One way to alleviate this problem is to have a harsher tax on vacant properties to punish using housing as a store of value and creating artificial scarcity in the market, e.g. like how the DeBeers corporation made diamonds artificially scarce and scammed the world for the past century selling a shiny rock.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-progr...
The bigger issue is with vacant properties being used as cash stores.
Sure you can. Unimproved value of the land is simply the value of the lot as a whole minus the value of building that sits atop (well, improvements aren't always buildings, but that's a simple example). You can approximate it by comparing it against the transaction prices of nearby lots that aren't improved, or by taking the construction cost out of the purchase price of the lot.
> is popular with politicians
Land value tax in general isn't that popular around the world, and Henry George's version of it, where all tax is replaced with just a land value tax, even less so. As far as I'm aware, there is literally no jurisdiction in the world whose sole tax revenue is from LVT. Economists and idealists like land value tax; politicians, who derive a lot of power from the wealthy landowning class (who in turn would be the most hurt by LVT), not so much.
> The bigger issue is with vacant properties being used as cash stores.
Land value tax would be an excellent way to curb real estate speculation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Denmark#Land_value...
And if it's done similar to an appraisal they see what market price is for a sale (which combines the value of the building + land). Then they can estimate how much it would cost to rebuild that building if it were completely destroyed. That's the value of the improvements. The remainder is the amount someone implicitly paid for the land.
So I'm going to try to say something different.
1. Here is the article that convinces me it is very possible to assess land separate from improvements. It details several strategies for doing so. Also properties are assessed in these ways already in many places. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/does-georgism-work-par...
2. Accuracy of assessment does not need to be super high for this idea to work. You just need an assessment with the intent of assessing unimproved land. The tax does not need to be literally 100% of unimproved land value, it just has to be a high percentage. Let's say there is a +/- 30% accuracy of unimproved land value assessment. We can have a 70% tax on that assessed value. Some people would in actuality be taxed at 97.5% of land value, and some people at 52.5% of land value. Perhaps the unfairness of this discrepancy is a true downside. However, one could argue the same about property taxes now.
Someone can always come up with a contrived example to find a short coming in a rule or law. That doesn't make the law not sound or wise.
"Speeding shouldn't be illegal. What if there is a tornado behind you and you need to rush to get away from it, but you go faster than the speed limit to save your life? See, we can't have laws for speeding."
Well...kind of. It's pretty bad in a lot of places. There aren't enough homes in the places people want to live.
It has nothing to do with supply - there are more houses now than can be occupied in the US. It has everything to do with misusing the supply we have.
It has everything to do with the supply of housing and how it's been severely constrained over the years.
At some point, enough is enough and you have to accept that there’s no room for more housing without ruining the city. You could focus on reclaiming AirBNBs and vacant housing and you might be able to make a dent in the problem.
Just announce that your city is full and tell everyone to move on. Ruining the city will make landlords money and everyone unhappy.
So Manhattan isn't worth anything to anyone? Funny, I thought it was one of the most valuable and productive places in the country and there were still swarms of people wanting to live there.
This is accomplished by some clever technology the Italians use: they are able to stack dwelling units on top of one another.
In many ways, it was a more pleasant place to live, since I could walk or bike to so many places.
???
There's no need for 'collusion' - term is 'inflation' - which will 100% happen when we start printing money at that scale.
It's unavoidable, almost by definition.
Housing costs are already skyrocketing and this is moving into rents already, at least largely in part because of of massive Fed Stimulus. In the short run it might be better to just give some cheques to people, but not over any period of time.
So you get 0% inflation when we give money to the rich and bail out the banks, but as soon and you give a hobo $50 the entire economy crumbles and inflation spikes, right? Very conveneint ideology
You fabricated a bunch of ideas which have nothing to do with what I said.
'Very convenient fabrication'.
--> If you put a lot more dollars into the real economy by direct distribution, then rents will go up via systematic collusion. Most of that money handed out will be captured by landlords.
That has nothing to do with with what may or may not happen if you concentrate money in the financial sector via whatever means.