When you're a billionaire all of life's basics are effectively free. And there are only so many houses, private jets, and super yachts you can buy.
In any case your first, second, third, and fourth home will be owned by a corporation based in the Cayman Islands and buried under an opaque list of shell companies, all of which you also own via cut-outs, one or two of which may be actual registered and regulated banks, which mortgage the properties back to you so you can play games with interest rate arbitrage.
And all of this will be handled by a small personal mini-corporation employing tens of tax experts, lawyers, creative accountants, and investment managers, so you probably aren't even interested in the details.
It's too easy for the ultra-rich to find loopholes in any rules. If there is a tax on homeownership, they will simply not own any home but will own some corporate entity that own the asset. See ? No secondary residence. Just an investment in a corporation that happens to home a bunch of houses.
As an analogy, we catch more dumb criminals than smart criminals - but overall it's still worth having police, even if a few bad guys get away.
But what's the point? If they can't get money out then it doesn't matter. The only reason houses are worth holding as an asset is public bodies stopping the creation of more housing, driving the price up. You fix that with less state interference, not more.
In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values.
Countries stop doing this when policy is captured by neoliberal dogma. The UK is a perfect example. Housing was relatively affordable before a disastrous "right to buy" policy in the 70s, with extra enforced restrictions on state house building, destroyed the national housing market.
Now most housing is unfeasibly expensive. And hundreds of thousands of properties stand empty because they're owned solely as investments.
This is excellent for private landlords, property speculators, and older home-owners. It's an utter disaster for everyone under the age of forty because rents are unaffordable and ownerships is unimaginable.
The problem was not building more housing to cope with increased demand. That would've happened regardless of whether the Right to Buyers were renting off the council or had bought their property.
> In the world the state builds and owns a lot public housing and this depresses rents and property values.
Public housing, but not housing. The state controls what can be built where, which can drive up demand enough that property becomes a valuable enough asset to let it stand empty. Giving the state more power on top of that to correct that incompetent use of power seems worth questioning.
Or prevent companies from holding real estate as an investment vehicle?
I'm not naive enough to argue that this is a definitively easy thing, but especially when it comes to housing, the poor and middle class are getting completely fucked right now; it's gotten to the point in the crisis where we absolutely need to do something urgently.
This has the added benefit of injecting a ton of extra transparency and sunlight into corporate dealings.
* in many countries, I don't know about the USA.
I think we should add very steep taxes on second+ homes and "investment properties", but that's to address the housing problem, not to address the massive wealth disparity.
The real problem is their ability to buy things like "lawyers" and "newspaper coverage" and "senators", and it's much harder to effectively tax that sort of thing.
Also corporate ownership of single-family residential property in the US should be forbidden.
