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Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

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Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#291

Post by HideousKojima »

pkulak wrote: post #188
logifail wrote: post #89

> There are four full-service car washes in town, with a fifth on the way; three are bunched up on a mile-and-a-half stretch of Route 14. Social media complaints about car wash overkill spurred town leaders to take action. Four (or even five) doesn't sound that much? What's the actual problem here? How is a local politican supposed to determine what is the correct density of any particular type of service within her…

> why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? If we taxed land, then sure, we'd get efficient use of land. But we (mostly) don't, so here we are, surrounded by car washes and parking lots.

>But we (mostly) don't

Just because we don't have Georgism doesn't mean we don't already tax land a ton. Annual property tax revenue for the entire US is ~$600 billion. By comparison, federal income tax revenue is about $2.6 trillion annually.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#292

Post by 55555 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #181

I really hate sounding like a broken record but this is just another instance of how low property taxes and the absence of land value taxes massively benefits low-value businesses. The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan. TBH I think real estate used to have high information asymmetry between local residents and large investors; low property…

can you please elaborate on this? i don’t understand exactly. “The real business of car washes is real estate, it's profitable enough to get 3-4x leverage with a low interest loan”

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#293

Post by _heimdall »

etothepii wrote: post #285
_heimdall wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting. So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would stil…

The key point is that the value of the land is almost exclusively a function of other people's work.

Is that always the case? Sure land value is impacted by what else is around, but is that the nearly exclusive valuing factor everywhere?

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#294

Post by rootusrootus »

makeitshine wrote: post #235
rootusrootus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty normal for people to want to take good care of things they’ve spent hard earned money on. Is driving a filthy car some kind of weird flex?

He's saying it rains and the car gets clean. I only needed to rinse my car off once a year, max, and did that with a garden hose. It was fine otherwise. Car washes are a waste.

I live in the PNW where it rains pretty steadily most of the year and my car gets absolutely gross if I don't wash it once every couple months. Not dusty, I mean filthy dirty. Rain does not make the car clean, quite the opposite. All that water on the road getting kicked up brings muck with it.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#295

Post by Turing_Machine »

This kind of thing has been around for a long time.

The classic method was to build a trailer park or a drive-in theater. You could keep steady cash coming in until you were ready to build something more substantial, then simply evict the trailer owners (space rent was typically month-to-month) or tear down the movie screen and grade the parking lot flat, in both cases with very little demo cost.

Trailer parks and drive-in theaters were both way bigger than car washes. These guys are pikers.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#296

Post by rootusrootus »

sapling-ginger wrote: post #243
rootusrootus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty normal for people to want to take good care of things they’ve spent hard earned money on. Is driving a filthy car some kind of weird flex?

A dusty car body is no more "filthy" than the soles of your shoes. Do you wash your shoe soles?

It doesn't get merely dusty unless you live somewhere very dry. I live in the PNW and it rains a good portion of the year. The car gets absolutely filthy during the rainy season.

If my shoes were that dirty, then heck yeah I would clean them. What a mess, it's easy to get your clothes dirty when the outside of your car is filthy. My kid's white dobok is especially sensitive to dirt on the car.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#297

Post by kodt »

WWLink wrote: post #271
gunapologist99 wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I take pride in the fact I haven't been to a car wash in probably 3 years and have likely gone myself less than 10 times total. You don't come off here as well as you think you do.

I don't get it? When I wash my cars I like to go all out and clay them and wax them. And then the next morning there's a nice layer of dust. And the morning after that the morning dew has cemented that dust on. Even a 3 year old car that has been washed twice a week at an automatic wash is going to look a lot worse than a 5 year old car that occasionally gets a good hand wash. The constantly auto washed car is going…

Garage

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#298

Post by rootusrootus »

chaorace wrote: post #267
rootusrootus wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s pretty normal for people to want to take good care of things they’ve spent hard earned money on. Is driving a filthy car some kind of weird flex?

If torn jeans can be a fashion statement, then so too can an unwashed car. Let them have this, why don't you?

I'm perfectly happy to let them have this, I was just curious why someone would deliberately neglect basic maintenance. It's kinda foreign to me, and frankly I'm towards the lazy end of the motivation scale.

Fashion statement is actually a pretty good explanation, thank you.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#299

Post by mjmahone17 »

_heimdall wrote: post #250
mdasen wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Land value taxes aren't about destroying natural land to extract value. The point of taxing the value of the land in urban areas is that a lot of the time places essentially squat on land that could be better used. A car wash building will have a low assessed value for its improvements compared to a biotech building. For example, in my city we have a carwash with its improvements valued at $400,000 and a biotech buil…

Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting. So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would stil…

On the parks/“natural land”: would you rather land exist as an empty razed dirt field for speculators to wait to sell, or given back to the city?

Taxing the land value means there’s no incentive to own land that won’t be productive. The city or municipality can guarantee land it owns can have natural growth on it, whereas when private individuals own it the state can’t really stop the land from transforming into a parking lot.

As to how to value the land: the market decides. What is the price for the land, if you took away all existing improvements on the land itself? There is usually enough vacant similar land around where this is pretty easy to figure out.

The government can charge for services like upgraded electricity and keep the land value low, or they can bring the electricity to the land and count “lots of electricity available” as part of the value of the unimproved land.

Re: Why are there suddenly so many car washes?

#300

Post by xeromal »

Retric wrote: post #277
_heimdall wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for all the details! Limiting a land value tax to densely populated areas is a great detail here. Sorry if I end up with a long list of follow-up questions here, this is really interesting. So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. In dense areas that wouldn't be nearly as much of an issue, but it would stil…

> So my main concern related to destruction of natural land is that there is a disincentive to keep land natural if you have to pay the tax anyway. There’s no need to limit land value taxes based on density as that’s what’s giving land its value. With the property if the tax is say 0.2%. An acre of farmland worth in rural Idaho worth 20k would be assessed as being worth 20k in a land value tax and an acre of swamp mi…

I just worry if there are valuable trees on a piece of land. It would be unfortunate for someone to own, say, 10 acres of land with redwoods on them. If the wood is valued at a ton of money, that would encourage them to chop it down.
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