Live data from Hacker News

High property taxes are good

brooock.com

431–440 of 620 posts

Re: High property taxes are good

#431
post #107

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…

You should never sell land because ground rent doesn't disappear, land is a monopoly.

Re: High property taxes are good

#433
post #384

I'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.

San Francisco (all of CA) has very low property taxes compared to non-CA cities. Because of Prop 13, property taxes are limited to 1% of the purchase price of the home (appraised values can change a max of 2%/yr).

As a result, my neighbor has a house with an effective tax rate of $3M).

Re: High property taxes are good

#434

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.

Not in all cases. I live in a Resource Conservation area where no lot less than 10 acres in size can be subdivided per zoning laws. The zoning is set as it is to preserve watersheds, wildlife, etc. There are limits (by ratio to land area) that dictate structure density, amount of impervious substrate that can exist within the perimeter of my property, etc. Just because I own over 10 acres doesn't mean I can sell my property to a developer so that they can build four high rise apartment buildings and turn a rural area into a burgeoning metropolitan hub (while destroying a large swath of forest in the process).

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

#435

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."

A lot of companies like McDonalds are just real estate companies in disguise, an LVT would wipe out the stock market.

Re: High property taxes are good

#436

Earlier 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.

You can't make smarter decisions downstream, you can only distribute the burden of the monopoly away from your interest group.

Re: High property taxes are good

#437

Earlier 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.

I understand it's going to hard but not impossible. Assessors can work together at the state level and identify owners with multiple properties and send them the extra tax bill or a way to dispute it. They have enough information about what we own and where we live.

Re: High property taxes are good

#438
post #384

I'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

The elephant in the room is the amount of housing supply being held by banks and private equity in an effort to shore up housing prices. They can afford high property taxes. Your elderly parents might not be able to.

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

#439
> This has led to is a glut of high quality housing at very low prices. The amount of money one needs to save up for a downpayment in Chicago on a 2BR in the city center is 5x lower than in San Francisco or New York.

That is because it is Chicago and not SF. Not because of taxes.

Re: High property taxes are good

#440
post #384

I'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.

Landlords will just pass the extra tax to tenets. And mostly low income tenets will bear the cost as they are least likely to have enough money for down payment.
Post reply on HN