As to the housing crisis, what laws are preventing multistory buildings? SF blocks a lot of housing over 3 stories since they want to keep the mystique of the city from the Full House days (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_House). This makes housing extremely expensive since no one can easily put up a 50 story luxury housing apartment complex (which could have 1.5k sq/ft for a mere $675k).
This particular fallacy is a classic false dichotomy. It's not an either-or situation. In CA the incumbents voted themselves a massive tax break ("because retirees") when, if retirees were something you really cared about, you could simply give them a lower rate of tax or no tax at all for their principal place of residence while still collecting taxes from non-retirees.
I was disappointed they didn't have photos of row after row of poorly maintained multi-million dollar single-story ranch houses in the Bay Area. My old neighborhood in Mountain View was filled with retirees who were paying next to nothing to stay in the houses they bought in the 60s and 70s. These were the same people who would regularly vote against new housing because it "harmed the quality of the neighborhood." Every time I walked to work, I day-dreamed of how many people could live close enough to walk to work if we could put a 10 story apartment building over each of those junky old Eichlers.
It's not a fallacy if you think people own land. They shouldn't have to pay a yearly fee to keep the government from taking their property. Think about applying the same thing to laptops. Laptops are tools, or at least may be tools, for production and income. Why not tax all laptops owned by software folk as we tax other business goods?
In general, this argument seems to come down to "the society provides so much, pay your damn share." How about no, I don't want the society to pay for so much? As a result, I want to pay less.
If you don’t want society to pay for so much, maybe move to somewhere without one. Most of us want to live in a place where we all pitch in to help provide public services.
For example, police. If you legalized all drugs, you'd not need as many as you have. You could save money by not having their salaries, pensions, and benefits. You could also increase revenue by having reasonable taxes on the sale of the vice. Now you don't need to take land from people.
My whole point in all of this is that property taxes are not necessary. Rather they are used by people that don't want to think about ways to truly free their society. Those people limit building heights. They limit trade. They limit the very means that a state could make a reasonable income.
Note than land value taxes, a special case of property taxes, are widely considered to be the most efficient means of taxation among economists.
Homes are relatively unique in being something you own and still have to pay taxes on. They’re also unique in being something whose ownership and location determines so much about your life, such as where you vote and who you vote for, whose taxes you pay (far beyond property taxes), where your children can go to school, which police department serves you, whose laws you have to follow... it seems reasonable that they would have a special tax status too.
Property taxes fund the society they benefit from so it's only fair that they keep paying them.
Property taxes means the government owns both your land and anything you have on it and you are merely renting from them. This is not OK in my opinion, and I believe all property taxes should be abolished as it requires people to continue paying rent to the government forever. My dad had to step in to prevent my 85 year old grandmother from being evicted and having her house auctioned off due to years of overdue property tax because (shocker) she didn't have any money. So let's evict this little old woman we should be taking care of and make them burdens on their families because her breadwinner spouse died years earlier and she couldn't afford to continue paying rent to the government who did nothing but bleed money from her and her husband their whole lives. Really considerate of us as a society. Luckily she had family to pick her up. What if she didn't.
I'm sorry but the government has done fuck all to make my land better other than be a pain in my ass when I want to make it better and force me to pay them in order to do any construction ON MY OWN.
Yes, that's correct and why this is so controversial.
I believe society has a right to tax land, because owning a completely inelastic item like land prevents others from using it.
The issue at hand is that if you do not pay property taxes, the government will take ownership of the land away from you. That undermines the ownership. (So does eminent domain and civil asset forfeiture.) The ability to keep out everybody except the government is still useful, but not nearly as valuable, since anyone that really wants to take something from you can just use the government to do it.
There are other sticks available to encourage people to contribute money to their communities. You could still assess someone's taxes based on the value of their land property, but rather than take the property, you cut off its access to municipality services. If you don't pay your vehicle tax, you don't lose your whole car, you just lose your license plate and the ability to drive your vehicle on public roads. Similarly, if you don't pay the property tax, maybe you lose the ability to connect to local utilities and make use of public services. Cops and firefighters charge fees to come to your property. Public schools charge your kids tuition to attend. Perhaps the city won't enforce street parking restrictions at the end of your driveway, and starts leaving the roadkill cleanup truck there. Or maybe the city just publishes a list of non-payers, and local businesses start refusing you service. Most critically, the local cops won't help you defend your property ownership.
The problem isn't that property taxes exist, it's what happens if you don't pay them. If the actual result for not paying property tax is identical to a landlord evicting a non-paying tenant, the actual relationship to the property is not ownership.
You choose to live in society you have to play by its rules. You have a vote as well, so it's not like you have no way to change things.
Allodial title is a good thing. But the city still has to pay the bills.
The rule is that prudent management of the commons has a cost, and that cost must be paid. It is reasonable to divvy up the bill by the extent to which someone is likely to benefit from the commons. As it turns out, assessing local taxes based on the value of land property owned in the jurisdiction is a reasonable approximation, it turns the tax rolls into an easy correspondence with the plat maps and ownership records, and it is not very difficult to assess. It's fine to assess the tax based on value of owned property. My point is that the taxes should attach to the owner of record, and not the property itself. Indeed, the article details several unintended consequences from various methods of assessment.
It would also be reasonable to pay by a flat capitation, but that is a regressive tax in practice, despite being neutral in theory. Sales tax is more progressive, as the tax scales with the amount of money you can afford to spend. Income tax can also scale progressively, such that the people who can afford to pay more by virtue of higher incomes must do so. Those are all the responsibility of people. If they fail to pay, the punishment lands on them. And I think it is not proper to seize real property for debts that were unilaterally imposed on people without their explicit individual consent. Seize cash. Seize bank accounts. Seize stock certificates. Do not evict a family from their home. Do not take the vehicle they use to drive to work. And yet, those latter two are often the only asset classes subjected to property taxes.
I am already a bit hostile to eminent domain thanks to the Kelo v. New London case, which stretched the concept of "public use" beyond the point of reason. I vote my one vote as hard as I can, and yet society still remains unjust. This is a failure of society's rules. Those treated unfairly by them have always had the option to stop playing by that set of rules, and institute another that they find more suitable. You have no inherent obligation to a society that does not respect your contributions to it.
You have one vote. You also have one voice, that spreads based on the height of your soap box. You also have a wallet, which you can open or close based on the societal values behind those things you might wish to buy. And you have one clever ape brain, which has a built-in dislike of unfairness, and the ability to set goals and make plans.
It is reasonable that one might wish to protest the imprudent spending of municipal funds by refusing to pay tax? Or is it preferable that one pays the tax, as assessed and on time, and then assassinates the mayor and city council, because all other reasonable and effective means of protest have been rendered unusable? I would prefer that protest via withholding of material support remain a viable option.
You mean like stopping the chemical plant up the creek from dumping in your water supply? Or do you mean building the schools your children go to, or do you mean building the highways/ports that allowed your washing machine to be built/imported? Or by "fuck all" do you mean building the electricity grid and telecommunication infrastructure so you can sit in your living room and write nonsense on the internet?
I don't see why, at least in an area with any sort of constrained land supply, it is desired to keep old people in the same home (I can see same community, not same home).
From a land efficiency standpoint, where single family homes and apartments/condos both exist, you'd generally want to incentivize:
* childless folks (young people, empty nesters) in smaller homes (apartments, condos)
* families with children in larger homes (single family homes)
Property taxes are a powerful incentive to encourage people that become empty nesters to move to smaller locations. The lack of incentive to do this is part of why Bay Area single family home prices are surging - older demographics aren't selling their homes to families that really want to own for stability reasons.
(note: For the curious, in CA, Prop 13 doesn't per se create a disincentive as it allows moving the tax base to a new property for those older than 55 - but its presence removes what would be a strong incentive (cut taxes by moving). A strong tax disincentive to move though is capital gains tax structure on housing).
Look at SF. The right answer is to for old people that bought into the town during the Haight-Ashbury days to sell since they are too cash poor for the rents (property tax). The wrong decision is to change the zoning laws that prevent 5+ story apartment buildings that meet earthquake code.
So what? It's not like old people don't continue to use the roads, police services, etc. If they had kids, then they're also paying off what it cost to educate those kids (the property taxes they paid while their kids were in school covered only a fraction of the annual cost per student).
I could happily do without all those things. Create a free-living zone where I could move with little tax. https://la.curbed.com/2015/3/13/9980908/slab-city-going-legi...
Land is a finite resource and we should absolutely make ownership of it subject to tax.
Or did you mean, why can't other people pay for that?
I think house prices in china can't really be compared with other country for lots of reasons, eg: they don't own their homes (70y lease), very low interest on loans (1-2%), real estate is seen as a very good investment in china, etc.:)
Also, China lacks very good investments (the stock market is still a joke), so real estate is seen as the only viable option to beat inflation. So even in hot markets like Beijing and Shanghai, lots of nice apartment buildings will have empty units, which are just being held as an asset and are not even renovated to be rented out.
China is not really that unique from other countries, it’s real estate market is quite expected considering the factors that created it.
I believe that "you can't invest abroad unless you have money for a legal counsel" applies to a lot of countries.
Adding to you point on property taxes: Russian provinces with regional property taxes only saw, i think, 1/10th of the bubble in comparison to the rest of the country. At the time when an average private individual could buy 5 flats in 3 years in hopes of bubble growing faster than than interest on his loan, it will be pretty expensive to pay even 0.75% property tax, as it can easily be bigger than guy's annual income.
Oh god, yes. The housing crisis is extremely complicated, what we see now in Sweden is the result of a perfect storm.
In the 90s Sweden had a surplus of houses from the 80s building craze and municipalities completely stopped building rentals. The municipalities in Sweden are extremely strong too and have a monopoly on what gets built on their land, and they don't want rentals they want expensive homes because expensive homes are inhabited by people paying good income taxes. So, they never took those plans for building new housing complexes off the shelves till very recently (but the municipalities still want expensive homes, especially in the bed communities outside Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö).
We've also had the start of the fourth baby boom very recently, that's put a lot of strain on our housing market. The kids from the third baby boom in the early 90s grew up to move out and they started getting their own babies. This is what happened in the mid to late 60s too with the people from the first baby boom during WWII grew up and Sweden launched the million program to cope (which the national government can't do this time with the current laws in place, it's up to the municipalities alone to predict this and solve it and they failed or didn't want to solve it).
In Sweden getting building permits is a very time consuming ordeal and can cost a lot in legal fees. Building in Stockholm is about twice the price of building in Berlin and will take about twice as long to negotiate with the local regulators.
We've had record immigration to the cities in recent years, some from foreign migrants but by far most of it has been internal migrants (since during most of this crisis municipalities could just say no to refugees and cite the housing crisis as a reason for it, which the big cities have taken advantage of multiple times. I grew up in one of the wealthiest parts of Sweden just outside Gothenburg, they've taken in a few hundred refugees since 2008 while tens of thousands of people have moved in from other parts of Sweden). This is also consistent with our previous history; in the 90s we had a very large immigration of refugees but the housing prices still took a dive.
And finally, this is just how Swedish culture has evolved and it's happened faster than we've had time to react. Compared to the rest of Europe, Sweden has an unusual amount of people living alone. We move out very early from our parents and divorce is uncomplicated here which instantly creates new demand for housing; where there was previously only demand for one home, now there is a demand for two.