Redfin Economist says land value tax will fix the economy

It doesn't have to be this complicated. We don't need a land value tax.

The most straight forward way to make people avoid speculating is to heavily tax all non-primary residence homes. Cap the amount people can charge in rent to some %s of purchase value (incentive to have high purchase value) to and set a baseline on the taxes required and make the math for building property empire bleak (absolute destruction of the housing-as-a-financial-asset model).

If you want people to buy homes to live in them, and not as a store of value or speculative instruments, we can disincentivize that behavior directly.

It encourages productivity instead of rent-seeking and restores housing stock to people who are trying to live in a place, rather than extract value and it puts more taxes in government coffers from the likes of companies like BlackRock and REITs.

It's simple. Tax people who buy homes they don't plan to live in heavily.

Frankly, people are already giving up moneymaking opportunities by not turning their literal own backyard into a multistorey apartment development or glue factory where permitted. LVT doesn't radically alter that, just adds a stick incentive as well as a carrot incentive

Usually the obstacle is they're not permitted to, not least because the neighbours don't want it. LVT doesn't solve the neighbours not wanting it - at best they get a small tax reduction but they still live next door to a glue factory and will lose money selling their house. For some things it makes it worse: now people protest against mass transit they don't think they'll hear or will bring the "wrong sort of people" into the neighbourhood because land near a transit hub will be in a higher tax bracket. And if LVT is assessed on development potential of the land, homeowners that dont want to sell to developers should absolutely love some more restrictive covenants on the neighbourhood that mean the nice plot they live on is no longer classed as suitable to build anything bigger than the house they already live in.

I did not write an argument against property taxes. I wrote one against abusing the properties of taxes to achieve goals beyond the primary purpose of taxation.

I will read your link this evening.

I personally advocate things like urban density, mixed use zoning, walkable cities, human sized homes, urban forestry, but I don't think LVT's are the right tool. I live in a city with "market value assessment" for property taxes, and it profoundly lacks transparency, and is a very dodgy regime altogether. The main thing a LVT creates is constant churn as (retired) people cease to be able to afford to live in their homes, incentivizes being a landlord, and punishes family wealth creation via home ownership (which is a barrier to class mobility), as if you own property, you now need to generate revenue from the land to pay the taxes on it. The LVT isn't for services either, it's punitive by definition.

Sure, it would get rid of some vacant buildings, and we do need a way to discourage land and property banking that turns hot money into high prices for home buyers, but taxes are what you impose when you have a policy that nobody would win re-election on voting for. It's literally what nobody wants. Nudging taxes are inferior back door policymaking by regulators (in their own interest) who can't get the political traction for an actual policy. Who is nimby'ism a problem for? Arguably, people who want to impose unwanted experimental policy, and in-effect loot the wealth that cohesive local communities and their cultures invested in and built. Nimby'ism as concept is a slur that makes a villain of anyone with a home and investment in their local community, and who may be skeptical of centralized policymaking. I'd question the underlying values behind advocating an LVT, as they tend to be within a degree of some other very technocratic impositions that mainly benefit their administrators.

We already have some Land Value Tax in many areas, although some of it is inverse to the proposal. By putting a conservation easement on some land, you can preserve it for wildlife and have a minimal tax.

>>So it’s kind of just basically a shorthand for I think, being kind of selfish. valuing your property value, your view, your neighborhood character that you want more than building a neighborhood that is welcome for all people or for more people. To be able to afford and live in. So, unfortunately, nimbyism, it’s like a consequence of, I think incentives.

It is not a consequence of incentives, it is a consequence of the fact that when someone moves to a place with a particular quality of life, pays more, and then pays high taxes and high maintenance costs for decades, they themselves have paid for decades to build that quality of life. To say that oh, your neighbor can randomly decide to make a major construction project literally in your backyard and convert a wetlands housing endangered species into a several hundred unit high-density living complex, with years of construction and two orders of magnitude greater traffic on your street forever - yeah, you can expect people to object. (this literally happened to me, and in a matter of weeks we got 10x the largest crowd to show up at a planning board meeting and we gave a presentation to shut it down; not yet permanently, but...)

And rightly so - the developer is literally stealing all the value that you and your neighbors and town created over the past few decades, and then profit from the buyers also.

Now, if you are talking about areas that are already cities and have such high density that there is effectively no wildlife, then it might be different, but again the value of walkable neighborhoods vs random massive development is not to be overlooked.

So, no this proposal is preposterous, aside from being a nonstarter. Young people who might want it are great at making noisy protests and notoriously bad at bothering to vote - the one thing that matters, while older people, and especially those who own property, tend to reliably vote.