Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does, but commercial property tends to change ownership and undergo construction more often. Therefore property taxes on commercial property tends to be higher. As a result, cities have an incentive to build commercial property over residential homes. The result is that the people working in those offices are competing for limited residential space (leading to high prices) and often have to settle for long commute…
Prop. 13 means that a commercial renter can rent out the land to one tenant after another virtually forever without the taxes going up very much at all (way below inflation). At some point it gets to a point where it is never economically advantageous for either renter or landlord to ever have the landlord sell... the situation is only disadvantageous for the city/community (which is getting far less in taxes than ot…
High property taxes are good
431–440 of 620 posts
Re: High property taxes are good
#432Wouldn't you also consider anyone buying a "starter home" a speculator? Their goal is to continuously flip their house.
Re: High property taxes are good
#433I'm struggling to make sense of the cause and effect in the article: "The high cost of property taxes have long pushed away speculative investors as it has pushed the carrying cost beyond what is profitable to hold as a passive investment long-term." Alright, so now the speculative buyers are gone and we're dealing with ordinary home buyers that actually occupy their home. These genuine owners are paying high propert…
> And what on earth does Chicago have to do with San Francisco or New York? This was such a laughable comparison because BOTH of these cities have high property taxes compared with more affordable cities in other states.
As a result, my neighbor has a house with an effective tax rate of $3M).
Re: High property taxes are good
#434Land 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.
We pay high property taxes (which are split value taxes, by the way) relative to other rural areas in the region. That is, we are taxed for the virtue of owning relatively large plots of land (for our area) that come with the protections afforded by the zoning laws--even though our sparsely-developed properties and the characteristics thereof provide benefit to all in our area, including city dwellers (e.g. readily available and clean drinking water, maintaining a healthy ecosystem), for which a value could be assessed that would result in lowering our taxes.
That said, I purchased the property specifically for the Resource Conservation zoning protections, as did my neighbors--and we'd have the zoning laws set no other way regardless of the cost of doing so.
Trying to jam more people into the same finite amount of space is not a sustainable solution (here's looking at you, Bay Area). A byproduct of the recent pandemic was that a significant number of people beta tested relying on technology to get their job done independent of where they were physically located. I would argue it generally worked quite well (though not in all cases).
Though a more ambitious plan than merely increasing taxes and hoping that more housing is developed, why not incentivize people to move to less populated area with the intent of promoting a more-even distribution of population density over time; incentivize medium and large businesses to either permit remote work or establish and maintain local/regional offices if remote work is not conducive to their lines of business or their corporate culture; and fund timely development of new and improvement of existing infrastructure that would make previous two goals achievable?
Re: High property taxes are good
#435High 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."
Re: High property taxes are good
#436Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
It just doesn't matter. Land value taxes aren't going to happen. We need to make smarter decisions with the policy levers we actually have, and not pretend we'll have levers we don't.
Re: High property taxes are good
#437Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even if this is provable, why not have a progressive property tax rate? Owner occupied properties can be charged half the rate of rented properties. Rather than increase it for everyone and making it harder on the very people who are likely to sell it to a speculative investor.
Now you need to police whether people are living in specific houses. This is simple and much harder to get wrong.
Re: High property taxes are good
#438I'm struggling to make sense of the cause and effect in the article: "The high cost of property taxes have long pushed away speculative investors as it has pushed the carrying cost beyond what is profitable to hold as a passive investment long-term." Alright, so now the speculative buyers are gone and we're dealing with ordinary home buyers that actually occupy their home. These genuine owners are paying high propert…
What author is saying is that if a property has a high yearly ongoing costs, it becomes tougher to just hold onto it and not put it into the market i.e. this causes increase in supply. If I have a $10k/year expense on a property, I am forced to at least generate a yearly $10k+ from the property. This would keep the rentals and property prices in the area in check
Obama should have let the bankers twist in the wind when the citizenry was out for blood in 2008. They repaid him by channeling money to Republicans. Put them all in jail.
Re: High property taxes are good
#439That is because it is Chicago and not SF. Not because of taxes.
Re: High property taxes are good
#440I'm struggling to make sense of the cause and effect in the article: "The high cost of property taxes have long pushed away speculative investors as it has pushed the carrying cost beyond what is profitable to hold as a passive investment long-term." Alright, so now the speculative buyers are gone and we're dealing with ordinary home buyers that actually occupy their home. These genuine owners are paying high propert…
Even if this is provable, why not have a progressive property tax rate? Owner occupied properties can be charged half the rate of rented properties. Rather than increase it for everyone and making it harder on the very people who are likely to sell it to a speculative investor.