laid-out wills, lost/absent documentation, etc.
Poverty drives people to violence and crime when they feel unheard and ignored. What if that house could help people find some peace in their lives? Instead maybe they become the very ones who rob and wreck it out of desperation. Societies need to help all people to keep the peace.
A lot of these issues can be or begin to be solved by giving them small apartments like in Finland. Homelessness ultimately costs society more than the actual cost to home them, ironically. We'll see, I suppose: https://www.nprillinois.org/illinois/2025-03-19/housing-experts-worry-about-federal-plans-to-cut-homelessness-programs
All those things cost carbon. All those vacation homes require a huge amount of infrastructure. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Notice how the first R is reduce? "Luxury" condos in urban areas now houses locals.
And as for the endless stretches of "cabins" that are just suburbs by a different name? Strip out the hazardous waste, strip anything easily reusable and let it return to nature. Re-foresting happens very quickly. Perhaps encourage some native, climate appropriate plants.
It's inconvenient AF. But it's where we're at.
That is the bummer, it’s all going to cost carbon and it’s all going to happen regardless if we ban people owning a second house. As long as the population keeps increasing, the demand for more new houses will naturally increase regardless of what we do to curb demand for second houses.
So I see it as a necessary evil. One in which I am of the opinion that that if we are going to screw with the environment and increase our footprint on nature then lets make it worth it.
For example, lets demolish more woodland but instead of single family housing, lets build a 30 story condominium with the first 2 levels being a shopping center, the next 3 being rentable office space, 20 levels for condominiums, and the last 5 being for entertainment, restaurants, and leisure. Hell create sub basement levels for parking. Is the construction bigger than building a house in the woods? sure. But in the long run by building vertically the overall footprint is much less than building a sub division, strip mall, individual restaurants, and a business zone.
I would much rather devote efforts into making that a reality than policing people from getting a second house. Hell, really try to market it to that demographic just so that we can combat the NIMBY attitude people have to vertical urban development and we will probably have more net good to the climate compared to anything else we do in urban development.
Yes! I get on Google maps and look at Hong Kong sometimes. Bit of an extreme example but it doesn't seem terrible. Tall buildings interspersed with nature. You get the best of both worlds. I could live like that. I'm not gonna say single family should be outright banned, but this endless suburbia we've got going on is terrible for everyone, the environment especially.
Seriously get on Google Earth and go for a walk about Hong Kong. They don't do everything perfectly, but it is impressive. We could be living so much better.
There's also so much bureaucratic pushback to building new houses for all sorts of bullshit reasons. The scarcity is indeed artificial and this is the kind of corruption that we accuse 3d world countries of. Except here it's called "lobbying".
Those second homes by the beach usually aren't where the unhoused need them, and they probably couldn't afford them anyway
Most of them, along with most houses in general, are in cities where the unhoused do need them.