Just when you think things in the city of Los Angeles couldn’t be any more dysfunctional, they manage to take the cake yet again. The City Council is seriously kicking around a new tax on property owners for leaving homes vacant.
Just think of it as the “Tom Bodett tax” — either landlords leave the light on for ya, or they pay up.
City Councilmen Mike Bonin, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Paul Koretz and David Ryu have asked city staffers to come up with a plan for an “empty homes penalty” or vacancy tax.
“No bed in this city should be empty when people are being forced to sleep on pavement. … Empty-home penalties encourage landlords to keep people housed, and they help raise needed funds to create more affordable housing. This is an important tool for addressing one of the root causes of homelessness in L.A., and it is a step we desperately need to take,” Bonin said.
Bonin claims that there are over 100,000 vacant units in Los Angeles, and about 60,000 homeless people. So just give every homeless person a vacant place to live and voila! No homeless.
The problem with this so-called solution to homelessness is that the lights may be on, but nobody’s home.
Penalizing the owners of vacant units is a typical big-government solution to an economic issue disguised as a remedy for homelessness. When all you have is a hammer, after a while everything starts to look like a nail.
Property owners are already operating vacant units at a loss because they pay property taxes, special assessments, mortgages and regular upkeep, but derive no income from them. Now you want to add to their losses. How does this lead to more affordable housing for Los Angeles?
Additionally, property owners say rental units usually sit empty when they are being sold or prepared for a major renovation (which can take years, given L.A.’s draconian permitting process). Both of these activities are good for neighborhoods and the tax pool.
When a home undergoes a major remodel, it increases the value of the property and the neighborhood. And when a home is sold, property taxes are set at the current and typically higher value. A sale also triggers numerous real-estate transaction taxes and fees that go to public coffers.
Everybody wins.
Except, apparently, for the Los Angeles City Council, who seem determined to punish property owners for the mess their own housing policies created.
There is seriously more wisdom coming from O.J. Simpson’s Twitter feed than from the City Council.
All of this foolishness is in response to the city being embarrassed by the fact that although the city and county spent nearly $600 million last year to combat homelessness, the number of transients shot up 16 percent to 60,000 people.
Of the city’s homeless population, the annual point-in-time count found 75 percent of them living outdoors, primarily in encampments on the streets.
In fact, homeless camping has become so widespread in L.A. it’s only a matter of time before there’s a special section devoted to it at REI.
Things are so out of control there is now a movement in the works to recall feckless Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti over his inability to stop the bleeding.
Garcetti hasn’t yet announced if he will sign on to Bonin’s wacky idea of hammering homeowners yet again, but I have a better idea.
If Garcetti is serious about providing public housing for the homeless, let’s start with his house.
The 6,000-square-foot Getty House is a three-story Tudor mansion with 14 rooms, seven bathrooms, tennis courts and a $25,000 chandelier.
I’d like to see the mayor’s face when the first homeless person takes a sink-shower in one of his bathrooms. Besides, you’d think Garcetti could easily relate to homeless people; He lives in public housing, is always asking people for money and the City Council doesn’t know what to do with him.
Hiking taxes on homeowners in the name of fighting homelessness may make Bonin and company feel better about themselves, but it will only make housing in Los Angeles more expensive, not less.
John Phillips can be heard weekdays at 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. on “The Morning Drive with John Phillips and Jillian Barberie” on KABC/AM 790.
