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>In austin we are starting to have an affordability crisis, whereas cities like houston are doing much better.

>The taxation is the same, what is different is the restrictive zoning in austin. In austin permitting can take 6-9 months and single family zoning restricts what can be built. The city council tried to revise zoning and failed due to NIMBYs, but they are trying again this year.

Austin's problems are straight out of a California textbook on what not to do.

Florida lacks an income tax too. Property taxes are distorted due to a law called Save Our Homes. SOH limits increasing assessed value of home prices to inflation (Consumer Price Index) or 3%, whichever is lower.

This mostly shift the tax burden to new home buyers and renters.

You get odd effects like in 2009, when property values dramatically fell due to the market bubble bursting, taxes actually went up because the assessed values were so much lower then the just market value.

In 2016, a 6.9 million dollar house was only taxed at 2.8 million. Source https://www.jacksonville.com/photogallery/LK/20170125/PHOTOG...

To be fair, and not to hate on H-town, but Houston’s concrete sprawl is not exactly endearing, and it’s relaxed permitting may have played a roll in its increased impervious cover and flooding.

I agree that Houston's concrete sprawl isn't endearing and that it's suffering some externalities, but in some respects I also see it as some sort of harbinger for Austin.

I like Austin, and would love to live there, but I'm timid about moving there in the short term because the transit, roadway, and housing situations don't seem very sustainable with all of this growth thrown on top.

FWIW, at least per numbers from proximityone.com (and I'm not certain how well-sourced the data is...) the Austin MSA is significantly less dense than Houston's:

> Geography. The total land area of the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land, TX MSA is 8,265.8 SqMi with water area of 1,178.1 SqMi. The metro ranked 21st among all metros based on total land area. With 2017 population density of 833.9, the metro ranked 20th among all metros (based on land area). http://proximityone.com/cbsa/1/cbsa26420.htm

> Geography. The total land area of the Austin-Round Rock, TX MSA is 4,221.7 SqMi with water area of 58.4 SqMi. The metro ranked 96th among all metros based on total land area. With 2017 population density of 501.2, the metro ranked 49th among all metros (based on land area). http://proximityone.com/cbsa/1/cbsa12420.htm

No opinion on the specific issue at hand, but wouldn't you eventually want to take the winning system of laws and implement it on federal level? Or would you expect better performing systems to naturally spread over? Are there any examples of that actually happening?

I think it is not state spread vs. federal, but more like state spread -> federal. Disclaimer: talking about the US.

For something simple that can stand on its own, that was what we saw with gay marriage and, I personally believe, what we will see with cannabis legalization.

For something as complex and interconnected as property taxes, I don't think it will be that easy to convert it to federal, so state spread is what we can hope for in the near future. An example of a similar issue is income taxing, where we ended up with a two-tiered solution: one federal (same for every state) + one state (differs for each state, with some having none at all).

You're assuming there'd be a winning system, that's a bad assumption, different systems would be acceptable to different sets of people. There isn't one right answer, there are many and people will gravitate to the ones they like. It's good that states can compete for citizens with each other.