4 ms·

This doesn’t make sense. You’re saying that adding a cost (taxes) makes the total cost lower. The opposite is true. If you live in California and rent, there is

• paconbork 5y ago
  This is only the case if you assume that nobody will change their behavior as a result of tax increases. If you're increasing the tax on structures, sure, there's no reason to expect that these costs won't be passed onto renters. When you tax land however, something different happens: underdeveloped land becomes a bad investment. If the taxes are the same on a single family house and a small apartment building, you're losing out on a sizable amount of money by not building the apartments (and the folks hodling vacant land are really losing out). So essentially the idea is that land taxes encourage landowners to extract as much value as they can from the land (and punish those who don't). In the Bay Area this most likely means building more housing, increasing competition, and driving down rents. Of course, this is assuming that housing is legal to build in the Bay area, so this is most likely unrealistic