521–530 of 645 posts
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There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-tax shocks. Prop 13 is about as dumb a mechanism you could design.
>There are reasonable ways to protect people from property-tax shocks. Such as?
https://taxfoundation.org/property-tax-limitation-regimes-pr...
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How does one “lose their home” if the value (to resell to others) goes down, but they aren’t moving & still living there?
They're saying that if the value goes up you can have to pay increased property taxes that you now can't afford.
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If that’s the case - which I don’t doubt - why are we encouraging home ownership at all? One of the key metrics the article presents is the drop in home ownership. Wouldn’t encouraging renters be a potential solution?
Because home ownership means greater economic stability for the individual or family owning it, and "we" consists of individuals and families?
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I used to be YIMBY, but I doubt more construction would lead to lower costs of living. When I researched this I couldn't find any strong evidence suggesting that more building would lead to more affordable housing. You would think that more construction would lead to more affordable housing, but it seems like more construction doesn't just increase supply, it also increases demand, which can offset any price effects…
There's absolutely zero evidence of "induced demand" for housing. And all available evidence suggests that 1: SF & CA have huge shortages of homes and 2: Building more is a good solution. Please see this non-exhaustive list of things which all show building more housing leads to housing affordability. * http://cityobservatory.org/another-housing-myth-debunked-nei... * https://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/news/201…
If housing prices were cut in half in SF you’d see WAY more people moving here.
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Thanks for the clarification. If it's a definition that applies to literally every physical good in a market economy, then it doesn't have much explanatory power to explain why some things are cheap and abundant, and why some things are expensive and scarce.
yea, I mean there have been large periods in human history in which land was not bought and sold. Many indigenous cultures don't have a strong concept of land ownership. In many modern socialist countries (Singapore, china), you cannot "buy land" you can lease it from the government for a long period of time (usually 99 years). In the united states, "education" is a good/service that transverses a weird line between…
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Affecting the seller's still creates a delta because the seller is also a buyer of wherever they're going to live next. Causing the new place to have much higher property tax than the existing place makes it harder to leave the existing place. And then fewer people do it, even if they e.g. don't need a place that big anymore.
That seems like a stretch, it doesn't increase the market price or the tax on the new property that the seller is acquiring, if anything it lets the owner save more money so they have more options to buy.
It also increases the minimum price the seller is willing to accept for the property, because they won't sell unless the buyer offers enough to compensate them for the higher tax rate they'll have to pay on the new property. It increases the bid/ask spread on long-held properties, so that more often no transaction takes place at all until e.g. the owner dies and the property is sold in an estate sale for less than the owner would have been willing to accept if they were still alive.
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While I vigorously support more construction in the SF metro area, I think expectations need to be set correctly as to the amount of construction required to actually bring prices down, instead of just slowing their rate of increase. It's a lot . I don't recall all the numbers, but I believe I saw something suggesting that we need to increase the rate of housing starts by a factor of 4 just to stabilize prices. To ac…
This is definitely a fair point. There's also - in my mind, living in a smaller town - the idea that it'd be nice if everyone coordinated to catch up mostly at the same time, so that it's not just Portland or Seattle or Boulder or San Diego or wherever... but everywhere.
This is especially true in California, due to Prop 13.
If we reformed the relevant rules, so cities profited from allowing new housing, I think a lot would change in this area!
Housing: * European way - build centrally design urban cities, with infrastructure, schools, public transportation, community spaces, recreation/business spaces. * American way - let for-profit developers build luxury houses around enormous google/fb/other tech giant campuses, and let struggling communities to figure out how to live with it... Medical care: * European way - build an efficient medical system which is…
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Demonizing landlords is not the answer. They did not get us into this mess. It's a distraction. Prices are set by the market.
In california, landlords largely did get us into this mess though. Like not on an individual scale, but as an organized political constituency they lobbied for the policies that have caused the problems we're experiencing and they're generally lobbying against the solutions.
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I think that if you're going to argue that supply and demand are not real for housing, you'd need to supply some good evidence of your own. There are a lot of ways to build more supply: https://www.sightline.org/2017/09/21/yes-you-can-build-your-... I find the 'Montreal' example the most compelling in that it's fairly "human scale", but tastes vary.
Rental housing has price floor that distorts the market. Once a property diverges from the requirements of housing subsidy programs, it usually gets abandoned. In most places new supply is high end and is making more housing available for people who don’t lack access.
Therefore, if you say it's bad to build new housing if it will end up being expensive, you're really saying there should be no new housing built during a housing shortage...
I find it's often better to think it terms of number of homes and housed people than in prices. If 100 new apartments are built, it's hard to say what will happen to prices exactly. But it's undeniable that there will be 100 more homes, and 200-300 more people can live indoors in that city, than without the project.