"Your land is for sale at the price you put, but you can change up the price if you don't want to sell it, and thus pay up extra tax."
This is how you end up with homeless seniors and disabled people. In my opinion, we shouldn't be working up schemes to force people out of their property. Otherwise you get a developer that comes in and offers you a price you literally can't refuse, pushing the market entirely in favor of the wealthy.
If they sell their land, then presumably they'd receive a substantial windfall with which they could buy a new cheaper place, or rent. If they don't receive a substantial windfall, then the amount they were paying for the LVT must've been low.
"If they sell their land, then presumably they'd receive a substantial windfall with which they could buy a new cheaper place, or rent."
Not really. You might be forcing someone out of a 2.5% mortgage into a 6% mortgage on a new property, incurring property transfer taxes, moving costs, loan underwriting, and other fees. You very well could lose money in some situations. Your argument also assumes they are not in the cheapest homes already. If they are, they could be forced out of the geographic area altogether if there are no cheaper homes (and inherently rents will be more expensive than the cheapest mortgages under that system).
My experience is that if a community feels that land is underutilized they will simply tax at the value the community would like to see the land used.
We had a family farm that had our taxes go from under $4,000 to around $25,0000 in a single year. There was no warning it just happened. We ended up selling the farm in a few years at a value it was being taxed.
I also think that NIMBY/YIMBY is a strawman argument used to keep the conversation from developing.
> NIMBY/YIMBY is a strawman argument designed to keep the masses distracted
Distracted from what? I do in fact view NIMBYs as the biggest roadblock to expansion of housing supply, so I must be part of the distracted masses you're referring to. What am I missing?
I live in a small New England town that definitely faces housing shortages. Our planning board (which I have served on) has occasionally blamed NIMBYism for poorly thought out housing plans. People trying to point out the short sighted thinking are easily dismissed as NIMBYs.
One example would be allowing mobile homes with HUD certification. Advocates for this idea would argue that it would provide affordable housing which is true if one looks at initial costs of just shelter. The problem is that currently HUD divides their housing standards by geography and north west Massachusetts and Virginia are considered the same region. This causes the insulation requirements are really inadequate for our winters. This was further complicated by mobile home providers supplying air sourced heat pumps as the heating and cooling. The mobile home was then able to marketed as energy efficient. The problem was that heating system would be completely inadequate without intense insulation upgrades.
The HUD certification comes along with the inability for any local building codes to be enforced. In 2006 as a town we voted to impose "Stretch Codes" for energy efficiency. We voted for that knowing it was going to add at 25% for any building project in town.
My opinion was that the result would unsustainable electric bills and inadequate heating for our vulnerable population. I believed that we would create a two tiered housing system and our vulnerable population would have inadequate housing. I have nothing against mobile homes and believed we could use mobile homes as housing under the current building codes if they had permanent foundation and were sheathed in an extra layer of insulation.
I saw the label of NIMBY as dismissive and distracting from actual issues and the conversation never developed.
I have experience with both air sourced heat pumps and insulation in our area. I have developed an abandoned school into studio apartments that use heat pumps exclusively for heating.
I find catchy labels like NIMBY and YIMBY close to meaningless and hamper dialog and the development of ideas.
Thank you for the comment I updated it to sound less conspiratorial.
They might be horrible but they are far less horrible than nothing.
Tenement housing is pretty horrible but way better than not being able to afford anything.
Boarding house rooms are horrible but better than not having a low cost/low commitment option while you figure things out.
Pretty much all of these existed a generation or two ago where I am from but are now completely gone and outright banned by city code. All done by supposed do-good era who had the best of intentions in mind.
We have completely removed the bottom rung of housing for anyone who needs to get started or fallen upon hard times. Once you fall you are simply not getting back up again.
Sometimes perfect is the enemy of good enough for now. I’d much rather live in a trailer home in Minnesota (and have!) than a tent or homeless on the street or in my car. There were very few other options available at the time. Less so now. Dealing with frozen pipes and only being able to afford to marginally heat one bedroom to 50 degrees during a cold spell is luxury to some folks.
One scenario they're good for is if you own the land and need something to save up for a few years when planning/building your house. Although with the advances in modular and tiny houses, they don't seem to be the best option for that anymore either.
Wait you don't have homeless seniors where you live? Here in California they are everywhere.
This is despite Prop 13 and all the laws on top of it that are designed to keep seniors in their forever homes. Feels like maybe handouts to real estate investment is not the way to give people a roof over their head.
seniors and disabled people can't just live somewhere cheaper?
I think they should be pushed out by the wealthy. If you're holding onto residential land in a developing city, and someone wants to build a skyscraper there they should be able to buy you out at a reasonable price. You shouldn't be able to hold land hostage while also paying low property tax
It sounds like you want to just move the undesirables to a ghetto (in the real sense of the word). Why shouldn't someone be able to buy a home and live there until they die if they can pay reasonable taxes? Redevelop the land as the population turns over instead of marginalizing people.
"You shouldn't be able to hold land hostage while also paying low property tax"
What property are you holding hostage that I can liberate from you?
>Why shouldn't someone be able to buy a home and live there until they die if they can pay reasonable taxes?
Because the taxes aren't reasonable. Land is a limited resource.
Imagine a regulation that limited factories by taxing them on the amount of smog they produce. Your argument is like saying "old factories should be able to produce smog at the same tax rate as when they started, it's unreasonable to expect companies to just rebuild factories around new technology"
>What property are you holding hostage that I can liberate from you?
I don't own any property. But if I did, you would be free to liberate it for a pretty penny.
Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.
"Because the taxes aren't reasonable. Land is a limited resource."
Taxes seem high to me in my area. Land is a limited resource, but not as limited as you are implying. There is plenty of land in other areas that could be developed. Instead, we have people with a preference for homes in existing areas favoring using the government to force people out.
Your smog example is completely off base and doesn't represent the way the taxes work in many areas outside of California. My taxes go up every year and will eventually be reassessed for additonal increase. However, that assessment goes up based on reasonable evaluation and not on someone potentially targeting you or your property by bidding it up.
"I don't own any property."
I assume you live somewhere. Perhaps you will be forced out when a wealthy company buys up all the rentals and raises rents.
People don’t realize that all property tax levied is paid for … by people.
If you put a $10m/yr property tax on the local Walmart, that money simply comes from slightly higher prices on everything (or most non-nationally advertised things).
Landlords aren’t paying property tax out of the goodness of their hearts, they’re paying them out of the rents, and if they go high enough they’ll either raise rents or sell-abandon the building.
I think the even more hidden thing is that taxes are more about policy than revenue. If it was just about revenue, then they would tax it at the source - income tax on people and companies. But just imagine the reaction people would have when 50% of their paycheck was gone. They even hid the cost of social security and Medicare by making the employer pay half so it doesn't show on the paycheck. Break it up and people don't add it up and you can use it to control their behavior on different subjects.
I live in the middle of nowhere where lots of people build one room shacks in the desert, because we allow that here. You can build whatever the fuck you want. Some are living in mud huts (yes in the USA).
They shouldn't be forced to do it, but they seem to love it. You'd be suprised how many people would prefer a one room shack given the option, lots of people don't actually want the kind of houses zoning and codes require in more dystopian parts of the US, they would rather spend that money on leisure or their children, or their own health.
Implementing Georgism before deregulating land use seems like putting the cart before the horse.
It's quite likely that once you can legally build a skyscraper on any piece of earth you own, that resorting to a tax extortion fest for old people in desirable areas will seem far more absurd than it already does.
High land values are in large part because zoning requires oversized land ownership for a token to build a housing unit, creating mass artificial demand. The other piece is in places like some of California the regulatory / licensing / permit costs cost more than it cost me to build my whole house.
Is it putting the cart before the horse? those zoning laws are a result of property owners trying to benefit from the unimproved value of the land by locally restricting the supply of property.
If you cut off the profit motive by disenfranchising property owners in this respect, the building regulation will return to the level needed for (actual) public safety and wellness (as opposed to just racketeering).
Under LVT there are huge inventive to keeping your land value low. Densifying causes land values to increase so rational actors who dont want to move will oppose density.
Of course you can. You can put all sorts of deed restrictions on it, foster some sort of habitat for protected animals,turn it into a wetland (protected), etc.
This is how you end up with homeless seniors and disabled people. In my opinion, we shouldn't be working up schemes to force people out of their property. Otherwise you get a developer that comes in and offers you a price you literally can't refuse, pushing the market entirely in favor of the wealthy.