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High property taxes are good

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Re: High property taxes are good

#231

Post by always2slow »

This article doesn't take into account the negative migration that's been happening from Cook county for the past two decades. Less demand means lower prices.

Also the claim that Chicago even has high property taxes for housing isn't really true. See here: https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/chicago-property... and here: https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/50-...

Currently trapped renting in a high property tax area because the monthly tax bill would be as high as the mortgage payment. This rent trap is starting to feel real permanent because any raise in the property tax just gets passed through to the renter when they raise the rent each year.

Re: High property taxes are good

#232

Post by nayuki »

> High property taxes are good

Not necessarily. I've learned that at least in Toronto, the property tax rate is derived from the budget instead of the other way around. Let this article explain: https://torontoist.com/2016/12/how-property-taxes-work-toron...

> With sales and income taxes (which can only be levied provincially and federally) governments establish a tax rate, and then see how much money that brings in.

> Each year municipalities decide how much money they need to bring in, and then set their property tax rates accordingly, to ensure they collect the requisite sum. They start from the total they need to raise, in other words, and work backwards to figure out what tax rate will yield that amount.

Because of this "backward" system of tax calculation, if every single building doubled in value, the tax rate will be halved, and the city will receive the exact same revenue.

So if you raise the property tax rate more than what it should "naturally" be, what will you do with the budget surplus? What will you spend it on?

Re: High property taxes are good

#233

Post by karaterobot »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #144
chadash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can always choose to live in a cheaper home. So your 90 year old grandpa has been living in a two bedroom apartment on the lower east side for 65 years. When he moved in at age 25, it was considered a crummy but affordable neighborhood, but now it's expensive and desirable. You want a 90 year old to have to move? I agree that maybe a 65 year old couple no longer needs to be in a 3,000 square foot home, but ther…

Why does grandpa get to live in a two bedroom apartment in the LES during retirement when so many other people can't afford it despite working for a living ? If he owns, you'd think that he could sell the two bedroom and downgrade to a one bedroom to keep the monthly cost down. Or even a studio. But at some point it's an incredibly desirable, expensive neighborhood and I'm not sure anyone deserves the privilege to li…

> other people can't afford it despite working for a living?

He bought the house by working for a living. The "fuck 'em, give me his house" argument isn't convincing me.

Re: High property taxes are good

#234

Post by binarymax »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #143
kristjansson wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, that's nearly another mortgage payment. Forever! For the privilege of living in Rochester, NY?

That's probably part of how they keep the kind of people they don't want living long term in Rochester out of Rochester.

Not sure what you mean by this. The city itself is quite diverse. Who are “they”?

Also this is all of NY, not just Rochester, that has rates such as these.

Re: High property taxes are good

#235

Post by SoftTalker »

rat87 wrote: post #197
landemva wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds absolutely terrible. I'm sorry. Hope your town gets it's shit fixed

Sounds quite nice to me. A good example of how private agreements such as easements can solve a lot of problems that people think require "government" solutions.

Re: High property taxes are good

#236

Post by kkfx »

I totally disagree because high property taxes means people would be pushed toward small and small, bad and worst houses. As a result instead of encouraging remote work and energy saving high taxes encourage crappy popular housing that waste much more energy AND can't be improved.

At maximum I agree about taxing homes depending on their energy consumption (all sources) to encourage modern house development. But definitively not high taxes on properties. I'm Italian and I've seen the effect of them destroying the market AND pushing people toward crappier and crappier homes. It's not just a personal idea.

Re: High property taxes are good

#237

Post by sinecure »

jrm4 wrote: post #205
sinecure wrote: post #195

There is so much incompetence and political game playing regarding property taxes. I work in commercial real estate development. We negotiated a TIF district in a small midwestern town to help redevelop their vacant mall. In theory, if we could redevelop the mall and fill it with new stores, the sales taxes and property taxes from this growth would greatly benefit the city over the long term and help finance this ris…

Sorry this was annoying and messy for you, but I look at many other countries and on balance this doesn't sound too bad, and certainly not "broken or incompetent" as if the US was on the verge of collapse because of things like this. If anything, this sounds like a system working, and you doing a bit of whining. Yeah, there's political game playing, that's called the price of localism and democracy.

A city breaking the law for decades by paying the school district illegally and no one doing anything about it out of fear of getting bad PR for their election campaign... or mishandling property assessments for 8 years are all pretty huge examples of incompetence and are not something I expect in a first world country.

It's the exact opposite of the system working. It's people being given power because of their party rather than their qualification and it indicates a greater sickness in politics in which we have become binary sports fans rooting for our team no matter the cost or quality of the candidate.

To be fair I have no clue how broken property taxes are in Europe or Japan or other first world places, but this ordeal was eye opening to me having grown up assuming our local governments were held to a higher standard.

Re: High property taxes are good

#238

Post by oasisbob »

SoftTalker wrote: post #193
jjoonathan wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> tax free if there are no government services provided on that land You're still giving the "it's property" framing waaay more credit than it's due. Remember, granting someone exclusivity to a contested resource means preventing other people who would like to use the resource from using the resource. It's entirely reasonable for those people, represented in aggregate by the government, to ask for compensation in ret…

Maybe we should be honest and say that you can't "own" land? Government always has eminent domain, and power of seizure for unpaid taxes. You are effectively renting the land from the government. Why not just call it that. Give people a 99 year lease instead of a mortgage and property tax. If you do nothing with the land, your lease can be terminated. If you improve the land (build a house on it), you can depreciate…

The complexities in land "ownership" are widely acknowledged and commonly taught:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundle_of_rights

Re: High property taxes are good

#239

Post by landryraccoon »

tptacek wrote: post #136
naasking wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does tax policy need to directly influence the mix of 1bdr and 3bdr apartments? Renters who need 3bdr apartments have enormous influence over the market already.

Can you say more about the influence of renters?

It seems to me to be the opposite. The mortgage interest tax deduction is a massive regressive government subsidy for homeowners, and penalizes younger people who rent or cannot afford to buy a home.

So I’m curious what suggests to you that renters have political power. To me it seems the opposite - tax policy massively prefers owners over renters.

Re: High property taxes are good

#240

Post by brockwhittaker »

always2slow wrote: post #231

This article doesn't take into account the negative migration that's been happening from Cook county for the past two decades. Less demand means lower prices. Also the claim that Chicago even has high property taxes for housing isn't really true. See here: https://www.rosenfeldinjurylawyers.com/news/chicago-property... and here: https://www.lincolninst.edu/sites/default/files/pubfiles/50-... Currently trapped renting…

They label property taxes as an absolute value paid, rather than as a percentage. Illinois per the Tax Foundation had the second highest rate*. In fact, it speaks to Illinois' and Chicago's affordability** that with such a high marginal rate, their property taxes as a dollar amount are on-par with many other states.

* https://taxfoundation.org/how-high-are-property-taxes-in-you... ** https://resources.oxfordeconomics.com/hubfs/Housing_affordab...

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