Underutilized housing
Create incentive
Regarding “People displaced by Harvey may overwhelm Houston’s remaining housing stock” (HoustonChronicle.com, Wednesday), Harvey has left tens of thousands of our fellow Houstonians stuck in shelters. Many of them will need accommodations for weeks or months as they repair their homes and reassemble their shattered lives. Congress should make a simple, temporary tweak to the tax code that would make the flood victims’ lives easier and substantially lower costs to the taxpayers: Allow donations of temporary housing to be tax deductible.
Under the current tax code, donating the use of your property, even to a qualified charity, is not tax deductible thanks to the “Partial Interest Exclusion.” Removing this exclusion, and allowing people to deduct the fair market rental value of the donated property, would encourage individuals and businesses to open their homes and other property to people in need.
One can argue that people ought to do this anyway, and many will, but hosting people creates a meaningful financial burden that the tax deduction can help offset. We know this from personal experience. For the past several years we have donated the use of our garage apartment to people in need through our church. Even the most careful guests with best of intentions impose costs through wear and tear, accidental damage and extra electricity, water and so forth.
Waiving the Partial Interest Exclusion would allow people to donate the use of property to an IRS qualified charity. As with all such donations, the usual rules would apply: The charity decides how to use the property, the owner cannot get anything in return and so forth.
Temporary rental apps like AirBNB have proven the case that there is plenty of under-utilized housing that could be put to work. Bringing a stock of donated housing onto the market can go a long way toward solving the housing needs of our most vulnerable fellow citizens. The Harvey flood victims are a great place to give it a try. Bob Lukefahr, Houston