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Comment by mabbo | Hacker News Reader

> My local taxes depend on my land value + my house value

Are they separate line items? Or combined? The difference matters.

My condo is taxed based on the whole value of the unit- which is something like 1/2 of the cost of a house in the same neighbourhood, which means I'm taxed about 1/2 of what they are. But I use 1/100th the amount of land they use. Meanwhile, the cost to the city in terms of infrastructure (pipes, roads, drainage, etc) is much lower than the houses in the subdivision down the road.

In effect, today's laws makes high-density-home owners subsidize the high cost of maintaining subdivisions by taxing on total value only. Switch it to 50% value and 50% land use, with explicit line items for each and you'll see more demand for high density housing.

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> Meanwhile, the cost to the city in terms of infrastructure (pipes, roads, drainage, etc) is much lower than the houses in the subdivision down the road

The costs in terms of lots of services that aren't physical infrastructure scales with population, though, and for some services (or for adverse impacts that services don't fully mitigate) is also higher, rather than lower, for the same population when density is higher; e.g., crime rates per capita tend to go up with population density.

The base of the land value tax is the value of the land though. If the land is in the middle of a high population density area then the land is worth more and it generates more tax revenue.

The difference between this and property tax is that if you have a 12 story building on one piece of land and a 2 story building on the adjacent one, otherwise identical piece of land, they both pay the same tax, giving the second property owner more incentive to build.

And then what when everything has become skyscrapers? I think it’s perfectly ok that not everyplace wants this end result.

You only do this in the places where you want everything to become skyscrapers. There is no real need for it in Des Monies or other places that already have reasonable housing costs.

This is how the problem started in the first place.

“The difference matters” I don’t see how, but I don’t fully understand how your assessment works. My city’s assessment is close to the market value [1] for the whole property, so it’s a mute point.

Either way, they do give me a breakdown, which I agree is right (land about 33% of overall value).

Again, for rental properties, there is a disincentive to having low density housing (my condo value in a 20 story building is assessed as 20% land)

[1] close to what I believe I can sell the house for

Without getting into the numbers, this is the right approach:

Some people argue Property taxes vs Land Value taxes thinking it is roughly the same, and that althought it might change tax structure it wouldnt change rent prices.

But thats true if you look at it statically: dynamically, you make poeple in single family homes want to abandon them and sell them to developers, so you naturally turn an enemy (nimby) into an ally (sell for developers).

I’ve owned property in Virginia and California and both the counties I lived in break out the assessed value of you land and your property as separate line items on your bill. They do NOT break your payment into multiple lines.

For example, my current home is assessed as $150k land value and $350k house value for a total of $500k.

In my locale, assessments are required to be based on market value. The market doesn't assign a separate value to the house and the land.

No but the assessor can - and in every place I’ve owned property, does - give you a breakdown.

Heck, the breakdown is required information in your federal taxes if you want the depreciation expense.

And for all of us who don’t live in crazy-land CA, we have to get assessed since my purchase price (I.e. market value) ten years ago is meaningless today.

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