4 ms·

The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities. When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their a

by mg 1y ago

The biggest change I anticipate is larger cities. When I ask people what they would like to change about their life, pretty much everyone mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. Because everyone wants to live right in the center of a big city. While at the same time, when I look at Google maps, big cities are tiny. I zoom out a bit and every big city is just a tiny speck in the middle of nowhere. When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. And when driving in comfortable autonomous electric buses is available frequently and cheaply, living outside the city becomes more compelling.

bhickey 1y ago
> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents. > When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.
- esseph 1y ago
  > Suburbs Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
  - bhickey 1y ago
    That's because they externalize their costs leading to high builder ROI.
    - esseph 1y ago
      Sure, but they're not sitting empty and people are buying them before they're even finished. 2400-4400sqft homes.
Nevermark 1y ago
If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development. And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper. Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes). But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end. Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.
- _nalply 1y ago
  That's Henry George. I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
  - Nevermark 1y ago
    > That's Henry George. Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum. -- > the wealthy and powerful object to it The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens. So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich. And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.
liampulles 1y ago
There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read

by mg 1y ago

bhickey 1y ago

> pretty much every one mentions that their apartment is too small and too expensive. This is due to under supply of urban housing due to bad zoning law designed to inflate rents. > When construction becomes cheaper, it will be more compelling to build houses outside the city. Suburbs are financially underwater. People don't want to pay high property taxes to live in some Levittown hellscape.

esseph 1y ago
> Suburbs Still the "American Dream" for a lot of people, and these copy/pasta McMansions are going up all over the place.
- bhickey 1y ago
  That's because they externalize their costs leading to high builder ROI.
  - esseph 1y ago
    Sure, but they're not sitting empty and people are buying them before they're even finished. 2400-4400sqft homes.

Nevermark 1y ago

If land was taxed (the physically exclusionary resource that should be taxed), but property/development on it was not, the economics of building big and building up would be much cheaper. No more annual wealth tax (on the same value, year after year!) on development. And holding land to parasitically benefit from neighbors improving the neighborhood would become unprofitable. With land no longer a money parking/hedging instrument of the rich, all that non-functional demand would disappear and land would get cheaper. Interesting that eliminating a recurrent wealth tax would help the non-rich so much. (Who could also improve their properties without raising their own taxes). But carefully aligning incentives in the market, in the direction of encouraging not disincentivizing investment on par with other options, I.e. not treating different kinds of investments differently tax wise, usually helps everyone in the end. Today a wealthy person with one house on 100 acres, pays a significantly lower tax per acre than a regular person with that same house on a fraction of an acre. The poor are subsidizing rich land ownership.

_nalply 1y ago
That's Henry George. I don't understand all consequences yet, except one, that the wealthy and powerful object to it because it hurts them and so the Land Value Tax is rarely introduced. Even if it gets introduced, it will abolished soon thereafter.
- Nevermark 1y ago
  > That's Henry George. Yes! He was a very clear thinker. Refreshing when you find someone who manages to see things as they are, right in front of you the whole time, independent of the numbing filter of unexamined cultural momentum. -- > the wealthy and powerful object to it The poor, whose property to land ratio is high (even if they individually own very little in absolute terms), subsidize the rich whose property to land ratio is low (even if in absolute terms they own more). And it compounds, because this makes land, like Bitcoin, a place to park money and reap the rewards of other people's growing population demand for something limited, and other people's investment in development. So housing for anyone but the rich becomes more and more of a financial challenge. And market warping mechanisms are tried, like rent freezes, etc. But somehow, simply taxing the precious limited resource (land) more, and dropping the tax on developing useful property on land, which is what is required to increase housing, rarely gets tried. And as you say, quickly gets reversed when it happens. So many ways the poor, middle class, and not so rich, pay the taxes of the very rich. And the very rich do a very good job of framing things, so the want-to-be rich believe they need to keep things that way -- to their own, and everyone else's, detriment.

liampulles 1y ago

There is an interesting book called Scale by Geoffrey West, which speculates about how the scale of things like organisms and cities is bound by spatial networks. Worth a read