341–350 of 615 posts
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…
The answer is private equity "roll-up" strategies of "boring businesses". You're going to see this accelerate in tons of other things that PE thinks can be easily consolidated, the gold rush has already started for dental practices, primary care providers, coin laundry, HVAC companies, landscaping, etc. American small businesses are disappearing because that's what consumers want (what they vote for with their dollar…
Veterinary care choices are simultaneously shrinking and skyrocketing in price.
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…
> Is there a clear way to guard this system from building higher and higher economic centers
On the social side: In the current system, poor people are forced to live in ghettos and spend 2 hours a day on a round-trip commute. It's too expensive to live near their work. If we had a land tax, the rich enclaves near the city are now financially incentivized to open up their public schools and areas to poor(er) people by building vertically. The current incentives point in the opposite direction.
On the environment side: We will have less sprawl, and by extension less environmental damage. It requires less concrete, less energy, less roads, less driving, less shops, less train lines, etc, to serve a dense area, on a per-capita basis. You are however correct that natural reserves are a public good, technically speaking, and an efficient land tax system will need to account for public goods in its implementation. This is an important implementation detail that I'd defer to economists.
> Related to that, what's the solution for infrastructure and resource requirements?
My car washing consists of occasional use of the gas station scrubber.
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…
Is there any evidence of this? Companies like Mister Carwash lease nearly all their properties and when they purchase plots seem to alway try to do a sale and lease. Their latest results claim they run 436 sites and lease 427:
https://ir.mistercarwash.com/news-events/press-releases/deta...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If the market were too small, the weakest would fail, right? Right? I find it interesting that we have sayings like this, and sayings like "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." > why should a politician need to step in to regulate, rather than letting the market decide? Because the market doesn't price in externalities. Sure the market will figure out which car washes live. But what abo…
It sounds like you are saying it would be better for those people to have never been employed (i.e. some of the carwashes never being built) than employed for a while and then losing their job if the carwash goes out of business.
According to several sources, car washes seem highly likely to damage the car, and are also usually unnecessary (the car works fine even if dirty, unless visibility is seriously impaired, and eventually it rains and the rain automatically washes the car if you park it outside). Probably a lot of people are conditioned that they need to have a clean car.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
> 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? That seems to be jumping to an extreme end, that someone owns an empty plot of land that has been cleared and destroyed to bare, dead dirt. My concern is that the same incentive pushing one to sell a pile of dirt would exist for someone owning an undeveloped, natural plot…
If anything it's not extreme enough. Consider how much area in city downtowns is given over to paved-over parking lots that are just left to sit there rent-keeping for years. That's worse than just dirt fields, because at least the dirt fields can support life!
> My concern is that the same incentive pushing one to sell a pile of dirt would exist for someone owning an undeveloped, natural plot of land.
...if the taxes are high enough to incentivize them to sell.
If you have an undeveloped plot of land in a city where land taxes are high, you should be incentivized to either sell that to someone who will make use of it, or donate it to the city to serve as a public park, rather than getting to have your own private green space somewhere that space is at a premium for everyone else.
In my city you're not allowed to wash your car in your driveway I guess it's too hard on the storm drains to have soap and dirt and stuff going down them Or maybe city council is just in some kind of racket with car wash owners or something But either way, that's why we have so many car washes here... And it sucks ass