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High property taxes are good

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Re: High property taxes are good

#2
In my region of northern New Hampshire, there are a lot of retired folks with houses rising from $200k-ish values to closer to $500k-ish values in the last 5-10 years.

As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees.

In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home is so expensive that you can't afford the property tax, downgrade. Those of us who can't afford property will shed no tears.

Re: High property taxes are good

#5

High property taxes are good on non-owner occupied homes.

Also it should be used as tool to increase densification. Just increase if property is not sufficiently dense, maybe to some 20%. At that point people are free to choose either to allow redevelopment to happen or support local community.

Re: High property taxes are good

#6
Land value taxes are even better. Property taxes provide a disincentive to making the land more productive. A land value tax would incentivize residential landowners to build more units which provides more supply and would lower rents.

Re: High property taxes are good

#7

In my region of northern New Hampshire, there are a lot of retired folks with houses rising from $200k-ish values to closer to $500k-ish values in the last 5-10 years. As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees. In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home…

> Those of us who can't afford property will shed no tears.

You seem to believe the fallacy that not being able to afford a home is other homeowners fault, and not due to poor government planning (likely by the same politicians you willingly vote for.)

Re: High property taxes are good

#9

Land value taxes are even better. Property taxes provide a disincentive to making the land more productive. A land value tax would incentivize residential landowners to build more units which provides more supply and would lower rents.

Almost all property people buy and sell is productively used, and separating the value of land and improvements is practically impossible.

Edit: As a weird example, subtracting what it would cost to build my California house from its current market value gives a value for the lot far lower than the actual market price of an empty lot in this location. This isn't just due to the depreciation of the construction (2012) but to market inefficiencies. It's actually the norm in our town. Only developers with economies of scale can really afford to build here, modulo a few wealthy families who are building their dream home without concern for ROI.

Re: High property taxes are good

#10

In my region of northern New Hampshire, there are a lot of retired folks with houses rising from $200k-ish values to closer to $500k-ish values in the last 5-10 years. As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees. In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home…

But the absolute home value shouldn't affect property taxes. It should only be the relative home value. The county takes the entire budget, and divides it by the total of all the home values in the county to determine the basis for assessing taxes.

The problem comes when a given home goes up in value more then their neighbors, or when one neighborhood increases more than other ones.

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