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San Francisco’s tax also applies to the value of liens held on a property, personal property and other assets connected to the real estate holding. In addition, the city defines transactions broadly to include changes in ownership of corporations and other entities that possess the property.

The tax was challenged by the owner of a 17-story office building at 211 Main St., a few blocks from The Embarcadero, and an 11-story office building at 260 Townsend St., south of Market Street. San Francisco levied nearly $12 million in taxes, interest and penalties on the owner, CIM Urban REIT, after a merger in 2014 changed the ownership of CIM’s parent company.

In a ruling Thursday, the First District Court of Appeal rejected the owner’s argument that San Francisco was bound to follow the state’s tax rates. The court said it agreed with Superior Court Judge Ethan Schulman’s conclusion in a 2020 ruling in the case that “a local transfer tax is a municipal affair that does not implicate significant state interests.”

CIM also contended that San Francisco was assessing transfer taxes on properties that had not actually changed ownership. But the court said a 2008 San Francisco ballot measure, Proposition N, approved by more than 68% of the voters, had validly defined a change in corporate ownership of a possessor of real estate as a taxable transaction, even if the title to the building does not change hands.

Sponsors of Prop. N said in ballot arguments that multinational companies were costing San Francisco millions of dollars by using shell companies to hide ownership transfers, Justice Henry Needham said in the 3-0 ruling. He noted that the measure, which also increased transfer tax rates, applied only to property worth more than $5 million.

Prop. N was “intended to avoid evasion of transfer taxes by entities transferring ownership interests in lieu of transferring real property,” Needham said.

Bradley Marsh, a lawyer for CIM, said the company was disappointed by the ruling. It could appeal to the state Supreme Court.

What can I do to prevent this in the future?

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If you are at an office or shared network, you can ask the network administrator to run a scan across the network looking for misconfigured or infected devices.

Article source: https://therealdeal.com/sanfrancisco/2022/03/08/jll-hires-three-for-sf-office-with-multifamily-focus/

Report: Out of Town Buyers in Key Cities Have Nearly 30% More for Home Purchases Than Locals

Buyers moving from out of town in 2021 said they had way more cash on hand to purchase homes than locals in 42 major U.S. cities, according to a report from the real estate listing site Redfin. The report looked at 49 cities and found growing discrepancies as a result of high-income owners who are telecommuting due to the pandemic and can easily relocate. The highest discrepancy was in Nashville, where transplants had on average $736,900 to spend compared to $573,400 for locals. The report is based on saved searches by Redfin users, who enter their budget ranges, making it a definitely unscientific look. But the findings do align with increasing home prices in some cities, including Nashville, where prices rose 22.6% between 2020 and 2021, again according to Redfin. According to News 4 Nashville, homes in the city are only on the market for an average of 10 days with an average selling price of $410,000.

Redfin also found a handful of cities where locals have more assets for home purchases than people from out of town, most of which are in the Bay Area, including San Francisco, San Jose and Fremont.

“Moms 4 Housing” Home Welcomes New Residents

A foreclosed Oakland home that was the subject of a protest occupation by unhoused mothers two years ago has reopened as affordable housing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The building, which was owned by speculators Wedgewood Partners, was sold to a community land trust and transferred to Moms 4 Housing in a deal brokered by Mayor Libby Schaaf. The home has welcomed its first residents, a 24-year-old mother and her 1-year-old son. Now dubbed “Mom’s House,” it will host five occupants at a time who are mothers at risk of chronic homelessness. The new residents will pay a third of their income toward rent and the building will include wraparound services such as therapy and financial planning according to the Chronicle.

The previous owner, Wedgewood, was sued by the California Attorney General’s office — a lawsuit unrelated to the Moms 4 Housing protest — for illegally evicting tenants after purchasing foreclosed properties.

Tenants in Corporate-Owned Buildings Plead Before U.S. Senate for Oversight

Seven tenants of corporate-owned properties testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs on Tuesday, asking for better oversight of corporate landlords that receive federal funding, NPR reports. The tenants are part of a group called “Renters Rising,” a national tenant association that is a project of the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy. Tenants complained of retaliation, rent increases and deferred maintenance according to NPR. The presence of private equity and corporate landlords in the housing market increased after the 2008 recession when millions of homes were foreclosed upon. Tuesday’s hearing also comes as private businesses accounted for a growing share of home purchases during the pandemic, per a report on private equity in the housing market by Redfin.

This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter.

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Roshan Abraham is Next City’s housing correspondent and a former Equitable Cities fellow. He is based in Queens. Follow him on Twitter at @roshantone.

Article source: https://nextcity.org/urbanist-news/housing-in-brief-remote-workers-driving-up-home-sale-prices

San Francisco could soon become the latest city to tell property owners to put vacant housing on the market or pay up. On Feb. 8, city supervisor Dean Preston and supporters submitted a proposal for voters to decide this November whether the city should create a new vacancy tax, a measure now being adopted around the world to encourage potential landlords to put more housing on the market.

If passed, the measure will impose a tax of $2,000 to $5,000 on housing units unoccupied for more than six months, ostensibly freeing up more rental units in a city where they are in short supply. San Francisco’s city legislature estimates the new tax could bring 4,500 new units on the market over two years. The new proposed tax would exclude single-family homes and duplexes, and apply only to vacancies in multi-unit buildings.

San Francisco faces a shortage of 82,000 units, according to local governments’ report (pdf) on the region’s housing needs. As one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, median monthly rent rose 10% to $1,959 between 2015 and 2019.

Other major cities including Oakland, Paris, and Vancouver are imposing financial penalties on empty housing units. These can be vacant apartments in a multifamily building, second homes and seasonal properties, or in some cases speculative real estate purchased by foreign investors.  Most recently, Spain introduced a national vacancy tax as part of its new “right to housing” law.

Yet little data exists about the efficacy of vacancy taxes to increase the supply of available housing in competitive markets. Where vacancy taxes have been implemented, say housing policy analysts, some new housing units do come on the market and new tax revenue is generated for local governments. But even where successful, vacancy taxes haven’t been enough to meaningfully bring down prices across a city. To meet demand, cities need more new construction.

Do vacancy taxes fill empty homes? 

A vacancy tax attempts to increase the housing supply in two ways. First, it incentivizes owners of these vacant units to put them on the market, either for rent or for sale, adding to the overall active housing supply and eventually helping to bring down prices. Secondly, it generates tax revenue to fund more affordable housing. If property owners choose to leave units vacant and pay the tax, that revenue goes to the city and is invested in other affordable housing initiatives.

In its first year, Oakland’s tax raised $7 million which has gone toward a commission on homelessness, a mobile outreach team for homeless residents, and housing grants. In the Canadian province of British Columbia—home to Vancouver, one of the most expensive housing markets in Canada—a vacancy tax raised $231 million for regional housing plans over three years.

Lessons from Vancouver’s vacancy tax

In 2017, Vancouver introduced a vacancy tax alongside the regional government of British Columbia. The city’s “Empty Home Tax” charged 1% of the property value (since raised to 3%) for residential properties not occupied for at least six months of the year, with some exemptions. The regional government’s tax is 0.5% for Canadian citizens, and 2% for foreign property owners.

Three years later, it seems that the tax appears to have had a positive, if moderate impact on housing availability. A city report found the number of existing vacant homes (pdf) in Vancouver fell from 2,200 to 1,600 between 2017 and 2020 after the tax was implemented. An estimated 800 homes were either sold or rented as a result. An analysis (pdf) of the British Columbia tax done by the ministry of finance found that it “helped” add 18,000 rental units to the market in the Greater Vancouver area between 2019 and 2020.

Shane Phillips, a housing expert at the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, and other observers largely agree that the policy has had some positive impact, but hasn’t changed housing market fundamentals. “This tax has raised millions of dollars per year, which is great,” says Phillips, “But in terms of making a lot of housing available for long-term rental, it hasn’t done a whole lot.”

What’s needed, he said, is new construction.  And vacancy tax is at best one tool at city leaders’ disposal to increase the overall housing supply. “It’s useful on the margins, and can generate more revenue,” says Phillips. “But it’s not a substitute for building more housing.”

In cities like San Francisco, where construction of new housing has been insufficient for decades, a vacancy tax won’t spur enough new supply to meaningful reduce prices. But Bay Area cities are ramping up the pace of new construction. Both Oakland and San Francisco now have plans to build thousands of units of new housing over several years. But they will face high construction costs and land use restrictions, and without more dramatic changes, new housing is unlikely to come fast enough to bring down prices for those struggling to afford housing.

Article source: https://qz.com/2125251/cities-are-taxing-vacant-homes-to-create-more-housing/

Square feet

2,644 sq foot

Article source: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2022/mountain-house-real-estate-quiz/