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Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

loukidelis.com

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Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#101

Post by TimPC »

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

Improvements as defined in Georgism are the things you add to your own land that increase its value and don't include things added on other land. This is unfortunate when you take part in building community improvements but makes far more sense on average since the typical situation with most external improvements is that few people take part in them. I think in practice what happens is people end up balancing affordability and are strategic about the improvements they want made.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#102

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

sokoloff wrote: post #85
DubiousPusher wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not most places in the U.S. If your whole neighborhood's valuations go up you all get taxed more.

If your whole neighborhood goes up, but not the whole city/municipality, correct. If the entire tax base goes up (not just one neighborhood), you should expect the mill rate to fall.

Does it actually, though?

In practice - aren't tax rates changed based on politics?

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#103

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

notahacker wrote: post #96
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The inhabitants don't lose. Play your scenario out. A bunch of poor people buy 100 acres of land for $1, and they turn it into a paradise. It becomes cool, so rich hipsters wanna buy up chunks to Instagram it. The first person sells a patch of land he bought for $0.01 for $1M. Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year. These people have no jobs, so they can't afford $12,…

In reality, I think the scenario plays out a bit more like this: A bunch of poor people buy some cheap land with very low taxes because its a run down scruffy mess with no facilities. The land stays a run down scruffy mess with no facilities because the local property owners have strong financial incentives to keep it that way Incremental increases in the land value tax would make low income landowners hungry long be…

In reality, it works like Los Angeles and The Bay - and everyone who (owned) and gets priced out ends up with a massive windfall at some point.

How massive depends on how long they stay into the boom.

Again, no one ever loses (financially) from prices going up.

All you get are options (financially).

If your home is direly important to you, and being close to family is important, too - you still have options.

1) Sell and move in with family and use your gains to help offset their property tax

2) build an ADU in your backyard / convert your garage to an apartment - and use the rental income to pay your fair share of property tax - plus have the majority left over for spending

3) continuously cash-out refinance to pay your property tax + your previous cash-out

No owner loses (financially) from property prices exploding.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#104

Post by ClumsyPilot »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #79
derac wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do think they should get rid of prop 13, demolish all single family homes, and replace them with high-density buildings. What many people mean however, is that they want to continue to live there in the same single-family house forever. This is why prop 13 exists in the first place.

High density housing will not work in places with a high standard and quality of living. It will certainly erode individual rights, create environmental decline and infringe upon privacy. In developed countries, high density housing will either make the city unbearably expensive(NYC) or bring down quality of life.(SF) High density is a sign that resources are scarce but demand for them has increased. The sign of a we…

Westerners totally fail to appreciae,that once you replace all houses with, say, 6 story apartment of equivalent internal area, you gain so much space outdoors.

The single story suburbia looks claustraphobic - instead you have soace for parks, public squares, and services and facilities. There can be large distances between apartment blocks, and can be very green

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#105

Post by TimPC »

frankus wrote: post #5
cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

That's an interesting dilemma. I don't think Georgism fully solves the issue of returning community-created value to the community members who contributed to it. Of course the same is true under the current system for anyone who rents their residence. I think the ideal outcome would be to just build additional housing for the people who want to move there, i.e. split the tax per unit land across more units of housing…

If you switch to Georgism without fixing zoning it ends up worse not better. Zoning my land as suitable for a high-rise can destroy the entire value of my home because it becomes an unusable structure due to the higher rates of tax. At the same time zoning my land for high-rise causes the value to go up and that results in a massive tax increase that eliminates any price gain for my land. Since I so firmly don't want my land to be upzoned I become a NIMBY and compromise with my neighbors to also protect their land from upzoning. We all elect politicians that oppose all upzoning. Some Georgists argue that I'm supposed to want my neighbors upzoned because it raises my CD but they seem to have not done the math because if you're applying the CD over the entire US then upzoning a single neighbor raises my CD by fractions of a cent which I care so little about that it doesn't change the incentives for this political alliance.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#106

Post by TimPC »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #94
larsiusprime wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet real estate is still the world's biggest asset class, amounting to some 68% of all real assets worldwide: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal and the vast majority of that real estate's value is in land

> and the vast majority of that real estate's value is in land Is that true? Most of the value derives from the location - if you doubled the floor space over the land, the value of the land+improvements would double. The land isn't contributing value.

land value is mostly location value. Land value captures all improvements that aren't on the property itself.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#107

Post by TimPC »

moconnor wrote: post #84
owyn wrote: post #65

I have this half baked idea that taxation could be "inverted" in a way that would let people actually enjoy the game of taxation in a very capitalist way. Here's the scenario: Individuals shouldn't pay tax on regular income up to some limit, just pick $1M for now. Corporate tax could also be set at 95% (chosen only because of the beatles tax man song) above some limit, just pick $1B for now. Every individual, whether…

Transferable tax credits is the most interesting idea for a universal basic income implementation I’ve come across! It also has the benefit of appealing more to libertarian thinking (tax reduction and market-determined value!) than traditional UBI government handouts and by tying income to tax breaks looks less inflationary to critics.

The math on this idea is laughable though. Giving out $1 Million in tax credits per person in the US is $330 trillion dollars. Given that the US Federal Government only collects about $4 trillion in taxes and probably still wants to collect more than $0 then this scheme doesn't really work. Getting a $10,000 tax credit in exchange for nearly completely obliterating the federal budget just doesn't have the same oomph.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#108

Post by antman »

derac wrote: post #39
rufus_foreman wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value you put on living around your family and friends in this scenario is zero. That's not how normal people value those things.

People hate to hear this but noone has a right to live somewhere indefinitely. Logically, this doesn't even work. Lets say everyone in LA wants to live there with their children and their children's children and so on forever. Extrapolate this a few generations and eventually you will have a solid mass of humans 1000 ft tall. (This is a hyperbolic joke, you get the point)

   People hate to hear this but noone has a right to live somewhere indefinitely
I am sure you feel it made sense when you wrote it, or the example explained it in any way. I absolutely failed to understand the common knowledge aspect about people's limits to their ownership rights or even understand the sequence of events or mathematical explanation of the example.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#109

Post by TimPC »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #102
sokoloff wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your whole neighborhood goes up, but not the whole city/municipality, correct. If the entire tax base goes up (not just one neighborhood), you should expect the mill rate to fall.

Does it actually, though? In practice - aren't tax rates changed based on politics?

Tax rates are generally changed by an independent political process (the municipal budget) which often has the power to increase/decrease the mill rate based on how much money is needed/desired. This doesn't change the fact that the mill rate does generally fall by a lot when properties are reassessed in areas that have seen a large property price increase.

Re: Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land

#110

Post by ZeroGravitas »

drekipus wrote: post #14

This is an interesting post, But requires changes "to the system" that is a little too big for my small brain to think about. If I might diverge from a little as a thought I'm still figuring out: It ends on the thought of "for a common good" which makes me think of that utilitarian ideal, one that I don't think is going to be approached by democratic processes of popular vote and the like* So what then? if not "democ…

Your video pretty extensively documents that it wasn't for the "common good" or "us", the Nazis were explicit and he quotes them on it, as being keen to literally kill orphans, whores, the deaf and a whole list of other people with less "value". Not train them or teach them to provide more value, to kill them.

And even the ones they didn't kill, would get a reward only to the degree they contributed to the warlike plundering society they envisaged as their destiny (not one say voted on by the people themselves).

And this is the Germans they were talking about! The Slavs that they allowed to live would be literal slaves for the production of food to export to the Germans (the one's they hadn't killed).

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