In isolation keeping a neighbourhood character by setting rules around the paint colours and trim designs permitted seems like a benign set of laws to keep some interesting older neighbourhoods around. In practice they lock a city at a specific low density, often very close to the downtown core since the oldest development tends to be closest to the action. It can also exclude poorer residents (or even pretty well off people who can afford a $250,000 reno but not the $500,000 it'll take to satisfy the heritage committee).
I love an old victorian house, but not when there are hundreds of people living in tents next door and thousands more terrified they will have to join them because the cost of living is rapidly rising. If someone wants to pay to move that charming house to an area of lower average density, great. Otherwise it needs to come down to make way for hundreds of new units so people can actually afford the city.
The developers don't want to risk the buildings being designated, or even just the designation process itself being used to introduce lengthy delays and extra costs, at some point in the future.
Rather than helping to preserve older buildings, the risk of a heritage designation just speeds up the destruction of them. In the end, there are fewer older buildings, and more empty lots.
We really overuse these regulations. There are a relatively few buildings that are actually historic enough to warrant saving. But in many areas we're marking any old building as historic on the thinnest of pretenses. Having grown up in a city that was ruled by the historic review board, I'm unimpressed with the results. Maybe it's nice to see what they built 100+ years ago, but being forced to live in it forever? No. People change, neighborhoods evolve, we should carefully embrace that.
(In case it's suggested otherwise, I live in urban high-density housing, I'm just sympathetic to the concerns of others)
The need for housing outweighs the desire to get a return on your investment.
> The need for housing
And who is the arbiter of this morality or the urgency of this need? I say it would be elections where everyone in that area gets a chance to vote and decide for themselves.
Municipal regulation has been keeping the neighborhood the same so why not expect it will continue to?
And as we're seeing here, if they can't get what they want one way they do it another way.
I've always thought the way out (besides just waiting until a neighborhood is an absolute shithole of a slum and can be redeveloped because poor people have little political power) is just to straight up bribe people. New developments have a "fee" that is directly applied in cash to other homes in the area to reduce property tax.
Everyone likes a good bribe.
I think in most US states, the legal situation is actually that local governments are creations of the state. They are allowed to have their own ordinances and so on as a matter of convenience, to avoid state legislators having to bother worrying about every edge case that only comes up in one county, but they do not have a right to exist independent of the state saying that they do. There are exceptions, but municipal ordinances (and HOA rules) can be overridden by state law.
We don't /have/ to let all these little NIMBY fiefdoms exist. They exist at the pleasure of the state legislature, and therefore voters statewide, not just locally (modulo gerrymandering, a big caveat).
If you don't change hearts and minds they'll keep fighting against it via any method available.
That is rarely the reason, in my experience. It is merely an accusation that gets thrown around by people who want the NIMBYs to look shallow. There are usually far more specific reasons for opposing new development.
There are always just a few, however, who do want the money. So they cash in and sell out to developers, and then move to a less dense neighborhood. Eventually the whole neighborhood character does in fact change, it just takes years.
it could be tiered like income tax.
billion$ corp buy X from a billion$ corp biggest rate.
poor person sells some food to another poor person lowest rate.
Supermarkets are, generally, ground zero for problems with corporate taxes on things other than profits. They're extremely low-margin, so proposed revenue and transaction taxes would generally just increase prices of everything in the supermarket by whatever the tax is.
(That's just one problem, of course, but it's a very obvious one.)
Well, profits or VAT. Even more if you make some actually sane VAT that discounts all VAT paying expenses and all labor expenses.
I'm not sure any VAT on the world fits that description, but it is the one way to make them work as well as profit taxes, but as easy to tax as any other VAT.
You're not solving anything by switching the form of taxation.