61–70 of 78 posts
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Do you have a link to a summary? I missed it, if it ever made the front page news. IANAdeveloper… if a developer is otherwise within code/zoning, SCOTUS is probably correct. If they’re asking for zoning changes, there should be room for negotiation on nearby improvements.
News article about it: https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/supreme-court-ruli...
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> One development of 5 houses might not move the needle on that, but it then opens the door to neighbors doing the same thing, which could very much require major investment in infrastructure for the area. But then there is a corresponding increase in property tax revenues to pay for it, so this should require no approval and just be something that happens. The city pays for the new infrastructure from the taxes paid…
So the city has to build a new $50 million dollar sewage treatment plant in the hopes of getting that paid back over 50 years of property taxes, and gets no say in the matter or the cities budget? Sewage treatment plants have finite capacity, can't be built on a 'serves 20 units' incremental scale, and oftentimes new plants have much stricter requirements than grandfathered in one. Not everywhere is the bay area wher…
At least in the San Jose area, the sewage treatment was largely built 50 years ago, when it was doing a lot of agriculture, and flows are way lower with people than they were with food processing and other industrial processing. The new plant that's in progress needs and has way less capacity, even though the standards are much much much tighter.
At the one house per acre level though, you can likely manage with septic, which is incremental sewage treatment capacity, and not a huge municipal undertaking (there is record keeping and regulation and what not, so it's not nothing)
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> by taxing / fining people for having a second home. I don't see the issue with this? The profits in Canadian real estate are not on the back of some new found resource. It's entirely an effective wealth redistribution from have-nots to haves. If you have property, the vast amount of value in it is strictly from the fact that it is artificially scarce. To get into the "haves" you have to pay an artificial tax in the…
No, no, the government interjecting themselves into housing and creating an artificial scarcity, to aid their favoured voters at the time, is the problem. The idea that the solution to this is not to have the government step back but to have them become even more involved by redistributing this wealth distortion to their new favoured voters is a further level of madness.
The same, in my opinion, with inflation. Inflation has been caused by government monetary policy being too loose for three decades and effectively neutering its anti-competition authorities, but now they are getting tough on grocers as if the grocers are both the sole cause of the problem (false!) and that they made the problem in a vacuum (false!).
I have historically been extremely liberal, voting Liberal or NDP (even more liberal than the Liberals for those outside Canada) my whole life. The last few years of seeing our Liberal government fumble the ball so badly and point at everyone but the government itself (left and right governments of the current and past!) has made me realize the truth of the Reagan quote “government isn’t the solution to your problems, it is the source of your problems”.
Hayek’s Nobel speech on the pretence of knowledge is as accurate as ever.
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> by taxing / fining people for having a second home. I don't see the issue with this? The profits in Canadian real estate are not on the back of some new found resource. It's entirely an effective wealth redistribution from have-nots to haves. If you have property, the vast amount of value in it is strictly from the fact that it is artificially scarce. To get into the "haves" you have to pay an artificial tax in the…
The grossly inflated price comes from where though? I'd put it to you that a ban on usury where real estate was concerned would crush land values over night. Easy money (cheap loans) allow speculation, and speculation is one of the primary drivers of land value.
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I am not actually intending to be sarcastic at all - I think the entire industry is morally bankrupt. I am a real estate developer (re-developer actually - specializing in heritage buildings and other complicated adaptive reuse projects), so I deal with planners, committees, official plans, zoning by-laws and the building code daily. It is painful to see indefensible requirements being thrust on projects - even those…
What is your opinion on the recent SCOTUS decisions declaring that forcing developers to pay for community improvements qualifies as a taking? Do you see this having a material effect on housing development?
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What is your opinion on the recent SCOTUS decisions declaring that forcing developers to pay for community improvements qualifies as a taking? Do you see this having a material effect on housing development?
Do you have a link to a summary? I missed it, if it ever made the front page news. IANAdeveloper… if a developer is otherwise within code/zoning, SCOTUS is probably correct. If they’re asking for zoning changes, there should be room for negotiation on nearby improvements.
The problem is that in many areas (of Canada at least), zoning bylaws are horribly outdated and inconsistent with municipal priorities. But municipalities don’t have an incentive to change them because if they allow things to be done “as of right” with modern zoning, they can’t shake down developers to fund their pet projects. So everything is a negotiation, which again adds uncertainty and cost.
Governments need to get out of the way and let developers build, or accept that they are the source of the housing scarcity.
> Planners do important work moulding how our cities grow. Lost me at the first sentence. Let me fix it: “Planners follow the flavour of the day while committing the same sins over and over, their failures recognizable only in retrospect once replaced with a new (also faulty) paradigm based on centralized planning. Despite their repeated failures, as an industry or field of study they show no contrition and continue…
What's your preferred solution? Laissez-faire development?
I find it wild how much the west abhors eastern communist central planning and then adopts it for the very fabric of its communities.
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I thought the tax on "second homes" was a tax on landlording and speculation, not a tax on vacation homes. I think we might just be talking past each other here.
Why would taxing landlords reduce housing costs? It just increases housing costs for landlords, and in turn renters, as landlords become unwilling to pay for new construction until rents increase to cover the tax.
I don't know if it definitely works. But it's plausible. Tax what you want less of, right?
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The grossly inflated price comes from where though? I'd put it to you that a ban on usury where real estate was concerned would crush land values over night. Easy money (cheap loans) allow speculation, and speculation is one of the primary drivers of land value.
What you call usury is also a government caused problem. It’s almost like 30+ year amortizations and ultra low interest rates… weren’t good for affordability. But now everyone but the government itself is the cause of this issue (in the government’s humble opinion). Blame immigrants, developers, AirBNB, investors… anyone but government! And if you must blame government, blame some other level of government!
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Taxing people who own multiple homes and taxing people who own apartment complexes are two completely different things and shouldn't be conflated.
You do realize that if someone can avoid the tax by renting it out then they'll just rent it out to a friend for a nominal amount to avoid the tax?