91–100 of 156 posts
NYT review: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/books/review/land-simon-w...>
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do think they should get rid of prop 13, demolish all single family homes, and replace them with high-density buildings. What many people mean however, is that they want to continue to live there in the same single-family house forever. This is why prop 13 exists in the first place.
High density housing will not work in places with a high standard and quality of living. It will certainly erode individual rights, create environmental decline and infringe upon privacy. In developed countries, high density housing will either make the city unbearably expensive(NYC) or bring down quality of life.(SF) High density is a sign that resources are scarce but demand for them has increased. The sign of a we…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Your issue is "what if someone owns huge chunks of land and doesn't try to make any money off it?" That really has nothing to do with my issue. My issue is that, under the proposed system, two people who each own half of Los Angeles will pay a lot of property taxes, because the other half of Los Angeles adds taxable value to their half, even if their half is unimproved. But one person who owns the entirety of Los A…
> My issue is that, under the proposed system, two people who each own half of Los Angeles will pay a lot of property taxes, because the other half of Los Angeles adds taxable value to their half, even if their half is unimproved. That is the goal, isn't it. To remove speculation from land ownership. Under this model the owner of the unimproved part of LA has no right to the increase in his land value since he did no…
It would lower their taxes.
> This doesn't follow from anything. Land would have very low costs only if it is land that nobody wants, just like today. And selling your land will not lead to higher taxes on your remaining land unless the land that you sold gets improved in such a way that it increases the value of your land.
Please don't bother responding if you have no idea what you're responding to.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I still don't understand how Georgism makes any sense in a digital world. The biggest companies in the world require irrelevantly small amounts of land to operate. A person can make millions in a 10x10 box with a computer.
And yet real estate is still the world's biggest asset class, amounting to some 68% of all real assets worldwide: https://www.gameofrent.com/content/is-land-a-big-deal and the vast majority of that real estate's value is in land
Is that true? Most of the value derives from the location - if you doubled the floor space over the land, the value of the land+improvements would double. The land isn't contributing value.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A small version of this occurs in the Mountain West. Some well-maintained rural roads are actually maintained illegally across Federal land by the locals. The Federal government is responsible for maintenance but often doesn't do any for decades and so the roads go into severe disrepair. If you ask permission to repair the road out of your own pocket, you will have to file absurd amounts of paperwork and the Federal…
Stuff like this is way more common than just roads. The further you get from the lawmakers the more reasonable actuality gets, even if it is done plausibly deniable.
I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…
The inhabitants don't lose. Play your scenario out. A bunch of poor people buy 100 acres of land for $1, and they turn it into a paradise. It becomes cool, so rich hipsters wanna buy up chunks to Instagram it. The first person sells a patch of land he bought for $0.01 for $1M. Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year. These people have no jobs, so they can't afford $12,…
A bunch of poor people buy some cheap land with very low taxes because its a run down scruffy mess with no facilities.
The land stays a run down scruffy mess with no facilities because the local property owners have strong financial incentives to keep it that way
Incremental increases in the land value tax would make low income landowners hungry long before the land rose in value enough to make anyone millionaires, and land isn't exactly easy to sell quickly, especially not if it's marginally-less-shitty-than-before land with an uncertain future.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Georgists absolutely do not believe that public infrastructure exclusively drives value. Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land, both public and private. So your example of Disney is a very good pro-Georgist example. Why should someone who happened to own a random piece of land and did nothing with it for 4 generations get a multi-million dollar windfall becau…
> Rather that the value of the land is set ~exclusively by the things that happen not on that land You do know that that is not true, that the value of land often depends ON things that happen on that land, right? (It's not hard to come up with examples.) But, I do appreciate an example of something that I didn't mention, namely the propensity of Georgists to make claims that they find self-evident and profound but a…
I am very curious to hear your examples of improvements/activities on land that become part of the unimproved value of land at a fast enough rate to matter?
Of course some portion of the taxes go to Disney. Who do you think pays for the air travel system that brings people to Orlando or LA? Who pays for the freeway system that brings in the food?
Re your last argument, the word “mostly” is doing an obscene amount of legwork. Obviously the unimproved land has a market price $X and then the land + structures on it have a different price $Y. So no, obviously the separation is not a fiction, but any particular dollar value is certainly a bit subjective and fuzzy, just like all appraisals are. For what it’s worth, appraising unimproved land is much less subjective than appraising the land + improvements, which we use as a tax basis today.
I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…
If they do, because they exist, then who pays for providing those things?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't lose their houses. They sold them. When ownership of your house goes to someone else, you lost it if your bank balance stayed the same, but you sold it if your bank balance went up by the value of the house.
> They didn't lose their houses. They sold them. They lost their homes which is not just a house. There's a much more emotional aspect to a home that can't be expressed in merely dollars. They were also forced to sell in the story, it wasn't a choice.
You want me to feel sorry for someone who gets a Million dollar windfall when:
1) they got a million dollar windfall
2) they now have a ridiculous amount of options (because money = options)
3) if they're really determined to stay in their house, they can cash-out refinance continuously and use some of the unrealized gains to pay property taxes (and past cash-outs)
4) they could also build an ADU on their property and rent out the ADU to cover property tax + have extra money
5) If they actually do move and leave, it's because they preferred $1M do the other options
No, sorry.
This is like feeling sorry for people who win the lottery because they have to pay taxes and then everyone calls them for a favor.
Most things in life aren't ALL good.
I'd like to better understand the concept of "unimproved land value" vs. "improvements". For example, let's say there's a neighborhood of people who are quite poor but charitable toward one another. So they build nice gardens accessible for free, little galleries, drinking fountains and so on. As a result, other people want to move in, land value in the community increases, and eventually the original inhabitants can…
The inhabitants don't lose. Play your scenario out. A bunch of poor people buy 100 acres of land for $1, and they turn it into a paradise. It becomes cool, so rich hipsters wanna buy up chunks to Instagram it. The first person sells a patch of land he bought for $0.01 for $1M. Suddenly, property tax on everyone's $0.01 parcels shoots up from $0 to $12,000 per year. These people have no jobs, so they can't afford $12,…
Owners don't lose from property shooting through the roof under current taxation schemes but under a 100% LVT they lose their community and gain next to nothing financially because land value is entirely captured.