50% of US GDP is about to become US gov't expenditure.

Any houses or value after that should be taxed.

I think that the government constantly threatening to take your basic shelter that that you PAYED FOR already and put you out on the street... even though.. I repeat.. you PAYED FOR THE PROPERTY ALREADY..is outright fascism.

The last place I want my money is in a politicians pocket. But this community overwhelmingly supports this concept.

If a slave is taxed at 100% and an indentured servant is taxed at 20% - what does that make you?

Running to the right and embracing authoritarianism is much preferable to the politicians than, say, a general strike and a unionization movement. Which would actually harm the people in power instead of squishing those at the bottom.

I argue it in good faith. I want government to shrink. The constitution should be used as a tool to constrain the size and scope of Government. And with the New Supreme Court it's chipping away at the concept the State can rule by edict. It's an exciting restoration of Democracy.

Today Government spending is 44% of GDP - which is colossal by most measures. In fact It's much larger than the CCP. Government size will shrink either through inflation or default because its debt burden is 130% of GDP. In research done by Hirschmann capital, 51 out of 52 times a country’s debt-to-GDP ratio reached 130%, the country eventually defaulted. The one exception is Japan - whose trajectory doesn't look great today.

Like it or not, you are either fighting constitutionalism or the mathematical force of Gravity. But there is no way Government will continue to expand.

So what the mandate of Fed Gov should be and how long TTL?

Economic mechanisms like this, which don't change anything in the physical world, almost never have any long-term impact, positive or negative, since the economy is a densely-connected network. Findings of large effects depend on stopping accounting somewhere, and you can get positive or negative findings depending on where you stop.

Money juggling is a great distraction from what really matters: physical quantities and actions.

Unless you're paying cash, most people think in terms of what their monthly payment will be. So driving down the price may not make any particular house any more affordable.

At maximum I agree about taxing homes depending on their energy consumption (all sources) to encourage modern house development. But definitively not high taxes on properties. I'm Italian and I've seen the effect of them destroying the market AND pushing people toward crappier and crappier homes. It's not just a personal idea.

In other words, the assetless classes support taxing those with earned fixed assets.

When reframed this way, the article reads to me as a high falutin petty and bitter whine.

All taxes are theft. The only justifiable tax is a tax on consumption and perhaps a tax on children because population increases exponentially. That would take care of all the bundle of taxes and simplify the tax code.

However the arguments feels defective because it uses Chicago as an example. Surely the reason housing is plentiful and affordable in that city is because it has been slowly depopulating for decades and it currently only 75% as populous as it was at its peak.

1. The absolutely staggering incomes at the top top end in NYC make income taxes a more effective revenue source.

2. In addition to property taxes, if you own an apartment in a building, there are a lot of other monthly costs. As I’m writing to this, it occurs to me that they may be completely equivalent to the maintenance costs on a house, but I suspect that condo and co-op boards are not nearly that efficient.

Keeps the riffraff away...and me...but they can afford their roads so...

The prices are like that due to the labor market and that we've been a blue collar city for the longest time.

—

FWIW: Chicago has high property tax rate and it does seem to correlate to relatively steady median price movements.

But that is just one example…

There are likely other factors at play in Chicago as well: number of units of supply per capita and quality of public transportation come to mind as two that might have some bearing on housing prices.

I don't own any property myself and am sympathetic to the idea of raising property tax, but many arguments for LVT/raising property taxes don't paint a convincing argument for why property owners should vote against their self interests.

Try living in NY, where effective tax is between 3.5% and 5% (mine is 3.8 in the city of Rochester). It’s really hard for people to become homeowners at that rate, especially when the market goes up and an appraiser can show up at any time and re-assess your value and raise your taxes.

The only way to actually make a good cheaper is to produce more of it.

But home owners don't want their homes to stop increasing in value.

If their was a bill in Congress to magically double the housing supply, I guarantee you it wouldn't pass.

Plus passing a property tax hike won't get you re elected.

That is because it is Chicago and not SF. Not because of taxes.

High property taxes will make housing cheaper, but it wouldn't make housing affordable. Sure that house might only costs 100k but with a 2k per month property tax, no one can afford it.

The problem with it though is that it is a very regressive tax, especially in states that get the majority of their income from property tax as compared to income taxes (I'm looking at you Texas).

> They can be adjusted annually based off the needs of a local market

Or, in the case of Texas, a very large portion of property taxes in urban centers ends up as recapture and goes into a state-controlled slush fund. These portions (school taxes) are not actually adjusted at all.

> the money collected from property taxes doesn't evaporate from a local area

See above statement again. This may be true for city-level property taxes though.

> Retirees and low income individuals are often able to make cases to reduce their tax burden

I would disagree with this. There are exceptions written into the law that provide exemptions for some of these groups (which are often abused and disincentivise "good" use), but overall lower-end properties have many more comparables to set value based off of, and tends to be much closer to "market". These residents also don't tend to have the funds to many these arguments, and commission-based tax-appealers don't stand to make much money taking on these cases (the absolute dollar value is relatively low). Further, high-value properties without many comparables are the easiest ones to argue for lower tax burden on.

Finally, when property values actually do decrease (due to central bank action on interest rates, etc) it can be difficult to get the assessed value lowered without an actual sale.

Tldr, the current implementation of property taxes in many locations is extremely regressive.

Also this is all of NY, not just Rochester, that has rates such as these.

It's also a great way for poor neighborhoods to not be able to afford what they need.

This much is demonstrably false, at least where I live. I don't even pay property taxes to the city, I pay them to the county. There's no tie between those funds and my neighborhood. Then, a lot of the taxes are passed from the county up to the state as well, where it's further spread out.

As such, there's a lot of discussion around lowering property taxes to help these retirees.

In my opinion? Fuck 'em. Property taxes are a brilliant method of perfectly progressive taxation: you can always choose to live in a cheaper home. If your home is so expensive that you can't afford the property tax, downgrade. Those of us who can't afford property will shed no tears.

Hard to take stuff like this seriously.

Wouldn't you also consider anyone buying a "starter home" a speculator? Their goal is to continuously flip their house.

on balance, the housing price appreciation, and therefore tax burden, on "these people" is functionally entirely due to external macroeconomic factors, which you can clearly see on the Zillow Housing price index by typing in "New Hampshire" or any relevant zip code: https://www.zillow.com/home-values/

The average NH home increased $7k-$10k in value per year linearly for the last 10 years!

Then it increased $25k Jan '20 -> Jan '21.

Then it increased *$53k* Jan '21 -> Jan '22.

10 years worth of price appreciation, and therefore tax appreciation, occurred in a 2 year window.

I understand many people have a pet housing policy issue they care about, but trying to attribute this step-function change in tax burden to "New Hampshire zoning laws" and "these people" as opposed to the massive increase in demand caused by Covid urban flight/WFH & relaxed monetary policy is completely unreasonable.

The "system" and governments frequently prefer angry people direct their rage at other citizens instead of them! QED

Yes agreed, though I do think people conflate things and vilify wrong targets, which sounds a lot like the OP.

E.g. in California it's en vogue to rail against "Prop 13" without considering why it was passed, or how it helps people on fixed incomes remain in their homes. , or more importantly how the financialization of homes has made things bad globally.

He bought the house by working for a living. The "fuck 'em, give me his house" argument isn't convincing me.

Maybe 65 is too young for retirement age, but I certainly feel that there is an age at which old people should start getting special privileges, like the right to not have to move. And the rest of us can wait our turns and hope that we get to take advantage of those privileges some day.

For instance suppose when Grandpa was a young man in 1950 he bought a used 1940 Martin D-45 guitar for a little under $400. That's equivalent to around $4800 in today's money.

He's still got that guitar and has kept it in good shape. Vintage D-45s from 1942 and earlier go for insane amounts on the collector market, and he could sell that for over $100k, probably over $150k.

Why should Grandpa have the privilege of owning a vintage 1940 Martin D-45 as long as he wants when so many other people who would like to play a vintage D-45 cannot afford too despite being working musicians?

Should we therefore have a periodic instrument value tax on musical instruments to keep people from keeping their instruments too long? Grandpa can sell the vintage D-45 and use a fraction of the proceeds to buy a new acoustic guitar or even hire a luthier to build him a custom guitar so its not like having to give up his 1940 D-45 would keep him from having a guitar.

You'll grow older and possibly understand. There are things that must be experienced, they can't be learned in any other way.

False equivalence. There's no reason you have to be cruel to either.

You can always build more housing or provide financial services to help poorer people buy homes. Or just, you know, lower the cost of homes so property taxes don't have to be astronomical and force older people out of their homes to begin with.

If housing costs and property taxes are so high it forces older people out, I don't see how that somehow benefits poor people anyway. They still can't afford those stupid expensive houses.

Unlike first-time buyers, though, for whom asset inflation is itself strictly a tax (paid by them, to seniors, but far more so, banks and investors), price inflation of an asset you already hold is free money.

It's highly distortionary.

It'll also allow the government to bully anyone they want by evicting them, even if the price were fair. Local reporter digs up dirt on city council? Well, the city council just reviewed property tax claims, and decided that the reporter's house is "undervalued".

I moved from an ostensibly low tax state, Texas, to one with an income tax but my overall burden for state costs is pretty much the same or slightly lower as property taxes are low and there is no sales tax (8%+ in Texas).

I was paying over $1500 month in property taxes in Houston burbs.

They’ll get you somehow!

https://tax.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/571/~/i-don...

source? On one hand they could be as you said, but the alternative could be that investors think that "cheapest of the big 6" makes real estate there undervalued and therefore a good investment.

Japan home ownership: 61%

Yet there is such a housing crisis in the states due to the "zoning" bogeyman

Longer term, the impact on rental costs depends on whether you think this policy would increase the amount of housing available for people to live in.

Where I live, many properties are bought and kept empty - the rental income isn't worth the hassle and they are being held for capital gains. High property taxes would presumably result in some of those properties being sold to occupiers.

Consider an extreme case - a land value tax of 20% (meaning you pay the government the full value of the unimproved land every 5 years). Land values would plummet, right? Lets say it were introduced over 30 years, so prices could adjust smoothly instead of crashing. What does the steady state look like after 30 years?

They mostly cater to the existing residents that own homes and partake in municipal voting.

They'll stop creating new housing developments and put massive permitting fees on proposals for new construction.

https://www.officialdata.org/ca-property-tax/#37.74219147779...

In the interest of being intellectually honest though, that's probably not the full story. It's worth pointing out that Chicago's population peaked in the 50's and that property taxes were probably lower back then.

Also worth pointing out that there's a lot of directions for sprawl to help meet housing demand. I actually grew up in Indiana and my dad worked in Chicago. We lived in Indiana because the property tax was significantly lower even though housing prices were comparable.

So your answer is to dismiss my position without evidence? Your point that property tax is worse than LVT isn't justified by your claim. If land values are determined by government assessment like property values are, then you're still paying property tax, albeit with an obfuscated input for improvement in the calculation which may be higher or lower or just the same as a regular property tax.

The point of this "margin" you mention gets rather deterministically and uniformily raised across the board.

I don't understand this. The owners have pay mortgage, taxes, insurance, and repairs. How can it be decoupled? The landlords I know would have to sell if they lost their renters, or if the rental income fell below a certain amount.

That's true, but it's also a looming economic disaster as it prices out the younger generation and entrenches generational wealth.

Chicago are famous for their highest rate of 2.5% per annum, grown smoothly over 15+ years. Thought experiment: What happens if the land value tax rate keeps growing smoothly? What does it look like at 10% per annum? 20%? 100%?

At 100% per annum, the average land value of a house needs to be below $50k or so in current dollars (most would need to be much less). Any higher, and ~nobody is willing to pay the taxes.

A large home costs $200k or so to build vs a small/cheap home at 80k, so property prices now range from 50k (old cheap home) to 250k (new, high-end home).

That's a huge result for housing affordability! People are currently saving deposits of 80k to get a mortgage.

Instead of paying mortgage costs to capital holders, you're paying tax to a government that ostensibly exists to serve you. Instead of buying "the most I can afford so I get a retirement fund", now people are buying housing based on their willingness to pay an ongoing cost for access to amenities.

For example low property taxes encourages NIMBYism which results in lower density zoning which reduces new supply.

If high property taxes reduce NIMBYism by making homeowners feel the housing crisis themselves, that alone could ultimately increase affordability.

When people say that the US is a "low tax economy" they seem to forget property taxes, which make the effective rate in almost _all_ US states higher than the UK (and much of the rest of Europe) if you own a home. It's just a "poor value for money" economy instead.

You must come from a privileged family.

Angry voters wanted a "tax revolt". Jerry Brown's Prop 8, on the same ballot, would have given homeowners a specific break but they wanted blood.

As a result, cities have an incentive to build commercial property over residential homes. The result is that the people working in those offices are competing for limited residential space (leading to high prices) and often have to settle for long commutes (leading to gridlock).

Did you mean to post a different source? The one you posted doesn't "show" anything, equivocates on whether LVT actually reduces blight in the few instances where it's been practiced, and makes meaningful suggestions for solutions other than LVT that it indicates have been shown IN PRACTICE to reduce blight (e.g. a land bank).

Texas has an interesting solution to this. Homeowners over 65 can elect to defer the payment of their property taxes indefinitely, although the taxes eventually get paid when the house changes owners.

I'm uncomfortable with this phrasing. Are you implying that the bailouts were some kind of quid pro quo?

Some people have very strange misconceptions about LVT & Georgism.

But surely you have improvements on the land and friction from moving...

I like LVTs, but there's some significant devils in the implementation details.

Usually the assessment and sale price are not far off.

All zoning is exclusionary to my knowledge. That's the entire point. It's not necessary but it exists because it exists. And, it's sticky. It was established most likely when the entire city was raw land and undeveloped; so it served as a plan for development. There was no NIMBY because people were building their BY. Because there was a plan, you could decide where you wanted to build that BY.

Once you have developed the land, raised family, lived in a house for decade(s), and the city around you develops and changes. Now, your property maybe better utilized as a multifamily complex or a nuclear reactor, or anything really. But, it's your home and you shouldn't be taxed out of it. Rezoning as a process is may difficult and probably should be. There's a lot of stakeholders/neighbors who are impacted by a change. They should have some say. It just so happens that those people who bought a single family house in a single family neighborhood tend to prefer it to stay that way so they get called NIMBY but it's a completely rational perspective to have if you were in their shoes. Thus, an introduction of this tax only serves to displace the current owners who can not afford the new tax bill and does nothing to change the actual zoning. So the result is, richer people with bigger tax-bill budgets move in and your even further into the NIMBYism trap not even realizing you're in a zoning trap.

If you open up the zoning (and perhaps the building restrictions), the best and highest uses can actually prevail.

It will still force density eventually as the home's structure value depreciates (demo costs are the same no matter how much the home is worth). Any new structures will be pushed into higher value uses.

BUT let's say we instituted a blind land value tax tomorrow: many people would be forced out of their homes AND could not sell the home for what it was worth: a buyer would still have to either live in the house and pay the higher land value tax or tear down the structure and build something more profitable...the haircut they would otherwise have to take in either case would be reflected in just paying less for the house in the first place (assuming they've done their homework).

This could even happen after the land tax is implemented. That the land value rises above the point of its use but below the point of where the land could be re-developed into the higher value use case. Then....you are kind of stuck in a bad spot until your situation changes or you go bankrupt.

We actually already see this in the market: land with a tear down will cost less than land that is completely clear. The costs to develop are just less in the latter case. Also, people are forced by the construction market to settle for less valuable structures on high value land because there is just a shortage of material and talent to redevelop everything that we want redeveloped already.

Prop 13 is one of the worst ideas in taxation ever. It would be better just to let the aged and disabled freely defer property taxes beyond a certain, income-based level (and maybe also to let other people do the same with certain limits on total deferred amount relative to assessed value for time-unlimited deferrals, and total time for value-unlimited deferrals.)

Most old do not live in assisted care. ANd healthcare is independent of land ownership.

CA is extremely screwed up on how it taxes. I used to live in Cupertino where some people were paying taxes on 2 million dollar lots valued at 100k.

It's not a perfect market, rents are sticky, landlords don't profit maximize all of the time (e.g. they might keep the rent the same for several years for good tenants), but in general landlords will charge the highest amount they can charge at all times regardless of what their cost basis looks like.

Basically they put a tax lien on the property, they just don't collect on it while the original homeowner is occupying the property.

I'm not a lawyer, but my basic understanding of this is that if it exceeds the value of the property, the estate can just let the city/county seize the house. Otherwise, they'd need to pay the deferred taxes in order to transfer the title to the heirs.

Obviously this is not legal advice.

It seems to me to be the opposite. The mortgage interest tax deduction is a massive regressive government subsidy for homeowners, and penalizes younger people who rent or cannot afford to buy a home.

So I’m curious what suggests to you that renters have political power. To me it seems the opposite - tax policy massively prefers owners over renters.

Of course nowadays it's easier to hire behind grandma than it is to defund school buses.

There's a huge difference between a "residential area" and an area where it's literally illegal to build anything except houses and parking lots. It's not a case of just formalising what already existed, when you make the bodegas and offices and light workshops illegal you turn it from a residential neighbourhood into a soulless dormitory.

> Are we out of land in the US? (I'm assuming you're in US). Why do you need that specific piece of land that the person you are displacing already owns? Job/commute, convenience, etc are unacceptable answers in my book. Employers can and should be dispersing, you're likely broadly employable and could find work elsewhere. They could put their office elsewhere. But you're choosing to live in an area that you can't afford to own (and they're choosing to office out of a location that their employees can't live in). Ignoring those or pushing them on the current land owners makes no sense.

(I'm actually not in the US, but HN being HN I pretty much have to comment from a US perspective).

Agglomeration has huge benefits, that's why we have towns and cities in the first place. The current landowners almost certainly moved to somewhere that was previously less dense and made it more dense by moving there, no doubt chainging the character of the place in the process, so I don't think it's fair for them to complain about the next generation doing the same thing.

And if I tried to start my own new city in the middle of nowhere the exact same thing would happen: the first group of people move in, the city (maybe more like a small town to start with) becomes a pleasant place to live with jobs available, more people want to move in, but now there's enough people living there to NIMBY-block any density increase. If we tried to set a schedule at the start where we'd gradually densify the zoning? San Francisco already has a law like that on the books, they just ignore it.

> Curious if you have any evidence that rents are not market driven?

Zoning is a huge market distortion. It's essentially illegal to build anything in SF (over half the homes in San Francisco would be illegal to build today), and don't get me started on artificially low property taxes. So the rents are "market driven" in the sense of supply/demand, but that supply is being artificially choked off.

> I happen to believe you are more in control of the entire situation than you care to admit but would rather stay put and blame the boomers or change the rules because you don't like the cards you were dealt.

I mean sure, I can choose to live somewhere worse and commute for longer or take a worse job, while the boomer lounges about on my tax dime. But the fundamental injustice is very real.

> The "shed no tears" thing goes both ways, but they did get there first and they do already own their house, so it's an uphill battle for you.

They've created a de facto rotten borough by pricing everyone else out. But when democracy stops working the issues don't go away, people just find more direct ways to express them.

No, because that's already subtracted out of the total property value to produce the land value.

> And if COVID telecommuting is an indication of market preferences, home-owning adults prefer small, out-of-the-way towns with plenty of space, low property taxes, and good internet connections.

The exodus from city centers stems from farther-out places being cheaper - i.e. having lower land value.

Putting in a 10 to 25+ million dollar multiple level parking garage can pay off, but only if there is enough demand for it and you can get zoning permission.

Houston.

Because they have fixed incomes (generally). This income is immune to market forces. That's why.

While many elderly invested wisely (and at the right time) to become wealthy, especially when leveraging dips (like during the 80s), it doesn't change the average case. Living month to month on a fixed income is the norm after retirement.

The state taxes were added to partially backfill the lost local taxes. Prop 13 was a major contribution to moving control from local governments (which it kneecapped fiscally) to the State (which it also kneecapped, because of the supermajority requirement to raisd any tax, but not as badly.)

The federal government went through a similar activity a few years later when Reagan slashed budgets. Everyone survived.

The state/federal budgets today are astronomically higher, even after accounting for inflation.

Below is a newspaper article I saved from over 30 years ago:

--

See Dick and Jane-and Simple Simon-Solve the School Budget

By ALICE J. GLASSER

Once upon a time, a very long time ago, there was a schoolhouse with a few children and a teacher. The children went to school to learn and the teacher went to teach. It was all very simple.

Then a few more kids came, so they hired another teacher. Now, with two teachers, they needed someone to supervise. So they hired a principal. (Meanwhile, a lot more kids came, but just one more teacher.)

So the principal hired an assistant. But still more kids came, so they built another school and hired another principal. And now, with two principals, they needed someone to supervise. So they hired a superintendent, an assistant superintendent, a supervisor of Here and a supervisor of There. And since they needed a place for all these people, they built their own building and called themselves Unified. And they were happy until someone pointed out that there wasn't enough for them to do. So they hired a director of This and a director of That to develop pages and pages of things for them to do.

But there still was a problem. Unified had no one to implement these pages and pages of plans. So they hired coordinators of This and coordinators of That to decide which of the pages and pages of plans they should implement. (Meanwhile, a lot more kids came but just a few more teachers.)

Now Unified needed a bigger building for all their people. So they bought a really big place. So big that they hired a few more Heres and Theres and Thises and Thats to fill up the space. And they were happy until they realized that they had run out of money. Their budget didn't balance. (Meanwhile, a lot more kids came and an occasional teacher.)

So they hired a financial expert of This and a resource planner of That, and Unified came up with a Plan to balance the budget. They would break down all the walls between all the classrooms and once again have just one schoolroom. Only this time there would be 500 kids and one teacher. Of course, the teacher couldn't really teach and the kids couldn't really learn, but Unified was happy. Their budget was balanced. It was all very simple.

----

As chairperson of the Mar Vista School Site Council in West Los Angeles, Alice J. Glasser has been wrestling with Los Angeles Unified School District budgeting problems. By profession, she is a physician.

Update: I found it online here: https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-07-08-me-1359-s...

I did allude to that in a previous comment regarding the "propping up "and "weighing down" of values

> Lower cost is not necessarily lower value. Land cost is land rental value times some amount of time (usually based on the expected cap rate).

Cap rate/land rental value is difficult to assess on land

> There are, for instance, empty parcels of land in Idaho that now go for more than whole apartment buildings in Detroit Are the two parcels the same size? Are they representative of surrounding parcels and not outliers? Are they the same distance (in transit time/cost) as the nearest town/city center?

I'll admit that I don't have the exact values under the constraints you've listed. And given different geographies, that's going to be difficult to accomplish. However, there have been several reports of prices in Idaho increasing due to now-former residents of the Bay Area fleeing into state and buying up land and houses.

https://www.krem.com/amp/article/news/local/out-of-state-hom...

You want people hailing from further distances via public transit and rail, and you want the majority of the businesses in an area servicing a highly dense, local community that can all walk there within 10-15 minutes.

This enzyme must be removed, the American Urban Body reworked to reject suburban thinking like this.

Low mortgage rates cause house values to go up because value is based on what an affordable monthly payment for that house.

Low rates means value goes up to equalize payments which is mostly superfluous for people with only one home and good for anyone with investment property but it causes a 20% down payment to be an unsurmountable barrier to entry for those looking to enter the market.

Home ownership is one if not the best way for families to generationally escape poverty.

Not any more.

So with either kind of improvement the tax can go up, but LVT still encourages development compared to property tax as undeveloped land will still attract a greater proportion of tax than it would under a property tax.

When it comes to housing construction and tax incentives, what they need to do is (1) set tax incentives to discourage egregious misuse and encourage density, and (2) get out of the way.

As someone living in the middle of one of these debates right now, the idea that we need to carefully control the mix of 1bdr apartments vs 3bdr apartments is... risible? The frontline of this issue is SFZ, not what kind of apartments we build.

With the "portability" affordances for people over 55, and with the special treatment of farms, I think there's still plenty of room for heirs to receive properties with ridiculously low assessments. A savvy person trying to give the greatest tax advantage to their heirs would sell their property with the lowest assessment, and buy the most expensive property they can, make it their permanent residence, and leave it to a child or grandchild.

In combination with the special treatment for farms, I think there's plenty of room left for people to inherit property which they don't actually need, with ridiculously low assessments.

It also requires property owners to do EXTENSIVE research and information gathering CONSTANTLY to ensure that the number they put down is reasonable.

Many of them literally can't (ex: my 87 year old Neighbor Phylis doesn't care what her house is worth, because she plans to die in it, and isn't seeking to maximize utility. Instead she wants to pass peacefully in the house she remembers raising her kids in, and has lived in for the last 50 years. She has no car, is in a wheelchair, and uses basically no online services - how is she going to go evaluate the right value for her house?).

---

Basically - this plan sounds great for 5 seconds and then you realize people would literally revolt the second you pass it.

Example 1: Bay Area home $1.7m; old taxable value $300k, new taxable value $700k (1.7m - 1m), prop taxes ~9k/year.

Example 2: Fresno home $700k; old taxable value $200k, new taxable value $200k (700k - 1m, so no affect)

Grandparent's home? Parent's second home? Child's second home? Uncle's home? Sibling's home?

No. Bay home is now $1.7m taxable, $21k/year

This is how free markets work.

That is, that leaseholder you can't turf is enjoying a lot of the value of the land, and it may not be correlated to past payments or transactions.

In turn, lots of the benefits of a LVT evaporate if the taxable value (of landowner's eventual rights) is so decorrelated from the present value of land uses.

That's the problem here: valuing the land alone is hard. Separating rights, adding more owners and options and preferences --- doesn't make valuing the land alone easier.

Electricity and gas and internet are private companies using an easement.

Police and fire can easily be funded by sales tax, just like the public transit. Alternatively, land owners can voluntarily pay yearly for police and fire, or opt-out just like people are not forced by government to buy homeowner insurance.

For state an local governments this is mostly true but even there the federal government helps out.

What you want is for the wealthy to pay for the poor and old and those without much wealth or income.

You're still giving the "it's property" framing waaay more credit than it's due. Remember, granting someone exclusivity to a contested resource means preventing other people who would like to use the resource from using the resource. It's entirely reasonable for those people, represented in aggregate by the government, to ask for compensation in return, even if the government provided the landowner no additional services beyond the exclusivity.

The entire concept of "owning" land is just a hustle to argue against paying taxes on it.

Also, an acre with parking attendants doubles the number of cars so they could be clearing close to 2 million before expenses, and attendants aren’t that expensive.

and then what!?

Housing shortage is due to unions and govts that refuse to establish public infrastructure for everyone. This is done on purpose to create UTism .. Us VS Them..between property owners and those who don’t own property. Divide and Rule strategy. It has never failed over centuries.

It takes two to tango. Perhaps you'd be better off keeping your frustrations to yourself and improving the clarity of your writing.

> The real value of land has appreciated >60x over that term.

What is the "real value"? It's what someone is willing to pay for it. If the returns on the land are not that much, as you contend, then it's not worth >60x what it was. If the property owner has some protection than means they can't be shifted off the land for 99 years, then that land is not worth as much as you contend because it can't be used for something else. If someone else thinks the land is undervalued then they can bid on it and make more money, but they'll have to pay the tax and find a way to extract that value. If the land really is that valuable then the landowner can say so and pay the tax on it now because they think they'll get the return in future.

In short, you're assuming that the "real" value and the actual value are different and erroneously so. This assumption makes the reasoning self-contradictory - the value is determined by people's bids, not some Pythagorean value floating around somewhere waiting to be happened upon by some perfect system.

Money is a medium of exchange. There are items that are literally not for sale, and the excuse of "but they got money!!!!" is completely unacceptable as a replacement.

How are you going to value the writing on the walls of the home my neighbor from her now-deceased son?

How are you going to value the 6 (six!) graves of the dogs she's buried in her back yard, Each with a custom stone statue.

How are you going to value that she's memorized her current home layout, so that large cataract in her right eye doesn't bug her as much when she's in the familiar layout?

How do you value the extra time and expense it would take her to find a new home, given she's wheelchair bound?

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and your "new plan" is devolving into trying to add all sort of extra conditions and rules around this - which gets us right back to: implement this and people will literally try to kill you.

A lack of density closer to cities is a real problem: it makes living close to where you work prohibitively expensive, and promotes sprawl.

Your source effectively says the opposite-- some leases are limited, but "With an ordinary land lease right, the lease contract period is fixed but in practice can be renewed almost in perpetuity." and "The lease contract period under the Old Land Lease law is fixed, but the lease can be renewed almost in perpetuity."

Even the fixed terms for non-commercial use are generally very long-- "Land leased out to be used for single-family homes and condominiums can be leased out with a fixed-term land lease. The contract period is 50 years or more. "

> So even if you follow that avoidance strategy, I'm going to buy your land on the cheap.

I bid the NPV of the lease + the NPV of the land after the lease. If you outbid me, you're taking an economic loss. I can even afford to overbid a little, because I'm just paying a small percentage of my bid.

E.g. say a sane discount rate is 5% per year. Lease is 50 years. Lease payment is $1/year. True value of the underlying land is $500k. Value of land in 50 years is estimated to be $1M. Tax rate 1%.

NPV of the lease payments is $19. NPV of the land is $92,000. I bid $200k and pay $2k in tax (compared to $5k).

Sure, you could bid $200,001 and get the land, to get an asset with a net present value of $92,019. This is not a favorable transaction-- even if there's some building residual value at the end.

In the end, the only way to value the independent value of the land is going to be from some kind of assessment process. A bidding based scheme is not practical: separating the value of the land and building is really hard. (And if we start having people judge whether the pricing of leases, etc, is fair-- that's effectively assessment).

> Until next year when it's 0 again because that buyer has gone away.

Why would the buyer go away? The state itself could maintain offers on any properties lowballing their property taxes. But that wouldn't be necessary, because at any time, there would always be ample interest in purchasing real estate for discount prices. You say this yourself:

> if your house is valued at the neighborhood average, it will be bought in 30 seconds

...but again, it sounds like you misunderstand my proposal. In 30 seconds, someone would offer to buy, and then the current property owner would have the choice of either selling, or keeping their property but raising their property-tax assessment to either that amount, or the local average, whichever is lower.

> > such as ground leases must be 30 years or more except a fixed-term ground lease, which must be 50 years or more

I quote from the article I shared with you:

> The initial period is 30 years, regardless of the building structure. The lease can then be renewed for 20 years at the first renewal, then ten years thereafter. This differs from the the Old Land Lease in that under the old law, the initial lease period is different depending on the building structure.

and this for fixed-term ground lease:

> The lease contract period is ten years or more and less than 50 years.

Which means we have two articles that are in disagreement but that is irrelevant because again, I am not proposing to use Japanese law verbatim.

> I disagree with most everything you say, and I am not sure further discussion would be productive.

Yes, constantly defending straw man positions or needing to answer how many angels can dance on a pin is not productive for me either.

> Aside from the minutiae:…

Thanks for selling me all your land and making my descendants incredibly wealthy because you thought it was better to avoid taxes.