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

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

#51

Post by mjmahone17 » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:29 AM UTC

lazide wrote: post #8

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

By 'lose the land', really they'd be forced to sell or go bankrupt/accrue tax debt. Which is pretty terrible if the folks are little old ladies settling down to avoid the cruel harsh world, and now need to find somewhere else to live when they are least capable of doing so (being on a fixed income and all). The 'can't put old widows out of their homes' scenario is why California's Prop 13 came to be, btw. Even withou…

Unless the laws are bad, if property taxes are going up to the point you can’t afford them, why wouldn’t you rent out enough of your high value property to pay them, and live in the rest? That might mean building an ADU or a multi-family unit where you live in one of them, but I don’t see why “people will need to move when their homes rise in price” is a legitimate argument. Unless the laws prevent you from both living on and also making money from owning the same land.

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

#52

Post by hibikir » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:35 AM UTC

kodah wrote: post #7

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

I've always called this "state-to-state" income inequality, because it used to be that people from relatively wealthy states would "retire" (probably not actually retire) in lower income states because they can purchase a home with less friction. Nowadays, the income inequality gap has grown drastically in each state, so I think this problem just falls under that umbrella. A good source: https://www.cbpp.org/blog/a-s…

The problem with this is that states are very poor boundaries for almost any economic and demographic indicator: A US state is a mostly arbitrary collection of rural, urban and suburban people, which happened to be put together a few hundred years ago, and which have relatively few economic ties with people from different groups. A big difference among states is just how much of each group we get, plus a small multiplier between big, successful metro areas, and those that are not. How different is it to live in northern Illinois, vs south east Wisconsin? It's still really the Chicago metro area, and the state is mostly irrelevant. The same on both sides of the Kansas City metro.

When you are measuring income inequality within states, all you are seeing is that the largest metro areas are in almost all cases getting richer, while rural areas poorer. It's not a matter of rich states and poor states at all. For almost anything that matters, those state lines are just confounding your statistics.

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

#53

Post by derac » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:41 AM UTC

mjmahone17 wrote: post #48

derac wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People hate to hear this but noone has a right to live somewhere indefinitely. Logically, this doesn't even work. Lets say everyone in LA wants to live there with their children and their children's children and so on forever. Extrapolate this a few generations and eventually you will have a solid mass of humans 1000 ft tall. (This is a hyperbolic joke, you get the point)

Yeah I don’t see what’s wrong with your (in my mind) utopic vision. Everyone who wants to live in a mass of humanity 1000 ft tall should be able to afford to live in that mass, and we should be researching ways to make it more and more affordable. The only way it doesn’t work is if the community makes it impossible for more new people to get in, or if there isn’t enough economic opportunity to support all the people…

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.

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

#54

Post by jlhawn » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:44 AM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

> As a result, other people want to move in

> Their own charity and neighborliness spelled their doom

is allowing more homes not possible? If not, then where’s that “neighborliness” now?

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

#55

Post by Schroedingersat » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:54 AM UTC

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

In concept the answer is simple (although avoiding loopholes is difficult).

If it's your only residence then you get to cap the tax on one unit of housing worth of land at max(x% of income, y% of net wealth excluding that particular unit of land).

In your scenario the poor locals must subdivide and sell or commercialise some of their land, but get to continue benefiting from the commons they have built even if they have 0 income and survive purely off of that commons.

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

#56

Post by robocat » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 3:54 AM UTC

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #26

cousin_it wrote: post #3

I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…

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,…

> Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year

In New Zealand, property taxes are relative: the tax you pay depends on how much your property price rises relative to everybody else’s property prices. The local government has a fixed budget, which is apportioned between all the properties proportional to property values.

Example: a city has a budget of $1000. The city has two houses, one worth $100k and another worth $900k. The property taxes are $100 and $900 (ignoring fixed charges). If the houses double in value to $200k and $1800k, the property taxes are still $100 and $900.

It is important to keep this in mind when arguing about property price increases, because price increases don’t always matter.

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

#57

Post by robocat » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:01 AM UTC

derac wrote: post #53

mjmahone17 wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I don’t see what’s wrong with your (in my mind) utopic vision. Everyone who wants to live in a mass of humanity 1000 ft tall should be able to afford to live in that mass, and we should be researching ways to make it more and more affordable. The only way it doesn’t work is if the community makes it impossible for more new people to get in, or if there isn’t enough economic opportunity to support all the people…

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/book-review-seeing-lik...

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

#58

Post by nine_k » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:08 AM UTC

motohagiography wrote: post #20

swatcoder wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don't invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don't invest in them at all because they want to get out. Gentrification isn’t an art project. It’s people with more wealth or income-opportunity coming in and buying up cheap stuff at the prices they can afford. That a…

This criticism of gentrification ignores the sellers who are glad to take the money for what they invested, and the reason the industry moved to that area in the first place was to get access to the people who were there. The landowners are the community, provided that they are present and managing their investment. This is a fundamental cognitive divide as well, as the positions aren't reconcilable because it's a ch…

> The landowners are the community

In cities with multi-tenant buildings it's typically not so. Renters are the community, or a large part thereof.

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

#59

Post by Schroedingersat » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:09 AM UTC

anamax wrote: post #22

Oh goody. Another group with an equation that they confuse with a complete picture of reality. (When you point out that reality comes up with different answers, they try to change or camouflage reality.) Note that Georgists don't tell us HOW the value of this "land value tax" is determined. It certainly isn't uniform across the US, but where does it change and why? In addition, Georgists insist that "public infrastru…

A buy or sell offer system works pretty well for determining value.

Claim whatever value you please for tax purposes.

Anyone can put your land into the commons by giving you your claimed value multiplied by a small safety factor. The current owner then gets priority on public housing or continued stewardship of the asset.

Anyone can purchase your land in a forced sale by offering your claimed value x a larger safety factor (+ max(the median home value within a half hour walk/train/etc, median home value country-wide) if it's your only residence).

The goal is to counteract the agglomerative nature of wealth. Profitability (no matter whether your abstraction for ownership is property or political favour) as a fundamental concept is a tax on the poor to the benefit of the wealthy. You must fix this for your system to be stable and not excessively punishing to the poor.

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

#60

Post by ethanbond » Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 4:21 AM UTC

anamax wrote: post #22

Oh goody. Another group with an equation that they confuse with a complete picture of reality. (When you point out that reality comes up with different answers, they try to change or camouflage reality.) Note that Georgists don't tell us HOW the value of this "land value tax" is determined. It certainly isn't uniform across the US, but where does it change and why? In addition, Georgists insist that "public infrastru…

Georgists absolutely do not believe that public infrastructure exclusively drives value. Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land, both public and private. So your example of Disney is a very good pro-Georgist example. Why should someone who happened to own a random piece of land and did nothing with it for 4 generations get a multi-million dollar windfall because Disney accomplished something nearby?

Re the valuation of land separately from the improvements, these are already separated on the vast majority of appraisals. Granted the need to get this right goes up if all taxation was derivative of this, but let’s not act like this is some impossible problem that no municipality would take a stab at. The vast majority already do.