Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Tax the Land

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 613 posts

Re: Tax the Land

#601

Post by colinmhayes »

jjav wrote: post #352
closeparen wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. They are pretty successfully standing athwart capitalism’s most powerful firms, going toe to toe with people who have hundreds of billions of dollars on the line (in terms of Silicon Valley’s capacity grow and add headcount, not just the re…

> People who own single family homes at the kinds of locations where developers are eager to build apartment buildings are among the wealthiest and most powerful ever to have lived. This is about as far from true as it can get. Ordinary working class people who just happened to buy a cheap house in a place that many decades later became a hot-spot of real estate development.. are still ordinary working class people.…

> are still ordinary working class people

I don't agree. If you own an asset worth a million dollars you are not working class. You may choose to work, but you are not forced to. IMO working class means you need to work to live. Choosing not to sell you home is not being forced to work in order to afford necessities.

Re: Tax the Land

#602

Post by colinmhayes »

jjav wrote: post #600
colinmhayes wrote: post #597

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But based on LVT, open fields in the middle of Manhattan is not the maximally productive economic use for that land. I'm not sure this is true though. Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park. It's not very hard to make the claim that central park provides more value than putting up apartment buildings would. Central Park makes that island some of the most expensive land in the world.

> Manhattan wouldn't be close to what it is today without central park. It certainly wouldn't and I wouldn't argue the contrary. But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula? Surely it'd be possible to take some of the Central Park area and convert to highrises without meaningfully diminishing the benefits of having a Central Park. But how much ar…

> But from the perspective of analyzing LTV and its implications, how would that be written into the tax code formula?

I think the way it would work is the government would have to pay LVT on land it owns, and people would have to decide whether the LVT would be worth more than the current use through elections. Sure, NYC could probably get $10 billion or so a year (who knows maybe its $100 billion) if they sold off central park while under this taxation scheme. I think hardly anyone would want that though, and NYC would just continue to pay itself the LVT instead of collecting the money from citizens that bought the park land. By the way this is a gross oversimplification since the LVT collected from the properties surrounding the park, and probably all of Manhattan if not NYC, would be drastically lowered if the park was developed.

> pushes for highrise development everywhere else (if that's the goal)?

I don't think this is the goal. The goal is efficient land use. That might mean high rise development instead of empty lots. It might mean national parks that people cherish. It might mean a great big park in the middle of manhattan. What matters is that the question "is this land being used optimally?" is being considered.

Re: Tax the Land

#603

Post by pandaman »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #596
pandaman wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All rights, positive and negative require the state to enforce them so if we were to accept your definition, the negative rights would not exist and the whole positive/negative qualification became moot. You are free to not recognize the existence of negative rights but then how can you argue over the distinction between positive and negative in a good faith? > If someone else wants to put up dense housing on their p…

>You are free to not recognize the existence of negative rights but then how can you argue over the distinction between positive and negative in a good faith? My "faith" doesn't matter. The logic of the argument matters. And frankly, you don't seem to be putting forward very logical arguments. >> If someone else wants to put up dense housing on their parcels, their property, there is no negative-right violation again…

My logic is quite simple: positive right is a right to compel, negative right is a right to deny. It also makes the naming consistent. A right to compel disappears when there are no people to compel, the right to deny becomes absolute when there are no people to try the denied actions.

What is your logic and do you have an example of a negative right, that doesn't require enforcement?

And I agree that as a private individual I don't have a right to deny construction wholly. Same as I don't have a right to elect anyone. The community has the entire right, I only have a right to vote.

Re: Tax the Land

#604

Post by cascom »

diebeforei485 wrote: post #491
cascom wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you talking about? The city/county charges for those services - us municipalities are going broke for two simple reasons 1) public pensions 2) mismanagement

They don't charge you the full cost of providing those services. There is a whole playlist about this: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0

I would call that mismanagement, no?

Re: Tax the Land

#605

Post by Manuel_D »

alex_sf wrote: post #542
Manuel_D wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or work near where you can afford to live? If there aren't jobs that support living there, live somewhere else? You're presenting an absurd dichotomy. And what happens when there's no jos where you live, and the only places where jobs exist have extreme housing shortages? You can spend hours commuting each day, but then you're probably burning just as much money through gas - not to mention destroying the environme…

> And what happens when there's no jos where you live Then you start a small business, employing others and building up your community. How do you think the ‘places where jobs exist’ started? > the only places where jobs exist have extreme housing shortages? If it’s intolerable to enough people, they won’t be able to hire. They’ll have to move, or pay more to overcome the housing shortage. The fact that it isn’t, and…

> Then you start a small business, employing others and building up your community.

The idea that anyone can just start a business is seriously indicative of how our of touch this forum can be.

What if there's no goods or services that are in demand in your immediate community? What if your community is impoverished and dying? What if you have no capital to start a business?

> How do you think the ‘places where jobs exist’ started?

Often it was because of natural resources, or geographic factors that made it conductive to establishing a population center (like river or harbour access).

> If it’s intolerable to enough people, they won’t be able to hire. They’ll have to move, or pay more to overcome the housing shortage.

The latter is what's happening: prices of housing are skyrocketing and locking people into poverty.

Re: Tax the Land

#606

Post by closeparen »

anamax wrote: post #552
closeparen wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about. Now we can’t have any more of the places worth caring about because to do so would threaten the historic fast food joints on their peripheries. Which almost no one even likes, but “almost no one” is all it takes to prevent a change under current rules. Of sprawl we can always print more. Of places worth caring about we’re stuck forever with whatever we had before w…

BTW, you do know that typical suburb lots are closer to 1/8 than 1/4 acre, right? (Atherton and Greenwich are NOT typical.) > The suburbs encircled the places worth caring about. How do suburbs keep SF from thriving? Apart from giving people someplace else to go that is. When people leave cities for suburbs, they're saying that they prefer suburbs to cities, that they don't prefer what you assert that they prefer, th…

>When people leave cities for suburbs, they're saying that they prefer suburbs to cities

Indeed, forget iconic. Places whose design is merely not utterly deranged are so rare in North America, yet so desired, that your choices are to be extremely wealthy or else to consume very little of them. You can't get the extra bedrooms to raise kids in reasonably hospitable urban settings because adults wiling to pay $2500/mo outnumber them.

People leave for the suburbs because they're cheap. They're cheap because they're abundant. They're abundant because of a comprehensive suite of restrictions and subsidies designed to make them so.

Wander down the El Camino Real. An endless ribbon of stroad, fast cars, parking lots, strip malls. A place whose sidewalks are a farce. A place that makes it very clear you are not mean to be outside your car except in the smallest doses. A place no one really likes driving, either. That's a choice. All that mileage could instead have the character of San Francisco's loveliest neighborhoods. Could be a place worth caring about. Could be community and home and identity and leisure. If you allowed it.

Re: Tax the Land

#607

Post by geocar »

alex_sf wrote: post #595
geocar wrote: post #590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't need to take from others to be free. That is, in fact, the opposite of freedom. But irrelevant: Things have already taken from others and they want it back. > Equity is impossible without violence and restrictions on freedom. Agreed, so because violence was used to obtain an UN-equitable position, they want it back. (I feel a little bit like I'm repeating myself; what's another way to say this?) People th…

> But irrelevant: Things have already taken from others and they want it back. Who took what, from who, when? > Agreed, so because violence was used to obtain an UN-equitable position, they want it back. Again: what, from who, when? There are two answers to this: something that isn't actually violence (agreeing to employment), or something from hundreds of years ago ('stolen land'). Neither are good arguments, in any…

> I don't think you read that sentence correctly. Three things:

> 1) Positive rights should not exist, because: 2) Positive rights cannot exist without violence and slavery

Violence exists regardless of whether "positive rights" exist. You are stating this again, but you haven't proven any kind of relationship beyond the tautological one.

I can't move on to the third point until you clear this up. Everything else seems like a distraction:

If we can agree that violence and slavery is bad, why can't we agree that some kind of retribution is required? Maybe this is why:

> something that isn't actually violence (agreeing to employment), or something from hundreds of years ago ('stolen land'). Neither are good arguments, in any way.

They're excellent arguments. Even agreeing to be "employed" for room-and-board in exchange for work could be slavery, especially if the person agreeing doesn't know if they have other choices. "Stolen land" was still stolen. What's the good reason for a statute-of-limitations on this?

I think you are dismissing these out-of-hand, and if you can't address them, maybe this is what is wrong with your entire philosophy?

> There is nothing stopping me from defending my property myself.

Of course there is. What are you going to use to defend your property besides violence?

Re: Tax the Land

#609

Post by diebeforei485 »

inter_netuser wrote: post #227
diebeforei485 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already see standard property tax forcing the elderly out of their homes in many areas. It's reasonable to offer options to low-income retirees, for example allowing them to defer property tax payments until death. Texas does this, it works alright. Note that a single family dewlling on .75 acres likely costs the government a lot of money to provide services (plumbing, sewer, electric etc) and is likely already…

>Note that a single family dewlling on .75 acres likely costs the government a lot of money to provide services (plumbing, sewer, electric etc) and is likely already a net debtor to the city/county. This style of development is why American (and Canadian) cities are going broke. Maybe in a dying city nobody wants to live in anyway. Most costs aren't spending the entire budget on plumbing/sewer/electric. All of those…

> RE developers are on the hook for those in new developments.

I'd suggest educating yourself on how infrastructure maintenance is actually paid for.

Here's a video to start: https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0

Re: Tax the Land

#610

Post by diebeforei485 »

refurb wrote: post #289
diebeforei485 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We already see standard property tax forcing the elderly out of their homes in many areas. It's reasonable to offer options to low-income retirees, for example allowing them to defer property tax payments until death. Texas does this, it works alright. Note that a single family dewlling on .75 acres likely costs the government a lot of money to provide services (plumbing, sewer, electric etc) and is likely already…

When I built my house I paid full price to have those utilities brought to my house. We’re talking over $100,000. And I continue to pay service charges for maintenance of all utilities.

Your service charges do not cover the full cost of maintenance, that's the problem.
Post reply on HN