Where are all these empty houses? Even then, they appreciate in value, even empty and propery price appreciation is the best place for a trust fund based in the caymans to obscure ownership of earnings. There isn’t a bigger effect from a few empty properties than house prices exploding 2 of 300% in a couple of decades.
Here I can speak for Italy: everywhere, since there are too many risks to rent them, even for the a trust fund based in the Caymans
No easy way to get the house back at the end of the contract if the tenant decide to not leave. The eviction process can last years, assuming there is not some laws to block all the eviction processes (a quite common thing)
No easy way to get the house back if the tenants do not pay the rent: you cannot simply evict them
The landlord often still need to pay for some expense of the rented home which would be way lower if the home is empty (some consumption-based expenses)
In case of damages from the tenant, you need years to recover them (if you are lucky), and most often than not what are paid is way less of what you need to repair them
If you register the contract to have done it lawfully, you need then to pay taxes bases on the rent income (correctly) even if the tenant is not paying you. Basically the state say "you have x income from the rent, pay me y even if you are not getting paid and I (the State) do not want help you to be paid"
if you use some kind of agent to find the tenants, they obviously are not responsible (should they?) for what the tenant do after, and you need to pay them a share of the rent.
last but not least, you can decide to sell a rented house but assuming you can, the price would be way lower given the points above (obviously there are exceptions to this).
So people prefer to keep the houses empty and take the cost, knowing where renting it lawfully could led.
Milano has a lot of empty houses (some research say at least 1/3 of the total) but they are not property of some big fund based in the Caymans (right, maybe the very expensive ones in the historic center of the city, but are not that many). They are property of people who get as inheritance or who bought them years back when they were less expensive.
Thats a fair point. To me, one is clearly the lesser evil. I can agree that lesser evil arguments suck but its the best I can find, personally. I choose the one I see as the side who won’t deliberately make it worse for us and better for the people they represent. Personally, I’m a post structuralist and I don’t think anyone can be trusted enough to allow mechanisms of power and hierarchy to exist.
The only problem with your approach (that I respect) is that this way you are rewarding anyway the same people that are creating the (supposed) problem you have. While you are thinking that you are voting for the lesser evil, they interpret it as an approval of what they are saying/doing, so they have no reasons to change.
Honestly I prefer to vote for someone else because it is the only way of saying "you are doing it wrong" and have the message delivered.
But what really I am having trouble with is that now everything need to be black or white, there could not be some middle ground point we can agree. People think that if you do not agree with a side then you are obviously be against that side: problem is that both side say intelligent things and both side tell stupid things, so I can agree with a side on an argument and with the other on another but for some reason that is lost.
However, short of a utopian, philosophers revolution, the best I have to offer is a lesser evil argument. Thats where I’m at. The way I see it, maybe wrongly, is that people on the right share my same frustration but that’s been captured by the very powers that force it on them in the first place. They have our neighbours looking down to find the solution and not up, where the problem has always been.
Maybe we should start to vote for who say intelligent thing irregardless of the side he is. I think that both your lesser evil approach and mine "vote for someone else just because" approach are not good enough to offer a stable solution.