Hacker News Reader

Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Grocery stores have to pay rent, too.

HQ2 is a great case study on why we ought to have the Land Value Tax. Under this regime, wherever Amazon chooses to put their HQ would have all the same market mechanics occur (prices would still rise with the market) but the increase in prices would be seized as tax revenues and not as a windfall for landlords who had nothing to do with why Amazon chose to put HQ2 there. The region could then use this to e.g. build public housing, improve infrastructure, create functional transit hubs to allow people to disperse a bit while still remaining part of the community, etc.

View on HN

> HQ2 is a great case study on why we ought to have the Land Value Tax.

Are you implying that Arlington does not have a real estate tax based on property value?

Otherwise it seems you are saying that Arlington should arbitrarily seize all profits from landlords because landlords are evil boogiemen.

They're not necessarily evil, they're just profiting from something they had no role in creating. The LVT taxes specifically the value of the land as if nothing were on it - therefore it's value that is extrinsically generated by things like educational institutions, public infrastructure, geographic desirability, or... access to high value employers like Amazon(!).

It's worth noting that under this regime, any actions the landlord does take to increase the value of their particular use of the land is theirs to keep. Build a better apartment building that can demand higher rent? All upside is yours. Build a better storefront that entices higher end tenants? All the upside is yours once again. Seems like capitalist justice to me: you're entitled to what you've produced (value of things on the land) and the community is entitled to what it has produced (value of the land itself).

I don’t understand how this is supposed to work. Land value goes from 1 dollar to 2 dollars because Amazon moves in. Cool, tax revenue goes up 100%, too. This seems no different than a general real estate tax, though. Additionally it seems like this says nothing about whether the rent will go up 100% or 500%.

This feels extremely hand-wavy and borderline wishful thinking. Land value isn’t fully separable from improvements. (My land and improvements are both more valuable when my neighbors improve their properties. My neighbors benefit the same from me. I fail to see why we should be double taxed for the value we create.) Even is separable, it’s not at all clear that landlord profit could be separated this way, because landlords don’t rent out land.

Tax on land value only, excluding improvements. This encourages landowners to build to the limit of marginal construction costs, which benefits both the local economy and tenants.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com