1. Economic Efficiency: Unlike income or consumption taxes, an LVT is non-distortionary. It doesn't discourage productive activities like work, saving, or investment. Land is a fixed resource; its supply doesn't change with price or tax fluctuations. Therefore, an LVT wouldn't distort market incentives, unlike other taxes. By shifting the tax burden onto land, we could potentially reduce the distortionary effects of other taxes and promote economic growth.
2. Wealth Inequality Reduction: Land ownership in the U.S. is highly concentrated. A significant portion of the country's land is owned by a small percentage of the population. An LVT would primarily affect these large landowners, redistributing wealth more evenly across society. Plus, land can't be hidden or moved offshore, making an LVT difficult to evade and an effective tool for wealth redistribution.
3. Sustainable Land Use: Many landowners hold onto vacant or underutilized land as a speculative investment, waiting for its value to increase. This leads to urban sprawl, inefficient land use, and higher housing costs. An LVT would make this kind of speculation less attractive, encouraging landowners to develop or sell their land. This could lead to more efficient land use, less urban sprawl, and potentially more affordable housing.
It's unclear (at least to me) why Google, say, whose business activity is very non-land-intensive, should be in a favorable tax position compared to, say, farming. You say "because the farmers use more land!" And it's true; they do. But if you don't already believe that land should be the determinant of tax, that explanation doesn't give you any reason to start believing.
Re wealth inequality: No, this tax will make the wealthy hold less of their wealth in the form of land. They'll just hold it in some other form, and that other form will be taxed less or none. That might redistribute land more evenly across society, and that might be a net win, but it won't redistribute wealth very much.
If the wealthy do decide to hold their wealth in other forms, this could potentially free up land for more productive uses or for those who might not have had access to land ownership before. This could lead to a more equitable distribution of land, which is a form of wealth in itself.
The argument that the wealthy will simply shift their wealth to other less-taxed or non-taxed forms is not necessarily a critique of the LVT, but rather a critique of the overall tax system. If other forms of wealth are undertaxed, the solution would be to reform these areas of the tax system, rather than reject the LVT.
It actually doesn't, because if you hold unused land it's already fully rational for you to sell or lease it, so that some other activity can take place on it instead - any land that's taxed by LVT must by definition have some economic value. LVT may discourage pointless speculation in land values, but that's a benefit and far from a 'distortion'.
You could say that they can set the land to being a special tax code for tree farming or w/e. Which is something that already exists. I've been looking for a 10 acre plot (being picky on location, shape, etcetc) for a couple years now and most plots are already taxed at a lower rate due to this sort of tax code.
So my question/point is, people who are selling land (presumably as part of an investment) would be muddled in with people who are holding thousands of acres for tree farming. At least, in my experience.
What's the solution in this area? Be more restrictive on who gets the relaxed tax incentive? Perhaps not care, and assume wood prices will go up dramatically since tree farming is now much more expensive? Just curious on your thoughts
Your hypothetical tree farm would be taxed at the same rate as a neighboring parcel that didn't have a tree farm on it.
But you don't have to wait 40 years to realize a return on your investment if you don't want to... the sale price of the land would be going up every year, because the trees would be growing (a tree farm with 20 year old trees on it would be worth a lot more than a tree farm with 1 year old trees on it, yes?).
I myself am not fully persuaded by Georgism, but as far as I can see, there's no disincentive to things like tree farms under a Georgist model.
An average value for farmland might be something like $5000 / acre.
The average value for land in even a low cost of living city can be $2.5m / acre.
Hmmm, I don't get this point. If the incentive is to sell of develop your land what happens to "fallow" land that serves as a habitat for plants or animals? Seems like this would encourage developing land even if it's in a suboptimal location and would otherwise remain fallow, which seems less sustainable than the status quo.
The market will help to a certain extent, because land in the countryside is not going to be assessed (and therefore taxed) nearly as highly as land in the city center. "Vacant lots" out in the countryside are great, but in the city they are a scourge.
That said, the government will need to step in to protect urban and semiurban greenspaces/greenways, because LVT would indeed encourage development of those. (Extreme example, Central Park would be assessed as worth billions of dollars and taxed many millions a year).
I think, ideally, local and state gov'ts would either buy or grant tax easements on urban green areas. If done right, LVT could then incentivize developers to either use the land for buildings, or turn it into a greenspace, avoiding the gross middle-ground of parking lots and other low-value and use.
We were under utilizing it and now its a hospital among other things.
Land out in the countryside would not be hugely taxed under this system.
This is targeted at that parking lot in San Francisco that really should be an underground parking lot with 1 story of retail at the ground floor and 4 stories of housing above it.
In the EU there are "set-aside" payments to encourage farmers to do this, and national parks and other restrictions to protect the more valuable habitats.
> Unlike income or consumption taxes, an LVT is non-distortionary. It doesn't discourage productive activities like work, saving, or investment
It's not great for anyone who chose to invest in land based on the current rules, and then the rules change.
> Many landowners hold onto vacant or underutilized land as a speculative investment, waiting for its value to increase
This is a symptom, not a root problem.
> encouraging landowners to develop or sell their land
The land may now be worth less than it was, as it has an instant and recurring negative sign attached to it.
>It's not great for anyone who chose to invest in land based on the current rules, and then the rules change.
Taxing land is intended to change current land investment behavior.
speculation... wasteful monopolization and other rotten externalities ARE the problem.
and since when are prices of land decreasing suddenly a terrible thing?
2) How do you account for the difference in land value (seaside versus downtown versus suburban, views versus no views, etc)?
First off it did: the standard of living of anyone in a Western/industrialized society is ridiculously higher than 100 years ago. And even for less well-developed countries reduced absolute poverty and the diffusion of technology (Germ Theory, vaccines, mobile phones) has done wonders.
One interesting metric is that the cost/effort of being about to produce one hour of light has absolutely plummeted over time:
* https://www.vox.com/2015/6/9/8749751/historic-cost-of-lighti...
As Terry Pratchett observed:
> You can't make people happy by law. If you said to a bunch of average people two hundred years ago "Would you be happy in a world where medical care is widely available, houses are clean, the world's music and sights and foods can be brought into your home at small cost, travelling even 100 miles is easy, childbirth is generally not fatal to mother or child, you don't have to die of dental abcesses and you don't have to do what the squire tells you" they'd think you were talking about the New Jerusalem and say 'yes'.
* http://groups.google.com/group/alt.fan.pratchett/msg/ee9e9fb...
If you're talking about working hours:
> Now it is true that the needs of human beings may seem to be insatiable. But they fall into two classes --those needs which are absolute in the sense that we feel them whatever the situation of our fellow human beings may be, and those which are relative in the sense that we feel them only if their satisfaction lifts us above, makes us feel superior to, our fellows. Needs of the second class, those which satisfy the desire for superiority, may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they. But this is not so true of the absolute needs-a point may soon be reached, much sooner perhaps than we are all of us aware of, when these needs are satisfied in the sense that we prefer to devote our further energies to non-economic purposes.
[…]
> For many ages to come the old Adam will be so strong in us that everybody will need to do some work if he is to be contented. We shall do more things for ourselves than is usual with the rich to-day, only too glad to have small duties and tasks and routines. But beyond this, we shall endeavour to spread the bread thin on the butter-to make what work there is still to be done to be as widely shared as possible. Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while. For three hours a day is quite enough to satisfy the old Adam in most of us!
* John Maynard Keynes, "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
* http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf
An essay putting forward / hypothesizing four reasons on why the above did not happen (We haven't spread the wealth around enough; People actually love working; There's no limit to human desires; Leisure is expensive):
* https://www.vox.com/2014/11/20/7254877/keynes-work-leisure
It did. Domestic labor went from walking down to the creek and using a wash tub to throwing it into a washing machine, coal fired stoves were replaced with gas and electric, garments made by hand are now made an ocean away, television and the internet made homes more fun to be in and gave a break to parents minding children, beating the rugs was replaced with a vacuum, the freezer and microwave made quick meals trivial to prepare..
And then, suddenly and totally organically, with no help from a media that is owned by a few large corporations that would benefit from doubling the workforce, it was decided that working in the home is slavery, now two incomes chase the same home that costs now twice as much and the population pyramid is inverting beacuse nobody had kids.
May I suggest a more accurate tax....Capital Value Added Tax...we have extremely large warping of the tax systems and political systems by uncontrolled capitalism run amok.
Start with hedge fund tax of 3%, ah ah before you complain several large hedge funds have stated they would be in favor of such a tax as it addresses inequality without damaging hedge funds.
The question: > Shifting the burden of municipal property taxes towards land and away from improvements such as buildings - as proposed in the Detroit land value tax plan - will enhance the incentives for owners to develop their land and thereby give a substantial boost to local economic growth over a ten-year horizon.
And responses: 7% Strongly Agree, 46% Agreed, 17% Uncertain, 2% Disagree,2% No opinion, 24% Did Not Answer
https://www.kentclarkcenter.org/surveys/land-value-tax/ (The link also shows the responses weighted by the responder's confidence, and the individual responses).
In a field which has notable problems with predicting the future, adding more samples may not improve matters.
Sometimes they get it right.
UK-focused articles rebutting common arguments against a land value tax, written by an LVT advocate: http://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/p/index.html
Edit: Link: http://www.yppuk.org/2023/03/mark-wadsworth-obituary.html
Does a new tenant always get a new 99 year lease, or is it the remainder of the previous lease? I would not consider a lease expiring next year, for example, to be of equivalent value.
I spend a lot of time in Arden, Delaware which is also a single tax community. Many of the people of Arden love the town and Georgism. So much so that there seems to be several people from Arden that were named either Arden or George.
Does the same naming thing happen in Fairhope?
Recently the home builders on new houses have sold the house and then also been selling the leases to a 3rd party as an investment. These 3rd parties have been radically increasing the annual ground to much higher levels. I’m never going for a lease hold property.
By "good flexibility" I mean options to convert from perpetual ownership without screwing current owners -- our perpetual ownership model involves extremely favorable tax treatment at certain stages (capital gains forgiveness, like kind exchanges, cost basis step up) and you could make these benefits contingent on a conversion to a 99 year lease or something. I believe there is data that shows people have a stated preference for perpetual over 99 year, but they have a revealed preference that is neutral between the two, and this is how you could achieve the conversion without seizing land.
By "bad flexibility" I mean that LVT calculations seem easier to sabotage to blatantly favor the upper crust. If they can do it for income / capital gains tax, they can do it for LVT. Rolling leases, however, have a pretty transparent periodic price finding mechanism. Nothing is perfect, the treatment of improvements at renewal/auction time is a likely vector for skullduggery, but to my intuition it still seems better than LVT due to having more eyes and competing interests focused on the process.
Anyway, this is a "butterfly idea" where I haven't put enough thought into it to have a strongly informed opinion one way or the other and I want to know if someone knows of scholarly work on the subject.
people own more than that The property should be taxed
also corporation-owned properties should be taxed
edit: i mean annual property taxes
It could so easily go badly though, and be worse than the existing system. The arguments in favor though, are very compelling.
There are established means through which tax assessors appraise the value of properties. They are held accountable by means of appeals in the judicial system. Tax rates themselves are democratically determined by the electorate for whom they are applied.
1. which I only sorta agree with depending on the context
2. 75%? To be figured out by someone more informed than I, and not declarable.
I own a chunk of acreage in farmland adjacent to my metropolitan area. The township won't allow it to be developed further due to density restrictions, I have my one house on it but that's all I get and I'm happy with that, but his tax would be implemented at the state level. The state would say "You have a lot of valuable land here right next to the city. We're going to tax you wildly on land you can't develop.
Furthermore, this tax would just serve to increase speculative churn and encourage chunks of land that would eventually go on to become parks and public lands to be broken down by landowners into small chunks for the densest and most valuable uses.
The whole problem is that what is valuable is not necessarily what is good for society and this does nothing to address that. I'm always struck by how weirdly free-market / Laissez faire land value taxes are given who typically pushes them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38240940 Nov 2023 (3 comments)
What's missed is the general idea. It's not land per se but any ownership that can be/is used for "rent seeking" (i.e. getting money without contributing any work). Nowadays things like intellectual property, natural resources and major infrastructure are the major things that should be taxed in this spirit.
Expanding this idea to that all means of production falls in the rent seeking category, one arrives at socialism.
But yes, expand this to IP. Tax Microsoft and Disney for the full value of their copyrights. If they don't want to pay the tax, they can let the copyright lapse early. Tax google for the full value of google.com. And so on.
The socialist terminology around the different forms of property is really bad and causes a lot of confusion.
It's better to focus one-by-one on comparatively small reforms that each close off a single avenue of rent-seeking and can each be justified on sturdy economic footing by economists with minimal direct relation to he-who-must-not-be-named. This approach is less revolutionary (we know how those go), more propaganda resistant, and generally better.
Isn't class conflict a direct and inevitable result of private ownership of capital? What kind of arrangement makes companies pay more for labor than they have to?
The goal of these policies, IMH(umble)O, should be to help poorer renters become richer homeowners.
I feel like you do that by reducing the total cost of walking that path. Not by increasing their tax obligation every step up the socio-economic ladder they climb on their way out of the lower class.
Taxes would still happen on renter investment property.
Just not someones personal home.
So no subsiding at all.
The concept of imputed income also helps homeowners. If you own a house that you rent out to people, the money you get is counted as income. If you are an owner-occupier and paid off your mortgage, then you effectively pay rent to yourself... money that you otherwise would've needed to pay to others, but don't need to pay tax on it.
So essentially you get a deduction even besides the mortgage interest deduction. All of this is also factored into home values, and thus the purchase decision for new buyers won't ever be dramatically better than renting.
The solution of a land value tax is necessary. It is most necessary in the residential space, including for first homes, because that is the most important place where we need to ensure high and quality supply, and affordability.
Helping homeowners, specifically, but not others is arbitrary and unfair.
Providing a citizen's dividend out of the revenue of a land value tax, to help all, would be fair, and would help enable people to acquire homes if they want them.
This is how it works in Canada: principle residence has no capital gains on sale.
If you move to a new place, and don't sell the old one, then you have to change its status and the clock starts ticking on any price appreciation after the status change. Further if you rent out part of the structure (e.g., basement), then you have to pro-rate a status change of the property (generally proportional to surface area) and declare rental income.
No capital gains isn't necessarily a great system either. It leads to people treating their primary home as a retirement savings vehicle.
Taxing inflation-adjusted capital gains on home sales is a sensible compromise. And maybe also allowing the gain to be divided over years of ownership.
Eliminating those and increasing corporate/second property taxes instead would be insane. That means that renters would be responsible for most of the taxes required to maintain the streets in front of my house.
Ultimately, land itself is like air and water, it is a birth-right.
Owning land is not a birth right.
Absurd.
I find it absurd that rich people can move to an area they like and displace all the families that have been there generations by virtue of property tax increases effectively conquering the land.
I find it absurd that the government can take your home AT ALL after you have spent your whole life paying for it.
It is true that a LVT will have a larger percentage impact on the market value of undeveloped land who bought land for speculation without any investments in making the land more valuable. This will especially affect people who bought up lots of land speculating on the value going up. This includes people who bought up lots of land for farm/lumber/mining, but also people who buy up urban plots and keep them as a flat land parking lot while waiting for the value to go up.
Any change in taxes will have some winners and some losers. For example an increase in traditional property taxes hurts anyone who bought expensive houses. An sales tax/consumption taxes hurts anyone who saved up financial assets. An increase in income taxes hurts people who invested in education to increase their labor value.
The question is which is the least unfair way to tax to meet the needs of society. Most of those other taxes will actively discourage valuable investments that make society as a whole more prosperous. Property taxes discourage building. Wealth taxes discourage saving. Income taxes discourage earning and investment towards future earning. In contrast a tax on land value, doesn't cause there to be any less land. It does discourage speculation in future increases in land value, but that speculation is mostly zero sum (it might make the individual speculator richer, but doesn't increase the wealth of society as a whole).
Yes, but you could also say:
"They key is that it is a tax on the relationships between specific landowners and the local representatives and lobby dollars spent"
Now, if you're a farmer on the edge of Austin, and the city's growth means your land is getting increasingly valuable due to high housing demand, then your tax will go up, potentially until you're forced to give up farming and sell to developers. That's intentional, it means the land will be used for something more valuable than it's current use.
It's a fair concern, but also because property tax already includes some land tax it's not dramatically different. Those activities are already mostly done in areas where land is extremely cheap.
The long answer requires a discussion about what you define as "fair" & the exact implementation of the tax governing the land you're talking about. This would be true of any tax though. The answer would still likely be no, though.
Many places have implemented an LVT. I suggest you look into some of them to see how the tax usually plays out in practice. In NSW, Australia, for example, farmland is exempt.
If you are sitting on land that is more valuable than the use you put it to, maybe you should have an incentive to put it to more valuable use?
Also, i'm picturing the value of the land literally by what i'm trying to buy it as. Not sure how much more accurate it can get than that (at least, it's as practical as it can get. Since it's literally the sell price). These are pretty rural, fwiw. 5-10 acres, ranging from 150-250k. Heavily depends on distance to towns, interstates, etc.
Fun fact, a couple of the companies that own these lands i refer to also have a few (very limited) special gated communities. Lots that are ~20 acres, with a ton of HOA-like (CCRs) restrictions on preserving the trees. It looks a lot like living _in_ a park. Trails everywhere, etc. I was really close to getting one of those, but wetlands make a lot of purchases difficult here in WA.
And your original claim was:
> Therefore, an LVT wouldn't distort market incentives, unlike other taxes. By shifting the tax burden onto land, we could potentially reduce the distortionary effects of other taxes and promote economic growth.
If you keep the other taxes, that benefit is reduced, compared to if other taxes were eliminating. (Though, on re-reading, I do see several bits of language that indicate you were thinking about not eliminating other taxes.)
"Efficient" by one specific measure--how much money you can make from the land. But who says that's the best measure to guide land use?
What do you propose is the best measure to guide land use and what policies can be put in place to align those principles?
inb4 its from the Matrix; only red/blue pill is. The [term]pilled is from /pol/.
Say I've got a few acres of forest that I want to keep as forest for carbon capture and as a place for birds to rest during the annual migration, and say there are logging, mining, and oil companies that want to log, mine, or drill on that land.
Under the present system keeping it as a forest doesn't make my position worse. It just means I don't reap the profits that I could reap by selling or leasing. Its an opportunity cost, not a real cost.
Under LVT my taxes go up because of those valuable potential uses. That's a real cost to me for keeping the forest.
You could even add a life tenancy for yourself to the deal -- you'd probably get out of paying any taxes at all.
Land right next to Lincoln is likely to be valued like other residential and industrial spaces; land out in McPherson County is likely to continue to be valued like other farmland.
> and since when are prices of land decreasing suddenly a terrible thing?
Because if it decreases, then it will discourage people from selling. You think it will increase selling (and for some reason think that's good); I'm saying that this might counteract that.
More: If the tax rate has gone up enough that the price has gone down, then if I hold it, I'm also having to pay the higher taxes year after year. That's going to encourage selling, not discourage it.
I don't like Georgism for other reasons, but I think that part will work as advertised.
What might those be? Can you expand on why you don't "like" it...
Yes. Capital interests have spent the last 50 years laying minefields around the concepts of socialism. "Socialism is when more taxes," "socialism is when unions stop your employer from paying you more than your lazy coworker," "socialism is when you own nothing (as in property, not just assets)." Focusing on small, concrete reforms allow you to navigate around the mines.
> Isn't class conflict a direct and inevitable result of private ownership of capital?
No, it depends on the terms of ownership. Finite terms and progressive taxation can prevent the exponential runaway that establishes and perpetuates class structures.
> What kind of arrangement makes companies pay more for labor than they have to?
Policy that makes labor less desperate and therefore have higher bargaining power. There are many levers to pull.
Also at least here in Finland land tax is more a center-right thing, and falls under the general umbrella of "neutral taxation", which in practice is usually a dog whistle for flat or regressive taxes.
> No, it depends on the terms of ownership. Finite terms and progressive taxation can prevent the exponential runaway that establishes and perpetuates class structures. > Policy that makes labor less desperate and therefore have higher bargaining power. There are many levers to pull.
Pedantically there's class conflict whenever there are classes that have conflicting interests (e.g. workers want more pay but owners want to pay less). But yes, its effects can be reduced with various policies.
They can, but IIRC the Supreme Court just ruled that they have to give you the proceeds from the sale minus whatever lien value they had on the property.
Not that I necessarily disagree with your sentiment, but the situation isn't quite as dire as the statement makes it appear to be.
Not much more dire than that.
We too have such a thing, in a much more complicated way, but it's a mere fraction of what you pay.
On average, a dutch household that owns a home pays 851€ per year in municipality taxes, which includes property tax, waste/garbage services and sewage rights. Pure property tax may be as low as 50€ per month.
The idea behind it is very simple: you can't eat a home. A home you occupy does not generate any immediate income. Further, a home owner has little influence on the value of its property. When it rises in value that might be great, but your income, whichever it is, does not rise along with it. Finally, one can effectively never retire in their own bloody home with such a scheme.
Property tax is deeply unethical and cruel. Astonishing how the ultimate capitalist country allows for it.
But a place to live is obviously a requirement of existence, and therefore must be a right.
As for 'own money' etc, it isn't god-given out of thin air, but results from our current system of organizing work and distributing rewards. Some would say that system is unfair, even rigged.
What percentage is passed on as a birth right?
The discussion is about shifting more of the burden on those profiting so greatly off the land they own.
Imputed income is everywhere, are you suggesting it should all be taxed? When you prepare a meal in your kitchen instead of paying for it in a restaurant, you effectively pay chef's wages to yourself, "money that you otherwise would've needed to pay to others, but don't need to pay tax on it." Another reason why singling out homeowners on imputed rent is fallacious is that if the imputed rent were to be taxable, then the cost of maintaining and improving the home would be deductible, just like it is for landlords, and there would be no caps on mortgage or real estate tax deductions related to acquiring or improving the property, just like for landlords.
Renters are not building equity. They are spending their wealth every month and accumulating no equity in return.
I don't agree with calling a "homeowner" rich. Owning the ground beneath your feet is a big part of having equity. With a mortgage, unlike rent, every month an increasing amount of your wealth accumulates as equity as you pay off your principal. Once you pay off your mortgage, you've significantly reduced your monthly burn rate and can start moving your accumulating equity into retirement accounts.
Reducing the total cost of primary home ownership, reducing the cost of financing a primary residence to help build equity, etc. are all important parts of giving upward class mobility.
These are not things you want to disincentivize. You want your renters to become owners. You want your workers to become small business owners. You want your communities to build equity in themselves.
If you tell me that being a homeowner today makes you rich, I'll tell you that is part of the problem.
You think any for of US government operates on a shoestring budget? They are the most bloated entities on the earth. And its based off the backs of the poor and middle class.
LVT cleans up this incentive some by putting taxes in place in areas where the land is more valuable. I think Georgists would argue for doing that _and_ removing property taxes, specifically so you aren't taxed for the things you own.
I'd prefer to have more direct spending on services than we have, so the money isn't proxied off a building, or how many windows you have, or whatever harebrained scheme local bureacrats might invent. So you just pay X a month to have trash taken; X for sewage, etc etc. But I'd say that moving to just taking money in a way entirely unrelated to service consumption is going in the wrong direction.
2. Why land, specifically? Why land only? It's not the 1800s anymore, and land is not either the primary asset or the primary source of wealth. Why single it out as the thing to tax? It feels like a theory stuck in the past. It needs to explain why, in 2023, land is the one thing that should be taxed. I've seen handwaving, but nothing that feels all that solid. (The one argument that has at least some merit is that no more land can be created, unlike everything else. True, but so what? There's a maximum number of bitcoin, but Georgism doesn't say to tax them. Why is land the one magic thing to get taxed?)
3. It is easy for the rich to have a smaller proportion of their assets in land than it is for the middle class. (Unless they rent - and then they wind up getting charged for the tax without having the benefits of owning the land.) LVT - if it's the only tax - means that the rich can easily wind up paying little or no tax. I'm not of the "confiscate all the rich's assets" crowd, but letting them pay almost nothing doesn't sit right with me, either.
Also: There's this one annoying trick where "they" (the rich) constantly get whatever they want whenever the thought pops up and thats normal but any small step taken to roll back the trend and that is often popular or at least a cult-fave is radical and insane.
Edit: Family Guy already did this and they did it the best (frivolous difference in belief or opinion -> This man is insane -> custody -> comedy)
Exactly. It makes renter investment property more expensive to maintain, hence making rental properties a less desirable asset, reducing the numbers built and increasing the cost of renting.
Whereas a homeowner doesn't pay that tax at all, meaning the entire residential property burden is put onto renter.
On the flip side it would increase the number of single family homes and make them cheaper so people could afford them and stop renting.
Sounds like a huge win for single familys and huge hit to giant private equity funds buying up homes and land to turn the middle class into an eternal population of renting serfs.
It would also keep communities intact as people would never be priced out of their own home.
Net win for everyone but the private equity landlords and bloated government.
I've been a victim to people thinking like that - which is why I'm currently paying £1600/month for a 500sqft 1-bed flat, shared with my girlfriend.
1000sqft or 10,000sqft, small rural home or prime real estate, both zero tax. There's no incentive to improve land use.
Or just make the law have size limitations to be eligible for the exemption.
Easily addressed issue. Not even worth duscussing.
This would be great but try and find out where a homeless person can go and get help for their pet...thats no where to be found. The money just went ...somewhere.
Government's have a way of disappearing money.
https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/pet-assistance-and-support-....
Only one of those is income.
But also as more people transition to single family homes renter demand will decrease as well.
It equals out except instead of private equity firm owning all the houses, normal people will.
Good to know.