4 ms·

Big fan of land value taxes. They apply pressure to make the best use of the land rather than sitting on it. However, I'm not sure it will help cities like Ba

Big fan of land value taxes. They apply pressure to make the best use of the land rather than sitting on it. However, I'm not sure it will help cities like Baltimore, where they were unable to turn things around even by giving away houses for $1 and no taxes for a few years. In a city, you're more dependent on the government to take care of things, and in most US cities, with single party control, it does not happen. They don't take care of crime. They let infrastructure decay. The schools are crap (despite high per-pupil spending). They make crony deals with the unions on pensions and benefits that are not possible to fund. Not feeling safe and with a bleak future for their kids, people move out. I've seen this happen over and over again with coworkers who initially were big on city living, but eventually moved out when they got mugged or had kids. The result is insane taxes as population leaves, and subsidies from the surrounding areas to try to keep the failed city afloat. The high taxes and obvious government incompetence then act as a moat to keep people out.

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>They don't take care of crime. They let infrastructure decay. The schools are crap (despite high per-pupil spending). They make crony deals with the unions on pensions and benefits that are not possible to fund. To expand on this point, why would there be any institutional will to take more than a token effort to do any of those things? It's not like they risk getting voted out by someone who isn't on the same side and will leave the root system of the party's power to control government mostly intact (doing the opposite would anger enough people to not be in the self interest of anyone who gets elected). Even if you keep voting in different politicians who actually want to do anything you're never actually getting a major refresh until you get someone from a different party who aggressively appoints a different set of cronies.
maxsilver 8y ago
> Big fan of land value taxes. They apply pressure to make the best use of the land rather than sitting on it. I like that Land Value Taxes hurt anyone hoarding land to ride the rising assessments (which is a major problem today). But I don't like that LVT punishes people for productively using land. Land Value Taxes apply pressure to make the highest capital return on every piece of land, which is not the same thing as the best use of the land, and would hurt many good uses of land that are not profitable. > In a city, you're more dependent on the government to take care of things, and in most US cities, with single party control, it does not happen. Yep. And what's worse, most cities intentionally want to make all of these things worse. Cities are often intentionally destroying their infrastructure (tearing down useful-but-unloved infrastructure for useless-but-pretty replacements) and intentionally destroying their affordable housing (purposefully gentrifying areas of their cities, to drive out residents deemed undesirable) The cycle of driving people out of the city by attacking housing/transportation/services is not an accident, it's not happenstance. This is an intentional design goal baked into how they frame every problem and how they approach every change. It's not something anyone will admit to upfront, but if you travel through Urbanist circles long enough, you can get into the behind-doors conversations they have and see this in action. > I've seen this happen over and over again with coworkers who initially were big on city living, but eventually moved out when they got mugged or had kids. Yep. And if you escape the crime or the school problem, they'll hit you on housing or transportation instead. There's no escaping the never-ending list of problems forced upon residents. Suburbs are the place for affordable housing. Suburbs are for functional schools. Suburbs are for sustainable living. Suburbs are for decent infrastructure. Suburbs are for diversity, especially on the low-income/working-class side of things. Suburbs are the place you begin your startup in a garage, because Suburbs are the only place cheap enough that a regular person could have a garage at all. Cities aren't for people. Cities are for the conglomeration of capital, and capital alone. Humans need not apply.
- clairity 8y ago
  > "Land Value Taxes apply pressure to make the highest capital return on every piece of land, which is not the same thing as the best use of the land, and would hurt many good uses of land that are not profitable." (highest and) best use [0] is generally understood as maximizing economic return, so you're essentially arguing semantics here. with that said, i agree with the underlying sentiment that it's not the only "return" we should consider. maximizing economic return fails to capture the richness of the human experience in often obvious but not easily quantifiable ways, which is why we let economists get away with such unrealistic models. but your position on suburbs (vs. urbs) is baffling (and idealistic). suburbs externalize their costs to achieve that cheap living. implementing an LVT would (presumably) take that advantage away. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use
logfromblammo 8y ago
They weren't "giving houses away for $1". They were requiring people to assume the liabilities related to code and zoning compliance, along with a remediation schedule, in order to take ownership. And those expenses couldn't be paid by a mortgage loan; the city had to issue its own loans. Typical monthly payment was $300/month, and they had a low default rate, so it was still a decent deal. But it wasn't just $1. House flipping is a career for some people. Every last one of them look at probable resale value after remodel in comparison to expenses required to reach marketable condition. No flipper would do $100k of work on a house when the neighboring properties simply don't sell at any price, and tend to remain vacant after foreclosure. And that's the "location" factor talking. I don't know if it's the first, second, or third "location" in the list, but if a city culture or city government sucks, people and businesses don't want to move there. I have seen it in every city I have lived in. The local government takes ever-increasing amounts of your money, and digs entirely separate holes to throw that money into, rather than any of the naturally-forming potholes on every street that isn't part of some councilman's route to city hall. The governance that worked with steadily increasing population doesn't work with stagnant or decreasing population. At some point, a declining city needs to de-annex some of its former territory and prune its own deadwood. And it needs to fire its municipal employees that are not absolutely essential to keeping the city infrastructure running. Some shut down their city police and fire departments, reverting to sheriff's deputies and volunteer firefighters, who may even operate out of the same buildings. But the problem is the politics. Admitting the city is insolvent and promising to cut some services to save the rest doesn't get you re-elected when your opponent simply denies the problem exists and lies about the city's condition to make people feel better about still living in it.
- dev_dull 8y ago
  > And it needs to fire its municipal employees that are not absolutely essential to keeping the city infrastructure running. There is nothing more challenging than firing incompetent city employees. And if they can lodge a discrimination claim against you (regardless of whether it has ANY merit) then just forget about it. Promote them up and out. What a cesspool.
dbcurtis 8y ago
> Big fan of land value taxes. Pardon the negative knee-jerk reaction, but I have seen land value taxes used abusively and in the most coercive manner you can imagine. It still makes my blood boil. Back when I lived in Minnesota, the metro area interests were rezoning farm land as residential, and then taxing it at residential property rates, even though it was still used for corn fields and pasture. This was utterly destroying family farms. Now before you accuse me of NIMBY-ism leading to housing shortages.... this was to create new ex-urban housing areas with 2.5 to 5 acre minimum lot laws. There was no shortage of places to build houses. Houses for sale sat on the market for months. This was driven by politicians and developers in cahoots to shove aside people that were in their way, and coerce them to disgorge their property and give up their lively-hood through unjustified perversion of the tax code. Using the tax code to rob people of their property rights is not the answer. If you want to live in a kleptocracy, there are several you can move to. Maybe you will be one of the lucky ones and the state won't rob you.
sansnomme 8y ago
That won't always help. Look at Bay Area. Best value and economic return would be investment banks and tech companies. And then people would start complaining of even more gentrification. The metric governments should be aiming for is making cities MORE affordable than e.g. suburbs. Cities can offer a higher quality of life (in the sense of easy access to food and transportation) due to higher productivity and scale. Home ownership should be priority and subsized (apartments aren't that expensive to build at scale if you are willing to go prefab and pull in workers from Mexico.) Also, aesthetics complaints need to be disregarded. Most cities would end up looking like Seattle and New York anyways, complaining about tall buildings is just short sighted. Trying to have both economic benefits of a dense population and a "pretty" (i.e. rustic-looking small town hippie style architecture) is just not feasible on a large scale. Sure you can have a few pockets here and there but making it the central tenet of your urban planning will just cause more homelessness. You can't both have your cake and eat it too.
nwah1 8y ago
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania adopted a split-rate property tax system which penalized land more heavily than improvements. They saw improvements across the board, including in terms of crime rates, the rates of fire, etc. https://blogs.ubc.ca/rosonluo/2013/04/08/land-value-tax-policy-in-harrisburg-pa-u-s-densification-policy/ https://blogs.ubc.ca/rosonluo/2013/04/08/land-value-tax-poli...

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

>They don't take care of crime. They let infrastructure decay. The schools are crap (despite high per-pupil spending). They make crony deals with the unions on pensions and benefits that are not possible to fund. To expand on this point, why would there be any institutional will to take more than a token effort to do any of those things? It's not like they risk getting voted out by someone who isn't on the same side and will leave the root system of the party's power to control government mostly intact (doing the opposite would anger enough people to not be in the self interest of anyone who gets elected). Even if you keep voting in different politicians who actually want to do anything you're never actually getting a major refresh until you get someone from a different party who aggressively appoints a different set of cronies.

maxsilver 8y ago

> Big fan of land value taxes. They apply pressure to make the best use of the land rather than sitting on it. I like that Land Value Taxes hurt anyone hoarding land to ride the rising assessments (which is a major problem today). But I don't like that LVT punishes people for productively using land. Land Value Taxes apply pressure to make the highest capital return on every piece of land, which is not the same thing as the best use of the land, and would hurt many good uses of land that are not profitable. > In a city, you're more dependent on the government to take care of things, and in most US cities, with single party control, it does not happen. Yep. And what's worse, most cities intentionally want to make all of these things worse. Cities are often intentionally destroying their infrastructure (tearing down useful-but-unloved infrastructure for useless-but-pretty replacements) and intentionally destroying their affordable housing (purposefully gentrifying areas of their cities, to drive out residents deemed undesirable) The cycle of driving people out of the city by attacking housing/transportation/services is not an accident, it's not happenstance. This is an intentional design goal baked into how they frame every problem and how they approach every change. It's not something anyone will admit to upfront, but if you travel through Urbanist circles long enough, you can get into the behind-doors conversations they have and see this in action. > I've seen this happen over and over again with coworkers who initially were big on city living, but eventually moved out when they got mugged or had kids. Yep. And if you escape the crime or the school problem, they'll hit you on housing or transportation instead. There's no escaping the never-ending list of problems forced upon residents. Suburbs are the place for affordable housing. Suburbs are for functional schools. Suburbs are for sustainable living. Suburbs are for decent infrastructure. Suburbs are for diversity, especially on the low-income/working-class side of things. Suburbs are the place you begin your startup in a garage, because Suburbs are the only place cheap enough that a regular person could have a garage at all. Cities aren't for people. Cities are for the conglomeration of capital, and capital alone. Humans need not apply.

clairity 8y ago
> "Land Value Taxes apply pressure to make the highest capital return on every piece of land, which is not the same thing as the best use of the land, and would hurt many good uses of land that are not profitable." (highest and) best use [0] is generally understood as maximizing economic return, so you're essentially arguing semantics here. with that said, i agree with the underlying sentiment that it's not the only "return" we should consider. maximizing economic return fails to capture the richness of the human experience in often obvious but not easily quantifiable ways, which is why we let economists get away with such unrealistic models. but your position on suburbs (vs. urbs) is baffling (and idealistic). suburbs externalize their costs to achieve that cheap living. implementing an LVT would (presumably) take that advantage away. [0] https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Highest_and_best_use

logfromblammo 8y ago

They weren't "giving houses away for $1". They were requiring people to assume the liabilities related to code and zoning compliance, along with a remediation schedule, in order to take ownership. And those expenses couldn't be paid by a mortgage loan; the city had to issue its own loans. Typical monthly payment was $300/month, and they had a low default rate, so it was still a decent deal. But it wasn't just $1. House flipping is a career for some people. Every last one of them look at probable resale value after remodel in comparison to expenses required to reach marketable condition. No flipper would do $100k of work on a house when the neighboring properties simply don't sell at any price, and tend to remain vacant after foreclosure. And that's the "location" factor talking. I don't know if it's the first, second, or third "location" in the list, but if a city culture or city government sucks, people and businesses don't want to move there. I have seen it in every city I have lived in. The local government takes ever-increasing amounts of your money, and digs entirely separate holes to throw that money into, rather than any of the naturally-forming potholes on every street that isn't part of some councilman's route to city hall. The governance that worked with steadily increasing population doesn't work with stagnant or decreasing population. At some point, a declining city needs to de-annex some of its former territory and prune its own deadwood. And it needs to fire its municipal employees that are not absolutely essential to keeping the city infrastructure running. Some shut down their city police and fire departments, reverting to sheriff's deputies and volunteer firefighters, who may even operate out of the same buildings. But the problem is the politics. Admitting the city is insolvent and promising to cut some services to save the rest doesn't get you re-elected when your opponent simply denies the problem exists and lies about the city's condition to make people feel better about still living in it.

dev_dull 8y ago
> And it needs to fire its municipal employees that are not absolutely essential to keeping the city infrastructure running. There is nothing more challenging than firing incompetent city employees. And if they can lodge a discrimination claim against you (regardless of whether it has ANY merit) then just forget about it. Promote them up and out. What a cesspool.

dbcurtis 8y ago

> Big fan of land value taxes. Pardon the negative knee-jerk reaction, but I have seen land value taxes used abusively and in the most coercive manner you can imagine. It still makes my blood boil. Back when I lived in Minnesota, the metro area interests were rezoning farm land as residential, and then taxing it at residential property rates, even though it was still used for corn fields and pasture. This was utterly destroying family farms. Now before you accuse me of NIMBY-ism leading to housing shortages.... this was to create new ex-urban housing areas with 2.5 to 5 acre minimum lot laws. There was no shortage of places to build houses. Houses for sale sat on the market for months. This was driven by politicians and developers in cahoots to shove aside people that were in their way, and coerce them to disgorge their property and give up their lively-hood through unjustified perversion of the tax code. Using the tax code to rob people of their property rights is not the answer. If you want to live in a kleptocracy, there are several you can move to. Maybe you will be one of the lucky ones and the state won't rob you.

sansnomme 8y ago

That won't always help. Look at Bay Area. Best value and economic return would be investment banks and tech companies. And then people would start complaining of even more gentrification. The metric governments should be aiming for is making cities MORE affordable than e.g. suburbs. Cities can offer a higher quality of life (in the sense of easy access to food and transportation) due to higher productivity and scale. Home ownership should be priority and subsized (apartments aren't that expensive to build at scale if you are willing to go prefab and pull in workers from Mexico.) Also, aesthetics complaints need to be disregarded. Most cities would end up looking like Seattle and New York anyways, complaining about tall buildings is just short sighted. Trying to have both economic benefits of a dense population and a "pretty" (i.e. rustic-looking small town hippie style architecture) is just not feasible on a large scale. Sure you can have a few pockets here and there but making it the central tenet of your urban planning will just cause more homelessness. You can't both have your cake and eat it too.

nwah1 8y ago

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania adopted a split-rate property tax system which penalized land more heavily than improvements. They saw improvements across the board, including in terms of crime rates, the rates of fire, etc. https://blogs.ubc.ca/rosonluo/2013/04/08/land-value-tax-policy-in-harrisburg-pa-u-s-densification-policy/ https://blogs.ubc.ca/rosonluo/2013/04/08/land-value-tax-poli...