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Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

economist.com

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Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#61

Post by panglott »

Frozenlock wrote: post #44
j_baker wrote: post #33

> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvemen…

The harm for the owner in leaving the lot vacant for a decade is opportunity cost. If he is in a valuable spot , it would be advantageous to sell and just do something else with the money. Imagine high land taxes in the middle of the desert. Is it an incentive to build? Quite the contrary.

This is the point of land-value taxes rather than simple land taxes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

The site-value of unoccupied desert is pretty low, so the land-value taxes on it would be low, which gives incentive to build there rather than elsewhere. Whereas an empty lot on valuable real estate in the city would face not merely the opportunity cost but also a high land-value tax.

A lot of tax policy in John Locke and Henry George's day was about getting "unused" land into "productive" uses.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#62

Post by logfromblammo »

j_baker wrote: post #33

> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvemen…

I should point out that a tax to promote efficient use of land surface area should not include the value of improvements to the property.

Most municipalities in the US tax property based upon assessed market value, which discourages more efficient use of land. If you knock down your single-family house and erect a multistory condo, the value of the improvement will swamp the value of the land, and you will be punished with much higher property tax.

Georgists (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) explored the probable effects of land taxes extensively, though I don't agree with the premises of their reasoning.

For one, Henry George drew the supply curve for land as a vertical line, to reflect the idea that you can't make more land. But different areas of land have different suitability for any given purpose. It is true that you can't increase the surface area of the Earth, but you can still rank every hectare by how much effort it takes to reach it from the center of global trade. The economic projection of the world map is basically one huge ocean in the middle, a ring of port cities around it, roads and rivers spreading outward from there, and deserts and wilderness way out at the edges. Those peripheral lands are the ones that get used last, when land prices are highest, and that's why the supply curve for land is not vertical.

Besides that, it is difficult to separate the value of the land itself from the improvements on it, or even the improvements near it. Is it just for you to be taxed more when someone else builds a train station near your house? I think the way to levy a land tax that is least susceptible to abuse or political manipulation is to calculate it based purely upon surface area. A hectare in the furthest backwater of the jurisdiction is taxed at the same rate as one in the busiest urban center.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#63

Post by jes »

omegaworks wrote: post #53
jes wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't wish to be confrontational, but in my view, taking other people's property without their voluntary consent is wrong. As I understand the last paragraph of your comment, you wish to see the owner of the vacant lot forced into a situation where he had to act in some way other than how he currently chooses to act. In other words, you want to substitute your judgment for his, when it comes to the use of his prope…

>taking other people's property without their voluntary consent is wrong. Knock! knock! Oh Hi Mexico... Toc! Toc! Hola Ohlone Native Americans... Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The law is man-made.

I agree, the law is man-made. Seemingly, it is made by men and women who do not care much, if at all, about what is actually right or wrong, what is to the interest of the citizens and what is not.

What is actually right and wrong, in my view, is based on the nature and requirements of human life.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#64

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ctdonath wrote: post #36
happyscrappy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. Suburban has more emissions per person but the city has far more emissions per square foot, meaning air quality is far worse and consequent health problems.

Do any such studies address sequestration (or other suitable term) of emissions? I may produce more emissions, but I also maintain near an acre (and aspiring to much more) of CO2/etc-absorbing forest & other foliage. Not sure how it all actually balances out, but I never see reported studies addressing suburban/rural foliage conservation impact vs urban bulldozing & paving every square foot for miles.

If you have 1+ acres of forest on your property, you aren't living in the suburbs; that's exurban or rural.

If anything taking sequestration into account would make suburbs look worse. 100 acres of dense urban development plus 400 acres of untouched forest is going to sequester much more carbon than 500 acres of suburbs with a few trees sprinkled throughout, yet they would hold the same number of people.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#65

Post by dankohn1 »

_delirium wrote: post #48
dankohn1 wrote: post #41

I may live in the densest neighborhood of any HN participant: North Battery Park City [1] in Lower Manhattan. As an example, my son's 500 kid elementary school serves 9 buildings. And I'm here to tell you, the future feels great. Specifically, living vertically has all sorts of wonderful aspects in terms of community (the kids can trick-or-treat without leaving the building), access to resources (my kids can ride the…

What's odd is that Manhattan's population density has on a long timescale been declining rather than growing, despite quite a bit of construction. In the 1900 census the population was 1.85 million (density ~80,000/sq mi), and it reached its peak of 2.33 million (~100,000/sq mi) in the 1910 census. Since then it's on the way down, with some bumps here and there: 1.96 million (~85,000/sq mi) in 1950, and all the way d…

Here's a great illustration of the falling density in Manhattan from 1910 to today: http://www.vox.com/2014/9/23/6832975/manhattan-population-de...

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#66

Post by philwelch »

ctdonath wrote: post #36
happyscrappy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only that. Suburban has more emissions per person but the city has far more emissions per square foot, meaning air quality is far worse and consequent health problems.

Do any such studies address sequestration (or other suitable term) of emissions? I may produce more emissions, but I also maintain near an acre (and aspiring to much more) of CO2/etc-absorbing forest & other foliage. Not sure how it all actually balances out, but I never see reported studies addressing suburban/rural foliage conservation impact vs urban bulldozing & paving every square foot for miles.

If more people lived in cities, a lot of the rural/suburban land they live on would revert to wilderness, which would turn into CO2-absorbing forest and other foliage anyway. So it's disingenuous to try and claim credit for personally having title to any of it.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#67

Post by whybroke »

jes wrote: post #49
j_baker wrote: post #33

> Land taxes are efficient. They are difficult to dodge; you cannot stuff land into a bank-vault in Luxembourg. Whereas a high tax on property can discourage investment, a high tax on land creates an incentive to develop unused sites. Land-value taxes can also help cater for newcomers. New infrastructure raises the value of nearby land, automatically feeding through into revenues—which helps to pay for the improvemen…

I don't wish to be confrontational, but in my view, taking other people's property without their voluntary consent is wrong. As I understand the last paragraph of your comment, you wish to see the owner of the vacant lot forced into a situation where he had to act in some way other than how he currently chooses to act. In other words, you want to substitute your judgment for his, when it comes to the use of his prope…

Where did the land owner get the land? In a great many places (such as North America), it was stolen in the not so distance past and a great deal more rudely than taxation.

If that act is justified as taking under utilized resources then we are certainly justified in using the more mild pressure of taxation to fix an obviously broken system.

Maybe the best idea rather than the impossible task of finding the true owner to create policies that make the world a less effective place, we should tweak land ownership patterns in the interests of efficiency and maximization of net wealth or quality of life.

> In other words, you want to substitute your judgment for his, when it comes to the use of his property.

It is not unambiguously his property and when there is grotesque under or mis-utilization, yes another judgment is desperately needed such as taxing the owner to compensate for the loss the rest of us are carrying until that loss stops.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#68

Post by mikeyouse »

SilasX wrote: post #31
melling wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are forced to move to these areas because they want to have a bearable commute. Your solution is to jam everyone into a more confined area. Another solution is to make commuting from a "long distance" (e.g. 60-120 miles) more bearable. In NYC, for instance, subways could be built to NJ. Faster trains (low-speed maglevs) could be built like what's being done in China ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_S1,_BC…

The train part itself is 46 minutes if you take a bullet (red columns): http://www.caltrain.com/schedules/weekdaytimetable.html That would only be your full commute, though, if you were doing deep SoMa to downtown Mountain View.

The Caltrain electrification project will further speed this trip since electric trains can accelerate and decelerate more rapidly. The full San Jose to SoMa trip should be roughly 16 minutes quicker based on impact studies.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#69

Post by Jacqued »

krschultz wrote: post #54
graeme wrote: post #28

Something that annoys me about these articles is that they're basically saying "the world's densest cities should make themselves denser" Maybe we should just copy what those cities did. Imagine what america's GDP would be like if it had ten cities like the current NYC. I live in one of the densest neighborhoods in north America, the plateau in Montreal. It achieves this density with low rise buildings, and it's a ve…

I think if you expand a low-rise city you end up with Washington DC or LA, meaning debilitating traffic. The density is not high enough to support mass transit effectively, but it's too high for effective roads.

As I said in response to another comment, you actually can. Paris has a density of 50000/sqmi (to compare with Manhattan's 70000) without high rise buildings.

What you can't have though, is large avenues and parking lots everywhere. Every inch of space than can be build has to be built.

Re: Poor land use in the world’s greatest cities carries a huge cost

#70

Post by bradleyjg »

gdilla wrote: post #23
lisper wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can in Manhattan. The tallest residential structure in the U.S. is going up within a few blocks of Central Park. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/432_Park_Avenue

But it's already unaffordable for the average NYer before it's even ready. If wealthy foreigners can park their money in manhattan, they will, without living there. That doesn't help scarcity for actual residents.

I'd have no problem at all with those billionaire towers but for the nonsensical property tax breaks (421a, J51, etc). Throw in a small non-resident property tax differential and I become an enthusiastic booster.

If a bunch of billionaires want to pay property taxes while using barely any city services that sounds like a win to me. We can use that money to provide better services to the people that do live in the city year round.

In my observation the people who are most bitter about billionaires "buying up Manhattan" are the multimillionaires who want to be on the top of the heap.

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