This Is Exactly Why Oakland Is Oakland

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Criminals are tangible, the many more future victims are too abstract for most people. Until we realize by being lenient to the immediate means destroying much more in the future, this type of attitude would continue.

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All you have to do to realize that is look at Detroit or Flint. They are lenient out of necessity, since they only have enough resources to investigate the most serious crimes.

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Welcome to the town

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This is a lot worse.

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Yeah, pretty lame. That is why I left Oaktown. Just too much sheet, all the time.
If it is not the pathetic leadership in City Hall, you have Renter Nation wanting every freaking concession imaginable. At some point, the developers can only pass so much of the additional cost(s) to the buyers. If it gets so bad, developments won’t pencil out, so guess what that means? Exactly. Less housing, so higher rent or housing pricing anyway.

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As an Oakland landlord I just received a letter from the city informing me of the new vacant property tax from Measure W. It’s $6k a year for vacant property and $3k a year for vacant condo/townhouse and duplex, and $3k a year for ground floor commercial space parcels. The tax will start in 7/2020 for properties deemed vacant in 2019. A property is considered vacant if it’s in use less than 50 days in a calendar year, so a landlord needs to rent it out for at least 2 months in the year.

It’ll be interesting to watch how this plays out. Even though I won’t let me property sit vacant for that long, I will still be affected by this in terms of increased competition because now there will be more units on the market that were previous withheld. There will be more properties for sale too if owner doesn’t want to deal with tenants. This is a first in the bay area as far as I know.

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Do you have any vacancies at the moment?

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I don’t at the moment, but one tenant will move out end of Jan so will look for a new tenant soon.

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wow. This is exactly like the Vancouver empty homes tax.

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How do they know a house is vacant? They have no way to tell whether a house has a tenant or not

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  1. Onsite inspections
  2. Crosschecking if utilities turned on or not?
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The letter didn’t say. They probably don’t have a defined set of methods yet.

Every rental needs to pay business tax in Oakland. If a property does not have a business tax filed then that property is vacant. That’s one way.

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