Why does it matter if owner is known or not known?
Person or entity wants to keep invested in real estate to protect assets against market fluctuations and frivolous lawsuits and it turns that real estate is a great investment.
Why is that wrong?
As long as person/entity complies with all laws (including whatever - empty housing tax?) - it shouldn't matter.
FinCEN has the right to know and it does, but it hides this info from public because probably some prominent political figures are in play here.
It's not wrong for an individual to choose an investment vehicle that aligns to their overall strategy.
However in an overall social sense, I do think that residential property investment in itself is wrong because I view housing as a utility and a basic necessity along the lines of water, healthcare, fire/police services and internet.
The issue is actually a simple trade off - whether it's more important to ensure people can own their own homes, or that people are allowed to use real estate as an investment.
I don't blame individual investors for this, but I do support the idea of introducing laws to limit property speculation. Bear in mind that I'm from Australia, where property investment has become a cancer that has drawn money away from productive assets (like startups) and into property, which is relatively speaking non-productive rent-seeking (outside of its effect on the construction and design industries). There's no net output from acquiring debt to buy a house so that you can do nothing but sit on it and flip it three years later for profit.
I'm very sympathetic to Georgism, but you all seem to have taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended up in a discussion about the real estate ownership anonymity.
Of course it will. You just need to charge the land value tax to the owning entity. The same is true now for any taxes, fees or fines regarding that property.
If those are not paid, government can seize and auction-off the property.
Yes anonymous ownership and Georgism aren't strictly mutually exclusive, but the path that led us here is a decidedly incompatible ideology of land just being another asset.
> However in an overall social sense, I do think that residential property investment in itself is wrong because I view housing as a utility and a basic necessity along the lines of water, healthcare, fire/police services and internet.
In China, the government owns all the land and citizens merely lease it for 70 years.
Yet even with no land ownership, there is still land speculation.
For the reasons enumerated in the article. Difficulty of local governments addressing violations, inability for neighbors to contact the owners to sort out shared issues, etc.
And more. There is societal good created when people are able to discover who owns property. No piece of property exists in a vacuum.
City and county government typicaly hold the deeds. If an anonymous LLC is being problematic just have them send a letter "Pay fine within 30 days or we sell your property on the courthouse steps." I prefer to know my neighbors but I also understand why some owners would want to stay anonymous. But being anonymous should not allow you to be an asshole as well.
There’s really no axiomatic reason why the LLC has to be anonymous in the first place.
The whole concept of an LLC is a construct, a fictional entity intended to take the place of a person before the law. It is fundamentally a state created thing, there’s no issue of rights or natural law at stake here. It’s a privilege.
The usual goals stated for allowing corporations to exist at all are shared ownership and limited liability, to enable productive and speculative enterprise.
A single person who wants to hide within that structure doesn’t have any special claim on that right, unless they can demonstrate why the state should allow it, an argument that has to be made on the grounds of increased social good.
If we want anonymous property ownership we should legislate it. We don’t, real estate transactions are usually public.
Beyond risk: they absolutely know how much money can come from real estate industry groups and benefitting themselves, and how little from opposing it.
I totally support the notion that if violations are remain unresolved and fines are remain unpaid, government should have full right to repossess the property and sell it on public auction.
Or to play the other side, why would anyone want to hide from public knowledge that they own a property?
All property records are public. You can go to the city or county and get the names of who owns any property in that area. But now 30% of those properties are owned by companies who's owners can't be identified.
So actually the public is losing access to something they already have. There is public benefit to the land registry being public. That is being lost.
IF you're a celebrity, your place of residence could be identified if these records are public (just takes time/work to collate/search the data).
If you want to hide the property from your spouse in a divorce, the data may compromise it and force you to lose the property in a settlement.
I can see that the data is useful in some circumstances, but i feel the data should be available only for law-enforcement purposes (and taxation purposes), not available for general inquiry.
You can find celebrities if you want. The paparazzi does.
Your other example of hiding property in a divorce is actually an argument in favor of not allowing this. IANAL but is that legal? If it is legal, and you want to say morality is up to the individual, then it's not an argument either way.
The government has the right to tax you for the land, to buy and sell land, etc. So ownership of land in your community is a matter of the government, sure... But it's also a matter of the people. If the government sells a public park to a private company, wouldn't you want to know that the LLC was owned by the Mayor's brother?
Don't forget that journalists (the 4th estate) are a check and balance on the government. Don't be so quick to give away your rights because you don't see an immediate benefit.
> Why does it matter if owner is known or not known?
Sometimes you need to contact your neighbor. If they don't live there (or if you don't live there) that can be hard without an actual name and address.
I manage a rental property. I've needed to talk to all the adjoining properties at some point for fence issues, tree issues, and noise issues. They are all rental properties, so none of us live in the houses (college town).
It's taken me 20 years to collect the contact info of two of the three adjoining properties. We still haven't managed to contact the owners of the property in the back.
Our house is the only one with an actual name and address. The others are trusts or LLCs.
I disagree with your argument that we shouldn’t care about this as long as it’s legal.
There are many things that are legal but still damaging or wrong. In many cases (including this one, IMO) we as a society should be able to know more about the behavior so that we can deal with it if it’s problematic.
For one thing, the "NIMBY" problem gets much worse when a multi-billion dollar company has a substantial portion of its worth tied to the value of the homes that it owns. The last thing we need is an incentive for huge firms to benefit from limiting housing supply.
Everyone can care about things they want to care about.
I own that house and I don't want you to know who I am - and this is part of my hard-earned assets protection strategy.
Why your casual curiousity to know is more important than my desire to legally own the property without disclosing information about me to everyone and their cat?
I'm no expert, but as far as I can tell, "The Law" has been a last resort in resolving local disputes between neighbors. It's heavy, slow, and expensive. Rather, custom and direct negotiation have been the mainstays for orderly civic relations.
Anonymity essentially takes all of that and ejects it. Without a new legal framework to replace it (that you almost certainly will like less because it will both cost more, and demand more access to you by the state), demanding that formal legal means be used in all contacts with you is demanding that your neighbours pay significantly more to achieve mutual ends. All while giving the rest of civil society the brush off: "I've got mine, you can kindly go have a nice day."
I guess the idea of community is pretty much obsolete, but the smallest unit of governance, like say a home owners association, would probably undermine your anonymity if you chose to participate.
In that case, shouldn’t there be a public registry of people who invest in weapons manufacturers, oil companies, and other corporations that produce unhealthy products?
Apologies if I'm just projecting, but this seems nihilistic.
Why does it matter if we know or don't know anything?
Why does it matter if we know or don't know who wrote, lobbied, or voted for a bill? Authored a commit? Bought an ad? Wrote an article? Funded a study? Owns a newspaper? Holds a broadcast license?
I would call it a bit more utilitarian personally. Philosophically there is some value to that attitude in theory but only if everything else is known about a concept such that origin is irrelevant.
If someone finds scientific and mathematical proof that say an antibiotic formulation is impossible for a prokaryote to develop resistance to it doesn't matter if it was done by a respected winner of a noble prize, funded by a meat industrialist who wanted everyone off of his ass about antibiotic usage, or a crackpot who stumbled upon something right for utterly wrong reasons. If it is right the origins don't matter.
In practice however we don't and the source hints at other aspects including conflicts of interest. Perhaps the hypothetical universal antibiotic technically works but allows viruses to proliferate and fill in many ecological niches meaning overuse is still bad even when disregarding digestive bacteria. And perhaps the hypothetical meat industrialist knew that abd covered it up.
Why does it matter if we know or don't know who wrote, lobbied, or voted for a bill?
Bill's are supposed to be created and voted on by "representatives" for the people who elected them. Transparency is how we know if they're doing the job we elect them to do.
Authored a commit?
Code is copyrighted. We should know who wrote it. It can also be helpful for having discussions with the author if needed.
Bought an ad?
I'm for this with political ads to prevent undue influence. I'm actually in favor of banning political ads sponsored by anyone outside the state, including parties. For non political ads I'm not sure if it matters.
Wrote an article?
This is not required.
Funded a study?
If the study is going to influence public policy I think we have a right to know who funded it.
Owns a newspaper?
Same so long as they offer political content.
Holds a broadcast license?
That's a government grant of monopoly on an o thg otherwise public resource. We should know who the government is granting exclusive use to. Same for land ownership.
Required? Perhaps no, but it's common, especially in serious journalism. The reason to do so is similar to the other reasons. Imagine an article talking about an Oil company that is donating money to a charity. If an article is written by a professional journalist with a history of accurate reporting, you are likely to trust it more than if you found out the author was a PR rep for ExxonMobil.
It's a matter of the negatives -- that come with allowing people to purchase large amount of property anonymously -- outweighing the positives.
As long as person/entity complies with all laws - it shouldn't matter.
Agreed. And one of those laws might very well be: "If you own more than X amount of property (of this type or another) -- you need to disclose some basics about your identity."
and this in itself bases itself on a whole pile of pre-assumptions about what's right and the proper scope of the state's and individuals' rights should me.
We argue heavily about the dangers of tax evasion but the fact that government consumption of GDP and spending worldwide is at near record levels doesn't deserve reconsideration?
We discuss how "dirty money" is laundered through real estate but how much discussion centers around the sorts of laws that make that dirty money become such in the first place. Many activities that require money laundering are extremely debatable in their illegality, but this gets put by the wayside because money laundering = automatically evil, intrusive laws of all types necessary to stamp it out.
Then there's the whole issue of simple privacy. Yes, maybe people should have a right to at least some financial privacy, even from governments and corporations, let alone their neighbors. Transparency has its benefits but when you've created a taxation and financial monitoring system so pervasively, parasitically intrusive that any private attempt at keeping ones financial assets is considered suspicious, then this might just be a problem with the system, not so much all of those who want a measure of privacy.
It's odd that many in the hacker news crowd, who supposedly value digtal privacy from intrusive ad tracking and the growing tendencies of surveillance capitalism seem to throw the entire underlying philosophy behind these notions right out the window when it comes to elements of financial privacy, for property or money.
Because some geniuses seeking to freeze time have made it impossible to build more anything at the scale required and therefore land not being used because it's an investment is bad because it jacks up the price of what's left for everyone else and we want to know who's doing that so we can shame them because that's easy and changing laws is hard (edit: sarcasm implied).
Person or entity wants to keep invested in real estate to protect assets against market fluctuations and frivolous lawsuits and it turns that real estate is a great investment.
Why is that wrong?
As long as person/entity complies with all laws (including whatever - empty housing tax?) - it shouldn't matter.
FinCEN has the right to know and it does, but it hides this info from public because probably some prominent political figures are in play here.