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You can solve this with an age-based property tax abatement. I’d personally aim to make it an abatement for the equivalent of a 1BR condo, though - 85 year olds
by ericd 7y ago
You can solve this with an age-based property tax abatement. I’d personally aim to make it an abatement for the equivalent of a 1BR condo, though - 85 year olds really don’t need large houses with a bunch of stairs, whereas young families do, and often can’t find much supply on the market in cities, which drives up prices. If an old person wants to live alone in a huge house, I think it’s ok to tax them on that.
- gedy 7y agoGeez... it's their home, not some public utility. Let them be.
- ericd 7y agoI mean, I'm not completely unsympathetic, but we charge property tax partly to make sure land is being used well, and not just being sat on while it appreciates. When people live in low density housing in the midst of cities, that has a very real cost to everyone else in that city. The housing crisis is partly a result of this phenomenon, and that hurts a huge number of people.
- AdrianB1 7y ago"I'm not completely unsympathetic, but" You are completely unsympathetic. There is no excuse to force someone to "use their land well". Their land, their choice, not yours. Cities can expand, not get stuck in every piece of already build land. Get the city larger, build tall block of flats, check the Chinese new city monstrosities for the results. Like this: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/A0CG0G/apartment-block-chongqing-china-A0CG0G.jpg https://c8.alamy.com/comp/A0CG0G/apartment-block-chongqing-c...
- EliRivers 7y agoLook at the windows on some of those. Wow. Everything else aside, I would love to have windows like that.
- ericd 7y agoI don't understand your last paragraph, but clearly society generally doesn't agree with you that "their land, their choice". Maybe in your country it's different, but in most cities in the US there are a huge number of restrictions on what you can do with your land. I think too many, in some ways. If you want to have complete freedom over your land, you generally can't live inside a city, because people inside a city are much more interdependent, and what you do can very easily impact others. In the countryside, you have much more freedom to do what you want with it.
- AdrianB1 7y agoSee the picture, it shows how you can make "more efficient use" of land by building tall, high density apartment buildings that will bring more people and traffic and pollution in the cities. When I built my house it was 1 km (0.7 miles) outside of the city, that was the distance to the closest building. Now, just 12 years later, it is 1.5 km inside. Not my choice, not my doing, not my fault: why should I be put all the restrictions and the taxes when the city expanded (in a really ugly way, btw) chaotically and engulfed everything around it?
- Can_Not 7y agoWouldn't a better solution be to exempt a person's current residence up to X value?
- jogjayr 7y agoThe challenge is in the details. Who determines X, and how? Is X fixed or does it increase over time? If yes, is it indexed to inflation? In what way? CPI, local housing market, something else? Capping property taxes is the same as rent control. It has the same challenges in its implementation, and the same downsides and costs.
- achenatx 7y agoIn austin, property taxes are "capped" but they keep accruing+ interest. They are taken out of the estate when the owner passes.
- caseysoftware 7y agoCapped in what way? My escrow goes up every year as City Council consistently increases rates to the legal maximum.
- refurb 7y agoOr even better, which Texas already does, is just defer taxes until the home is sold. If your house has gone from $200,000 to 700,000, having to pay $150k in deferred property taxes doesn’t seem over onerous.