4 ms·

Land value (like all value) is subjective. There is no inherent value to land. What one person is willing to pay is not the same for everyone. Appointing someon

Land value (like all value) is subjective. There is no inherent value to land. What one person is willing to pay is not the same for everyone. Appointing someone to imagine a price for the purposes of taxation doesn't change this fact.

LVTfan 6y ago
Every teardown provides a clear picture of the land value for that neighborhood: the transaction price plus the cost of clearing off the old building. The similar sized lot next door is worth just as much. And the value of whatever improvement is on it is the difference between what the building-plus-land is currently worth, and the value of the land -- pretty much the depreciated value of the existing improvements. Map these values, and you have a pretty good tool for good land assessments. And for lots a wider or narrower, or deeper or shallower, there have been very usable tables for over 100 years. NYC was doing this in the first decade of the 20th century. A tax on land values asks us to pay to exclude others from our site. In the middle of nowhere, that price can be $0. On valuable sites, it can be quite high. Today, a lot of city land is leased, and the tenant pays the landlord for the use of the land. The higgling of the market sets the price. There is a lot of revenue potential there, and collecting it for public purposes doesn't take from anyone something he created. And that can't be said for sales taxes, or wage taxes, or taxes on buildings.
snidane 6y ago
Property taxes are bad because they punish labor and effort. Land tax (important to distinguish) doesn't inhibit labor and effort. On the contrary cities implementing land taxes see increase in output because land gets better allocated to who need it. Simply because people sitting on vacant and absent land in the middle od cities drop it and sell it somebody else. Land is not subjective but perfectly objective. It is a necessary input to all production - whether it is agricultural (obvious) or manufacturing (your factory has to be placed somewhere) or services (you need access to concentrated area for qualified workers in big cities). You can't even survive without standing on land. 100% of people need land to survive so how can it be subjective? It might be subjective to birds.
_0ffh 6y ago
Yup, tax sounds problematic. Another way would be to declare all land common property and rent any piece of it out to the highest bidder. The market solves the problem of pegging it to a value.
moreaccountsplz 6y ago
There are ways to address value being subjective: use an incentive compatible revelation mechanism. E.g. http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/ http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/ where the property-owner appraises his own property, pays a fraction of his given value as a tax, and anyone can buy his property at the appraised price. Whether it would be /accepted/ is another matter. But it's not impossible in the squaring-the-circle sense.
pydry 6y ago
>In my opinion property taxes are terrible because they aren’t in the owners control at all. There’s no way to know what your tax bill will be next year and no way to control for it. So it's no different to rent in this respect. It IS effectively rent, it just spreads the unpredictability of renting across the whole society instead of concentrating the negative downside among one portion of society. Unimproved land is pretty fungible. If you have two empty lots across the road or even in the same area they will usually end up costing about the same.

LVTfan 6y ago

Every teardown provides a clear picture of the land value for that neighborhood: the transaction price plus the cost of clearing off the old building. The similar sized lot next door is worth just as much. And the value of whatever improvement is on it is the difference between what the building-plus-land is currently worth, and the value of the land -- pretty much the depreciated value of the existing improvements. Map these values, and you have a pretty good tool for good land assessments. And for lots a wider or narrower, or deeper or shallower, there have been very usable tables for over 100 years. NYC was doing this in the first decade of the 20th century. A tax on land values asks us to pay to exclude others from our site. In the middle of nowhere, that price can be $0. On valuable sites, it can be quite high. Today, a lot of city land is leased, and the tenant pays the landlord for the use of the land. The higgling of the market sets the price. There is a lot of revenue potential there, and collecting it for public purposes doesn't take from anyone something he created. And that can't be said for sales taxes, or wage taxes, or taxes on buildings.

snidane 6y ago

Property taxes are bad because they punish labor and effort. Land tax (important to distinguish) doesn't inhibit labor and effort. On the contrary cities implementing land taxes see increase in output because land gets better allocated to who need it. Simply because people sitting on vacant and absent land in the middle od cities drop it and sell it somebody else. Land is not subjective but perfectly objective. It is a necessary input to all production - whether it is agricultural (obvious) or manufacturing (your factory has to be placed somewhere) or services (you need access to concentrated area for qualified workers in big cities). You can't even survive without standing on land. 100% of people need land to survive so how can it be subjective? It might be subjective to birds.

_0ffh 6y ago

Yup, tax sounds problematic. Another way would be to declare all land common property and rent any piece of it out to the highest bidder. The market solves the problem of pegging it to a value.

moreaccountsplz 6y ago

There are ways to address value being subjective: use an incentive compatible revelation mechanism. E.g. http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/ http://radicalmarkets.com/chapters/property-is-monopoly/ where the property-owner appraises his own property, pays a fraction of his given value as a tax, and anyone can buy his property at the appraised price. Whether it would be /accepted/ is another matter. But it's not impossible in the squaring-the-circle sense.

pydry 6y ago

>In my opinion property taxes are terrible because they aren’t in the owners control at all. There’s no way to know what your tax bill will be next year and no way to control for it. So it's no different to rent in this respect. It IS effectively rent, it just spreads the unpredictability of renting across the whole society instead of concentrating the negative downside among one portion of society. Unimproved land is pretty fungible. If you have two empty lots across the road or even in the same area they will usually end up costing about the same.