Comment by systoll | Hacker News Reader

Comment by systoll | Hacker News Reader

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But all else isn’t equal – denser places have less land per house.

With a property tax, the total tax bill increases when you build upward and make the apartment block. If you take a lot with a single home on it, and then stack 9 identical homes on top, the resulting property might be worth 9x as much. That’d mean the renters of that bottom home still have to pay 90% of their old property tax.

With LVT, the tax bill is based on whether you could build up productively, whether or not you actually choose to do so. So if you stack 10 family homes on top of one another, the renters of those homes would pay 1/10th the land tax.

This shifts the relative tax burden toward lots which are less dense than their surroundings. Encouraging infill and discouraging sprawl. If it pushes some to build their single family home in the exurbs so that an apartment block can be built in the suburbs, that’s a net win.

Overly optimistic. If you stack 10 family homes the land is now 10x more valuable and gets taxed accordingly.

If you bring more families into an area, the land around them may become more valuable, but there’s no reason that effect would be localised to the apartment block.

This is the core distinction between LVT and property tax.

That makes no sense. If land affects the value of the land around it then it had to have gone up.

If you put 10 family dwellings on land, then its value is at least that of 10 family dwellings. So each individual renter is somehow paying 1/10th the 10x greater cost. You haven't reduced the LVT by sharing it between the LVT between the renters, they're all paying the same or more.

If you buy a block of land with 10 filled apartments on it, and then you demolish it and leave it vacant, the land still has value.

In theory, it still has whatever value the optimal use would provide.

In reality we don’t have an optimal land use oracle, and valuation techniques would take the vacant lot as a data point suggesting that the area is bad. The assessed land value might decrease a tiny bit – along with that of your entire suburb, and similar regions. But it’s not going to zero.

Similarly, if you take a block of land, put 10 apartments on there, and fill them with renters, you’ll create property value where there was none, but the land value isn’t going to go up 10x.

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