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Comment by rightbyte | Hacker News Reader

> Land value tax would fix this.

The banks decide what your house is worth and the gov then tax you based on that. Seems like a way to force people into a never ending grind and kicking out seniors. No thanks.

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Er, an LVT doesn't tax the house at all, that's precisely the point. It only taxes the land... It's literally just a property tax that doesn't tax the house.

So if I've got 10 acres that I'm keeping as an undeveloped wilderness to provide habitat for migratory birds to use during migrations and you've got 10 acres next to mine with a 200 unit apartment building on it we pay the same amount of tax?

That doesn't seem fair since your 10 acres is using way more of nearly every government service property taxes fund and requires more of nearly every government infrastructure that property taxes pay for.

In that case, I'd imagine the solution would be to ask for a zoning change to the land (changing it's value), or put it in a non-profit which could have special tax treatment - or transfer ownership back to give under specific conditions.

My understanding is that in most places taxes would go down for homes. They would go up massively for those with vacant lots or a lot of land in prime areas that is being underutilized, which is why LVT is great.

My understanding is that people try to live their life and than tech bros and yuppies move in and somehow the taxes go through the roof and you gotta leave.

I mean, you sell your house with a lot of lot for a lot to some Facebook manager and move to Florida, but the whole scheme seems sinister to me.

Somehow "not getting my neighborhood ruined" is labeled NIMBY:ism nowadays?

I was specifically responding to the actual effects of LVT in practice. I'm not sure what you mean by sinister and also 'neighborhood ruined'?

A LVT is a fixed tax per square foot of land. It incentivizes maximizing the property value on the land and building high density housing there.

To clarify, it's not a flat dollar amount per square foot, it's a flat percentage of value. An acre of land in Wyoming is not taxed the same $/sqft as an acre of land in NYC.

Why couldn't ther be a tax per sqft? LAT rather than LVT. Would it change incentives in the way gp hypothesizes? Seems like it would.

That would be a terrible idea, frankly, because it will cause gradients of overbuilding/land abandonment and underuse. Think about it this way: you have a city where land is worth $30/sqft/yr in the center, $10 at the edge and $20 in between. If you set the tax at $20/sqft/yr, you will not incentivize people to build enough in the center of the city. It will be just fine in the middle, but it would be impossible to earn enough money from land to pay the tax on the outside of the city, so people would just abandon the land or try to build way more than you would actually want there (in which case the supposed land tax is actually cutting in and taxing labor and property as well)

I didn't mean there would only be a sqft / yr based on the value. I meant there would be a sqft / yr + value. So the city center would still be a higher tax than the edge.

The edge would still be worth more to build on because of the lower base-dominant tax.

But it does make the edge less accessible to lower incomes due to the base tax.

It should probably be a max value or max sqft on a given entity than try to indirectly force that with tax values. There's a reason we have anti-trust laws.

How does "value" get defined here? In the context of LVT.

The same way we've been doing property assessments for decades. Just easier because there's no structure to assess

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