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High property taxes are good

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Re: High property taxes are good

#521

Post by raldi »

krustymeathead wrote: post #505
raldi wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps I'm not stating the proposal clearly. Nobody would suddenly lose their home. If you understated its value, and someone made an offer, you'd have the opportunity to restate the property's value, keep the home, and pay the appropriate property taxes from then on.

Hypothetically, let's say I owned a modest home. Then, what if a very wealthy person who grew up in that home wanted to buy it for a grand sum of money? In that case, I'd be torn between revaluing my house to a huge amount (that no one except this one person would be willing to pay) and being forced to sell. It's an interesting scenario, because that wealthy person could lower their valuation almost immediately after…

C'mon, even setting aside the fact that the victim here walks away with a giant pile of money, there are countless ways to address this extremely unusual special-case scenario. For instance, you could be free to decline to sell as long as your declared valuation was >= the local neighborhood average.

Re: High property taxes are good

#522

Post by Dracophoenix »

yellowapple wrote: post #504
Dracophoenix wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just neighboring parcels. Any improvements on one's own property (separate from the land itself) would be factored into LVT through an indirect tax on improvements via a higher assessment value. While certains areas can be "nice", not all homes in a given area are equally "nice". Some parcels of land will have their values "propped up" by the home that is sitting on it as well as proximate homes while others are…

> Any improvements on one's own property (separate from the land itself) would be factored into LVT through an indirect tax on improvements via a higher assessment value. No, because that's already subtracted out of the total property value to produce the land value. > And if COVID telecommuting is an indication of market preferences, home-owning adults prefer small, out-of-the-way towns with plenty of space, low pro…

> No, because that's already subtracted out of the total property value to produce the land value.

On paper yes, but in practice there will be a de facto tax on improvement due to higher demand caused by what an physical improvement of one's own property signals.

> The exodus from city centers stems from farther-out places being cheaper - i.e. having lower land value.

Lower cost is not necessarily lower value. It's possible for areas out of the way to cost more, even if they start cheap, simply due to a short-term spurt of high demand. There are, for instance, empty parcels of land in Idaho that now go for more than whole apartment buildings in Detroit there despite the city being the automotive capital of the United States where one had historically seen the opposite trend.

Re: High property taxes are good

#523

Post by DevKoala »

bergenty wrote: post #448
DevKoala wrote: post #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.

Well Chicago is one of the best cities in the world to live in based on rankings so I don’t know what you’re implying here.

My point is that there are a dozen factors that account for the difference in housing costs.

The median income, the population density relative to the housing inventory, the weather, the demand, etc.

Re: High property taxes are good

#524

Post by nomel »

arrosenberg wrote: post #368
nomel wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nah, rents aren't determined by owners' costs I don't understand this. The owners have pay mortgage, taxes, insurance, and repairs. How can it be decoupled? The landlords I know would have to sell if they lost their renters, or if the rental income fell below a certain amount.

If the market cost of renting a unit drops below the landlords' cost to maintain the unit, the renter doesn't go "oh well, that's a shame, I guess I will pay the higher amount." The landlord either eats the loss or gets out of the game. Since vacancy is the worst possible outcome for a landlord, they can't just hold their units off the market to get the price they want.

I see. The dynamics are much more complicated than I, naively, thought.

Re: High property taxes are good

#525

Post by midoridensha »

mlyle wrote: post #502
midoridensha wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if grandma lives in a city where there's no jobs for me? Asking people to move in with their relatives is not the answer; the answer is very simple: build more housing. Eliminate zoning rules and start replacing older buildings with new, larger and taller buildings.

> Eliminate zoning rules and start replacing older buildings with new, larger and taller buildings. Right now, NIMBY tries to prevent taller buildings. A land value tax incentivizes more effective land uses-- as opposed to property taxes that include improvements, which reduce the incentive to build high density.

>Right now, NIMBY tries to prevent taller buildings.

It's simple: eliminate NIMBYism. It only exists because local governments and laws allow it. Don't do that.

Re: High property taxes are good

#526

Post by lmm »

yucky wrote: post #181
zip1234 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of the abandoned houses in Detroit are owned by speculators who will do nothing with it but wait for land prices to increase.

Many of the houses abandoned in Detroit were abandoned (and often torched) due to the ridiculously high property taxes and lack of value returned by the city for those taxes. It's hard to justify telling land owners to pay high property taxes when the city delivered the highest crime rates and worst performing schools in the nation in exchange for those tax dollars.

Land value tax aligns incentives better. If property values go down because the place sucks, at least your tax bill drops in line with that.

Re: High property taxes are good

#527

Post by TheMechanist »

brigandish wrote: post #487
chadash wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The biggest problem (IMO) is that it's not so simple to value land. Where I live, being two blocks over can make a huge difference. It's easy to say "you paid $500k for your house, so we're gonna tax you on $500k". It's much harder to accurately say what someone would have paid for the land were it not developed. I understand the benefits of LVT, but how do you solve this? Are there any good examples of governments t…

> I understand the benefits of LVT, but how do you solve this? Georgism[1], which I'm fascinated by. One way to organise it is to ask people how much tax they're willing to pay, from which the land value can be derived (as that's the real point of assessing land value for someone who isn't willing to sell that's the real order of things). However, if someone bids on the land for that price you must sell. > Are there…

> One way to organise it is to ask people how much tax they're willing to pay, from which the land value can be derived (as that's the real point of assessing land value for someone who isn't willing to sell that's the real order of things). However, if someone bids on the land for that price you must sell.

Some people have very strange misconceptions about LVT & Georgism.

Re: High property taxes are good

#528

Post by epistasis »

Dracophoenix wrote: post #104
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the difference between the two in reality? Land value tax incentivises turning a single-family home into a multi-unit building. Property tax explicitly discourages that.

Instead, I see LVT incentivizing the production and purchase of mobile homes, RVs, and hotels. You could live tax free if you don't have a permanent abode.

The tax is still paid, just indirectly.

The only way to avoid it is to move to areas where land is valueless.

Why does a tailor on Saville Row in London charge $10k while the tailor in southern Italy charge $1k for a bespoke suit?

Land values and land rents: https://twitter.com/dieworkwear/status/1549648048426344448?s...

Re: High property taxes are good

#529

Post by lmm »

naasking wrote: post #285
tptacek wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The premise of a market is that everybody is acting with partial information, and the market aggregates and allocates over time. I'm no anti-government squish, but there is no evidence, and a lot of countervailing evidence, that local governments can effectively (or even non-harmfully) make policy to influence the housing mix. When it comes to housing construction and tax incentives, what they need to do is (1) set t…

> I'm no anti-government squish, but there is no evidence, and a lot of countervailing evidence, that local governments can effectively (or even non-harmfully) make policy to influence the housing mix. I disagree. No planning has lead to many ghettos. The planning we've done here has avoided ghettos. I think the data is very clear on that. > When it comes to housing construction and tax incentives, what they need to…

> I disagree. No planning has lead to many ghettos. The planning we've done here has avoided ghettos. I think the data is very clear on that.

Citation? Where is that? Where I live the planning regime was famously ineffectual in the '50s and '60s, and as a result it's far more livable than big cities that had more planning: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2021/12/07/the-big-...

Re: High property taxes are good

#530

Post by brockwhittaker »

EddieDante wrote: post #473
brockwhittaker wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

sorry I just made this site this morning to post this article. it's just a simple node-http server! I don't write much :)

New, huh? Was't this yours, too? https://web.archive.org/web/20200822170417/https://brooock.c...

yep! i just spun down that service and didn’t bother to use it again, i wanted something simpler.
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