5 ms·

You can't just demand more housing. You have to make people want it. This is why I'm strongly in favor of taxing land by area. A ten story condo with 100 units

• codingdave 8y ago
  That would significantly increase the taxes on agricultural use. Is that your intent? To incentivize high density residential, while making it hard to grow food?
  • jdietrich 8y ago
    America is one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural products. There is no shortage of agricultural land that could and should be used for housing development.
    • khuey 8y ago
      Developing additional agricultural land on a large scale is incompatible with the carbon intensity reductions necessary to avoid incinerating the planet.
  • YeahSureWhyNot 8y ago
    agricultural use means different zoning which will taxed differently.
  • rmah 8y ago
    There isn't much agricultural land, if any, in cities and suburbs. In the US, land is taxed at the local level (municipality and county), not at the state or federal level.
    • aetherson 8y ago
      There's a coordination problem with this, though -- how do you get all the different cities to all adopt this tax scheme, and if some don't, don't we just shift around density?
      • epistasis 8y ago
        Right now, California's property taxes are highly restricted by Prop 13, an anti-tax measure that, among other things that restrict the ability of the legislature to levy taxes, caps property tax basis at purchase price plus 2% increase per year, far far less than real estate appreciation, and often less than general inflation. So property tax is already controlled at the state level, and any change will require voters to enact it by proposition at the ballot box, statewide.
    • madengr 8y ago
      Not always. Here in KS side of Kansas City suburbs you will find crop fields between dense, multi-story developments. The agriculture land tax is applied throughout the state. The developers exploit this to pay vastly lower property taxes than if it were vacant land. One instance in particular, they’ll run a harvester right next to a 6 story development, and it probably only takes 10 minutes of run-time. Pretty crazy, but it’s a tax savings.
      • aswanson 8y ago
        KU seems to have an excellent emag staff, from your comments. Would you recommend sending a son there for EE (out of state)? Also, did you take any classes under Dr. John Schmalzel? I had a few classes with him and he went there.
        • madengr 8y ago
          Yes, if your son is interested in RF and RADAR/Remote Sensing, they have an excellent program. No, looks like he was there before me. I did an MSEE in ‘96, under Moore and Gogineni.
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Land tax is calculated based on local rents, not state-wide single numbers. LVT long time proposal is that most of the value in land rent is due to government spending and another activities positive externality.
• ykevinator 8y ago
  The services used are proportional to bodies inhabiting, at least to some extent. Sewage, roads for example.
  • mchannon 8y ago
    This is exactly wrong. Services used are inversely proportional to bodies inhabiting. In far-flung suburbia, you still need all those miles of roads and sewer pipes serving a relatively small number of people. One of the papers did an excellent heat map of the Bay Area and pinpointed where all the traffic congestion originates. The eastern periphery of San Jose was the worst.
  • mrfusion 8y ago
    I think your two examples are actually the opposite.
• sbzodnsbd 8y ago
  It is. In my city at least. And at the federal level for landlords as well. My local taxes depend on my land value + my house value. Larger land, (or more desirable) more taxes. In federal taxes, for a rental unit, you get a depreciation expense only on the value of the structure. Not on the land. So more valuable land vs. structure, less federal discount.
  • mabbo 8y ago
    > My local taxes depend on my land value + my house value Are they separate line items? Or combined? The difference matters. My condo is taxed based on the whole value of the unit- which is something like 1/2 of the cost of a house in the same neighbourhood, which means I'm taxed about 1/2 of what they are. But I use 1/100th the amount of land they use. Meanwhile, the cost to the city in terms of infrastructure (pipes, roads, drainage, etc) is much lower than the houses in the subdivision down the road. In effect, today's laws makes high-density-home owners subsidize the high cost of maintaining subdivisions by taxing on total value only. Switch it to 50% value and 50% land use, with explicit line items for each and you'll see more demand for high density housing.
    • analog31 8y ago
      In my locale, assessments are required to be based on market value. The market doesn't assign a separate value to the house and the land.
      • sbzodnsbd 8y ago
        No but the assessor can - and in every place I’ve owned property, does - give you a breakdown. Heck, the breakdown is required information in your federal taxes if you want the depreciation expense. And for all of us who don’t live in crazy-land CA, we have to get assessed since my purchase price (I.e. market value) ten years ago is meaningless today.
    • conanbatt 8y ago
      Without getting into the numbers, this is the right approach: Some people argue Property taxes vs Land Value taxes thinking it is roughly the same, and that althought it might change tax structure it wouldnt change rent prices. But thats true if you look at it statically: dynamically, you make poeple in single family homes want to abandon them and sell them to developers, so you naturally turn an enemy (nimby) into an ally (sell for developers).
• reitzensteinm 8y ago
  It may be interesting to make land taxes progressive, rising exponentially based on the value of the land divided by the number of occupants. Three adults sharing a flat would pay next to nothing, but not even Bill Gates could afford to make an inner city skyscraper his home.
  • conanbatt 8y ago
    Chill. If you want to go overboard just advocate for nationalizing all land.
  • walshemj 8y ago
    And is that 100% a good thing slum landlords will abuse this to avoid paying taxes.
• andrewmutz 8y ago
  People already want it and developers would build it. But, at least in California, the problem is that local zoning laws make building it illegal.
  • robertAngst 8y ago
    Can someone explain how/why California has failed government policy? And why more government involvement in sectors would be a good thing? I understand the benefits of central planning, but when I see it fail locally, I wonder if the flaws outweigh benefits.
    • njudah 8y ago
      TLDR: The government is deeply involved in housing and development, as the government controls what can be built and where. This is an effort to loosen government controls by limiting local governments ability to restrict housing development near transit hubs. Specifically, the state government is attempting to restrict local governments' ability to create limits on housing density in certain areas.
      • robertAngst 8y ago
        This is quite an interesting take, your state government is fighting local governments? This is truly another dimension of the More/Less government dichotomy they teach you in school. Btw, it seems the local governments are quite Anti growth? Am I understanding that correctly?
        • mixmastamyk 8y ago
          Yes, and not just in CA.
        • Gh0stRAT 8y ago
          Correct. The city council is elected by residents of the city, and land owners have a strong financial incentive to elect representatives who will limit housing. (The shortage drives-up their property values) You might think that renters living in the city would eventually outweigh the landowners and elect council members in favor of new housing, but instead SF passed a rent control measure which prevents the current renters from feeling the sting of the housing shortage so they aren't strongly incentivized to vote for more housing either.
• Eridrus 8y ago
  Land taxes are a great idea, but they are even less popular than zoning changes. Almost every housing law has carveouts for small buildings/landlords with few apartments since they are politically powerful and relatively sympathetic. Advocating for land taxes rather than zoning changes is wishful thinking
• conanbatt 8y ago
  LVT for the win. It's been proposed first in california in 1890, as a solution to homelessness and poverty. So Im not feeling confident that will happen.
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• gersh 8y ago
  There is already land tax, but with proposition 13 people lock in low tax rates. So, if you've owned a home for a long time, you are gonna pay a lot lower taxes than someone, who recently bought a condo on land with the same value.
  • khuey 8y ago
    A land tax is different from a property tax. A land tax taxes only the unimproved land. A property tax taxes the improvements as well. With a land tax two adjacent properties of equal size would be taxed the same, even if one is an eight story apartment building and the other is a parking lot. This strongly incentivizes improving the land to its highest and best use. Under a traditional property tax system erecting that building results in a large increase in property tax (as the value of the structure is now taxed) which dampens the motivation to build. Under California's prop 13, the parking lot probably has a tax valuation from decades ago and thus is taxed even less, further reducing the benefits to redeveloping the property.
    • gersh 8y ago
      The land tax along with the house. Perhaps, you believe the land should be taxed more highly and the house should be taxed less. When permitting is tough, the fact that you got the permits to build the house should increase the value of the land. While the structure may be taxed, it also can generate revenue. If land value is a high percentage of the value, property tax should have similar incentives.