Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 7:53 PM UTC

rufus_foreman wrote: post #31

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,…

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.

A variant on the concept is that taxes accrue whilst the present (residential) owner holds the property, but come due on sale or transfer, inclusive of inheritance.

Same would not hold for commercial or nonresidential property ownership. Presumably not by trust (e.g., shielded / non-person) ownership.

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

#132

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 8:00 PM UTC

robocat wrote: post #57

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.

> demolish all single family homes Ahhhh, brutalism . . . “The Soviets decided to pass: the plan was too extreme and destructive of existing institutions even for Stalin. Undeterred, Le Corbusier changed the word “Moscow” on the diagram to “Paris”, then presented it to the French government (who also passed). Some aspects of his design eventually ended up as Chandigarh, India.” https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/16/b…

Or Paris, or Madrid, or much of the rest of Europe in which 3--5 storey townhouses are common. These might be single- or multip-occupant dwellings (e.g., a single family or household on multiple floors). Typically zoning is denser, though structures might be either attached or detached.

In either case, the land-usage intensity rises by multiple factors.

The option is not between 1-story quarter-acre development and a forest of Burj Khalifas. There is in fact considerable intermediate ground.

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

#133

Post by boomboomsubban » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 8:08 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #125

boomboomsubban wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your issue is "what if someone owns huge chunks of land and doesn't try to make any money off it?" Then Hollywood gets built somewhere else where someone does want to make money. And eventually, those improvements may make the land the other person owns worth more money anyway and they'd be unable to pay the taxes.

This is why Georgism is just an urbanizer's ideal; a gentrification engine, if you will. It emphasizes putting things in the hands of someone that wants to do something with it rather than just maintaining ownership as an option until a voluntary sale is desirable for the occupant. Gee. I wonder who could ever be behind a push to make it easier for developers and real estate investment firms to utilize artificially c…

Right, Georgian is some fraud being pushed by the developers and real estate firms who currently have such little power to incentivise the direction of the ownership landscape. If a real estate magnate ever did something like become president surely they'd push Georgism through.

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

#134

Post by Aunche » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 9:32 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #123

Aunche wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The 'can't put old widows out of their homes' scenario is why California's Prop 13 came to be That's the Prop 13 lobbyist's excuse. In reality, these old widows are never at risk of being kicked out of their house at all. I'm sure plenty of investors would be willing to pay off the widow's taxes in exchange for ownership of the property after they pass.

Which guarantees the centralization of assets in the hands of a monied few. You might as well just write carpetbagger on your forehead. It's quite clear the outcome you're vested in. The entire concept of an estate existing to anyone but the already well-heeled would become even rarer than it is now. If you want to invest, go solve a problem that isn't creating a predatory pressure on the real estate market. Homes an…

What a ridiculous assertion. Either you're a carpetbagger yourself or you're simply completely ignorant to economics. We're talking about the most progressive form of taxation here that most affects the wealthy. Any revenue generated from land taxes is revenue that doesn't have to taxed from income or sales, so regular people would be able to accumulate a much larger estate to begin with.

>Not investment vehicles, or somewhere to hide cash from that nasty inflation.

Exactly, which is the point of disincentivizing people of treating it as an investment...

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

#135

Post by robocat » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 10:46 PM UTC

DubiousPusher wrote: post #111

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.

This is not the case where I live. Levy rates are set in statute.

Are rates proportional to house valuations used in “most places in the U.S”?

That is, are most rates not “mill rates” (where relative house values matter, not absolute values).

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

#136

Post by boomboomsubban » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 3:40 AM UTC

boomboomsubban wrote: post #133

salawat wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why Georgism is just an urbanizer's ideal; a gentrification engine, if you will. It emphasizes putting things in the hands of someone that wants to do something with it rather than just maintaining ownership as an option until a voluntary sale is desirable for the occupant. Gee. I wonder who could ever be behind a push to make it easier for developers and real estate investment firms to utilize artificially c…

Right, Georgian is some fraud being pushed by the developers and real estate firms who currently have such little power to incentivise the direction of the ownership landscape. If a real estate magnate ever did something like become president surely they'd push Georgism through.

Autocorrect changes "Georgism" to "Georgian." I caught it the second time but missed the first.

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

#137

Post by drekipus » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 7:25 AM UTC

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #110

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 pl…

Common good of their master race / chosen people. Sorry I thought that was implied.

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

#138

Post by ahtihn » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 11:10 AM UTC

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #129

ahtihn wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In developed countries, high density housing will either make the city unbearably expensive(NYC) I think you're reversing cause and effect.

Please give me an example? Or give me an example of an affordable city that is also high density in America. I haven’t seen it.

I don't have an example and I'm not saying there are affordable high density cities.

What I'm saying is that they aren't expensive because of the density. They are dense, because they are expensive, because they are very desirable places to live. You wouldn't densify an area where no one wants to live...

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

#139

Post by int_19h » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #121

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If their family lives nearby, they probably own homes and can all sell and move together, move in with each other, move to an area not far away that's substantially cheaper, use your huge winning to build an ADU in your dear family member's backyard and be even closer together, etc... You. Don't. Lose. By. Winning. $1M. You get options.

It's all relative. If everyone else moving in can spend a mill plus, you're priced out. If you and your neighbors happen to be the only ones improving things, and the mil plus group comes in and stagnates/displaces you through gentrificative forces, requiring you to to start from scratch elsewhere. Lets say you live long enough for the cycle to repeat multiple times. I assume proponents would say, "well, hooray, ever…

> all anyone ever wanted to do was live together and be left alone

It's a great ideal, but the problem is that land is a finite resource, so eventually you'll run out of space that is necessary for the next group of people who want to live together and be left alone to actually do so. At which point, you either have a stark divide between those who got in their claim and those who don't, or you come up with some redistributive system that gives newcomers a chance.

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

#140

Post by int_19h » Sun, Aug 21, 2022, 3:49 PM UTC

skybrian wrote: post #86

mjmahone17 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other thing people who own land can do: take out a mortgage to build more homes on their land, live in one and either sell the subdivided land/co-op/condo units or rent them to others. The only people who can be “driven out” are the renters, but if you let owners subdivide and build more, even they should be able to stay in the neighborhood indefinitely. It’s only once you break the chain by not building new home…

This is a scenario where there are no zoning rules preventing the denser housing from being built. It might be easier to fix zoning first? (Property that's zoned to allow more development is more valuable, but property owners are often against lifting zoning restrictions anyway.)

It's usually implied in most Georgist proposals.