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Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

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Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#551

Post by asdff »

rcpt wrote: post #413
asdff wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Property taxes are higher than California, right? I can't find the source handy at the moment, but I've heard that a house in Austin that looks like a couple hundred grand cheaper than an equivalent house in California for the listing isn't actually any cheaper when you factor in the increased taxes and potentially other costs I'm not aware of.

https://www.taxfairnessproject.org Arguably taxes are higher for newcomers. Yes rates are lower but purchase price is insane. But Native Sons of the Golden West pay pennies on the dollar in property tax. Old businesses to. It's a $30B per year tax cut to successful real estate investors. That's 3x the size of the NSF and several billion more than NASA. This is the root of all California's problems. Underfunded school…

What state parks are closing? What infrastructure is crumbling? The new construction on the 5 freeway is some of the most impressive work in the country and LA is currently building more rail than anywhere else in the country at once currently; la metro has been making money hand over fist since 2016 sales tax initiatives. CA also spends some of the most money per pupil in the country. Unlike other parts of the country, the sprawl has been pinned now by geography at least in LA where its infilled to the mountains, and can infill no further owing to the terrain. Construction goes vertical now in LA, there's almost no greenfield left to develop short of some holdout farm plots in San Bernardino and Riverside counties. In texas, eventually there will be unified suburban sprawl all between houston and austin and dallas-fw, probably within our lifetimes, since there is no geography to pin development.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#552

Post by hef19898 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #56

The official reason is because of housing: "To be clear we will be continuing to expand our activities in California," Musk said. "Our intention is to increase output from Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50%. If you go to our Fremont factory it's jammed." But, he added, "It's tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away....There's a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area." https://ww…

I am certain the 54 million $ in tax breaks and incentives have nothing to do with it whatsoever...

https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/14/21323977/austin-tesla-tax...

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#553

Post by [deleted] »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #549
t-writescode wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As long as Seattle is your source or destination, Seattle's transit is pretty okay. If you dare go Eastside; or, worse, need to go from like Renton to Totem Lake; or Redmond to somewhere that isn't the the center of Bellevue, you're just never going to get there in a reasonable amount of time.

Sure, but the east side is fairly anti transit compared to the west side. Look at the drama Bellevue put everyone through for the new link route from Seattle to Redmond via Mercer island. Also, Renton to Totem Lake should only be one connection given a weird sound transit airport route (590?) from West Seattle to Bellevue that goes through Renton.

[deleted]

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#554

Post by refurb »

rcpt wrote: post #425
thephyber wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the superior option for an owner Agree with you, but I would guess most of the Gigafactory workers who haven’t exercised stock options probably can’t afford to own in the Bay Area. While Prop 13 probably filters down to renters in reduced rent, the supply/demand issues for housing is still pretty out of whack even with all of the new units in Milpitas. Also Prop 13 has second order effects that keep older empty nes…

> Prop 13 probably filters down to renters in reduced rent It doesn't. Rent is set by the market. New and old landlords have drastically different tax rates but charge roughly the same rent. Same deal with gas stations: you can't figure out how much property tax they're paying based on the price at the pump. In fact one of the main reasons California has rent control is that Howard Jarvis promised renters that landlo…

It kind of does but more in a political way. Property taxes on commercial property are also frozen and the trade off was rent control for tenants.

But you are right that the rental and home sale markets are entirely different. Owning costs more than renting in SF by a large margin.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#555

Post by asdff »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #244
asdff wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Median home price in austin is nearly 600k and in California its 800k, so its not as dramatic as a million cheaper unless you are considering places like the hollywood hills where homes go for north of $1.4m minimum (although you can get a home elsewhere in the LA area for $750k in many parts, this is a relatively high water mark)

>Median home price in austin is nearly 600k and in California its 800k, Compare Austin to somewhere near Freemont or compare TX to CA. Comparing Austin to all of CA is more than a little dishonest since there's a lot of rural nowheres in CA to drag down the average price but the comparison exludes all of Texas's rural nowheres.

Median home in LA county is 775k, lower than state median even. Concord CA, 35 minute drive from freemont, has a median of like 650k. Note I said median and not average too.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#556

Post by asdff »

kshacker wrote: post #423
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Median home price in austin is nearly 600k and in California its 800k, Compare Austin to somewhere near Freemont or compare TX to CA. Comparing Austin to all of CA is more than a little dishonest since there's a lot of rural nowheres in CA to drag down the average price but the comparison exludes all of Texas's rural nowheres.

Absolutely. I am a Californian, and when I see my family talking about the houses they bought in Texas, and yes maybe that was a decade back, and I compare them to an equivalent house in Cupertino (there are none maybe, and I am not that familiar with Fremont but I think it is the same range, just 10% lower worst case), the price difference has to be a million at least, could be more.

That's cupertino, look at concord for better prices.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#557

Post by keewee7 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #56

The official reason is because of housing: "To be clear we will be continuing to expand our activities in California," Musk said. "Our intention is to increase output from Fremont and Giga Nevada by 50%. If you go to our Fremont factory it's jammed." But, he added, "It's tough for people to afford houses, and people have to come in from far away....There's a limit to how big you can scale in the Bay Area." https://ww…

Of course he is blaming housing prices when the real reasons are the lower taxes and pro-business environment in Texas.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#558

Post by m0zg »

8note wrote: post #318
m0zg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The traffic situation is already pretty bad in that area, seemingly deliberately so. That is the case even during the pandemic, I can only imagine how bad it is when _nobody_ is remote. It seems that progressive Austin wants everyone to move to the city and give up their cars, which is not a realistic thing to do for most people in TX because it's not built for such lifestyle. I have no other plausible explanation. S…

Terrible traffic is the result of a city wanting everyone to use cars, rather than the opposite. Slow, low traffic car trips is the sign that the city wants people to not drive. Moving to a non car centric city means you don't need a car for your trips. The lifestyle is to stop having a car, because it's unnecessary

In this case terrible traffic is the result of buding a ton of crooked relatively narrow roads without any rhyme or reason. Family with children _cannot exist_ in most of the US without a car. Even in Austin itself if you don't have a car everything is just too far apart, and you could spend an hour or more fetching groceries quite easily. I actually forgot my driver's license at home and while it was being fedexed to me I got to experience the car-less Austin lifestyle. Let me tell you authoritatively, you wouldn't want to live like that. But at the same time if you live in Austin itself you don't want to bother with a car either, there's relatively little parking, so you'll really be struggling to find a spot once COVID subsides. I've seen the same deliberate shrinkage of parking happen in other "progressive" cities. Nobody gives a shit if you got kids and need a car. Another thing that Austin shares with other progressive cities is its massive and growing homeless population, though I must also say that even the homeless people are nicer there than, say, in SF or Seattle. At least I haven't seen anyone shoot up heroin in public or shit on the sidewalk.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#559

Post by etchalon »

rcpt wrote: post #451
mullingitover wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a renter, you're paying 100% of your landlord's property taxes.

No you're paying rent. The idea that property tax is passed down to renters 1:1 is just something you made up. The concept you need to look into is called tax incidence: https://www.maxwell.syr.edu/uploadedFiles/cpr/efap/Notes%20o...

I'd be careful about drawing the conclusion about rent shifting on that paper you linked, which really just says Carroll and Yinger's 1994 paper was right. Carroll and Yinger's paper is not unchallenged in economics (there are so very, very many papers on the problem), and it's entire line of reasoning is basically:

1. Property owners make a lot of money and own a lot of property.

2. When you increase property taxes, people who own a lot of property pay a majority of that increase.

3. Rent prices don't immediately increase 1:1 when property taxes rise, based on one data set.

Basically, property taxes are mostly paid by people who own property. Most property is lived in by the owner. So property taxes aren't regressive, since rich people end up paying the majority share.

People have been trying to create a model for the impact of rent shifting since the 60s. No one has a good model yet. It's hard to model.

If I sign a lease for 2000/mo, and the state increases property tax on the owner, the owner can't immediately increase my rent. Rents increases are generally governed by local laws. But over time, they can raise it, and it can be reset when the current occupants leave.

So an owner's profit margin takes a hit when property taxes rise, and renters bare a smaller percent of the burden of the new tax than the absolute amount raised in the short term. Long term, renter's are still covering the owner's total cost of that property, otherwise the owner would be losing money on the property – which, if that were prevalent business practice, we wouldn't have that many landlords.

So yes, renter's pay property tax.

Re: Tesla’s headquarters will move to Austin

#560

Post by random314 »

darawk wrote: post #192
random314 wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk had billions of dollars in performance based stocks vesting over these years. The simplest reason for moving is avoiding billions of dollars in California state income taxes.

No it isn't. CA will still try to tax those shares if and when he decides to liquidate them. However, Musk does not ever need to liquidate any shares. If he never wants to pay any tax, all he has to do is buy a hedge against the shares (thereby locking in a particular price) and take out loans against the now hedged asset. And like magic, he's got all the cash he could ever need and zero capital gains.

Can I do this with my vesting stocks? I get tax deducted stocks, always!
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