Over 13% of the homes in Japan are abandoned

1. Through life circumstances, they need to move. The most common case is when they have kids and need a bigger home, but sometimes they need/want to move closer to a new job elsewhere in the city, neighborhoods change in ways they don't like, kids move out and they want to downsize, etc.

2. Property taxes do go up, yes.

3. When real estate goes up, everything else goes up too. People that can afford more expensive homes also generally have more disposable income. So they influence prices in the market and food, restaurants, services, daycare, etc. all get more expensive.

> And can start a new life in a cheaper place - probably getting about same money for the same job - but with whole lot of money in the pocket.

This is a thing, yes. You see older people move away from the city once their kids move out. When your kids are young, it's good to be in a city and stay put so that they can get a good stable school, long-term friends, and access to lots of learning experiences. Once the kids have left, though, that all matters less.

But there is a cost to that. Uprooting and moving means leaving behind friends and familiar places. Diminished friendship among the elderly is one of the causes of suicide and lower life expectancy. It may mean moving farther from their own children.

For example, I live in Seattle. My mother-in-law used to be a twenty minute drive. We spent a lot of time with her and she spent lots of time with her grandkids. Every year, the rent went up on her apartment until she couldn't afford it. She moved out to the country. It's a beautiful house, but it's an hour away, so we see her much less often, and that's a real loss to all of us.

> Why should we feel sorry for them?

I think that's a shallow way to look at it. We should empathize with them, with both the good and bad parts of their experience.

Overall, I think it probably is a net win to have cities be mostly oriented towards professionals and parents and that it helps balance the demographic distribution of people in the US to have older people move to rural areas. But there are downsides too.

An example of rent-seeking would be if I were a steel producer and I ask the government to impose a tariff on imported steel.

Renting property is not rent-seeking. Wielding the power of local government to prevent new housing from being built is rent-seeking.

(I swear, the Kantian Categorical Imperative should be taught in high school just for its entertainment value.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Q8pf-Ad0w0

Not sure how his actions are evil or rent-seeking in any way.

Using it as an investment doesn't deprive others from using it. Using it as an investment means renting the property out to earn investment income on it.

And investing leads to that scarce resource becoming less scarce, through construction and expansion of housing supply.

Capital leads to abundance. Combating capital investments in housing leads to more housing scarcity. That's exactly what zoning restrictions and rent control do, and why some places have housing scarcity.

Vacant property is being wasted. Not too much of that, though.

Morally speaking, a housing market has much in common with a traffic jam or a crowded bus. Everyone takes up space, though some more than others. If you're living somewhere that housing is scarce, you're a small part of the problem, according to the space you take up. The only way to not be part of the problem is to move away.

It doesn't make sense to pick on some of the people in a crowd for making it crowded, assuming they're all taking a similar amount of space.

I doubt we'd have any workers paid through property taxes if we were paying like it's 1955.

Cities don't usually have a profit motive, can you name cities in booming areas that you think are 'extorting' money and wasting it?

It was never a requirement of feudalism that a land owner had 100% control over their land. Most feudal lords had a greater lord that expected tribute and support during war. In this metaphor land owners would be the lesser lords, not the king.

You can own a dog, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to beat your dog. And if you beat your dog, the state may well come in and take it away (and also jail you).

- The owner of land owns it outright. If you own land, you don't pay taxes on it to anyone. It's yours.

- Ownership of land is inalienable. Your land is yours, and you can't sell it or otherwise transfer ownership (except through inheritance).

- Land generates revenue through the collection of dues from peasants who would like to work it.

- The feudal dues associated with a stretch of land are fixed by tradition and, like the ownership of the land, can't be changed. This is why European peasant reform movements emphasized stable measurement units so heavily -- since lords couldn't change the nominal amount of feudal dues, changes were actually implemented by messing with the size of the units those dues were measured in.

- The king has no tax authority. He gets his revenue from the land he owns, just like every other noble does.

It is a radically decentralized system, even for the rest of the world at the time, and it reflects the very low level of societal development in feudal Europe.

The US property tax system is nothing like this. The government owns ALL the land, and no one else can ever own any. The government has tax authority over the land and many other things.

The proposition 13 system does look like it's trying to move things in the direction of feudalism, as far as I can see. It's even trying to make sure land can't be sold, in that when you sell your land, all the tax benefits are lost.

Under feudalism is actually when legal systems began to recognise allodial title as such. To the old fashioned kings, "land to which you have an absolute title" was just "land I haven't conquered yet".

When people talk about feudalism here, what they probably are referencing is the defacto inalienability of property under feudalism, and the consequent emergence of a small landed class who enjoyed revenues from a large labouring class.

The inalienability and concentration was not due to one law or institution, but typically several together. Some wills outright forbade the inheritor to sell any of the property, if they accepted the inheritance. In some parts of Europe, all of the property was inherited by one son -- primogeniture -- tending to concentration.

It was never the case under feudalism that there was no way to move into the landowning class -- some families moved in and some out -- but in practice families with land could very easily retain it. This changed only with the emergence of widespread trade and then industrialism, because these introduced much better ways to generate revenue from labor and led to a situation that might seem bizarre to us: poor gentry with vast landholdings and no money, and no way to generate revenue from the land since they couldn't invest in it, and no way to get outside investors because it was always "heads I win, tails you lose" when it came to collecting on the only asset of value the gentry had, the land.

What California is doing really is feudal, in the sense of encouraging the concentration of landholdings in a semi-permanent group of families.

Why? What entitles someone to being in a certain location?

For inheritances, you re-assess and consider it a sale. If the price went up lots, the kids can pay the tax and keep it, or they can sell the property and pay off the taxes.

I think a simpler solution would just be: you may choose to lock in a lower/earlier assessed property value for the purposes of property taxes, with the caveat that the state gets right of first refusal at the assessed value when you decide to sell.

Bam! One and done. Grants flexibility, too; each household can decide whether to treat their house as an investment or as a home, but not both.

High rent collection is a symptom of high demand for an asset. If the land wasn’t valuable, the rent wouldn’t be high!

But the argument that “place X is an economic engine but should still be cheap” is wildly unrealistic.

It's just the newcomers and perpetually poor who suffer the economic effects.

But, hey, the weather is nice and I don't see many "no gaijin" signs here. Would be weird since we're closing in on 40% foreign born after all.

Don't disagree, but it's also true that compensation at least for programmers is vastly higher in the bay area than Tokyo. Like 3x higher, maybe even more than that.

This all goes sideways when these funds are mismanaged & underfunded, which organizations have an incentive to do as it can be a nice way to juice profits immediately.

Wage theft is shameful in any color, and what has happened to American Pensions is stealing earned wages from workers retirement.

The city budget is not 100% salary. The city may buy water, textbooks, fire engines, fencing, sod, bleachers, asphalt, diesel, and so many other things.

Rent and mortgage payments don't immediately change for all existing workers. The bubble may turn in to a crash, meaning that these workers never face higher housing costs. Workers will normally be spending about 15% to 45% of their income on housing, meaning that most of their costs are unaffected by a housing bubble. Workers buy so many other things: food, computers, gasoline, cars, etc.

So if housing goes up by 50% now, next year the workers might need an extra 20% to maintain lifestyle, and that might mean the city budget needs to go up by 10% next year or the year after. If housing crashes, it could be less.