Personal Finance

Taxing property doesn't really work, because landlords just pass those taxes on to their tenants. Even if you make a big differential between owner-occupied and rental property (and homestead exemptions are already common), there's a huge base of people who are either short-term residents or lack down payment, and will rent regardless of how much of the landlord's taxes they have to pay. You can make specific neighborhoods or communities unappealing to landlords, but that just makes them move across the street.

One of the things that makes rental property attractive is the massive leverage available to speculators. You can easily get 5:1 leverage on a property - i.e., you get the profits on a million dollar investment for just $200k cash. Interest on the loan is low, because it's backed the the property, and that interest is tax deductible, and there's many ways to disguise profits or offset them with management expenses. Maybe there's things you can do in the income tax code to discourage property rental, but it's not going to be taxing the property directly.