5 ms·

Why is it "at the expense of" others, to own a home now? I've been trying for years to understand the concept of "everyone should be able to live everywhere" b

by dimino 10y ago

Why is it "at the expense of" others, to own a home now? I've been trying for years to understand the concept of "everyone should be able to live everywhere" but I just cannot wrap my head around it, or it's cousin, "I shouldn't ever have to move, regardless of geopolitical changes". Why are people so attached to any particular place that they'll suffer immensely to keep that particular place theirs?

nshelly 10y ago
Well, on a purely economic basis, many of those homeowners, including investment funds, are paying < 0.1% in property tax and sitting on properties that are worth millions in value. As an example, the homeowner of one property with a market value of $7M was paying 0.04% in tax.[1] Property taxes help pay for streets, police, ambulatory services, schools and maintaining parks. These essential services are paid for "at the expense of" renters and new homeowners. Of course, this deeply vested interest group also manifests itself in roadblocks for new developments that would mitigate the drastic increases in housing costs. [1] http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1536-Bryant-St-Palo-Alto-CA-94301/19497046_zpid/ http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1536-Bryant-St-Palo-Alto-C...
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  Oh. So it is somehow the homeowner's fault that the property values have increased around them?
  - nshelly 10y ago
    Not their fault, but it is their gain. One of the other posts here mentions a few solutions that wouldn't force retirees or those on fixed incomes out of their newly valuable properties. The coastal areas of California are unique in the US in that vast discrepancies exist between market value and what long-time property owners pay. - Apply market-rate taxation only for values over a certain threshold, say $1m+ and non-owner occupied - Defer tax payments until the property changes hands (aka they sell the property or pass it on) - Reverse mortgages
    - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
      Ahhh... so basically make it financially impossible for that property to be handed down to their kids? Wow. We really have become a horrible society.
    - burfog 10y ago
      It's completely messed up that a change in regional average property value could cause a change in total tax revenue. This causes a city's tax income to vary wildly. Cities take on obligations (bonds, salary increases, pensions) in good times and then hit disaster in bad times. We fight this in a stupid way. We limit tax increases for a property, with a reset upon sale. This discourages people from moving closer to work, causing our roads to be clogged with commuters. The right way is to say that assessed home value relates to the total portion of the city budget that your taxes must support. Your tax bill then wouldn't change unless the city budget changes or the relative value of your property changes. Subjecting the total city budget to voter approval is OK. Basically the problem is millage rate. The dollar value of your property should not directly (by simple multiplication or division) translate into a tax amount. It should instead translate into a portion of the total. That is, it should represent your share.
Nullabillity 10y ago
It's the least efficient way to use the land. Which is fine if you have plenty of it, but if you've already got a shortage and too much spread... That said, the GP didn't say that owning the house was the problem, but rather the regulation that makes that the only legal choice.
- dimino 10y ago
  But my point is why must people live on that land? Why not go live on some other land nearby? What is the foundational belief backing the idea that everyone should be able to live everywhere?
  - ricardobeat 10y ago
    Friends, places, social circles, kids in school... You can change all of that, but would you like to?
  - URSpider94 10y ago
    My belief, and I believe the belief of many others, is that the people who work in your city should be able to live there. If all of your school teachers, fire fighters, and police, not to mention store clerks and janitors, can't afford to live in your town, then that's unsustainable in the long term. At the moment, it's likely that these folks are commuting 40, 50 or more miles into PA to work every day from the South or East.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - lgieron 10y ago
      > then that's unsustainable in the long term I agree that it sucks, but I'm not sure if it's unsustainable. There are plenty of worse situations in the world that pretty long-lasting.
TulliusCicero 10y ago
It's not their owning a home that's the problem. It's the overly strict zoning regulations and process that control whether someone else's land can be turned into more homes.
angry-hacker 10y ago
What if your family and close ones live there? Your children's friends etc. Moving is not that easy for families and when you're not young.
- Hondor 10y ago
  Your children will have grown up since the 90's dot com bubble when you would have first seen the writing on the wall. This didn't just happen overnight. It's been going on for a couple of decades.
  - angry-hacker 10y ago
    I don't live in U.S but I assume you have families over there. Grandparents, cousins etc. It's healthy to be close to your family. If you're young and free, of course. Would you just separate your kids from their childhood friends, school etc? There are millions of reasons.
    - burfog 10y ago
      Yes. My parents did. They left the Bay Area when I was 9, never to return. They went to Texas, then Massachusetts. (thousands of kilometers) We left behind a large family on my mother's side and my dad's brother. I miss them, but one must do what is required. You move to where you can find a job and a home that work together. I did it. I moved to Florida. My brother did it. He moved to Texas, then Maryland, then Ohio. (again, thousands of kilometers) You do what is needed to provide for your family. If you can't afford the local area, based on available jobs and house prices, then you move. Often it is painful, but you must do it.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
vidarh 10y ago
To drag out that old Proudhon quote: "Property is theft". The basic idea is not that "everyone should be able to live everywhere", but that if you wall off a piece of land, given that land is a scarce resource, you are depriving others of access, and some considers that to be equivalent to depriving other of liberty. From that, even if you believe that property is necessary you may believe that efficiency of land use is an ethical issue where regulation to increase efficiency of use would be the ethical thing to do. One might also simply believe in a "lighter" version of this and believe that the ability to own your own dwelling should be right, and that high prices and scarcity created by large estates exist "at the expense" of others for that reason.
Futurebot 10y ago
Some of us believe living in a place, especially a place one was born/grew up, should be a right, not a privilege. Here's Polanyi (with comments from Brad Delong) on land: "Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution: Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful.... Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the process.... The inertia of the common law was now deliberately enhanced by statutes expressly passed in order to protect the habitations and occupations of the rural classes against the effects of freedom of contract. A comprehensive effort was launched to ensure some degree of health and salubrity in the housing of the poor, providing them with allotments, giving them a chance to escape from the slums and to breathe the fresh air of nature, the “gentleman’s park.” Wretched Irish tenants and London slum-dwellers were rescued from the grip of the laws of the market by legislative acts designed to protect their habitation against the juggernaut, improvement. On the Continent it was mainly statute law and administrative action that saved the tenant, the peasant, the agricultural laborer from the most violent effects of urbanization." http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march-23-2016.html http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march... Different values.
- bko 10y ago
  > "Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution: That's precisely why land should be left to the market. Because the alternative is not some egalitarian decision making with perfect information. The alternative is allocation of land through the political process, which has historically been used to encourage less than noble ideals like racial segregation and overuse of eminent domain.

by dimino 10y ago

nshelly 10y ago

Well, on a purely economic basis, many of those homeowners, including investment funds, are paying < 0.1% in property tax and sitting on properties that are worth millions in value. As an example, the homeowner of one property with a market value of $7M was paying 0.04% in tax.[1] Property taxes help pay for streets, police, ambulatory services, schools and maintaining parks. These essential services are paid for "at the expense of" renters and new homeowners. Of course, this deeply vested interest group also manifests itself in roadblocks for new developments that would mitigate the drastic increases in housing costs. [1] http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1536-Bryant-St-Palo-Alto-CA-94301/19497046_zpid/ http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1536-Bryant-St-Palo-Alto-C...

JustSomeNobody 10y ago
Oh. So it is somehow the homeowner's fault that the property values have increased around them?
- nshelly 10y ago
  Not their fault, but it is their gain. One of the other posts here mentions a few solutions that wouldn't force retirees or those on fixed incomes out of their newly valuable properties. The coastal areas of California are unique in the US in that vast discrepancies exist between market value and what long-time property owners pay. - Apply market-rate taxation only for values over a certain threshold, say $1m+ and non-owner occupied - Defer tax payments until the property changes hands (aka they sell the property or pass it on) - Reverse mortgages
  - JustSomeNobody 10y ago
    Ahhh... so basically make it financially impossible for that property to be handed down to their kids? Wow. We really have become a horrible society.
  - burfog 10y ago
    It's completely messed up that a change in regional average property value could cause a change in total tax revenue. This causes a city's tax income to vary wildly. Cities take on obligations (bonds, salary increases, pensions) in good times and then hit disaster in bad times. We fight this in a stupid way. We limit tax increases for a property, with a reset upon sale. This discourages people from moving closer to work, causing our roads to be clogged with commuters. The right way is to say that assessed home value relates to the total portion of the city budget that your taxes must support. Your tax bill then wouldn't change unless the city budget changes or the relative value of your property changes. Subjecting the total city budget to voter approval is OK. Basically the problem is millage rate. The dollar value of your property should not directly (by simple multiplication or division) translate into a tax amount. It should instead translate into a portion of the total. That is, it should represent your share.

Nullabillity 10y ago

It's the least efficient way to use the land. Which is fine if you have plenty of it, but if you've already got a shortage and too much spread... That said, the GP didn't say that owning the house was the problem, but rather the regulation that makes that the only legal choice.

dimino 10y ago
But my point is why must people live on that land? Why not go live on some other land nearby? What is the foundational belief backing the idea that everyone should be able to live everywhere?
- ricardobeat 10y ago
  Friends, places, social circles, kids in school... You can change all of that, but would you like to?
- URSpider94 10y ago
  My belief, and I believe the belief of many others, is that the people who work in your city should be able to live there. If all of your school teachers, fire fighters, and police, not to mention store clerks and janitors, can't afford to live in your town, then that's unsustainable in the long term. At the moment, it's likely that these folks are commuting 40, 50 or more miles into PA to work every day from the South or East.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - lgieron 10y ago
    > then that's unsustainable in the long term I agree that it sucks, but I'm not sure if it's unsustainable. There are plenty of worse situations in the world that pretty long-lasting.

TulliusCicero 10y ago

It's not their owning a home that's the problem. It's the overly strict zoning regulations and process that control whether someone else's land can be turned into more homes.

angry-hacker 10y ago

What if your family and close ones live there? Your children's friends etc. Moving is not that easy for families and when you're not young.

Hondor 10y ago
Your children will have grown up since the 90's dot com bubble when you would have first seen the writing on the wall. This didn't just happen overnight. It's been going on for a couple of decades.
- angry-hacker 10y ago
  I don't live in U.S but I assume you have families over there. Grandparents, cousins etc. It's healthy to be close to your family. If you're young and free, of course. Would you just separate your kids from their childhood friends, school etc? There are millions of reasons.
  - burfog 10y ago
    Yes. My parents did. They left the Bay Area when I was 9, never to return. They went to Texas, then Massachusetts. (thousands of kilometers) We left behind a large family on my mother's side and my dad's brother. I miss them, but one must do what is required. You move to where you can find a job and a home that work together. I did it. I moved to Florida. My brother did it. He moved to Texas, then Maryland, then Ohio. (again, thousands of kilometers) You do what is needed to provide for your family. If you can't afford the local area, based on available jobs and house prices, then you move. Often it is painful, but you must do it.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

vidarh 10y ago

To drag out that old Proudhon quote: "Property is theft". The basic idea is not that "everyone should be able to live everywhere", but that if you wall off a piece of land, given that land is a scarce resource, you are depriving others of access, and some considers that to be equivalent to depriving other of liberty. From that, even if you believe that property is necessary you may believe that efficiency of land use is an ethical issue where regulation to increase efficiency of use would be the ethical thing to do. One might also simply believe in a "lighter" version of this and believe that the ability to own your own dwelling should be right, and that high prices and scarcity created by large estates exist "at the expense" of others for that reason.

Futurebot 10y ago

Some of us believe living in a place, especially a place one was born/grew up, should be a right, not a privilege. Here's Polanyi (with comments from Brad Delong) on land: "Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution: Commercialization of the soil was only another name for the liquidation of feudalism which started in Western urban centers as well as in England in the fourteenth century and was concluded some five hundred years later in the course of the European revolutions, when the remnants of villeinage were abolished. To detach man from the soil meant the dissolution of the body economic into its elements so that each element could fit into that part of the system where it was most useful.... Some of this was achieved by individual force and violence, some by revolution from above or below, some by war and conquest, some by legislative action, some by administrative pressure, some by spontaneous small-scale action of private persons over long stretches of time. Whether the dislocation was swiftly healed or whether it caused an open wound in the body social depended primarily on the measures taken to regulate the process.... The inertia of the common law was now deliberately enhanced by statutes expressly passed in order to protect the habitations and occupations of the rural classes against the effects of freedom of contract. A comprehensive effort was launched to ensure some degree of health and salubrity in the housing of the poor, providing them with allotments, giving them a chance to escape from the slums and to breathe the fresh air of nature, the “gentleman’s park.” Wretched Irish tenants and London slum-dwellers were rescued from the grip of the laws of the market by legislative acts designed to protect their habitation against the juggernaut, improvement. On the Continent it was mainly statute law and administrative action that saved the tenant, the peasant, the agricultural laborer from the most violent effects of urbanization." http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march-23-2016.html http://www.bradford-delong.com/2016/05/highlighted-for-march... Different values.

bko 10y ago
> "Land could not, in Polanyi's view, be allowed to be the plaything of the self-regulating market for essentially sociological reasons: where people lived determined who they were, and a self-regulating market that told people they could no longer afford to live in the community where they thought they belonged would trigger such a strong sense of communal injustice to spark the chaos of revolution: That's precisely why land should be left to the market. Because the alternative is not some egalitarian decision making with perfect information. The alternative is allocation of land through the political process, which has historically been used to encourage less than noble ideals like racial segregation and overuse of eminent domain.