541–550 of 910 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Suburbs also bring in outside resources. The difference is that distributing those resources and collecting waste within the city is less costly than distributing resources and collecting waste within the suburb.
Suburbs may very well be the worst of both worlds, being more spread out but still not spread out enough to be fairly self sufficient.
Perhaps someone who has thought about this more can explain how a 'land value tax' differs from existing property tax regimes that explicitly examine the value of improvements and the value of land... This Detroit case is interesting because there are different rates of taxation on the land, but the difference in rate could also be obtained by increasing the land component of a parcel's value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the same tax should be on vacant rental properties. If you're still sitting on a rental property after 6 months to a year, you're charging too much for it since its apparently above market rate. At the very least you shouldn't be able to claim write off the loss on your taxes past a certain period. Maybe depreciation is another thing that should be fixed.
Pretty sure you can't write off missing rent as a business loss. Depreciation definitely needs to be fixed. You shouldn't be able to claim 3% of a structures value as business loss every year, without some sort of evidence that you will actually tear down the structure in 33 years. And perhaps after it has been counted as depreciated once, future owners shouldn't be allowed to deduct the depreciation either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Detroit has blight. LVT addresses property speculators that buy land to sit on it for 10 years and do nothing with it. With LVT they have to either pay up, develop it, or sell it. All options good for the city.
This argument has often confused me when so many people are concerned with global warming. Why should a city incentive land owners to develop and commoditize their land? If we want to reduce human impacts on the planet, why not incentive the opposite and incentive leaving the land natural? Land value taxes prioritize GDP and profit above all else. Isn't that how we got into this mess in the first place?
If you replaced property taxes with land value taxes and held revenue equal:
For rural areas, not much would change. Land is cheap and taxes would remain low.
For suburban areas, there would be a moderate shift in tax burden. People with homes on large plots of land would pay more; people with homes on smaller plots of land would pay less.
For urban areas, the changes would be drastic. Because land is limited in urban cores and appreciates in value every year, there's an absurd amount of speculation. An LVT would discourage this by making it costly to hold onto undeveloped or underdeveloped land just for future price gains. As a result, we could expect a surge in the development of vacant or underutilized plots, leading to a potential increase in housing availability and a decrease in rental prices. This would both alleviate housing shortages and reduce the speculative bubbles that can distort urban real estate markets.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agreed - the many counties in the US already have a portion of the property tax bill coming from a land value tax/Georgianism. California property tax bills have two components [1][2]: - structure/improvement assessed value - land value assessed value The land value component is re-accessed frequently and changes based on comparables (presumably but its mostly black box). The question is to what degree/portion of Geo…
You're forgetting the critical 3rd component of California property tax bills: Prop 13.
If you stay put and don't move, your property taxes won't go up much. So you can vote for all the govt spending you want: don't move and you won't have to pay for it.
I'm not saying people are "getting away with" low taxes. I'm saying that people are "getting away with" high spending.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Detroit has blight. LVT addresses property speculators that buy land to sit on it for 10 years and do nothing with it. With LVT they have to either pay up, develop it, or sell it. All options good for the city.
> LVT addresses property speculators that buy land to sit on it for 10 years and do nothing with it. Didn’t Detroit raze the lots in the first place, since they considered an empty lot to be better than one with a decaying house? I really doubt many of these lots will ever actually be developed to any reasonable extent, since they aren’t exactly in nice areas. And likewise I bet there won’t be many people dying to bu…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think tax law fears complexity. You make a table and there is an entry for "parcel of land with grass taller than 6 inches and containing one or more 1980s automobile with 3 or more tires" right alongside "parking lot" or "hospital".
I don't think tax law fears complexity Of course it does. Complexity in the tax law is regressive. It lets wealthier people and businesses take advantage of more deductions and writeoffs to lower their tax burden, due to the ability to hire accountants full time to work on it. Simple taxes that are difficult to avoid (such as LVT) are best if you want a progressive tax regime. One of the best features of LVT is that…
This looks more like a way to destroy society than prudent tax policy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Historically, whoever controls the land also tends to control political power. But also, assessment is a really tricky proposition.
> But also, assessment is a really tricky proposition. If anything it seems like it would be much easier than the current property tax assessment scheme.
Explain how it can be easier?
If valuation is based on sale price of the property or nearby comparable properties, those are objective numbers. A sale actually happened, at that price. So it was worth that much to someone. No room for argument.
A LVT gives power to the government to unilaterally declare that in some alternate universe, your plot of land might be worth a lot more, so they'll just go right ahead and tax you on that speculative amount in the absence of any evidence.
That sounds very open to abuse.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the same tax should be on vacant rental properties. If you're still sitting on a rental property after 6 months to a year, you're charging too much for it since its apparently above market rate. At the very least you shouldn't be able to claim write off the loss on your taxes past a certain period. Maybe depreciation is another thing that should be fixed.
Im curious why depreciation has tax implications, what was the intention
Depreciation reflects that the asset's value is used up over time by allowing the owner to deduct part of its value each period to reflect the reduction in asset value in their financial statements.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the carry cost is too high, who would buy the land? The thing missing from the above scenarios is: Owner can't afford the tax, can't find renters, can't find a buyer, so just walks away. This is why so many properties are vacant now. The owners just walked away.
Imagine a scenario where land purchase prices hover very close to $0. This is the end result of an effective LVT. It means that you only pay for the structures, or the cost to remove a blighted structure, etc. It makes real estate more liquid, and allows more people to try their hand at development without having a massive land bank worth millions of dollars. It decentralizes these decisions and lets more local playe…