We already have this in the Netherlands. In order to deter squatters you can hire a student to live in your property.
You can kick them out on short notice.
And you should not. Hyping real estate prices or just putting massive real estate to disuse and often pricing the locals out is a big problem but so is losing a property to squatting. Such things don’t always involve millionaires and billionaires.
Devils advocate: is it really such a problem? Perhaps it should be banned simply on moralistic grounds.
But I fail to see how a hundred or so buildings sold to millionaires and billionaires numbering in the thousands has any affect at all in a city with 20 million people.
Again, surely it’s not the best nor most democratic thing that these buildings exist at all.
But I don’t see how it can impact the bread and butter real estate and rental market. Surely this is caused by the city’s numerous bad housing policies like rent control, zoning, public transportation, education.
I disagree. We should encourage this. It's the best form of export: you sell a good, but the good stays in place. It also collects taxes, taxes that are used for the benefit of the local population, without those who pays those taxes consuming a lot of local government services. On the rare occasions that these billionaires visit their luxury residence, they inject plenty of cash in the local economy. Why would you want to eliminate this?
Paying an entity for building a useless empty building, so that they can build another useless empty building... All as a kind of wealth insurance scheme for a rich person who has reason to think their assets might not be safe in their home country (because they were obtained in corrupt or illegal ways?).
> Why would you want to eliminate this?
Because I believe we can do better than living off the scraps of the obscenely wealthy.
Regardless, given the scarcity of housing space in NYC, I’d expect that if more of it is used as a store of wealth, housing prices will generally increase.
Are you suggesting that, in practice, the currently levied taxes prevent this?
There is no scarcity of housing space in NYC. NYC is a very large city. About 80% of it is low rises. If you want to increase the housing supply, you an do just that: you approve more building permits. 10 or 20 or even 50 sky scrappers will not change the availability of land in NYC.
Yes, and the current zoning / city council / NIMBYism death triangle means most development is poorly located.
In expensive parts of Northwest Brooklyn & Queens, the waterfront which is a 15 minute walk to the subway was zoned to put up a ton of 40+ story residential towers. It's far enough away that many of them run private shuttle busses to the subway.
Meanwhile the subway station (Bedford Ave particularly) that you walk to from said waterfront is surrounded by 3-4 story buildings.. as is most of the walk there.
The difference is there were already people in those 3-4 story buildings to show up to city council meetings & whine about any zoning changes, unlike the previously industrial water front.
