4 ms·

> We don't have property tax in the UK. Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist. > I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it we

> We don't have property tax in the UK. Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist. > I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it were instituted at anything other than a token rate I'd leave. Depends on what a 'token rate' is. Cities I've lived in have set it at around 1 percent a year, and is used to fund the emergency services, schools, roads and parks in the area. In most places in the US, that's a $1-2k annual expense. Houses around here, largely built in the 1950's, sell for around $1.4 million, and thus taxes would be around 15k a year. Complaining that you can't afford taxes on a million dollar home is perhaps the epitome of First World Problems. Moreover, higher taxation is simply one effect of high rents. Labor here is expensive; fast food joints here aggressively advertise help wanted signs at 15 dollars an hour. I can only imagine what in-home health care costs, and there's a neverending stream of interviews with public service workers who cannot afford to live near the communities they serve. However, there is a second order effect -- if a fraction of the people who felt better off in Sacramento or anywhere else in the 1k tax regions moved out, prices in SF would fall. And if owners were more directly impacted by refusals to build high density housing, they'd probably be more in favor of new construction on average. > The idea that, say, my grandmother should just get kicked out of her hometown that she's lived in forever, that she bloody _built_, because a bunch of kids decided they like her city is completely absurd. Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy.

esotericn 8y ago
> Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist. There's a post further down in which it's explained how CT is nothing like a property tax. It's levied on the occupier not the owner and it's not percentage based. It's ostensibly for services rendered e.g. bins taken out, roads etc. Your home and all the homes in your town could quadruple in externally assessed value and the absolute amount paid would remain static because it's formulated in such a way that it's paid based on relative home value within an area (rather than absolute). > Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy. I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here. My grandmother is not wealthy. Neither is my mother. Neither would they become wealthy if the town around them suddenly turned into an SF/London. The external valuation of their home that they live in would increase which is a completely different matter entirely. It's an injection of financialization into a situation where none exists. I won't be dragged in to that game, sorry.
- simpss 8y ago
  > I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here. I think it's just a misunderstanding. You're talking about a situation where your grandmother owns the place and he/she is talking about a situation where your grandmother rents the place.
  - jldugger 8y ago
    Na, the inflation index has a thing called 'rent or rent equivalent' for a reason. The parallel I'm drawing here is between rent control and prop 13, which runs along comparable lines, ie: evicting grandma because she can't afford ( rent | afford property taxes ) because $demographic wants to live nearby is an affront to people's rights to be secure in their home and life. The rhetoric is the same, just with more bootstrapping.
    - esotericn 8y ago
      Ownership is distinct from renting. It sounds like some US cities have a situation more like shared ownership, in which you can't actually own a home because there's no way to pay (or set aside) the full future stream of property taxes. It seems bonkers to me because it would make settling down completely impossible, hence my comments about moving away to somewhere where homeownership exists. In the place I already live (UK) we don't have that, so I'm not calling for any change. In any case it seems that me (and people like me) moving out in this hypothetical situation of ownership being converted retroactively into rental gives you what you want anyway.
- closeparen 8y ago
  No. The external valuation of your house is wealth. A long-tenured homeowner in an expensive area is a millionaire and has the social obligations of any other kind of millionaire. More, even, since their wealth comes from squatting on assets rather than labor or productive investment. We wouldn’t humor a stock market investor in denial about his wealth; we shouldn’t humor a real estate investor. The preferential treatment of housing as an asset class is a big part of why it’s so inflated in the first place! If someone doesn’t want to be accountable for their house’s appreciation, they can give up the right to benefit from it at sale. Capital gains and deferred property taxes coming due at sale is probably the fairest proposal - doesn’t force anyone out, doesn’t let them free ride either.

esotericn 8y ago

> Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist. There's a post further down in which it's explained how CT is nothing like a property tax. It's levied on the occupier not the owner and it's not percentage based. It's ostensibly for services rendered e.g. bins taken out, roads etc. Your home and all the homes in your town could quadruple in externally assessed value and the absolute amount paid would remain static because it's formulated in such a way that it's paid based on relative home value within an area (rather than absolute). > Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy. I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here. My grandmother is not wealthy. Neither is my mother. Neither would they become wealthy if the town around them suddenly turned into an SF/London. The external valuation of their home that they live in would increase which is a completely different matter entirely. It's an injection of financialization into a situation where none exists. I won't be dragged in to that game, sorry.

simpss 8y ago
> I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here. I think it's just a misunderstanding. You're talking about a situation where your grandmother owns the place and he/she is talking about a situation where your grandmother rents the place.
- jldugger 8y ago
  Na, the inflation index has a thing called 'rent or rent equivalent' for a reason. The parallel I'm drawing here is between rent control and prop 13, which runs along comparable lines, ie: evicting grandma because she can't afford ( rent | afford property taxes ) because $demographic wants to live nearby is an affront to people's rights to be secure in their home and life. The rhetoric is the same, just with more bootstrapping.
  - esotericn 8y ago
    Ownership is distinct from renting. It sounds like some US cities have a situation more like shared ownership, in which you can't actually own a home because there's no way to pay (or set aside) the full future stream of property taxes. It seems bonkers to me because it would make settling down completely impossible, hence my comments about moving away to somewhere where homeownership exists. In the place I already live (UK) we don't have that, so I'm not calling for any change. In any case it seems that me (and people like me) moving out in this hypothetical situation of ownership being converted retroactively into rental gives you what you want anyway.
closeparen 8y ago
No. The external valuation of your house is wealth. A long-tenured homeowner in an expensive area is a millionaire and has the social obligations of any other kind of millionaire. More, even, since their wealth comes from squatting on assets rather than labor or productive investment. We wouldn’t humor a stock market investor in denial about his wealth; we shouldn’t humor a real estate investor. The preferential treatment of housing as an asset class is a big part of why it’s so inflated in the first place! If someone doesn’t want to be accountable for their house’s appreciation, they can give up the right to benefit from it at sale. Capital gains and deferred property taxes coming due at sale is probably the fairest proposal - doesn’t force anyone out, doesn’t let them free ride either.