211–220 of 620 posts
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Unimproved? Building a parking lot isn't cheap and it does make the land more useful.
> Building a parking lot isn't cheap It's cheaper than an actual building... > and it does make the land more useful. ...and less useful than one, too.
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.
> Land value taxes are even better. Property taxes provide a disincentive to making the land more productive. I could get on board with this if cost to build and demolish were considered. We have a lot of SFHs that don't make sense to turn into town homes yet because the value of the home on property + demolition costs + cost to build new townhomes on property is greater than what those townhomes could sell for. More…
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Outside of California "you paid $500k for your house, so we're gonna tax you on $500k" is not how property taxes work. The town/city/county typically does property assessments on regular basis (usually annually). These are based on doing comparisons with like houses in your neighborhood and are equal prone to "2 blocks over is way more desirable".
Difference without a meaningful distinction. Houses are bought on credit, that credit isn’t approved without an appraisal that supports the price being paid, and that appraisal is done using comps similar to a tax assessment.
High property taxes are clearly not intrinsically good; they're passed on to renters, and so they decrease affordability. Land value taxes sidestep this (increasing density decreases marginal tax burden on tenants), but they're not going to happen. You have to design policy for the world we actually have, not the one you'd prefer to live in. (Property taxes are a real problem where I live; we're an upper-middle-class…
LVTs are a panacea for the concerns paper wealthy. They fear taxes on stock trades, capital gains taxes, and other forms of paper wealth tax; a LVT lets them point at the homes of the masses and say "Look, there is an easy to track and tax asset class, sink your teeth into that and not my stock portfolio or trades."
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Wikipedia has some examples of places where it is used: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
I looked there and a bunch of the examples show places where it used to be used (which is probably a good indication of how hard it is in practice). The rest have very vague details and none of the examples there really go into any depth on the details of how they value land in practice. So I'm wondering if anyone knows which country has a good model to look further into.
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The way people in the US plan for old age and retirement, and the way they are treated by society, is terrible and property taxes are aspect of that. But the only way you should be able to own land tax free is if there are no government services provided on that land. No utilities, no public road, no emergency services, no municipal services. I don't know of anywhere in the US where that is an option. Unless you're s…
I live in a town like this. 'Roads' are actually reciprocal easements to allow all other land owners to pass. Each lot has water well and septic, though one group of houses has a large shared water system which pools the individual well permits. Electricity and gas and internet are private companies using an easement. Police and fire can easily be funded by sales tax, just like the public transit. Alternatively, land…
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This is local democracy in action. Vested landowners can put up barriers to entry to prop up their investments. They can also hand it down to their family, entrenching wealth for generations. Sucks to be an outsider.
"They can also hand it down to their family, entrenching wealth for generations." Not any more.
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There's a reasonable and holistic argument to be made for the generalized version of your position, but specifically wanting people to be removed from their homes by forces they can't control under the rationale, "fuck 'em", is counterproductive and - I don't think it's uncalled for to say - immoral. It's important to have a base level of humanity for people, regardless of what side of which broken social dynamic the…
The main problem is that in America, the tax structure is very much tilted in favor of home-owning at the expense of renters, that collectively, the homeowner class is receiving subsidies from the renter class (and the homeowner class already has greater net worth and everything else). There are multiple ways to reduce the impact of the problem. All of them would reduce property values and some might displace existin…
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.
I'm not clear on how land value taxes would incentivize the right kinds of units. For instance, would a land value tax incentivize the creation of tiny bachelor apartments, or larger apartments that families can use? We need incentives for both, and larger units are not very common these days.
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…
If there are cheaper homes for these privileged retirees to move into, why don't you buy those homes yourself?