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Tax the Land

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Re: Tax the Land

#2
No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive.

This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them.

We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things worse for everyone.

Re: Tax the Land

#4

No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive. This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them. We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things wor…

Current immigration is a strong positive contributor to GDP growth. All things equal, it should allow for more construction and lower (real) housing prices under the right regulatory regime.

Re: Tax the Land

#5

No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive. This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them. We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things wor…

If your thesis is true then increases with immigration should be correlated with increases in housing prices, right? But this is not at all what is empirically verified.

It's not a supply-side problem (or not only or even majorly a supply-side problem). We can see this because the housing bubble is occurring in widely different places with widely different construction rules: both very restrictive and very lax. This is fundamentally a finance bubble.

Re: Tax the Land

#6

No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive. This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them. We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things wor…

Or maybe just like, build more houses

Re: Tax the Land

#7
There is something deeply wrong with the fact that you can buy-to-rent a property and immediately turn up a profit, essentially inserting yourself as a parasitic middleman in the process, providing no service, and extracting an economic rent.

Re: Tax the Land

#9
Not really stated in the article are three caveats:

1) Zoning laws have to change as well to actually allow development of the land being taxed toward more productive ends.

2) The land tax amount needs to be high enough that the pain of the tax effectively forces owners to improve what's on the land. A homeowner sitting on a million dollar piece of property in California taxed at ~1% is still unlikely to build an apartment complex if they like their single family home just fine and are making $200k+/year in income.

3) It could be personal bias, but a lot of LVT arguments seem to implicitly assume that more rental units is a good thing, which I don't really agree with. Personally, I'd rather see 2nd homes taxed into absolute oblivion, and I say that as someone who was a landlord for several years. Affordable housing to me means "affordable housing you can actually buy" as much as it means "affordable rent". The two do not go hand-in-hand if rental income is incentivized enough that people buy as many properties as they can get loans for (California today).

Re: Tax the Land

#10

No matter what we do on the supply side it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from people coming here. Unless we slow down immigration housing will always be too expensive. This only further hurts people living here by chasing them out of their homes and taking control of their communities away from them. We can't solve the problems of every country in the world by destroying our own. That only makes things wor…

You're half way there...

no matter what we do on the supply side, it will be eaten up by the unlimited demand from investors.

while housing outperforms other investments or until regulators curtail the activity, housing will remain expensive.

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