2 ms·

The big one is probably getting individuals to vote to tax themselves out of ownership of property they can't afford to improve

• eternityforest 4y ago
  Why can't it just be a progressive tax that starts at 0% for the bottom 70% of lot size in your area?
  • asdff 4y ago
    I'm not sure how well that would work or not, but in cities with a housing crisis, the issue is not really people having acreage, but that they have a single family home or some other low usage building on the land at all in a place where there is demand for a lot more housing than what there is.
  • adastra22 4y ago
    It's all still too low. LVT should be 85% of the assessed value of the unimproved land, as a flat tax with no brackets and no controls.
    • eternityforest 4y ago
      Wouldn't that be a bit of an issue for low income people, to make it flat?
      • adastra22 4y ago
        The core underlying problem is that economic rents are extremely distorting. It is at the root of why we end up with hideous suburban sprawl with no affordable housing, and no walkable downtowns that nobody wants to live in. Taxing land value flips the incentives around and makes it more likely that we get nice, walkable, affordable cities. Because the ideal cost-minimizing strategy is to have clusters of nice high density housing near public transit and mixed-use urban markets, which is largely what people want. But not if you offer exemptions. If you offer exemptions the winning strategy is to build tons of spread out, cramped, single- or two-story residences with most of their land value exempted. But how will people pay their land value tax? Well for the most part, low income people will pay it the same way they currently do: rent. It's the landlord that pays the tax. (And preemptively: no, studies have shown that higher taxes aren't just passed back to the renter. So they'll pay the same rent even if the land value increases.) For other small homeowners, (1) there is expected to be a lot of disparity in land value in an 85% LVT regime. People in desirable places pay high LVT. People on the outskirts pay close to $0 because their land is valued close to $0 (compared to today, at least). And (2) there could be other social welfare programs (e.g. basic income, or unemployment LVT forbearance) which help those in need.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Usually the explanation is that big high rises with cheap rent will magically appear, and landlords will be unable to raise rents, because LVT magic. So the promise is a scenario like 1970s Bronx. The real answer, which the GOP was able to test the waters on with the SALT cap, is for the federal government to slowly back away from supporting mortgages. 0% down mortgages with rates linked to T-Bills depend on the policy to back mortgages. As the country gets poorer, that is less relevant.
• nibbleshifter 4y ago
  Define "improve". If I accumulate some land, its becoming a forest. For at least as long as my direct descendants live.
  • adastra22 4y ago
    And if your land is in a highly desirable location and/or contains desirable resources, you end up paying ever increasing property tax to keep it that way.
    • nibbleshifter 4y ago
      Y'see, frankly, fuck that. You try do something good for the world (put a forest somewhere, do a bit of rewilding), then that area becomes desirable, then some LVT prick comes along and tries take what's yours so some property developer can flatten it to build magnolia shitboxes. Edit: the LVT people on here remind me of the arseholes who want to replace most of the good public parks in Berlin with housing, lol.
      • adastra22 4y ago
        LVT policies tend to end up with more dense urban areas and more wild landscapes, on the whole. It's the current landowner-favoring policies that have resulted in suburban sprawl and car-focused cities. National parks and land trusts are a good thing, but such exemptions ought to be publicly managed since there are societal costs involved.