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Tax the Land

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Re: Tax the Land

#201

Post by tmnvix »

dismalpedigree wrote: post #150
uoaei wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

You are honestly arguing that the concept of private property is a mistake? Serious question. How do you envision things working when everything is communal? What motivates productivity and overcomes the tragedy of the commons?

Think about LVT as the occupier paying the community for the right to exclude them from a common resource. The price of that exclusion is set by the community. The occupier gets most of the benefits of private property rights without actually having private property.

This concept can be extended to all natural resources (and in some cases already is to some extent). The radio spectrum, mineral resources, etc.

I find this to be an attractive concept because I am philosophically opposed to the current situation where a new life is born into a world where all resources are already 'claimed'. That new life has just as much right to the world's resources as any other that already exists. This doesn't mean that someone can't make use of more resources than anybody else. They just have to do it in a justifiable way.

Re: Tax the Land

#202

Post by joshjob42 »

carom wrote: post #155
larsiusprime wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like a testable hypothesis, let's look at the evidence: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-t... The best empirical evidence available shows pretty strong signs that land value taxes are not passed on to tenants

>Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out. That's rich. As someone who is a landlord, I'm already charging what two owners ago was charging when they died and the city won't let raise…

LVT isn't a market distortion. Private landowners getting rich by not doing anything is a market distortion. If you buy a building (say that isn't rent controlled) and over 10 years the market rate for rents in the area doubles, you didn't make that happen basically at all but get to reap the rewards. That doesn't make any sense -- the community should get that money as the community created it!

On the other hand if you renovate a building and now can charge twice as much for rent, that hardly effects the land value at all -- it's one building in the area, it won't have a huge effect generally on the land value of adjacent buildings. So you'd get to reap the rewards of your work -- you improved the property and now get to make money from that improvement. LVT explicitly does not tax improvements, only the site-value of the land.

I'm certainly for eliminating rent control and massively liberalizing land use (you may still need very broad classes of zoning, ala Japan with 12 total zones all of which allow mixed use and multi-family dwellings and non of which except industrial zones restricts the minimum size/use in an area, but my preference would be to just have a separation between industrial and non-industrial use cases). That would help a lot! But it doesn't address the fact that when for instance Los Angeles installed the Expo Line for ~$3.5B the people who owned apartments nearby suddenly got a massive 20+% boost in the rent they could charge, a total value of which would have been large enough to pay for the line's construction & operation!

The value of that public investment ought to have come back to the city to be spent on yet more improvements, not pocketed by private property owners who happened to buy a building nearby a decade or more earlier.

Re: Tax the Land

#203

Post by giantg2 »

uoaei wrote: post #125
giantg2 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"(which would be realized in actual moneys upon sale of their property), and hence, should be taxed more." If it were taxed only when realized, that would make sense. "It's the poor use of land right now that I believe is the main driver of poor affordability of housing." It's the preference of a large number of people to live in a small area. You could fix this by capping the number of jobs so that increases in popu…

Your solutions seem hacky and off-the-cuff, when we could solve the problem by addressing it directly: if a large number of people want to live in a small area, make that area support a large number of people! High-density housing with walkable neighborhoods, and excluding cars from walkable spaces, makes all of the typical pains of city-dweller life melt away.

Aside from a small group, the people that want to live there don't want that though. There's a preference for SFH and larger footage. It's generally easier to control commercial activity than personal activity/choice.

I see the real problem as too many people wanting to live in one spot. To me, my solution is addressing the root problem.

Re: Tax the Land

#204

Post by causality0 »

Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners.

I'm not fully clear on this statement. Is it putting forth that local governments shouldn't be controlled by the people who are local, or is it saying that homeowners hold more power than renters? If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as everybody else. If they don't care enough to vote that's their problem.

Homeowners, like everybody else, vote in their own best interest. If you want higher-density housing figure out a way that it makes a place better for its inhabitants, not worse. Personally I've never lived in a city that got better as it got bigger and I vote accordingly.

Re: Tax the Land

#206

Post by joshjob42 »

atlgator wrote: post #176

Isn’t that what property taxes are at the local level?

The major, important difference is that LVT only taxes the site-value of a property, not the value of the buildings etc on it. More or less you'd be charged property taxes as if your lot was a blank empty lot. So for instance if you buy some land and redevelop it into an apartment building or a stadium etc your LVT would hardly change (it might a bit because your building might increase the value of properties nearby, but that's generally a pretty weak effect so it would have a small impact on your taxes). On the other hand, say that over the course of a decade your area gets gentrified, lots of new businesses open up, a new metro line gets put in and the area is booming, while you didn't do anything at all to your property but it's now worth 2-3x as much as you bought it for, well your tax bill will go up a lot (technically speaking, the LVT would go up to such a point that your property should be only worth about as much, accounting for inflation, as it was when you bought the property, since your building isn't worth any more innately).

Re: Tax the Land

#207

Post by orthecreedence »

eric4smith wrote: post #163

Vox needs a spanking. (As always). Just imagine. I have some land. Lots of people would love to buy it it for different things. But for now, I just want to hang onto it until I'm ready to use it. And my house is sitting right next to it. Yeah, nimby blah, blah blah. But it's my house and my backyard and my land so... I have to be forced to sell it? Brah. Just another socialist redistribution scheme.

> Just another socialist redistribution scheme.

Yeah, praised by socialists like Milton Friedman.

Granted I think LVT is kind of dumb too (saying this as a communist, fyi). I think the incentives it sets up are interesting and could make sense in a lot of cases in a market system, however short of a country run by an oligarchy of economists, it seems to me nobody would willingly turn over their property so such a system. Also, I can't help but think about how value assessment would actually work...seems it would be an easily corruptable process.

Re: Tax the Land

#208

Post by CryptoPunk »

causality0 wrote: post #204

Local governments, which have been granted near unchecked authority by state governments, are entirely captured by homeowners. I'm not fully clear on this statement. Is it putting forth that local governments shouldn't be controlled by the people who are local, or is it saying that homeowners hold more power than renters? If the former, that's just silly. If the latter, renters get the same one vote per person as eve…

In Tokyo, zoning is controlled by the national government.

Re: Tax the Land

#209

Post by tmnvix »

eric4smith wrote: post #163

Vox needs a spanking. (As always). Just imagine. I have some land. Lots of people would love to buy it it for different things. But for now, I just want to hang onto it until I'm ready to use it. And my house is sitting right next to it. Yeah, nimby blah, blah blah. But it's my house and my backyard and my land so... I have to be forced to sell it? Brah. Just another socialist redistribution scheme.

If you made that land I would agree with you, but you didn't so I can't.

Imagine if somebody purchased half of the existing radio spectrum and then decided to just leave it unused for decades. We wouldn't allow it. Perhaps if they compensated society by paying a tax for the exclusive use (or non-use) of it then we could justify it.

Re: Tax the Land

#210

Post by orthecreedence »

silicon2401 wrote: post #47
andrepd wrote: post #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.

> providing no service Being a landlord does provide a service, the service of managing the land and property. I don't want to buy a house right now because I'm not ready yet, so I _want_ landlords to provide properties so that I can have a home without having to go through the process of buying one just to sell it a year or so later.

> the service of managing the land and property

That's being a property manager, not a landlord. Landlords provide no services. One can be a landlord AND a property manager, but the role of landlord is distinguished simply by owning something that others want.

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