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> It's like they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bags full of hundred dollar bills over your fence and you are complaining about income tax. T

> It's like they are throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars in bags full of hundred dollar bills over your fence and you are complaining about income tax. They aren't throwing dollars over the fence, they're throwing debt over the fence. Sure, my property is on-paper worth more. If I cash that out, I just have to spend it all (every other house got more expensive by an equal amount, and I have to live somewhere). And the new person who buys it now has to cover all that extra debt directly in their mortgage, they get soaked too! Property values are not real wealth, it's not real money. It's fake. Coastal folks can treat it like it's real, because they can play markets against each other, they can depend on moving to some "low COL" area as their cash-out-to-real-money exit strategy. Those of us in low COL already (or who can't play markets, because they have to stay here for family/work reasons) don't have similar luck, the chain ends here, there's nowhere left to go. > Presumably if someone did something like build a crack house and halved the value of your property you wouldn't thank them for halving your tax bill! I would thank them, actually. Property should depreciate. It's the only way housing will ever get affordable for real humans again. I don't expect to get every dollar I paid for a house, back again. No one should. > locals have interests that are almost always out of alignment with the rest of society. Locals are the "rest of society". Locals don't all own property, half of our locals rent. Locals who own, still often have kids who need to buy houses, and they want them to be able to afford to live near them. The selfish behaviour seems to be coming entirely from developers or 'urbanists' who think if they just keep ignoring the ramifications of their actions, they can strongarm society into accepting forever-increasing housing costs. Why you paint "Locals" with that brush, when Locals carry every penny of those increased costs, I have no idea.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> Property values are not real wealth, it's not real money. I don’t know, having $100k+ more in equity than a couple years ago it acts like having an asset with real monetary value when I go to a bank looking for credit, having a big effect on both the amount of funds I have access to and the terms on which I can get them. It’s not liquid like cash, so there is more work to take advantage of it, but its definitely real.
michaelmrose 5y ago
The utility of your argument relies on it being something burdensome like a 200% increase but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary not only for the nation but for your area as well. If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room even after you paid off the capital gains especially when the first 250k single or 500k married couple is tax free. When you reduced the projected change in price to a more reasonable increase like 10% your argument about not being able to move to a lower col area becomes true because everything has gone up equally but it is hard to argue that the increase has greatly burdened your life to the point that people ought not be allowed to build on property they own. For example locally if assessed value went from 200k to 220k my taxes would increase 16 per month. 400-450k would net me a cool $41 per month. Looking at actually realistic figures makes it much harder to justify constraining housing supply which negatively effects all of society in order to optimize your tax bill.
- maxsilver 5y ago
  > but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary It's not, at least in the us. In the past nine years, my house went from a real-world value of ~$90k (2012), to now being worth ~$240k (2021), despite wages being mostly flat. This is not uncommon, most homes in this or any nearby city have posted somewhat similar gains (plus or minus 10%). This property specifically, recorded it's highest jump ($40k over a single year) in the year after they built luxury apartments in the lot directly behind it. And that's not a NYC / SF / Chicago / Seattle / Austin type hip place. It's just generic small-city Midwest nowheresville. A place with no restrictions on housing construction whatsoever, and has entire neighborhoods of new development in the past decade to prove it. > If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room You are not getting it. No, I literally can not do that. If my house went from 200k to 600k, then every other house has also gone up a similar amount. If I sell my house to cash out, my family is homeless, I don't have a "new living room". And if I want a "new living room" to live in, I have to give every single dollar of that 600k back, for some new property at similar high prices. It's not real money, it's debt that I happen to be holding in my hands in paper form, and the future occupant of my house is now on the hook for. Californians simply can not seem to wrap their head around this. They just assume the money is real, because "move to the south or the midwest" is always an option for them, so they can cash out and keep a bunch of it. Some of us already live in these places, and don't have a magic "high quality housing at cheaper-than-my-home-market rate" place to escape to. > justify constraining housing supply Literally no one is arguing to constrain housing supply. Blocking a shitty luxury development never constrains housing, it frees it to be used for real housing. Fighting against Poisoned Milk sales is not "justifying constraining milk supplies". Fighting against cost-raising developments for private equity firms is not in any way "justifying less housing". You can want more housing and not want everyone's rent to spike, these are not in conflict in any way.

dragonwriter 5y ago

> Property values are not real wealth, it's not real money. I don’t know, having $100k+ more in equity than a couple years ago it acts like having an asset with real monetary value when I go to a bank looking for credit, having a big effect on both the amount of funds I have access to and the terms on which I can get them. It’s not liquid like cash, so there is more work to take advantage of it, but its definitely real.

michaelmrose 5y ago

The utility of your argument relies on it being something burdensome like a 200% increase but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary not only for the nation but for your area as well. If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room even after you paid off the capital gains especially when the first 250k single or 500k married couple is tax free. When you reduced the projected change in price to a more reasonable increase like 10% your argument about not being able to move to a lower col area becomes true because everything has gone up equally but it is hard to argue that the increase has greatly burdened your life to the point that people ought not be allowed to build on property they own. For example locally if assessed value went from 200k to 220k my taxes would increase 16 per month. 400-450k would net me a cool $41 per month. Looking at actually realistic figures makes it much harder to justify constraining housing supply which negatively effects all of society in order to optimize your tax bill.

maxsilver 5y ago
> but in fact if your property went up by 200% for building a complex it would in fact be extraordinary It's not, at least in the us. In the past nine years, my house went from a real-world value of ~$90k (2012), to now being worth ~$240k (2021), despite wages being mostly flat. This is not uncommon, most homes in this or any nearby city have posted somewhat similar gains (plus or minus 10%). This property specifically, recorded it's highest jump ($40k over a single year) in the year after they built luxury apartments in the lot directly behind it. And that's not a NYC / SF / Chicago / Seattle / Austin type hip place. It's just generic small-city Midwest nowheresville. A place with no restrictions on housing construction whatsoever, and has entire neighborhoods of new development in the past decade to prove it. > If your 200k house for example went up to 600k you could in fact sell it and have a money fight with hundreds of thousands of dollars of real profit in your new living room You are not getting it. No, I literally can not do that. If my house went from 200k to 600k, then every other house has also gone up a similar amount. If I sell my house to cash out, my family is homeless, I don't have a "new living room". And if I want a "new living room" to live in, I have to give every single dollar of that 600k back, for some new property at similar high prices. It's not real money, it's debt that I happen to be holding in my hands in paper form, and the future occupant of my house is now on the hook for. Californians simply can not seem to wrap their head around this. They just assume the money is real, because "move to the south or the midwest" is always an option for them, so they can cash out and keep a bunch of it. Some of us already live in these places, and don't have a magic "high quality housing at cheaper-than-my-home-market rate" place to escape to. > justify constraining housing supply Literally no one is arguing to constrain housing supply. Blocking a shitty luxury development never constrains housing, it frees it to be used for real housing. Fighting against Poisoned Milk sales is not "justifying constraining milk supplies". Fighting against cost-raising developments for private equity firms is not in any way "justifying less housing". You can want more housing and not want everyone's rent to spike, these are not in conflict in any way.