this post was submitted on 14 May 2025
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[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 35 points 1 week ago (51 children)

I'll repeat again, I don't need a fucking tax cut. I need the price of housing to start going down.

Increase taxes on property significantly, and use 100% of that money to give everyone a basic income.

This incentivizes both people and developers to be efficient with their housing choices. Using too much housing for the area you live in? You pay extra to help out everyone. Using the right amount? No harm to you. Using less than the average? Here's a payout, thank you.

Prices overall will drop, because it's no longer profitable to simply own a home due to the taxes, and especially not if there's no people in it because the taxes won't be offset by the basic income.

[–] quaff@lemmy.ca 6 points 1 week ago (15 children)

There's an idea I hadn't thought of before. I wonder if there's any studies out there about how much space a single person needs to be comfortable. And how that'd change base on how many others are in the same space. Could be interesting idea to tax people based on their space to people ratio 🤔

[–] Someone@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

If I'm understanding this correctly, you wouldn't need to adjust any taxes based on occupancy. The property tax would be fixed based on the value, as it is now but higher. If a single person lived in a big house the new guaranteed income might be less than the tax increase, if you added a second person you'd double the income and potentially cancel out the increase. If you had a family of four in that same house, you'd potentially pay no taxes at all or even get some back.

[–] quaff@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Maybe not no taxes, but less? Could be an interesting way to tackle low occupancy rates. If it's possible to pay no taxes at all, it might cause people to sardine can a house to save on $.

[–] Someone@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I see where you're coming from, but I can't really see how that outcome would be any more or less common than it would be currently. I suppose I should've said effectively no tax, as it would simply be the new combined income being higher than the total property tax.

Some quick hypothetical math:

For illustrative purposes we can pretend every house is worth the same amount so we can deal simply with averages. At the same time we'll round the average household to 2.5 people. Let's say every house currently pays $5000/yr in property tax and that gets doubled, then we distribute the total evenly between every person in the country. We should end up with every individual person getting $2000/yr. If your household is 2 people, you'd effectively pay $6000, if your household is 5, you'd pay $0.

In the real world values obviously differ, but it would theoretically lower taxes on full houses and raise taxes on underutilized houses, with the impacts felt much less on small single occupancy houses and much more on huge mansions occupied by a small family.

I'm no expert, I'm simply a normal guy taking someone else's commented idea and running with it, so I'm sure there would be issues. In fact I see one already. This sort of sounds like how the carbon tax was supposed to work, where the average consumer breaks even, but in reality people in more rural areas felt like they were being punished because they didn't have realistic options to cut down on their fuel usage. This housing idea would have a similar issue where people in the least affordable cities would feel punished, because their shoebox sized studio might cost as much as a house fit for a multi generational family in a different province.

[–] BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 week ago

The trick to make this work is to tax the land value, rather than the property as a whole.

Rural area, land not worth a lot, fairly low tax. My rural property that I live in is about 20% land value, and 80% house value. Downtown core, land worth a lot, but then it gets divided by all the apartments in that building bringing it to a very low number. So you have a 40 million dollar plot of land, but there's 100 condos on it, which makes the land value about the same as above in terms of a percentage vs building value.

It's underutilized land that gets absolutely slammed. That empty nest couple who kept the 5 bedroom family home that's now inside the city boundaries and refuse to sell to let it be developed into condos. The 2-3 floor condo that was built 60 years ago right downtown, but really needs to be 10-15 floors at this point. Or the 1 story business in the core, sitting on a primary bus route or next to a bus exchange, that needs to be a condo building with commercial space on the bottom.

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