11–20 of 613 posts
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.
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 apa…
It’s one of the reasons banks and companies aren’t in the single family rental business.
The main thing that covers for it is property appreciation - the rent is used to just offset carrying costs while you wait for the property to go up in value.
Of course it will distort choices and leave some people worse off. If the author can't see that, then they have a serious bias problem. The whole point of the land value tax is to tax land to encourage higher density and higher cost use. This is especially damaging to people who hold land that is developed around. If I have .75 acres with a single family home and 30 years later the area around me is developed, them I will be financially forced off of my land because I could theoretically put an apartment building on it. We already see standard property tax forcing the elderly out of their homes in many areas.
Please, show me how an appropriately set income tax disincentivizes work. I'm guessing they can't and are equally uneducated on that subject. Income tax would only provide a disincentive to work if the alternative (assistance programs) is more attractive. Which doesn't seem to be the case. The people at that lowest level of income aren't paying (or gets refunded) income tax. Most of the tax at that level on income is for programs like social security and Medicare.
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.
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…
Housing is entirely local. The US has plenty of cheap land to build housing. People choose to live where the jobs are or where QOL is high. High prices reflect that. And that's good - it's a signal we should be building housing and opening new businesses elsewhere.
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…
[1] https://eyeonhousing.org/2021/03/immigrants-in-construction-...
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.
I think the answer is that much of the landlord’s initial profit is more or less income from working a job (buying, insuring, readying, showing, screening, fixing, collecting, etc) as evidenced by the share that a property management company takes if you don’t want to do all that work. That share is often enough to push a small positive cashflow into a moderately negative cash flow, meaning it’s the job aspect not the passive ownership aspect that’s profitable initially.
I laugh everytime someone calls being a landlord “passive income”. I’m not one because I saw the aggravation and effort my parents went through with a series of crappy tenants.
No one calls the pizza shop owner a “parasitic middleman between inexpensive ingredients and $15 cheese pizzas”. Because they can see that it’s work; they imagine being a landlord isn’t.
then there is area wise "property tax" which is an annual tax paid to local municipalities, small but it adds up.
when you are building a house, you pay "GST" or indirect tax on all consumables, wood, steel, cement, sand, bricks, glass, appliances, tiling, roofing, electricals, every darn thing and you cannot "claim" this tax as input so the government gets this.
what more do you want them to impose?
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…
Tokyo has a huge demand in accommodation and guess what, they keep building a lot of apartment buildings and it works.
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.