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Don't protect "renters". The entire concept of "renting" needs to die in a fucking fire.
Instead, we need to jack up taxes on residential properties. Send them to the moon. $2000/yr? Fuck that: $2000/month.
But nobody actually pays these exorbitant rates, because we create an "Owner Occupancy Credit". The tax rate is only high if the owner doesn't live in the home.
What happens to renters? Do landlords jack up their prices to cover the increased property taxes? Or do they offer their tenants a private mortgage or a land contract, so they don't have to pay the hiked taxes?
When they can make more money as a lender than as a landlord, they aren't going to be renting anymore. Establish an owner occupancy credit, and "landlords" will be fighting tooth and nail to convert tenants into buyers.
(The actual tax rate should target an 85% owner occupancy rate. When more than 20% of the population is renting, the non-occupant tax rate is increased 1% per year. When less than 10% is renting, the non-occupant tax rate is dropped 1% per year. )
How would you handle apartment buildings?
Making them all Condo’s possible I suppose but, there’d be a lot of poorly maintained buildings no one would want to actually own part of
Landlord has to live on-site. In what I fondly call "face-punching distance." And can only collect a monthly salary equal to 3x the median rental price of all of the units in that building. Any surplus profit after paying utilities, taxes, and maintenance cost (to maintenance people who either also live on site or are at least paid 3x the rent of a median unit), gets refunded to the tenants.
I would strongly discourage landlording of more than 3 units by extending the owner occupancy credit only to 1-4 unit properties. Apartment complexes could be divided into multi-unit condos, with the extra units able to be rented out by the owner.
The owner of the building lives in the building and leases apartments to tenants who live in the same building as the owner.
Duplexes, triplexes, and quadplexes could all have an owner living in one of the units, making the whole property eligible for the owner occupant credit, while the other units remain available for rent.
Bringing this back to your comment, suppose instead of dividing a complex into individual units, we divided it into a "quadplex" condo. A single property consisting of 4 units. The owner of that property occupies the quadplex, making the quadplex-condo eligible for the owner-occupant credit. 3/4 of the apartments are still rentable.
Somebody is making money off of those poorly maintained apartment buildings now. Better that somebody be someone who is actually part of the community (and thus motivated to improve the property) than a hedge fund manager living on the other side of the country.