new law that bans citizens of China and some other countries from purchasing property in large swaths of Florida can be enforced while being challenged in court, a federal judge ruled Thursday.
Judge Allen Winsor denied the American Civil Liberties Union’s request to block the state law as it seeks to overturn it. The group is representing Chinese citizens living in Florida.
They need to word these laws that owning residential property without living in them incurs a massive tax or is prohibited altogether. This is why housing for so out of control in parts of Canada like Vancouver.
Sureee but that would also apply to wealthy American “investors” and corps that buy property to rent out.
Good. It would be about time the rich actually paid their fair share in this country.
I’m all for implementing a bracketed system like income tax for entities that own X properties that dont live in them.
A florida law I actually agree with. In my area, 40% of home purchasers are Chinese nationals looking to park their money outside if China. No American can afford to buy a home and they’re using our houses like a piggy bank.
Same is happening in major Canadian cities too. Has completely destroyed the housing market. There’s other factors as well but that’s not helping at all.
Florida Man: He can’t be wrong all the time, right?
New Zealand has the same law. Their home prices were shooting through the roof.
Still are. Was never because of foreigners.
Is and always will be because people are greedy. How many properties does Luxon own again ?
Broken clock and all that
Florida has no place in deciding “national security issues” in who to sell property to near military bases. That is absolutely a federal prerogative. Federalist society Trump judge over-reach here. (Just so my politics don’t get too confused though: I’m a socialist and would actually support taking this property from rent seeking landlords.)
That would be an excellent point if it were federally owned land
This isn’t just regulating interstate commerce. It’s regulating international commerce, based on countries that are a “threat” and centered around federal military land.
It’s about not lettihg the housing market get wrecked any worse than it already is.
That’s explicitly not what the law is about, nor what they’re arguing to the judge. There’s a reason why selling to Chinese nationals has a larger penalty and it’s not to protect the housing market. The injunction should’ve been granted just because it creates real measurable harm due to racism, independent to the fact that it is a law that is blatantly out of Florida’s scope.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
Even though the bill targets people from multiple nations, the statute imposes harsher punishments for Chinese people. In any transaction with a “foreign principal of China”, the Chinese buyer could face five years in prison and $5,000 in fines; the seller could get a one-year sentence and a $1,000 fine.
Gabriel Chin, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, said this latest trend follows a long history of “alien land laws”. Many federal and state laws used the phrase “aliens ineligible to citizenship”. That was a euphemism, referring to Asians legally entitled to remain in the nation but forbidden to become citizens because they were not white, until a 1952 reform. For example, the 1859 Oregon state constitution protected “white foreigners” who wished to acquire property but prohibited any “Chinaman”.
Florida’s alien land law was only repealed in 2018, making it the last state to do so. Chin led his students in an effort to undo similar laws that remained on the books.
“In Florida, it took a very long time,” he said. “We brought this to the attention of the Florida legislature in 2001,” but “it was a very tricky problem because the [ineligible aliens] provision was in the Florida constitution.”
In regards to the new law, Chin added: “It would be one thing for Florida to provide that only citizens could own land. But for them to pick and choose among favored and disfavored groups is problematic.”
If they are really against “foreign entities” just make a blanket ban against all non citizens. Why pick and choose which specific one?
Now, every time someone wants to sell a house, and they see a buyer with East Asian Appearances or have an “Asian sounding name” They’d be afraid so sell the property fearing violation of law. This can cause sellers to just avoid selling to anyone who “looks Chinese”.
I concede. Still, there remains a problem of houses being snatched up by corporations, able to outbid any individual, and leaving nothing to actually buy, only rent from the very corporations buying everything. Yeah, we should apply this law to “foreign entities”, as a blanket rule, but there still remains the American corporations doing the same thing.
There was probably an element of anti-asian racism as the impetus of the law, but it also addresses an actual problem, so eh?
Now, if they could ban owning more than two homes, that would be nice. I’d even limit the number of apartment buildings a corporation could own, Maybe one apartment complex per city. Or maybe per state.
I’d even limit the number of apartment buildings a corporation could own, Maybe one apartment complex per city. Or maybe per state.
Easy loophole… Just open a subsidiary that would own the complex.
That’s where we get into sunshine laws that mandate that all companies must disclose who owns them, and list that owner as part of the paperwork for all company property, and then use that to deny ownership of multiple homes/apartment complexes.
We should have such sunshine laws anyway. It would prevent a lot of issues.
