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Comment by snidane | Hacker News Reader

This has been shown to be false already. Landlords cannot pass tax burden of LVT to tenants.

"The producer is unable to pass the tax onto the consumer and the tax incidence falls on the producer. In this example, the tax is collected from the producer and the producer bears the tax burden. This is known as back shifting."

From section "Inelastic supply, elastic demand" https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_incidence

If the landlords decided to increase rents expecting tenants would foot the bill, they would find out tenants to leave the location because it would be unlivable for them at that cost.

More likely scenario is by introducing LVT the landlord would be forced to do the opposite - ie decrease rent - as other landlords would dump their uninhabited properties back to the market.

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Perhaps individual landlords can't raise rents but the burden will still be passed to the tenants in the end. If you cut the profits of landlords enough to be statistically significant then it will cease to be profitable to be a landlord. (Former) landlords will then invest their money elsewhere, leaving people to buy their own property instead of renting, which incidentally means that they're paying the LVT themselves as well. The end user of the property always pays, no matter what clever scheme you cook up to squeeze money out of the underappreciated middleman.

Being a landlord is not some easy path to free money. It is a great deal of trouble and expense for (usually) marginal profit, and yet somehow people manage to be uniquely ungrateful for the services being performed on their behalf even as they freely choose to rent rather than own.

In the US, the profitability of being a "land" lord is highly dependent on the income tax deductibility of depreciation on the building.

Yes, tenants will be better able to afford to purchase a home -- and will be able to sell it more easily should they choose to, either to upgrade to a fancier house or a better location within the community, or to move to another part of the country.

Yes, they will be responsible for replacing the refrigerator and other appliance, and doing the maintenance (said to be estimated at 1% of the cost of the property, but of course that would vary a lot according to whether land value is 20% of the total, or 80% of the total value of the house-plus-land or condo-plus-share-of-the-land.

And for first-time homeowners, there are always some rude shocks.

Those landlords will have to find productive uses for their money, perhaps investing in young entrepreneurs, or developing land to meet the needs of their community for housing.

This. It's useful to think of it as an investor. As an example, if you own a property whose value is 250k in land and 250k in a house, and it currently rents for 20k a year and the land tax is priced at 10%, you would be losing 5k a year. So you put it on the market but no investor is going to buy a property that loses money so the price would have to fall out of the land value until the tax based on the value of the land is below the rent you are able to charge.

Now, if you abolish zoning or rezone places in addition to a land value tax, it could work as the investor could build more housing for the same land thus splitting the cost over multiple renters which I'm sure is the intended affect but a land value tax won't work without changing zoning laws.

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