This is basically a maximum wage for landlords, bound to start a secret society.

IMO it's a crooked notion that landlords are rent seeking and nothing else - they do create supply and maintain housing.

Issue is when they want to politically and artificially raise the value of their property by preventing more housing from being built, so, if you're going to ban something, ban artificial regulations on construction!

North Carolina has done some good by loosening up code around tiny homes, but, a lot of municipalities want to enforce big homes only because they like the property tax of high value houses, 4 bedroom and all. Small town I'm in basically won't allow expansion of housing because the people that live here don't want the village to get any bigger, but if it's democratic like that I'm mostly OK with it, it's when there's demand for housing and someone with a perverse incentive to block it that we should want to solve for.

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals.

Here in Norway the solution, as with so many other things, is taxing. Your home is evaluated at some "market rate", but if it's your primary residence the effective tax value is just 25% up to $1 million (70% on value above $1 million). For reference, a typical 3-room apartment in Oslo, the capital, is around $400-500k.

However, if it's not your primary residence, then you pay tax on 100% of the "market rate". The tax rate is 1%, so not insignificant.

Until a few years ago, tax on non-primary residences was much lower, and hence we had a lot more people buying to rent if they inherited money or similar. Some even had a dozen or more properties. These have now exited, so policy is working as intended.

One thing of course politicians for some reason didn't think of is that if most of the landlords suddenly sell, rental market will shrink. So now it's super-expensive to rent, and those who rent usually do so because they can't buy for one reason or another (no stable income to support a loan for example).

Landlord, or property management, is a job, same as any other job you might have. The problem is not owning multiple properties, but not paying enough taxes on land. Otherwise, landlords benefit from the free lunch that comes with economic growth and real estate price appreciation, which is true for every homeowners in this country.

IF you want affordability? Tax land.

Doesn't matter who owns them. Your grandma or wall street.

For affordability reasons, just build more housing. It doesn't matter how many houses anyone owns if you just build. more. housing.

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

India still has this in some states [1]. You wind up with everyone in the family owning a house. After that, other people own it and pass on most of the rent.

Better: progressive capital-gains taxes.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_Land_(Ceiling_and_Regula...

This would certainly drive down prices - how much is an open question. But I think its a fair compromise, UNTIL we actually do have enough homes for everyone. Until then something has to give - right now its people who can't own a single home that are yielding, but IMO it would be much more fair to ask people who already own a home to yield (not buy more than one). Ultimately that's the tradeoff to discuss.

Why would this help affordability? If you restrict who can operate rentals, that will inevitably shrink the supply of rentals, which will raise rents.

> there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

Many people wish to rent, not buy. If we make it so each landlord can own fewer homes, but renting demand stays similar we just incentivise more people becoming landlords

The purpose of people putting money into stocks or real estate is to allow for a simple, fairly 'hands-off' way to make money (real estate is not totally hands off, but is pretty close to a set-it-and-forget-it business).

Real estate works for this because you can really put in as much as you want into it.

Other business activities do not work because the entrance cost for non-rent-seeking business is extremely high and the risk is way too high compared to real estate. This is due to American regulation and labor laws.

This is a 'first-world problem', but now that I have capital, the question is 'what to do with it'?. Yeah, you could throw it in the stock market, but that's also rent-seeking in a sense because you're not really able to invest in primary rounds (I mean you can, but it's hard to find deals), so basically you're just providing liquidity to people, which is rent-seeking of a different kind.

So then the question becomes what else to do with it? I've given a ton away, but that's useless for the most part since it barely creates any economic value.

In my ideal world, I'd start a factory and hire a manager, but the capital cost of that is high, not because of the material or the rental cost, but because of the labor cost. So then, what's the option? I could easily outsource it all to China or India, but that's completely useless for the United States.

Then the question becomes, why start your own, when you could invest in others. Great! I would love to do that. It would be even better if I could simply invest in a local enterprise... Except, that's not easy either. Regulation over investments means that even investing in this is fraught with difficulty unless you want to establish some sort of 'fund'.

So basically, there's nothing to do with the money, which is sad, since I end up giving most of the money I make away anyway, and would prefer to have more of it to give away.

Until America figures out what it wants to be, it's going to be real estate for me... consistent incomes, fairly uncorrelated with equities (which I have a lot of too), etc. There's really not many other options here. There's barely any 'productive' activities taking place in the United States.

That's a surefire way to make sure that all rental properties are controlled by people who are able to de facto own a lot of properties with family members (or "family" members) on the paperwork, and who are able to enforce their ownership with extrajudicial means.

> Controversial, but for affordability reasons, there even should be a cap on how many homes an individual can own for rentals

Price controls and limits like this rarely work out in history.

Around here, many landlords renovate or build new high density construction. Put a cap on how many properties they can own and they'll switch from building/renting as many units as possible to maximizing the rent on the limited number of properties they can own.

Restricting the market in one dimension rarely has the desire effect.

Should this apply to multi-family homes or just single family?

Corporations are people and states aren't legally entitled to know the composition of a foreign corporation's membership.

I'm in favor of a property tax multiplier that increases with the number of properties owned.

That would not be useful. A far better solution would be to drive up rates to make/force landlords unload properties they could only afford at lower rates and also deport the roughly 30 million foreign nationals that are currently in the USA driving up costs of everything. It’s basic supply and demand, but ironically the immigrant supporters are allied with the billionaires and generally wealthy who profit from piling in ever more people into the same supply of housing and amenities and resources.

This is treating a problem symptom, not a root cause.

Landlords owning property is not a problem. Some people prefer to rent - they may be students, or they may not anticipate being somewhere for long, they might not want the risk of owning a home, lots of valid reasons. Having housing available for these people is good and landlords are a necessary and valid part of this market.

The problem is when people who want to own houses can't afford them, even when they contribute meaningfully to society. The root cause of this is not landlords existing. It is wealth inequality. A vanishingly tiny number of people own almost all the wealth in the system, to a point that the additional wealth gives them no real benefit, but serves only to remove that wealth from the vast majority of otherwise middle class people.

If you want to fix this problem return the top tax tiers to what they were 50, 75, 100 years ago and the problem will be severely reduced. It's not sufficient to solve it, but its low hanging fruit.