Especially when those 2nd, 3rd, + properties are being used as passive short term rentals. Observing the state of the housing situation “Hmm there aren’t enough homes for normal families to each have a chance, I should turn this extra property of mine into a vacation rental.” does this make said person a POS?
I see what you mean, that makes sense.
You could probably sell it as an incentive thing. Rent your property, pay less property tax on it.
But I’d say the tax on rent should still be there, and be proportional to it. Since the property tax would also be dependent on the value of the property, what you say could still be true.
The math I came up with to make multiple property ownership moral is that every homeowner should be charged a separate federal tax that is equal to their (city, state, county) property tax times the number of properties they own minus one.
So for instance, if you are currently paying $5,000 a year in property taxes and you buy a second equally taxed home. Right now you would pay 5000 extra dollars for that second home.
Under my scheme, you would pay $10,000 a year for that second home., or $15,000/year, $5,000 of which goes to the federal government as part of an anti-homelessness fund.
And if you got a third one at the same price, you would now pay $15,000 for each of the two extra homes, and now $10,000 for the first one, or $45,000/year, $30,000 of which would go to the anti-homelessness fund.
This would make it so that owning multiple homes would be something only the very wealthy or the very spendthrift could pull off, and it would disincentivize companies whose sole purpose is to profit off of making Americans homeless.