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Comment by davidw | Hacker News Reader

The entire special report is well worth a read: https://www.economist.com/special-report/2020/01/16/housing-...

There's a lot of information, history and a broad perspective on how things work in various countries.

Housing politics is key to so many things:

* The economy - allowing people to live in productive places is a benefit to them, and all of us, because they put their talents to more productive use. California, where the housing crisis is worst, also has the highest poverty levels of the US when cost of living (which is mostly housing) is factored in.

* The environment - cities are more environmentally friendly than sprawling suburbs.

* Equality and "social justice": the history of how people of color have been frozen out of the housing 'ladder' in the US is not as well known as more blatant and vicious examples of racism, but it is a huge reason why certain disparities have persisted.

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It's a land value crisis. That's why the same size house costs more in a city. Society creates land value.

Tax land, not labour.

Wouldn't this discourage activities like farming, while helping technology giants get ahead?

I think informing tax law with zoning would be useful here. Rural: tax labor. Residential: tax land. Commercial: tax land + building.

And then if you're really feeling like reform:

Tax assets instead of income for individuals, and tax both for corporations. Only tax income for small businesses.

Interesting. After some thought, I’d summarize that all taxes on income and assets..including property.. are inappropriate.

We should have a flat consumption tax for all. And a single one time child tax. It is in effect a double tax, but still will be lower impact than the cacophony of various taxes we have now...it can be used to fund education. Currently funded by property taxes.

a single flat consumption tax will stabilize economy. I suspect that it would also curtail consumption and carbon foot print. A tiered consumption tax might be punitive but not a terrible idea even though it ought to be a back up or a emergency measure during crisis situations.

Food, shelter, medical and educational expenses should be taxed after a minimal deduction.

> After some thought,

Try a lot of thought. Like Henry George. Ricardo. Einstein. Friedman.

And then reconsider.

Right. Ok. Have you anything to add or comment about taxes?

Esp re what those people have said?

https://progressandpoverty.org/

It’s little frustrating because you are not saying anything...just directing me to look up something or url links.

I suppose you have no opinion? I see no point in continuing this exchange. Cheers.

I don't know a lick about the book mentioned or literal references you have been silently recommended to study. Obviously the implied message that you've yet to pick up on is that you should try and research your own ideas before profoundly postulating positive platitudes that are .... full of P?

anyway, i suspect your "idea" is bad from the start... you say tax consumption... AND THEN tax the (just?) born... do you even darwin bro?

You are giving the disenfranchised the shaft from the outset.. who do you think would like this? who do you surround yourself with to get to this line of thinking? Rhetorically, I'm done.

i am assuming it’s the child tax that’s seems to be a problem for you. I didn’t suggest anyone read anything. I think you might have mistaken subsequent comments to be mine.

Perhaps if I expanded that as ‘pay taxes for the consumption of your own child’? And pay a fee before having kids. This could be in the form of a community trust or an investment fund at county, state or country level.

We pay different kinds of taxes but children are negative taxes. As in, cost of rearing children is mostly subsidized by the govt with taxes.

My suggestion was that every consumption good needs to be taxed. When income, property, inheritance etc are not taxed and only sale of goods is taxed, everyone pays a tax according to their lifestyle.

Example: a sleeping cot is taxed much lower than a yacht or a house. Parents save and pay for their children’s education. The retirees live off retirement plans.

In my last sentence I mention that food, shelter, medical and education are only taxed after minimal deductions. Which means, everyone essentially gets a kind of UBI for essential needs before their consumption in these survival categories is taxed.

Obviously if one is ‘disenfranchised’ there is charity. Currently we consume too much using credit lines and debt. The key is to restrict consumption and eliminate waste/scarcity...have more local governance than regional governance.

> Tax assets instead of income for individuals

That would cause an incentive to consume and a disincentive to save. I don't think that is the direction we want to push our financial system in.

on the margin, yes, but most people want to retire eventually. income tax is itself a disincentive to work, but people still do.

Yes it would. Stop farming in downtown and go somewhere with cheap land.

You got it

No, it wouldn’t. A proper land value tax is based on the unimproved value of the land. Farms are almost exclusively built in areas that have much lower land values than cities.

Farming would already be discouraged if farmers could build skyscrapers over their fields and collect the rents from those buildings. Since nobody wants to live in a skyscraper in the country, this never happens.

I'm not sure extracting even more money is going to solve the problem if the problem is alraedy one of high costs. Le Chatelier principle?

It will discourage hoarding. Unproductively using land in high value locations that are growing is currently rewarded - with asset appreciation.

If it is discouraged - with taxation, that land will be yielded to more productive use.

Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it. Either we can let that revenue stream fill up government coffers or it can go into private pockets. It's our decision.

> Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it.

Well put. If I suggested privatising air and that you needed to pay the owner to breathe it, that would be seen as ridiculous, and rightly so. Meanwhile, land is an equally natural resource and equally essential to human life, but private land is just accepted as "the way it is".

This isn't a reasonable comparison because air is almost completely fungible; it's automatically redistributed throughout Earth by the magic of physics. Not only that, it's not scarce.

People in fact do pay for 'special' air in the form of air purifiers, air conditioning, heating, etc.

Land is both scarce and unsubstitutable.

Land taxes won't lower rents but probably won't increase them either, as rents are set by supply & demand. The cost for renting out a space over keeping it empty is minimal. Meanwhile the tax revenue can be used to subsidise rents (for example).

IMO land ownership is a big negative externality, as others can't utilise that land and land is a finite resource. As with all negative externalities, they should be taxed heavily.

That's not how prices are set on a finite good:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0

Land is finite but for all practical purposes, housing is not. Even in NYC, there's plenty of room to build up and that's exactly what's happening.

In most places there are a lot of restriction on building houses, so i would argue that housing is more finite than land. If you have planning permission in the UK, your land will be worth a lot more than land without.

Land value tax taxes the unimproved value of land.

If you build a 5 storey house on it you pay the same amount as the guy next door who has an asphalt car park.

Hello my friendly Georgist

"That's why the same size house costs more in a city." This idea is actually debunked in the report; Singapore and Tokyo do not have a similar kind of problem in American cities because there's more construction of housing. In America, there are more restrictions around building and less tenant rights (compared to Germany/Switzerland) which causes American housing to be an asset for both wealthier/older US citizens and foreigners.

> Equality and "social justice": the history of how people of color have been frozen out of the housing 'ladder' in the US is not as well known as more blatant and vicious examples of racism, but it is a huge reason why certain disparities have persisted.

In my city (and several others) you can overlay a current map of "above/below poverty line" on top of a 1930's map rating neighborhoods by "risk".

Those rated low quality/high risk due to "threat of infiltration of foreign-born, negro, or lower grade population" in the 1930s line right up with the largest swaths of below-poverty-line neighborhoods today.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2015/04/after-nearly-a-centur...

>California, where the housing crisis is worst, also has the highest poverty levels of the US when cost of living (which is mostly housing) is factored in.

The housing crisis is relative. It's a crisis when your relative moves in.. All joking aside, _every_ major metro has an affordable housing crisis.

That's a funny joke but the housing crisis in CA is no laughing matter. many have lost family and friends who have had to leave the state. millenials have stopped having children. and the few who can buy are taking on insance mortgages to pay off million dollar homes which are supposed to cost 250K. Imagine global warming burning down every last house in your city 2-3 times and now you've got the approximate financial damage caused by the housing crisis in CA

Hey I mean I had to leave CA because of it.. I know how crazy it is.

>The environment - cities are more environmentally friendly than sprawling suburbs.

I'm not sure that is true, 50% of the world lives in cities but cities produce 70% of the worlds emissions.

There are a lot of articles talking about this. Here's one I grabbed:

https://www.citylab.com/life/2012/04/why-bigger-cities-are-g...

I think in the statistic you cite, 'city' includes both the urban part and the sprawling suburbs. You'd also want to compare apples to apples: someone living a very green life in a "western" city is still likely to live a more carbon-intensive life than someone doing subsistence farming.

I suspect it's more about wealth, people in cities earn and spend more. In general the more you spend the bigger your carbon footprint.

yeah, that might be true if we built cities where the only means of transportation was public transit. But I'm thinking of all those skyscrapers in SF, and how many folks make 1-2 hour commutes to work in them.

If there were more housing close to those skyscrapers; if it were legal to build it, those people would have shorter commutes - and occupy less land to boot.

Instead, San Fran is one of the NIMBYest cities on the planet and so all those people are forced to come in from further afield.

The skyscrapers themselves are pretty eco-unfriendly as well, frequently built as essentially a giant greenhouse with heavy heating & cooling loads to maintain comfort.

I suppose you might look at some technical discussions of whether you're better off with a larger area built up to 6-10 stories or something like that, than fewer, taller skyscrapers, but in general, that denser environment keeps cities from sprawling out, and is more friendly to people walking around.

I prefer the more European style of 2-8 stories, like here: https://goo.gl/maps/poabxNny8r8Jq46v7

But I think the broader point stands.

Many european cities max out at 8 stories simply because they were built before the advent of elevators, or the design aesthetic started before the elevator and they're keeping new neighborhoods consistent.

4 floors is mildly inconvenient on foot but 8 floors is becoming a real chore for people over 40.

Almost no buildings beyond 4 floors (5 the way Americans count them) lack elevators in Germany or Austria at least. I suspect it's the same elsewhere in Europe.

That seems counterintuitive to me. I'd expect only having one or two walls exposed to the outside (maybe 3 if I'm on the top corner) would reduce the amount of energy I lose to the environment compared to a house with 5 sides exposed. Plus a skyscraper can use a larger and more efficient system than a single family home.

Right, but your family home is likely insulated to at least R-13 in the walls and R-38 or better in the attic while an all-glass skyscraper is probably something like R-2. A tall & thin skyscraper also has an uncompelling surface to volume ratio.

There are significant demographic issues to account for, especially when looking at such high level statistics. Your breakdown also doesn't take into account the inverse land-use factor. High density in one location allows for lower density elsewhere, with additional environmental effects.

I wonder where those people not living in the city go to work or at school...

Oh, wait!

Rome is a city with less than 4 million inhabitants, they become almost 6 millions during a normal workday.

That mostly seems like an artifact that first world countries are much more urbanized than third world countries. Wealthy consumers generate much more carbon per capita in general.

New York City may produce more emissions than Papau New Guinea. But I don't think moving people from Manhattan to Vermont would lower emissions. Just the opposite in fact.

A person's carbon footprint is directly related to their wealth/income. If 80% of wealth/income is in cities, this isn't surprising.

Further, the definition of "city" can include a lot of sprawl in places like Houston, Phoenix, and even Beijing and Tokyo.

Even further, can you cute your source? I'm skeptical of both numbers. And it would be very easy to cherry pick either side of these numbers.

For example, a lot of concrete is pored in cities to build mid/high rises. Concrete produces a fuck-ton of carbon. Is this amortized over the expected lifespan of the building? Where is the carbon cost accounted for? A lot of the carbon is emitted in rural areas. But is it all just lumped into the city because that's where it's used? That seems unfair. A lot of rural wealth comes from natural resource extraction used to build and power cities...

Most power plants and factories are outside of cities. Yes, they mostly power the city and produce goods for the city -- but their providing a lot of income/wealth to rural areas...

> Further, the definition of "city" can include a lot of sprawl in places like Houston, Phoenix, and even Beijing and Tokyo.

Is it the case that you get to cherry pick which urban center is a real city based on how green it is?

The point is, there's likely a certain density at which it gets progressively more green to live in. If you're treating all cities equally, there's hardly a point in distinguishing between cities and small towns. There's not much of a difference between Omaha, Nebraska and Podunk, Kentucky. There's a gigantic difference between Manhattan and Yonkers.

I wouldn't be surprised if Dallas is "less green" than small towns in Italy, even adjusting for income/wealth. I would be surprised if the same is true when you compare to inner Tokyo (Shibuya).

One thing that would be interesting to know -- high rises can use a ton of energy to heat & cool. And the taller they get, a significant portion of the building is just stairs and elevators. I wouldn't be surprised if density gets "less green" at a certain maximum. Manhattan & Shibuya could very well be past that point.

>One thing that would be interesting to know -- high rises can use a ton of energy to heat & cool.

Sure, but how does that compare to the energy needed for lots of smaller buildings, which can provide the same floor space to the same number of people? I suspect the high rise is more efficient: it has far less surface area on the outside. The more surface area that borders the unheated/uncooled outside, the more energy you need to expend.

>And the taller they get, a significant portion of the building is just stairs and elevators.

Again, how does that compare to smaller buildings? Once you get past 1 floor, you're going to have to use space for stairs and elevators. You can't have a city with 1-floor buildings; the sprawl would be ridiculous.

>Manhattan & Shibuya could very well be past that point.

Have you been to Shibuya? Buildings really aren't that tall in Tokyo, especially in Shibuya. Remember, Tokyo (and pretty much all of Japan) is a highly tectonically active area, with frequent earthquakes. Manhattan has no earthquakes and has a huge layer of bedrock under it; it's basically the most idea place on the planet for building skyscrapers, except for being close to the sea (because of hurricanes, but these are rare because it's pretty far north). There are some reasonably tall buildings in Tokyo, but nothing like the 100-story behemoths in Manhattan.

Yeah, skyscrapers have a lot of stairs and elevators, but I'm pretty sure switching to a bunch of smaller buildings and replacing the stairs and elevators with roads and automobiles is not going to come out ahead on environmental impact.

For citation here are two sources:

50% of population: https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization#how-urban-is-the-wor...

70% of emissions: https://www.c40.org/why_cities

This is based on the concept of a "consumption emission", which is an interesting concept. The point being that cities (especially western cities) have seen their emissions drop due to de-industrialization, but consumption has increased (hence your statement about carbon footprints correlating to wealth/income). To say that cities impacts are smaller when they just outsource all of their carbon impact is disingenuous.

From your source: It usually incorporates the population in a city or town plus that in the suburban areas lying outside of, but being adjacent to, the city boundaries.

GGP suggested that suburban living is greener. How does the 50%/70% support his point if cities include the suburbs?

Think of it this way: The smaller area humans occupy, the more can be untouched wilderness.

Directly touching sure, but what about indirectly touching. If those city dwellers are all using more carbon and creating more pollution, then they may touch more wilderness.

Of course, they do not, but still....

People in cities have much shorter and less car driven commutes than in suburbs or rural.

Everything is near and there is public transport.

So how they would use more carbon is very hard to see.

This is also a factor or density right? There are more people leaving per square meter in a city than there are in rural areas.

Carbon emissions aren't the only impact humans have on the environment. As one other commenter pointed out, the further humans sprawl the more we encroach on wildlife habitat.

This trope of environment === greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is dangerous.

Wow, what a way to play with statistics.

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