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High property taxes are good

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Re: High property taxes are good

#541

Post by jelliclesfarm »

midoridensha wrote: post #498
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Multigenerational families are the answer. Move in with grandma. Problem solved.

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.

Why? Why can’t companies create jobs everywhere? Shouldn’t every American city deserve top notch infrastructure that the states only reserves for high density unaffordable cities where jobs are concentrated.

Maybe this will force the governments to spend some of our accumulated tax dollars to actually improve public transport and efficiently network cities and towns.

Zoning rules exist for a reason. People need infrastructure and water and services and power grids to live well. High density is not desirable nor will it be affordable. It behooves the govt to encourage high density where there are jobs to create artificial scarcity and inflate housing value.

Because higher the home value, more property tax can be extracted. This is the oldest con in the world. This is also why all high density cities are all expensive and housing is unaffordable and everything from water to power is expensive and public services are woefully inadequate.

Re: High property taxes are good

#542

Post by jelliclesfarm »

midoridensha wrote: post #525
mlyle wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

NIMBYism exists because people value their homes and stability. Any society needs stability to thrive. Without NIMBYs, there would be utter chaos and underfunded overcrowded cities.

Housing shortage is due to unions and govts that refuse to establish public infrastructure for everyone. This is done on purpose to create UTism .. Us VS Them..between property owners and those who don’t own property. Divide and Rule strategy. It has never failed over centuries.

Re: High property taxes are good

#544

Post by EddieDante »

brockwhittaker wrote: post #530
EddieDante wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

@tdarb's pblog (https://pblog.xyz) is pretty simple. It's just a shell script that builds a site and RSS feed with pandoc. The build system's a makefile.

Re: High property taxes are good

#545

Post by smugma »

bradgessler wrote: post #450
ed25519FUUU wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don’t know about NY, but in SF property taxes are effectively frozen based on the value of your home when purchased. I rented a house once in West Portal where the landlord was paying property taxes on the 1970 value of the home, which was something like $70k. The owner was gifted this house and taxes basis from their parents, who originally bought it. The tax bill came out to just a few thousand dollars as of 2020…

This website makes it easy. I looked up West Portal and there are several homes paying 1-3K, many in the 15-20K, and some 30K+

https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#37.74219147779...

Re: High property taxes are good

#546

Post by throwaway742 »

abeppu wrote: post #417
throwaway742 wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is once you start making complex rules people will start finding loopholes and ways to work around it. Like you pointed out vacancy taxes are very difficult to actually enforce. If taxes are based on how long you have owned the property maybe instead of selling the property I give you a transferable 20 year rent to own lease or create a corporation that owns the property and sell you that corporation so t…

I don't think vacancy taxes are _actually_ hard to enforce, but I think there are a lot of noisy objections from people who don't want them enforced, and that can be enough to sway municipal government. I agree that simpler rules are generally harder to work around. _However_, I notice that argument is almost always made to claim that governments shouldn't try to change behavior in line with the preferences of their…

I agree legislatures are often complicit and that is part of the reason why our laws are so ineffective. Spam filtering rules are much easier to update than legislation. I'm not saying we shouldn't try, but you also can't dodge a simple tax of x percent on each property. Perhaps a better way to offset it is something like a universal basic income.

Re: High property taxes are good

#547

Post by brigandish »

mlyle wrote: post #496
brigandish wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> However, if someone bids on the land for that price you must sell. But surely you have improvements on the land and friction from moving... I like LVTs, but there's some significant devils in the implementation details.

I agree, I often think about such things and wonder if they'd work as this hasn't been tried. I'm wary of taking the road to Hell with my "good" intentions/ideas.

For the improvements on the land bit, you could project at the beginning of the year what you think the land will be worth by the end of the year, due to planned improvements. That locks in the value for the year.

I can see problems with that too, but the real question is would those problems be worse or better than the problems we have now?

Re: High property taxes are good

#548

Post by glitchinc »

yellowapple wrote: post #93
conductr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A land value tax would incentivize residential landowners to build more units which provides more supply and would lower rents Zoning usually dictates what's allowed and is indifferent to tax rates

Exclusionary zoning exists because of NIMBYism. NIMBYism exists because of the financial incentive to raise land values. That financial incentive exists because of a lack of taxation on land value.

This is not always true. I live in a Resource Conservation zoning area that was established to protect wildlife and vegetation in our region and preserve a large watershed area that is one of the primary sources of potable drinking water for folks that live down in the valley in the suburban and metropolitan areas. I consider my family and I extremely lucky to live in the area that we do, but we are a far cry from NIMBYs.

Re: High property taxes are good

#549

Post by yellowapple »

glitchinc wrote: post #548
yellowapple wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exclusionary zoning exists because of NIMBYism. NIMBYism exists because of the financial incentive to raise land values. That financial incentive exists because of a lack of taxation on land value.

This is not always true. I live in a Resource Conservation zoning area that was established to protect wildlife and vegetation in our region and preserve a large watershed area that is one of the primary sources of potable drinking water for folks that live down in the valley in the suburban and metropolitan areas. I consider my family and I extremely lucky to live in the area that we do, but we are a far cry from NI…

That sort of thing doesn't require zoning; it requires public ownership and management. Land is unowned by default.

Re: High property taxes are good

#550

Post by yellowapple »

lmm wrote: post #533
conductr wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure I agree. Or doesn't fit with my experience/city/state. All zoning is exclusionary to my knowledge. That's the entire point. It's not necessary but it exists because it exists. And, it's sticky. It was established most likely when the entire city was raw land and undeveloped; so it served as a plan for development. There was no NIMBY because people were building their BY. Because there was a plan, you could d…

> It was established most likely when the entire city was raw land and undeveloped; so it served as a plan for development. There was no NIMBY because people were building their BY. Because there was a plan, you could decide where you wanted to build that BY. That's not really true. Zoning was usually set up later. Often the existing buildings wouldn't be permitted by the zoning rules but were "grandfathered in". (If…

> And for the "people shouldn't be forced out of their home" crowd: my generation gets forced out of our homes every 2-3 years because we can't afford to own and have to rent. So I won't shed any tears for boomers getting forced out of their home once in several decades

Plus, here in the US the vast majority of land ownership entailed forcing native peoples out of their homes.

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