SV reX said:Transportation is a basic societal need.
How bout we implement a tax on anyone who is hoarding cars and not driving them so that single moms and low income people can have them to drive to work?
You really don't see how bad an idea this is?
Transportation doesn't need to be cars though. Add more buses and routes or trains.
Pay for that by taxing collectors who don't drive their cars. 
SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
So, the "land hoarders" are individual homeowners who are ignorant and greedy?
You are ridiculously predictable.
I'm using his terminology. They were the majority of the group who got the zoning laws in place that created the artificial scarcity of housing we have today. No I don't really think individual homeowners were "hoarding" land or intended to.
Edit: In fact, I'd like to think they were never thinking beyond the next house-flip...
In reply to GameboyRMH :
Then why quote it if you don't believe it?
SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Then why quote it if you don't believe it?
Duke clearly used the term as a joke, I thought it was inoffensive enough to repeat.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I've been involved with construction and property development for 35 years. That doesn't make me an "authority", but it does mean I have direct experience with property developers, both commercial and residential.
The number of real estate investors who would willingly vote or lobby to limit the development options of their own property is vanishingly small.
And if, as you say, the vast majority are "individual homeowners", does that mean they are hoarding their property by actually living in it?
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I'll let Duke speak for himself, but I didn't hear him joke about anything.
j_tso said:SV reX said:Transportation is a basic societal need.
How bout we implement a tax on anyone who is hoarding cars and not driving them so that single moms and low income people can have them to drive to work?
You really don't see how bad an idea this is?
Transportation doesn't need to be cars though. Add more buses and routes or trains.
Pay for that by taxing collectors who don't drive their cars.
Mass transportation isn't really an option for most cities because of population density.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I think rewarding financial risk so heavily to the detriment of workers is another flaw in the system. If society needs to choose between being ideal for workers or gamblers, I know which one I rely on for goods and services...
Then who are all of these workers going to work for? Pretty much all employers, from McDonalds franchise owners to Jeff Bezos employ their workers with the intent to turn a profit. Take away the reward for the financial risk, and they don't have jobs. Real estate works the same way. Take away the reward for the risk of developement, and you don't have development. There is plenty of low priced land all over this country. It's low priced because it's undeveloped and farther away from existing developement. But you don't want land, you want land that is more valuable due to the work or investment/risk of others. Which is fine, but that's why it's more expensive.
Edit: I just realized that part of the problem is that you are only seeing one side of the coin. Financial risk isn't necessarily rewarded. It's rewarded when it works out. It can go horribly wrong when it doesn't. Hence the risk part. You need to see the balance, and not just pick the reward side to highlight.
Duke said:In reply to pheller :
Why would I be OK?
Say I own two lots right next to each other in a popular town. One property is vacant, one has my house on it.
My house requires utilities (water, sewer, power) and services (police / fire / emergency protection, trash and snow removal, library access, education, etc). All the conveniences of modern suburban life.
My empty lot requires none of those things until I build a house on it, or I sell it to someone who does. You could make a slight argument that it requires police protection, but an empty lot isn't really going to require much of that. Basic minimal property tax should cover it.
When you sell the land, you will incure the taxes for which have been denied the community during its vacancy. A neighbor could have been there, paying down the bonds on the local fire station, school, etc, instead, it was vacant. As it happens, they will equal almost all of your profit. Holding the land would have been for your luxury and enjoyment, but not for your financial gain.
Aside from taking some EXTREME RISK by holding the vacant land adjacent to your house, what did you do for the community to deny its contribution of local tax funding? You basically hoarded the land."Geee thanks for being greedy!" It wasn't a park. It didn't contribute to the community aside from a few trees and some well maintained grass that their dogs occasionally pissed on.
If the land didn't have value, and after 10-20-30 years you sold it for what you paid, then your community didn't appreciate. It must not have gotten good new jobs. It's school are roughly of similarly quality as decades ago. You merely got the enjoyment of having a large lot.
Why does having capital and speculating on land deserve a reward?
Now, if after 30 years you built on that land a new house and sold your old house, you'd make plenty of profit, because you were actually maintaining the building, paying for fire protection, for the roadways leading to it. Paying for your kids to go to school nearby. Being a part of a community. For that you should be rewarded for making your community great. You earned good incomes over those decades, and your neighborhood is pretty cool.
But the land? The vacant land did none of that. It just sat there.
Imagine if the vacant land was not owned by a neighbor who worked in the community, but someone who lived thousands of miles away. They contribute nothing. They don't work in the community. They don't have kids at the local schools. They merely speculate. They GAMBLE on your community. And to make matters worse, they've denied you coworkers. They've denied your kids having friends at that property. They havent helped pay for your fire station or your EMS. They haven't paid for your roads. The get all the reward and none of the risk. Unless you call a tiny tax bill every year "risk". If you lose money because the neighborhood or town or city goes to crap, then you weren't paying attention BECAUSE YOU DIDNT LIVE THERE. Anyone who actually lived there would've sold when the local factory closed, or the schools got bad.
Land should be the primary asssement of property taxes. You pay a bill to your local fire station, EMS, police based on the size and accessibility of your home. That's your insurance relative to the cost of your structure. You don't pay local income tax. You pay school taxes seperately as well.
The value of the land that should determine property tax rate, and it doesn't matter whether it's developed or not, because that land, even undeveloped, benefits from the rising value of that community and all the taxes that neighbors and residents have paid.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqQhoZgFZgk
Run for office and make it happen!
Just a note, this is just talking about land, not about the risk/rewards of developing property. I have some concerns about vacancy being used to mitigate loses and maximize profits, but LVT is a separate-but-related topic of that.
I'm 100% in favor of deregulating zoning. Here in AZ, however, if you changing zoning the negatively impacts land value, you can get sued for it.
Which is funny, because if your neighbor gets approval to build an apartment complex, you can't sue them for impacts to your property values.
It's only if you bought a vacant lot zoned for apartments and that lot gets rezoned for single family homes can you sue the local jurisdiction.
GameboyRMH said:Probably the same reason I can't buy an empty commercial building and turn it into rental apartments etc, he didn't have stupendous amounts of excess money lying around to afford an "investment" property in the first place, to say nothing of taking risky gambles with it for profit.
So again, you don't want to take the "risky gamble for profit" but when others do, they don't deserve the payoff.
If you are not willing to risk it, don't bitch when you're poor and the guy that took the risk isn't. Pheller owns a house, he can borrow against it to get his commercial property portfolio started if he wanted to, vs making excuses on why he can't. That's what a lot of people do, and when it works, they're somehow the shiny happy person for doing it?
OHSCrifle said:Run for office and make it happen!
Local office wouldn't help this issue. I'd need to flip the state legislature. Unlikely considering recent gerrymandered redistricting.
Zoning is a hot topic right now. People are pointing the finger at it as the primary reason for housing affordability. Myself, and others who support LVT and Vacancy Taxes hope that we can get people taking note of other strategies alongside re-zoning efforts. If we're lucky, re-zoning will solve many issues, if we're not, I think we need to look Land Value Taxes.
In order of importance:
-=1) Most Important) Zoning Changes - Moving to Form Based Zoning
- 2) Streamlined building permits and regulations. Local governments shouldn't hold up builders.
-3) Local governments need to start buying (net zero) houses to keep building rolling. Add them to housing trusts, bank them for housing programs, resell them later with incentives. Just keep'on building. It's good for the trades - it's good the local economy - it's good for housing affordability.
- 5) Vacancy taxes on non-primary residencies, multi-family housing, commercial/industrial buildings, and land with services.
- 6) Move towards property tax systems that make land value the primary asssement. Allowing property owners the ability to expand their existing house without additional tax burdens.
In reply to pheller :
When you sell the land, you will incure the taxes for which have been denied the community during its vacancy. A neighbor could have been there, paying down the bonds on the local fire station, school, etc, instead, it was vacant. As it happens, they will equal almost all of your profit. Holding the land would have been for your luxury and enjoyment, but not for your financial gain.
Aside from taking some EXTREME RISK by holding the vacant land adjacent to your house, what did you do for the community to deny its contribution of local tax funding? You basically hoarded the land."Geee thanks for being greedy!" It wasn't a park. It didn't contribute to the community aside from a few trees and some well maintained grass that their dogs occasionally pissed on.
Wait, what!?! I work a lot of hours and get taxed accordingly to benefit my community. So how about we tax people who selfishly only work 40 hours for the difference. That will get them off their couches and into 2nd jobs- for the community. Better yet, tax the hell out of people who aren't working. We'll have low unemployment in no time.
pheller said:Maybe I'm going about this wrong.
Would those of you involved in this conversation be ok with your property taxes be entirely based on your land value, with no tax assessed on the structures of the land?
of course, the tax on land would need to come up to cover the local budgets, but you'd now be free to build out your property without worry of it raising your taxes. However, if your land became more valuable due to say, a new high paying employer near by, there wouldn't be any way of avoiding those taxes.
This is exactly how the City of Charleston got rid of all those troublesome poor black families that lived in the downtown area. They couldn't pay the steadily increasing taxes on the property that had been in their families for generations. So the rich white people got together and taxed them out of the city. Then the rich white people bought the houses for pennies on the dollar, tore them down, and put up McMansions. All of the predominately black neighborhoods in the peninsula area are gone, just like the mayor and city council planned. It was brilliant, as long as you weren't an old black lady that was kicked out of her house.
Property taxes should be locked when the property is purchased specifically to protect the poor from being taxed from their homes.
Your ideas on property ownership are disgusting in every way and you should be ashamed of them.
In reply to pheller :
You are forgetting something very important. Duke didn't conquer the land or plant a flag and claim it. He bought it because someone else didn't want it. They wanted his money more than they wanted the land. So if you are saying that he shouldn't be able to buy it- he doesn't need it, it's a luxury- then you are also limiting the seller on how they can sell their land. So unless they can sell it to a buyer that you deem worthy- they can't sell it? But then they would be one one taxed for "underutilized" land, even though they don't want it?
pheller said:OHSCrifle said:Run for office and make it happen!
Local office wouldn't help this issue. I'd need to flip the state legislature......
Well... I have some very bad news for you. I am in CA and the legislature is "flipped" to the extreme from what you are seeing, and I can assure you, there are no good solutions happening here. In fact, the legislation that article linked above talks about is here in an extreme way, all from the legislature, and is a major factor as to why there is no housing being built here.
(I don't want to jump down a politics hole, but want to make it clear this is not a "side" issue as you seem to be implying)
GameboyRMH said:SV reX said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
Then why quote it if you don't believe it?
Duke clearly used the term as a joke, I thought it was inoffensive enough to repeat.
Actually, pheller said people were "hoarding land [...] for hundreds of years." He's the one who brought that term into the chat.
And I wasn't joking at all. Nor does pheller show any signs of being anything but 100% earnest here.
pheller said:Duke said:In reply to pheller :
Why would I be OK?
When you sell the land, you will incure the taxes for which have been denied the community during its vacancy. A neighbor could have been there, paying down the bonds on the local fire station, school, etc, instead, it was vacant.
Aside from taking some EXTREME RISK by holding the vacant land adjacent to your house, what did you do for the community to deny its contribution of local tax funding? You basically hoarded the land."Geee thanks for being greedy!" It wasn't a park. It didn't contribute to the community aside from a few trees and some well maintained grass that their dogs occasionally pissed on.
So... even though my vacant land didn't USE any of the community services we described, I still owe taxes as if it did.
Plus, somehow I'm obligated to contribute to the community. And not only that, apparently I'm obligated to contribute to the community only in ways pheller deems acceptable, or they don't count.
Fascist.
In reply to Duke :
Fascist isn't a strong enough word.
Duke said:And if, as you say, the vast majority are "individual homeowners", does that mean they are hoarding their property by actually living in it?
Like I said, I don't think that individual homeowners had any intention of hoarding land or that "evil capitalist land hoarders" was meant to be a serious description. I think they just wanted to boost their own home values over the short term, and the other people with an incentive to zone out high-density and low-end properties would've been real estate agents and high-end property developers.
In reply to pheller :
The impact of your land tax ideas would be absolutely devastating to poor and minority people.
In reply to GameboyRMH :
News at 10: The higher the density, the greater potential profit, at any part of the quality spectrum.
Boost_Crazy said:In reply to GameboyRMH :
I think rewarding financial risk so heavily to the detriment of workers is another flaw in the system. If society needs to choose between being ideal for workers or gamblers, I know which one I rely on for goods and services...
Then who are all of these workers going to work for? Pretty much all employers, from McDonalds franchise owners to Jeff Bezos employ their workers with the intent to turn a profit. Take away the reward for the financial risk, and they don't have jobs.
I've worked with plenty of businesses that only have workers but no employers at all, even operated one for a while, but I've never seen a business with only employers and no workers...
In reply to GameboyRMH :
I have. My bosses ran one for several years before I decided to ask them for a job. And they were making enough money with no employees that they could afford to hire one.
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