Mostly there are just pearl clutchers complaining about how elderly cash poor people sitting in large old houses on expensive land they've lived in for 20 years would be financially nudged into downgrading.
The real roadblock for LVT is not in the slightest bit technical, but simply that it would undermine a lot of privately held oligarchic wealth.
The land value tax “equally” punishes them for their inefficient land usage. But at some point we need to pay our fair share on taxes and the later group hiding behind the former group is how you end up with California’s dumpster fire of a housing crisis.
First house is claimed as homestead and gains on sale aren't taxed, but the yearly property tax should work similarly.
This is a negative for anyone who is renting since they now have to pay more rent to cover those taxes. (taxes set a floor on rent long term, though of course tax is only one factor in rental prices)
I wonder if you wouldn't be clutching your pearls if you were being forced (sorry, "financially nudged") out of your home of 20 years?
These cash poor elderly folks aren't exactly "oligarchic".
Can you confirm that you wish to see this practice completely banned (i.e. no payment of rent) to prove that you're not taking a two faced stance on this issue?
What we are talking about is different - a tax incentive to move to somebody who has benefitted from a large capital gain.
From that, it’s fair to conclude that I’m ok with renters having to pay market rent, regardless of their age or matriarchal status.
Ok. Sounds like you are in favor of market forces driving grandma on to the street when she rents but not in favor of market forces driving grandma to sell up and move to a smaller cheaper property.
Maybe the pearl clutching about poor grandmas was a little overstated.
>Determine that her specific piece of land is worth $X despite no comparison of open-market land-only transactions? Not fine.)
LVT is calculated and imputed using open market transactions. If unimproved property values all jump in an area thats coz the land value went up.
Show me a way that LVT can applied referencing open market transactions for unimproved land in a developed area and I’m interested to learn more about it.
Grandma can decide to sell her house on the market if the property taxes get too high. That’s good. She shouldn’t be able to be targeted by the city for her land value alone increasing despite no or weak supporting comps.
LVT is theoretically good. My problems with it are practical ones.
The problem you're running into is that it doesn't matter if it makes sense to you what these people want to do with their private property. What you think is "proper occupancy" doesn't matter, because we have private property rights.
You advocating for policies that infringe on that right is an attempt to exercise power over these people that you have no right to, whether or not you hide behind some collective sense of what's best.
This way these folks don't have to pay much more than before, can stay in their house and the county gets its share when these people die or move out.
And LVT that replaces zoning basically just lets the highest bidder do whatever they want with the land. An LVT that augments zoning could perhaps be tenable but I would argue that in VHCOL areas there's already something of an LVT in place. My SFH in San Jose is assessed as having equal value for the 8800sqft as it is for the house built on it. What I wonder is how the actuaries and policy makers responsible for assessing property values for county taxation actually do that, and how much of the formula is already based on land value.