The biggest thing missed when proposals like that is that not everyone wants to (or does it make sense to) buy a property. Making it 4x more expensive to own a rental property means that rent will be 4x more expensive for those that have to rent.
If I was moving to NYC for 6 months, or 2 years, there’s no way I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars buying-and-then-selling a property.
Not true, but I'm a Georgist so would be against the GP's targeting non-owner tax. Tax everyone according to the value of the unimproved value of their land.
I can show you plenty of places with $3k+ rents in SF with prop 13 property taxes that have not changed their tax meaningfully in decades. Taxes have absolutely no effect on what the renter pays. The tenant is always paying the land value. It's just going straight to the landlord if you don't have a land value tax, and it goes to society if you do. If you are going to buy a valuable property, why do you need to pay twice[0]?
If you adjust the land tax such that it equals the accruing land value, the price of land becomes zero. The local government can then use that tax money to do all sorts of things[1]. They can also use that as a way to reduce other taxes. Get rid of sales and income taxes. The Henry George Theorem states that a land tax should be able to solely fund governmental services. After all, all taxes come out of rents, so if you tax income, then that disincentives work, so you get less work. If you tax buildings, you get less buildings. If you tax land, there's always a set amount, so there is no harmful effects.
"Taxes have no effect on what the renter pays"; by this I assume you mean "market rate is market rate regardless of cost". Sure, to a point. The tax situation of my individual property does not impact the market rate. Just like how the market rate does not change if there is a mortgage on a property, or paid-in-full.
If the entire market is faced by a new tax all at once, you will see rents rise. Costs across the board went up, and every property owner isn't going to operate at a loss.
> Tax everyone according to the value of the unimproved value of their land.
Sure. This is the exact opposite of what the parent post was suggesting, where they suggested taxing people different based on the use of the same land improvements.
No. Renters are paying for the value of the land and the improvements. If the rental price of the apartment is above that, they won't pay it and find another place. If there are no places they will go homeless. Since landlords are already charging for this value, an increase of taxes does not increase the rents.
> every property owner isn't going to operate at a loss
So they will then sell. But who would buy at current prices? The main effect of a change in tax rate is a one-time change in the market price of the property. Someone won't be under water if the property was $1. The market will find a new clearing price.
I'm sympathetic to current owners, and this is why I prefer to combine the implementation of the Land Value Tax with a Land Tax credit equal to the existing value of the land to the deed owner. This will allow everyone to be net neutral over the transition period, and would even be net positive as the risk of ones property value dropping in recessions would go away.
> If the rental price of the apartment is above that, they won't pay it and find another place. If there are no places they will go homeless. Since landlords are already charging for this value, an increase of taxes does not increase the rents.
Nope. Sorry but that's not how it works.
If the landlord has to pay 4x tax they will pass some (all) of that increase to the renter. Also, a 4x increase in tax != 4x increase in rent.
So, say the property is worth 1mil$, and you pay 1% tax. That's 10k. You charge 3k rent. The taxman makes the tax 4%, now you have to pay 40k. You decide to pass 30k to the renter. So now they pay 36k+30k rent per year. 4x tax, 2x rent.
If a landlord does this, sure. Renters find a new place. No brainer. If all landlords do this, the renters arr fucked. Finding a new place will not save you. In effect you make it way worse on the renters.
The solution to the housing crisis is not some trick involving taxes, rent caps, adding more rules etc. The solution is simple: build more housing. That's the only thing that will work and will bring down the pressure.
We also need to stop conflating affordable housing with home ownership. If you are having trouble finding a place to rent you can afford there is no way you can buy a house. I feel like the HN bubble w/ our high sky salaries is somewhat disconnected from what the average person can actually do.
"If the landlord has to pay 4x tax they will pass some (all) of that increase to the renter. Also, a 4x increase in tax != 4x increase in rent."
How much of a tax gets passed along to the consumer is modeled in an introductory macroeconomics course. It depends upon the elasticity of supply and demand. A tax falls primarily on the side of the transaction with the lower elasticity, because they are less able to adapt behavior to avoid the tax.
The reason economists like a land-value tax is because the elasticity of supply for land is effectively zero: there is a fixed amount of land, and regardless of what the tax rate is, landowners are either going to seek a return on their ownership or will sell it to someone else who'll get a better return. Elasticity of demand is pretty low too, but it's not zero: people can double up with roommates, move in with families, or become homeowners. So a tax on unimproved land ends up falling almost entirely on the landlord, with relatively little long-term impact on rents.
In practice, we're likely to see pretty severe reallocations of land and short-term price dislocations, as existing landowners find that their usage is not productive enough to pay the tax and so they need to sell to new firms who will use the land in different ways. But this is working-as-intended: the goal of an LVT is to incentivize better usage of land through high-density development of desirable parcels, individual homeownership (when density makes sense), and commercial activity.
[Pardon me if I don't have a lot of respect for economists and their crackpot theories (remember 2008? What about the current inflation generated by printing money like there is no to more?)]
There are at least two problems with your logic: if you take all the land you can make the claim about the elasticity of supply, but not all land is created equal. Location, infrastructure, usage all factor into this. Taking the example of unimproved land. If I buy a piece of the said land near a town and don't use it for anything I just pay the tax on it and effectively lose money, right? What if the city builds infra near my land that makes it effective now to develop? Should I pay more tax now? It's still unimproved. Should I pay more tax in case of a rezoning if I could potentially build a house but I don't? See how I actually created one class of land by substracting from another!
If I can buy and afford (ie have the capital) to hold land for the long term + I can see where new developments are going to take I will be incentivized to hoard land. I can also make the case that it's undeveloped and I should pay less tax.
Now there is land that just sits there when it could be used for farming. Now we are having food and housing shortages.
That's why it's a land value tax, on the unimproved value of the land. Not all land is created equal. Land that's out in the boonies, which nobody wants, is going to have a low value and hence low tax. Land in a downtown area, close to all the amenities, transit, parks, etc. - will have a high value and high tax.
To answer all your questions:
"If I buy a piece of the said land near a town and don't use it for anything I just pay the tax on it and effectively lose money, right?"
Yup. Don't do that.
"What if the city builds infra near my land that makes it effective now to develop? Should I pay more tax now?"
Yes, you should.
This is actually one of the biggest arguments for a LVT, and it has three angles. The first is moral - it's society that's building the schools/parks/transit/infra that made the land value go up, so it should be society that reaps the benefits. After all, the property owner didn't pay to build that subway stop, they just got lucky and got to free-ride off of public benefits. It makes sense that the returns for building public infrastructure go back to the public in the form of additional tax revenue, which they can use to fund maintenance and new infrastructure.
The second is the economic flip-side of this: an LVT provides an incentive to right-size the government. Without this economic feedback loop, there's no check on public-sector spending tax revenues in inefficient ways. Who cares whether a new transit stop benefits residents vs. provides a boondoggle to contractors, if the benefits to residents are all captured by landlords rather than either the residents or the government? But if further public funding is contingent upon raising rents and hence tax revenues within the city, the incentive is to spend money in ways that will actually make the city more desirable and justify those higher rents.
The third economic argument is on individual landlords and developers. An LVT discourages speculation - if you're sitting on that unimproved lot and not getting any revenue from it, you're still paying taxes and will eventually go broke. Your incentive is to sell it to a developer who will build more housing on it, so that more people can enjoy the public amenities that made the land valuable in the first place. Leading into your next question:
"Should I pay more tax in case of a rezoning if I could potentially build a house but I don't?"
Yes. That's how you ensure that land is fully utilized and people who need housing can get it.
"If I can buy and afford (ie have the capital) to hold land for the long term + I can see where new developments are going to take I will be incentivized to hoard land."
It's the opposite way around - you're disincentivized from hoarding land, because you have to pay taxes on the land that's not cash-flowing. You're incentivized to sell to the people who are actually going to build and buy those new developments.
"I can also make the case that it's undeveloped and I should pay less tax."
You can also make the case that the government should just give you money, but in both that and your example, you'd be wrong. Everybody pays the same land tax, based on the unimproved value of the land. A developer who built an 80-unit apartment complex on 2 acres might pay $200K/year; a speculator who sits on 2 acres of undeveloped land also pays $200K/year. The difference is that the developer might be pulling in $2M/year and making a profit of $1.8M/year, while the speculator is slowly going broke. That and the developer is providing housing for 80 families while the speculator is doing nothing useful.
>> "What if the city builds infra near my land that makes it effective now to develop? Should I pay more tax now?"
> Yes, you should.
Doesn't this make NIMBYism even more tempting? I've got to be against any changes near my land, because it's going to increase my taxes and push me to move. In addition to not liking change in general.
A rational economic actor would not be a NIMBY under these conditions, because the increase in land values exceeds the increased tax they would pay, and so they could always sell their property for a profit and buy another one farther away from infrastructure if they don't like it.
In reality, people are change-averse and irrational for a variety of reasons, chief among them emotional attachment. So it wouldn't surprise me if people resist development in practice. A lot of NIMBYism is already of this vein - upzoning a property usually increases its value (because it can be redeveloped into more units), but is also frequently fiercely resisted by existing residents who won't sell at any price.
Note that a system can be rational even if participants are not - capitalism is, because actors who are irrational eventually go bankrupt and are forced to work for actors who are economically rational. That doesn't stop it from being unpopular, which, again, capitalism is. Many of the political issues getting an LVT adopted stem from this.
How is the value of unimproved land determined in places where there is no nearby unimproved land to compare with. For example, how would I determine this value in lower Manhattan?
You run a regression on the value of all the improvements, then subtract that from the sale price to get the value of the unimproved land. Smooth that over the per-square-foot value of neighboring properties and you can have a pretty good estimate of for the unimproved value of the land.
If you have a hundred thousand properties to collect data on, you can get a pretty good idea of "a 3BR unit increases the value of the property this much, a 2BR unit increases it by this much, X feet in height result in this change in value, per parking space the value increases by this much". Sophisticated real-estate investors and the banks that fund them are running this calculation anyway, that's how they know which properties are good deals. Once you have a formula for this, you plug in the stats of the property in question to figure out the value of the improvements, and then the unimproved value of the land is everything left over.
> So, say the property is worth 1mil$, and you pay 1% tax. That's 10k. You charge 3k rent. The taxman makes the tax 4%, now you have to pay 40k. You decide to pass 30k to the renter. So now they pay 36k+30k rent per year. 4x tax, 2x rent.
The price of the property is based on the return that the landlord can return. This should be obvious.
If you increase the tax by 4x, the most likely result is the market value will drop from $1 million to something like $250k-500k. The renters will be paying the same value. The new owner will have the same ROI that the previous owner had. Just different buying price and lower return per rental.
Or they sell it to someone for $1 million who is happy to live in it and pay the 1% tax without renting it out. (It may decrease in value some as it's no longer attractive as a rental property--especially if it isn't setup ideally as a home to live in.)
Not only that, but if I can afford it I will now buy all the land around me to insulate myself and make sure it doesn't get developed.
Also, what people don't get is that the same people that set the tax are the people that have the land and the political and economic power. Why would they do something that goes againt their best interest? We're all cool and open to all kinds of things until it happens in out backyards.
> If you increase the tax by 4x, the most likely result is the market value will drop from $1 million to something like $250k-500k.
Not really. This assumes it must remain a rental property.
What will happen is that this $1M property which was previously a rental now becomes a ~$1M property which is owner-occupied. The owner isn't going to take a 500K-750K loss just to keep it a rental.
>No. Renters are paying for the value of the land and the improvements. If the rental price of the apartment is above that, they won't pay it and find another place.
If investors are investing in apartments for people to live in there is no problem.
If investors are investing in land and leaving it empty waiting for the local city to build valuable infrastructure around them before they sell it, that's a major problem.
A land value tax will see the former do better and the later to do much worse.
As a society we need to decide if we want to have the cake or eat the cake. If I own the land, I own the land. The city has a responsibility to consider this (and many other things) when developing infra.
There are a multitude of levers that can be pulled to deincentivize this behavior, but the tragedy is that the people who benefit from it are hand in hand with the people that make and apply the rules.
> Since landlords are already charging for this value, an increase of taxes does not increase the rents.
This seems to assume that a rental property is forever a rental property and will continue to be rented at market price no matter what.
But that's not true. It's only a rental property if the owner can rent it out and not be losing money. If the conditions change (like taxes on it) so that's it can no longer be profitable, it is taken off the rental market (most likely by selling to someone who wants to live in it).
If that's one unit, no problem, the renter can go elsewhere. In the proposal being discussed where all rental units have a 4x tax increase, this applies to all rental units at once. Rent prices go way up and most rental units disappear from the market.
Well said and interesting. Part of the problem with change is that there are always negative effects somewhere, but the answer should be to address those negative effects... not to postpone change until a mythical no-negative version is found.
probably the main negative consequence of any real estate regime change would be the destruction of incredible amounts of (paper) wealth. if you're going to reduce the market price of real estate, you're going to devalue one of the most foundational assets in the economy.
but, that's the point. you can't reduce real estate prices without reducing real estate prices.
Destruction of wealth would be bad since that would impact everyone (homeowner or not). I would opt for wealth transfer. Build more housing! Once the demand decreases the price will decrease. This also solves another fundamental problem: we pretend that there are X houses and X people that need a place to live. In reality there are more people than houses. Way more. Build more houses. Build high density housing. Stop treating housing like some sort of holy grail investment.
Landlords are price takers. Rental supply is completely fixed in the short to medium run. Landlords can’t change supply when faced with a price shock, which means that rental demand is the only factor that effects prices.a landlords goal is to rent all of their properties at the highest rent they can get, a tax hike doesn’t change that.
> Taxes have absolutely no effect on what the renter pays.
Of course taxes have an effect on the rent price.
If the property tax is very low and the market price rent for that unit is very high, you're right, the owner will charge the high price and pocket the difference.
But the reverse is obviously not true. If the property tax is quadrupled (as per OP proposal) and now the rent no longer covers the ownership costs there are only two possible outcomes: the rent goes up to cover the costs, or, if nobody is willing to pay the new higher rent the owner sells the property off to someone who wants to live in it instead of renting.
The latter is good if we want to incentivize home ownership for everyone. But it does take a former rental unit off the rental market, so if there are people hoping to rent a place, it's bad.
If I sent you a picture of a home, and I asked you what it was worth, you wouldn't be able to answer me until I first mentioned it was in the middle of SF or if it was in the middle of the Arizona desert. The majority of urban values are not the value of the improvements but the value of the land.
The value of the unimproved value of land comes from your neighbors. It comes from your city. When roads and sewers and train stations are built, the value of being close to that infrastructure is given to the existing landowner. By properly returning this value to the city that created it, it gives them funding that they can use to build more infrastructure.
Eventually with a Land Value Tax is in place, what you propose of building new cities will happen. If you treat a city like a company, we might even see investment companies funding new cities. They make an investment of an infrastructure, get a profit, then they can use those profits and give back to their shareholders - the citizens. Or they could use those profits to build another city. The existing paradigm doesn't allow proper investment.
Right now they only charge for their costs and let the landowners take their share while the renters don't see a dime. Imagine if a company was not allowed to make a profit, and could only sell for a cost. That's exactly what happens with real estate today. They let landowners sit on empty lots that appreciate while they do nothing. They incentivize minimum parking requirements and single family zoned cities.
If I sent you a picture of a vacant piece of land in the middle of New York City's best neighborhood and asked you what it was worth, could you answer me?
You wouldn't be able to until I told you what kind of home you are allowed to build. If I only allow you to build a shack or make it a park you won't be able to extract any money by renting it out and thus you wouldn't buy it at any price, even though the neighborhood should command a steep price. If on the other hand I allow you to build a sky scraper of n storeys high, you will now be able to given other information on rents in the area that people are willing to pay.
What is interesting is that the dynamic actually flips once there is adequate zoning. Take a look at this[0] video on Tokyo zoning and how he talks about living in an industrial zoned area. He talks about how it's cheaper to do so, and if you want to move to a single family zoned area, it's actually more expensive!
Under the current system, landowners want their own land to be zoned as high as possible, while they want everyone else's land to be zoned as low as possible. Since 1 < everyone else, when people vote on zoning it is zoned as low as possible. With a LVT the system flips, everyone wants their land to be zoned as low as they desire, and they want everyone else's land to be zoned as high as possible. They would only accept land zoned restrictively if those people would pay higher taxes for the exclusive use of it.
In either system living in an industrial zone (or on the edge of it) will cost less as it is less desirable to live there (noise, air pollution, smells, further from grocery store, no parks etc) and nobody in their right mind would pay high rent there. Nothing to do with land value taxes.
Zoning changes what people will build there (we assumed it was even legal to have housing in an industrial zone there). If you rezone a residential area industrial and make it illegal to have housing there guess what will happen (assuming there's demand for industrially zoned areas)
Your argument is that places that are zoned lower are worth less, and places that are zoned higher are worth more. That's only true in the existing paradigm.
What would be true in the new paradigm is that places would only allowed to be zoned lower if people are willing to pay for that exclusive access. It's not just industrial areas, all higher zoned areas would be cheaper than lower zoned areas.
Land Value Tax incentivizes proper zoning, as the more scarce the housing is, the higher the tax. Proper zoning(like Tokyo has without a land value tax) flips the structure.
In fact the residential zoned houses at the edge of the industrial zone are worth less potentially than the industrial piece of land on that edge. (maybe not, because residential neighbors will get complainy ;))
I am saying that I don't see how a land value tax does what you propose. I had no idea what that even was until I read these posts and looked it up.
I don't see what you mean by zoned "lower" and "higher" actually. I can zone the land for another New York City in the middle of flyover country and that doesn't mean people will come just like that. The price this will command will be super low because there's nothing there (this is actually part of your land value tax system's reasoning). If I can find someone interested at all.
If instead I zone it agricultural I can sell it depending on vicinity to a small town, how flat it is (mountain side? No thank you for big agri, only small homesteaders will pay you a little at all). Flat and great soil near other agri infrastructure? Now we are talking pricy!
1. The inherit value of the land - rivers, gold or oil being key examples.
2. The nearby infrastructure
3. The zoning policies
4. The community and commercial services
If there is land zoned for another NYC, with the infrastructure of NYC, including the excellent port access, it would very quickly become worth what NYC is worth as people showed up. We see this with the pop-up cities in China after they reach completion. Though no doubt some will stay in ghost status forever.
It is up to the local government to do what they can to make the most of their land, just as much as it is up to the landowner of an individual parcel to do what they can to make the most of their land. The city is incentivized to zone the area so that it is valued highest. If they do a poor job of that, that is on them.
I completely agree with that last post's reasoning for why a pop-up city might stay empty or become another New York.
I don't see why it needs a land value tax and having one causes anything. All the things you are putting into your land value calculation cause that. Not the tax.
Now don't get me wrong. I'd love me a land value tax as it would probably mean I'd pay less for where I live. But that's it so far. Color me unconvinced otherwise.
Yep, this is a very natural way to think and why Georgist policies have not been enacted.
I'm a programmer, as most are on this website. The thing that mostly interests me is when incremental changes don't lead to global maximums. As are most who study AI and say, Agile development. When is it that prisoner's dilemmas occur?
I pay attention to things like programmers who fix the bug they introduced fix the bug at a deeper level[0], I pay attention to Simple Made Easy[1], I pay attention to the systemic effects[2].
I point out that the Land Value Tax is so simple and yet fixes so many things. It fixes an inherit problem with society at a deep level. You need to pay attention to the incentives and how they mold the eventual outcomes. Land value taxation leads to correctly aligned incentives.
Currently the closest example is Singapore[0], but they have much more central control than what a Georgist would find ideal. 99 year leases are far to long, and shorter leases would have much more beneficial effects.
Detroit was an example of a city that massively expanded[1] because of it, but eventually lost it's way.
Harrison, PA[2] is an example of a city that 'recently' used a revenue neutral split-rate system to keep from going bankrupt.
4x higher tax, not 4x total cost. First housing prices would crash, so rental prices would also drop. And they wouldn't go up 1:1 with tax increases. They would go up by some percentage which is fine. It should be a little more expensive month-to-month to rent vs. own. Renting should still be available, but a lower proportion of housing should be rentals.
“It should be more expensive month to month to rent vs own”
It already is. There are many tax incentives geared towards making owning cheaper. If owning was t already subsidized do you really think anyone would be handing out 4% 30-yr fixed rate mortgages like candy? Removing these would also make housing prices crash, which would lower both purchase cost AND rent, yet I don’t see many people pushing that idea forward (because it also makes it almost impossible for most people to buy)
The “I think people should own property, so I’m okay making it more expensive for people who don’t” is bullshit.
> a lower portion of housing should be rentals
Without numbers (the baseline you’re considering as true, and the number that is “acceptable”) this is just trying to impose a specific viewpoint without any data to back it up.
In Canada we don’t have 30 year fixed mortgages, the longest I have heard of anyone getting is 7 years and that’s me. Despite not having cost certainty in the long term we have the same property market issues as every other desirable place to live.
Those mortgages are still subsidized though. A 5-yr term before it adjusts, with upward protections on rate increases is still not what a "free market" would provide. These are government sponsored (in some way) programs to increse demand for homeownership without a corresponding investment in increasing supply.
Housing being used as a bet on appreciation, which fuels buying, which causes appreciation is best solved by building more housing. The way to make housing cheaper (or not be a speculation vehicle) is to build more housing. Full stop.
The loans are fairly close to an ARM in the US, and they're amortized on (typically) 25yr. They also tend to have prepayment penalties, which the US does not have for residential mortgages anymore.
I was commenting on monthly cost. Upfront cost for owning is much higher. Compare a mortgage down payment to a rental deposit.
How much more expensive proportionally matters; it should be up for discussion democratically.
To own property is to accept responsibility for the land, architecture, and legal liability. If you abdicate that responsibility to another party you should pay for a service; and the bar should be high for the standards of that service.
When it comes to realtor prices, you're absolutely correct. It's ludicrous that that effective monopoly has been able to persist.
There are other costs and risk though. Many places that have transfer taxes, plus inspection costs, appraisal costs, title insurance costs, and loan origination costs.
You also have to accomodate the risk or some major issue in the 1-2 years you're living there. "Saving some money over rent" doesn't necessarily justify the risk of having to cover costs for HVAC/electrical/plumbing work that has to be done.
If you have a bunch of properties with no stable ownership, where the buck will just be passed to the next person every couple of years, properties will fall into disrepair (moreso than they do now), and temporary bandaid fixes will be (more) or the norm.
Ie, I don't believe short-term property ownership is good for the property long-term.
> transfer taxes, plus inspection costs, appraisal costs, title insurance costs, and loan origination costs
Those other costs should be driven to a much lower floor as well. The majority could be automated, and likely are in the process of being (e.g. loan origination costs).
Essentially the only fundamental cost should be inspection: which is ultimately the buyer (and their lender) offloading systems assessment onto a third party. Who, if you read the fine print for inspectors and case law, is generally not legally liable if they miss something.
> some major issue
The solution to property maintenance seems surmountable. Require it for dense, neighbor-impacting scenarios (HOA, etc), and fund it via loans against the underlying asset (HELOC or home equity loans).
I'm sympathetic to your point, but I don't think it takes primacy over enabling individuals to own their own home.
If I was moving to NYC for 6 months, or 2 years, there’s no way I want to spend tens of thousands of dollars buying-and-then-selling a property.