Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, study finds
stories.tamu.edu
stories.tamu.edu
But land that is classified by each appraisal district as “Ag” is only taxed on the value it derives from agricultural activity. Consequently, you’ll see large plots of land in the middle of the suburbs and the city that are bailed for hay or that contain a corn field. So then the owner is only subject to pay taxes on the amount the hay or corn produced.
This is meant to protect and encourage agricultural operations, incentivize the maintenance of rural land, and shield residents that are subject to being overtaken by sprawl. But it’s also used to protect land investment, including large ranches owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals.
If the land is sold and developed, some back taxes are owed when the land is no longer city considered Agricultural. But that gets passed on the purchaser and is rarely assessed against the seller.
It’s possible this land is subject to delinquent taxes that, in Texas, incur significant interest.
Also, I’d want to know about zoning to see if the city has restricted the use of the land. Zoning is a double-edged sword as well.
Why wouldn't this land immediately be forfeited to the city?
Yes, hence the point of a vacancy tax, but that’s not relevant in the scenario here where they’re not paying. Having a short period, especially for non-residential property, is a good way to discourage tax cheating and it also helps with cleanup: the best time to deal with toxic waste was when it was generated but the second best time is now and absentee owners aren’t going to volunteer to do that. Seizing the land at least lets the government plan to do something useful with in an orderly manner before it starts causing problems too big to ignore.
There is no zoning, that would be kind of dumb and self-defeating in Houston.
Houston was a planned industrial community.
Which is well recognized as even dumber.
You don't see anybody trying to point out when actual zoning was enacted, or that Houston was founded where it was when it was for any other reason than to be the industrial powerhouse of the independent nation of Texas.
Except to serve as the Capitol of the new Nation too, but those guys moved to higher ground one day, I wonder why.
No brag, just fact.
Enquiring minds wanted to know.
Remember what Davy Crockett said when he was going back to Texas that time?
To some people it applies more than others.
The map shows numerous parcels in metropolitan Houston classified as "Ag" property. The devil is in the details, but the map justifies (and encourages) closer inspection.
Wake me when you’ve been encouraged enough to complete your (justified) close inspection.
Basically the real story is just that trees make shade (yes, we know already) and "vacant or abandoned" isn't much involved (yes, but we want to discuss zoning/taxes/urbanism things)
The main lesson I draw is that everything would improve by taxing externalities: the land is vacant because the property owners doesn’t have enough incentive to do something useful with it and we have a lot of inefficiency in our housing and transportation which a carbon tax would go a long way towards reducing.
Texas is bigger than that.
They have always taxed more carbon and more land in ways that make them rich as hell, at the average citizen's expense.
To the envy of other states' greedy taxing entities.
That wasn't so bad when there was still enough widespread prosperity for the average citizen to be able to afford it.
The land is vacant after they tore down the buildings because the taxes were already too high, and rising too fast.
No brag, just fact.
"How far up is the river now, Ma?"
"Six feet deep, and rising . . ."
Roger?
Well, if Roger's not here somebody's going to have to do the thermodynamics their own self, and it's good to take the initiative plus show it can be done wihtout scaring anybody by using equations or any of that complicated stuff :)
If not, you cannot make the land cold with air condition. You can just move heat around, with AC from the inside to the outside, but that costs extra energy -> more heat
Yes!
But only if your name is Roger :)
>you cannot make the land cold with air condition. You can just move heat around, with AC from the inside to the outside, but that costs extra energy -> more heat
Which is exactly what I've been saying since I was a teenager.
According to thermodynamics anyway . . .
County does not want to seize the land because they know they can't get tax amount owed and would be stuck with worthless property it has to maintain.
Probably need some form of tax amnesty system where counties can seize these properties, sell them off for any amount and wipe tax bill clean. However, that's process would be ripe for corruption which thinking about TX, I'm surprised they haven't allowed that.
The taxing authority (city or county, generally) maintains a list of all the property in tax arrears. Once a year, there is an auction where they go around the room and each bidder can bid a rate for each property; the lowest rate wins a coupon that entitles the bearer to collect the tax plus the rate from the property owner, but requires the bearer to pay the base tax to the taxing authority.
If a few years go by without the property owner retiring the debt, the holder can send a notice with some time requirements and after that, they can sue for the title and then they own the property. Usually the owner pays at the last moment but then they owe attorney's fees.
Adverse possession is completely different and would require living in the tax-delinquent property for several years.
It’s tempting to talk about “the whole problem” but if you don’t know how the system works it can be hard to see the forest for the trees.
In Washington state, tax foreclosure has a minimum bid of the taxes due and if there is no bid, the county takes title. Then there are procedures to sell those 'tax title' properties, my county says typically the minimum price is 80% of assessed value ... which would typically be more than the tax debt, so maybe better to participate in the tax foreclosure auction.
I don't know that the county has a duty to maintain tax title lands. Vacant land is probably going to get emergency maintenance by a government agency of last resort anyway.
Most Rust Belt cities had to do something like this because it turns out that just letting derelict property go resulted in neighborhoods death spiraling.
Instead we often give them tax abatements and other incentives with little recourse if they don’t deliver the promised economic growth and jobs.
"finds that vacant lots with vegetation can help cool surrounding areas. Abandoned buildings and paved lots do the opposite"
Different state but I think a similar conundrum. They’re old dairy cows living their best life.
Hedge Funds and Foreign Nationals owning large american ranches???
The hottest temperatures get to be about the same, but the trees don't hold heat like the concrete does. It falls off so much faster up here. It seems you can cool these houses with barely half the HVAC capacity that the other ones tend to require. Which is wild because the power grid up here is also much cheaper.
>On a scorching Texas afternoon,
Something I'm very familiar with, and the drone data speaks for itself as far as what it's like in the hot sun of southeast Texas.
Then how about at night?
Those buildings can then act like heat islands that can take more than one night for the heat to dissipate too.
Some cool off that much, some don't. Thermodynamics at work.
Based on heated mass is how long it takes to cool back off to ambient temp by morning. Good air circulation can help a lot too.
If everybody's roof is soaking up heat all day, the structures underneath that are being actively cooled at the same time are not expected to have nearly as much heated mass that needs to dissipate, and the only time for that might be at night.
But maybe that same amount of heat was actively dispersed into the surrounding air all day by the air conditioning units of the cooled structures, plus some of the night. And how efficient are A/C units anyway? That's got to make a difference too so it's not just abandoned buildings but any time people are not running A/C even while dwelling there. At least the windows are open then.
So the drone data on the buildings looks realistic so far, but everything else is just beginning to trickle in.
Regardless, I'm just fine without A/C in the summer in Houston if I'm in a proper place like a 100-year-old home that was built for it.
But I grew up in Florida when about the only places with A/C were supermarkets and banks, not even most college dorms or classrooms had it when I got there.
You just sweat more in Florida, because it may not reach 100 Fahrenheit all summer but the humidity makes Houston feel like a desert by comparison, and it sure doesn't cool off as much at night like it does in Houston with its milder type of "Northern Living" :)
Is there something specific to your geography that leads you to assume the temperature 60 miles away wouldn't "be anywhere close to yours"?
Even between places at roughly the same elevation, the climate can vary hugely within 60 miles of a coast. And a majority of the population of the US lives within 60 miles of a coast.
I live in a forest. When it’s 28C here, it’ll be 36C in the village a few km away. It’ll drop to 16C overnight here but they have a low of 28C.
All that masonry, concrete, blacktop, the absence of shade, and you basically just have a great big passive thermal accumulator.
Plant.
But the poorer districts are concrete all over, and nobody will care. As I worked as city planner before I tried to get into a district council once, but no chance. That was Ted Cruz' district
During the 1980s, there was a huge development surge, all up and down the East Coast. Basically, the whole coast got paved.
The summers really seemed to get crazy hot, and we stopped getting extreme winters.
This sounds like a Google problem as much as a Houston problem! But it’s amusing (and sad) to read about the Democrat mayor of Houston removing bike lanes and trying to ban electric scooters[1].
It sounds like they want to make the city even more car-centric, not less.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/politics/houston-mayor...
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/
as my go(es) to weather "app", billion dollar live sat feed on my phone, for lots of things, other than just local weather,including general investigation into *stuff™ such as finding citys, of which huston is easy, cause it glows in the infrared like nothing else, with the major ring roads and highways clearly visible from geosyncronous orbit at I think a 1 km/pixle resolution, in hot dry high pressure weather huston is clearly an oven. today is cloudy there, but watch for "better", ha!, weather
This brings up a lot of other questions: what about water and sewage infrastructure, electrical and fiber? What about maintenance of the vegetation? But it seems to me like a really cool idea, maybe even within the setting of a single homestead, where the basic setting is a forest, with some buildings nested within it.
It's nice to build a house under a tree. It's a bad idea to buy a house that was built under a tree.
There are still significant tradeoffs though when living that close to nature.
For example, I've stayed in cement/stone homes that are more dome-shaped. Completely surrounded by trees and a garden.
Water ponds all around that catch rain and feed under stone canals to different areas of the land and grey water systems feeding bamboo.
Wonderful, genius water retention system. But cold and rainy weather means you're surrounded by the cold and humidity of those same beautiful ponds.
I lived in 3rd Ward Houston for years, it was very well treed. As were most of the other inner loop “hoods”
One of the best things you can have on your property is a large deciduous tree on the south side of your house.
- In the summer, it shades your house (specifically the roof) so you spend less money cooling it
- In the winter, the tree loses its leaves so you get more sunlight (again, on your roof) which helps heat your house when it's cold but sunny
The PV panels, with the air space above the roof, would also act as a bit of insulation.
We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.
But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.
Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.
A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...
... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.
Trees look great - from a distance.
It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).
Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.
I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.
Lots of houses have decorative maples/plums/cherry/crabapples/fig in their front yard within 30ft of the foundation. I thought the rule of thumb was roots go as far as the circumference of the tree branches.
Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations. And I'm sure they're usually built by people knowledgeable about tree intrusion. By well-clear I mean half a football field away. I don't know about more densely-populated areas.
Smaller decorative trees are not usually a problem but nonetheless are best kept away from structures. It's the "nice old 50-year old oak tree" or the "30-year old pine tree" that is within 20 feet that will ruin your lawn and house.
I have a neighbor who simultaneously removed an oak tree from his back yard and a rather large young pine from his front yard ~12 years ago. The back yard is just starting to settle down. The front still looks bad. He mows his lawn in shifts: part at a time until he tires. During the rainy season you can still easily trace the oak tree's rotting roots as they steer the rainwater through the back yard. He saws and hacks at the roots, trying to keep the general flow toward the front yard and the street (as drainage is supposed to be in these neighborhoods). I know that he would be happier with a simple flat backyard of grass for his grandchildren to play on.
Every old tree near our lovely family home eventually had to be removed. This, despite the classic pier-and-beam construction. The shifting had gone too far to adjust the piers. It was time to adjust the trees: and my father, being an engineer, had to run the operation himself.
What an eye-opener that was: who knew that when an inch-thick braided steel cable holding an oak tree in suspension as it is sawed down could break, whip backward, slash and tear a 3-inch deep by 3-foot wound across the side of an even-larger pecan tree in less than the blink of an eye? Thank God no one was standing in the open area when the cable broke!
That's not an accurate explanation. In the PNW, in many cities, older more expensive neighborhoods tend to have more trees, not less. It's a serious equity issue, given the heat island effect.
The difference in foundation damage is because of soil profiles, not planting behaviors. We don't tend to have expansive soils around here. Take away the clay and you lose the hydrological forces which allow tree root to inhabit previously occupied pores.
That's evident. You are extrapolating your experience across the rest of the world, and it simply doesn't jibe with the reality that we live in.
In Texas, the damage due to "roots" is not due to tree growth alone, it's the desiccation and rehydration of clay that's the problem. Very similar to frost jacking of walls in Northern climates
And no good reason not to, generally. Our house is elevated on 18 concrete piers, anchored onto the bedrock - because the soil is shallow and not stable. We have trees growing inches from the house.
Where I live in the Midwest, trees around houses is incredibly common. I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood without them.
Yes! Search for a house without a tree in a neighborhood full of trees. Enjoy!
Having a flat lawn may be unnecessary, but generally, most people want a lawn that a lawnmower can cross w/o self-destructing [or that their oft-drunken uncle can walk across after dark without tripping on a root and passing before his time.]
A lawnmower blade is usually not adequate for a 4-inch root knuckle risen from the depths - that requires a chain saw. But then you're chain-sawing in dirt, mud and root, so neither safe nor easy. This is a contest the homeowner cannot win, merely survive.
Maybe the tree doesn't need to be right next your structure?
> A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed.
Definitely not my experience!
Another Texas problem is that the sewer gray water line is placed relatively shallow. I had neighbors who to pay a crew of dudes shoveling like mad to unearth the sewer line so the plumber can repair it. The most common reason was roots from a large tree. https://www.metroflowplumbing.com/detecting-and-preventing-t...
We have a nearly 50-year-old oak in our backyard. It is dying. Limbs are falling off it. We trim it. But it WILL die. We will dismantle it in an orderly manner rather than wait for a hurricane to hurl its parts into neighborhood homes.
There are methods for cultivating otherwise large-growth trees. I've seen them in French literature. Roughly they trim the tree each year and limit its above-ground height to human height. The trunk is allowed to grow significantly thick and branches are limited in length. I do not recall the name of the technique but IIrc it is primarily used in growing fruit.
Yes trees fall, and so does every building and everything else under the Sun, which itself will die. Trees have long lives, centuries for many. That's a pretty minor risk. Buildings need maintenance too.
And yet this isn't a problem anywhere else in the world.
"27 Tree Species That Are Bad For Foundations (Explained)"
https://homeinspectioninsider.com/tree-species-that-are-bad-...
Because nobody is there pouring tons of water and chemicals to produce a lush lawn, ironically.
Lack of lawn becomes bad!
Alas, bunches of people would rather see a rotting city instead of solar panels.
It's fundamentally a long bet that basically the same people (demographically if not often individually) who are complaining about this will turn around and pass legislation that makes development even more onerous and therefore makes their existing cheap 30-60yo building with a simple uninterrupted parking lot and un-engineered drainage ditches (the typical form vacant commercial RE seems to take) even more valuable.
The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
But there are no neighborhoods like that because we have regulated incremental development out of existence. There is no gradual redevelopment anymore because nobody can afford to get kicked in the dick by huge amounts of of compliance cost bullshit (all of which the useful idiots and those with financial motive are more than capable of justifying in abstract, no one droplet feels responsible for the flood and all that) to just take an incremental step. The only way to make the math make sense is to go whole hog, seek a variance and put up something huge and make back the costs.
This is why it "looks" like local residents care. They'd be fine with triple deckers organically filling in as well as subdivisions, back lot houses, etc, etc. They just don't want a N-over-1 in their suburban neighborhood. This is exacerbated by the fact that anyone who could be living in such a place at such a time when that conversation is happen is rich enough to have no other real problems.
Allowing more floorspace on a given lot of land in an in a place people want to live, increases land value solely because the status quo mandates floorspace scarcity in those places. In a world where everyone had all the interior floorspace they could ever desire, rezoning a random vacant lot for an infinite height building would have no effect whatsoever because there would be no demand the additional floorspace.
Allowing vast quantities of floorspace on every lot within city limits would surely enrich some homeowner-occupiers who own land, but only those whose land was in locations ppl actually wanted to live. Those in other locations, whose only current draw is “you aren’t allow to live/build in the place You want to be, so come here instead” would lose value.
Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.
That's 1/4th of a Liechtenstein.
Surely no one can just simply be betting their vacant building will become valuable with so much competition?
If they have low grade tenants off and on for 10yr they'll be in the black. The big money cash out is when some company who's expansion is being strangled somewhere else decides that they're gonna open a new site. And if you look at the macro trends this is slowly what's happening.
It's like the big boy version of how self storage can be a speculative RE investment rather than a income stream producing investment.
Since this is such a large contributor to the heat problem in the Houston area they should tear down the abandoned buildings and build Olympic-sized swimming pools on each of these locations. By my calculations, seeing that a pool occupies 0.31 acres, they could replace these abandoned buildings with up to 32258 swimming pools which would immediately improve the quality of life in the Houston area. The water is available if you just use one of those MIT condensation gizmos that passively pulls moisture from the air. That would mitigate some of the horrendous humidity issues that Houstononianites feel during their two seasons (warm and humid followed by hot and humid). Houston could be a veritable seaside paradise with this one simple change.
However, as it often is, Houston is a weird outlier because its development is so recent. The majority of its current footprint was built after 1970, with many neighborhood pools and community pools. Some are limited to residents of the area and their guests, others are fully public, such as this one:
Your thoughtful reply made me reconsider what I posted as if I had been serious. Seeing another instance of someone attempting to build a coherent picture in the reader's minds eye about the size of one thing relative to another (10000 acres is roughly 1/4 of a Lichtenstein), dredged up the recurrent memories about the all-too-commonly misused Olympic swimming pool comparison. I felt compelled to to reply and ended up building an implausibly plausible narrative about mitigating some of the issue with the overheated abandoned buildings by repurposing them as community improvements.
I am surprised that you would prefer the temperature there to be 10 degrees warmer. This reminds me of a time when I was out of state, in Mississippi, on a wellsite and I had picked up a copy of USA Today at the hotel before I left. I read the interesting parts and finally got to the weather forecasts on the back page for major cities across the US. As I scanned the forecasts they were all positive - Sunny, Breezy and Nice, etc until I got to Houston. For Houston their forecast header said "Oppressive". I checked all the other headings for all the other cities listed and none had negative connotations, only Houston. That gave me the chuckle I needed to get through that shitty day on muddy the wellsite and it continues to provide a pleasant memory all these years later.
I lived in Houston and the Houston area for 10 years and commuted for work to Houston for another 16 years. I'm pretty familiar with most of the pros and cons including the climate, the traffic, many of the communities, the abundance of delicious food options for any price range, the stormwater drainage issues due to over-development, problems created by lack of zoning, etc. and being a geoscientist, I can see advantages to repurposing these abandoned buildings for community use.
I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. They would all be built as indoor pools where families from the neighborhoods around these abandoned buildings can bring their kids on those hot spring days. In many cases it would probably not be necessary to remove the existing building, only to gut it and add pool facilities. I have my doubts about whether functioning outdoor pools are significant sites for mosquitoes to breed due to the agitation of the water surface from the pumps and the chlorination so I don't think your concerns about Aedes aegypti and the pathogens they spread are worth worrying about. For control of that problem you have to look at how Houston and other municipalities handle their stormwater retention ponds, their channelized creeks and bayous, and storm drains across neighborhoods in the city. Storm drains that are not regularly graded tend to have water pooling due to debris traps and that water becomes the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It is also a huge hill to climb to get people to manage standing water on their property by dumping accumulations after rain events.
We looked at buying homes when we lived there and frankly, Houston will always have issues with water because of the gulf coastal plain geology which left them with wide areas of very clay-rich soils which have low permeabilities and thus it is imperative for runoff to be a critical part of every infrastructure project in the region. Even knowing all this they still sold off all the Katy Prairie land where rice and sugarcane was grown and which regularly flooded for generations. That land was a winter ground for migratory birds from all over North America until they turned it into poorly-drained subdivisions with homes on concrete slabs that crack and buckle and keep foundation repair contractors busy.
I think it would be a useful project for a GIS pro to map these abandoned properties and short-list some of them for repurposing as described in communities where kids have few options for recreation. It would provide facilities for people of all ages to learn to swim, practice diving board skills, remain physically fit, and some of them could be fitted with wave pools to simulate beach conditions and make it more fun. Jobs for young teens in the neighborhood, community building, physical activity that one can do on a hot Houston day, etc. I see nothing but positives here. Maybe my whole post needs a /sh though.
And yes, the lack of planning does cause problems. It also has obviously has some benefits, like affordable housing. I live in a suburb (Sugarland) and while it’s not particularly exciting, it has everything I need for my family… and yes, it absolutely would be better 10 degrees cooler ;)
Re: one swimming pool per child project: when can you start?
I hope you work near Sugarland. The commute was pretty brutal some days.
As for the one swimming pool per child part, I have to defer to someone who knows something about constructing a swimming pool that people can use for fun stuff like swimming. The only large body of water that I constructed was a small, shallow pond where my childhood friends, my brother, and I would keep bait for our fishing trips. We dug a pit that was about 20' x 20' (~6m x 6m) and a foot or so deep (0.3m deep). We stocked it with crawdads, minnows we caught in the nearby creeks, and small perch we caught in creeks and stock tanks. It was a viable habitat for bait until the landowner destroyed our hand-built fort next to it and leveled the land while laying out lots for a new subdivision. Good times.
They also cut the tank dam on the best, most accessible stock tank near our homes and all the fish, turtles, frogs, etc spilled out across the landscape to an uncertain future. I'm sure most of the turtle and frogs found new spots to hang out but the fish were kinda cooked since they don't operate well in air. All of that to build cheap housing. My best friend and his Mom bought one of the houses and one day while I was visiting they showed me how you could open a cabinet door and see daylight through a crack in the corner where the cabinet had pulled apart as the house settled on a lot where we used to have a nice, well-stocked pond. Other corners in the house had similar issues where you could see daylight through cracks. My family built custom homes for decades. Those homes in that subdivision were some of the worst I had ever seen as far as quality of finish and attention to detail. Years later though I found worse places around Houston and up here in the DFW area.
To summarize what turned out to be another long-winded post, unless you want an ideal spot where your kids can get down and dirty and really enjoy all the muddy fun that kids should have, you should probably find someone else to construct swimming pools. I'm probably not the guy.
Like https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/houston-underground-th...
Smaller than Istanbul's, but definitely something nice to do
Stock them with carp, which will eat the mosquito larvae, and you can also eat the carp. Win-win.
Remember the purpose of property tax to begin with is for the owner to lose the property in case they are not as wealthy as someone else who might be interested someday. Or in case the property itself can not provide more than enough income to pay the tax in a timely way.
Another problem is that taxes were always high but they didn't actually start skyrocketing until a few decades ago, after one of the key stabilizing anti-Carpetbagger laws which prevented home equity loans, was repealed.
And the sky's the limit whenever untapped wealth is unleashed, to be audited and appraised.
So it's been kind of a race between property appreciation, available equity to borrow against as values increase, versus tax rates and appraisals trying to capture more of that in ways that can only result in owners becoming less whole that it ever has been.
Revenue-neutral or not, anything that makes it worse makes it worse.
But I forgot to add that the amount of revenue from property tax is only intended to act like collateral damage :)
When you do the math it turns out anytime you start taxing anything but commerce, it is unsustainable because it accrues and accumulates disadvantage to the taxpayer until it is overwhelming. Plus the higher that taxes rise above absolute insignificance, the more likely a major upset occurs from just a slight lapse in overall prosperity, re-balancing to the further disadvantage against those who can afford it least. And that doesn't include the pulling of political strings by those who benefit most from that type activity.
You don't sensibly tax people just for existing, even at 3/5 the amount per head. Likewise their property unless it is involved in commercial activity, nor wage income since the employer is the commercial enterprise they should have that all covered like it used to be when things were not so predatory.
But they tax "rooftops" like a lot of other places based on square footage and now in Houston there has been some recent influence to demolish unoccupied buildings more so for appearance sake to the world for the upcoming World Cup as an excuse more than anything else.
It appears the actual demolition of truly abandoned buildings can not be accelerated without blurring the lines between actual abandonment and merely unoccupied to some degree or another.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The big thing is there's enough people much wealthier than those who have the properties now, who want them either way, demolished or not.
Under threat of forced demolition those having buildings suitable for rehab would need to sell for less than they would have otherwise. Who cares about the poor sellers who have been paying taxes on the buildings the whole time, working toward a financial turnaround? The idea seems to be to incentivize new buyers to have better opportunities by preying on previous owners' misfortune.
OTOH, as soon as any property has had any nonproductive structures removed, its appraised value and tax levy drops like a rock, making it way more attractive for the same type buyers who could have already obtained all the lots having buildings they are willing to rehab.
The new buyers can then afford many more vacant lots for potential future construction, which had always been a non-bonanza prospect otherwise, and with the newly lowered taxes afford to wait and see which might be a bonanza to build on someday. A lot more so than the previous owners.
If a lot of this happens at the same time, then the market for reclaimed lots like this will have downward price pressure too until the effect runs its course.
Too bad for the little guy either way.
"Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue, some or all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes under property tax repeal."
And if you DO choose to tax commerce, the effects are lousy.
Even Milton Friedman repeatedly called LVT the "least bad" tax. Too bad he didn't life a finger to support it. Not sure who he was working for, or what pressures he must have been under.
I think it's helpful to stay up-to-date myself. But also not forget how we got here and what it was like before.
>Property taxes currently generate 70 percent of all local tax revenue,
That's what I'm pointing out.
How badly it can get out of hand. Not because it's unchecked, just because it exists at all and can't be kept down to insignificance through ordinary ups & downs. Especially not over the very long term.
That's what makes it unsustainable.
At least to where they tear down more perfectly strong buildings than ever.
And 70% is not nearly enough in case nobody noticed.
It's too late now. You could calculate when 100% won't be enough, or even 110%.
That's not as drastic as it sounds though. It only means your own taxes are bound to rise 30 to 40% above what they are now by the same time. But to the taxing authorities, it will be just a drop in the bucket.
Most people who can afford what they are paying now will be able to handle that much of an increase though. So maybe only a few thousand more will lose their homes and no way it should be any vast percentage wiped out completely.
But could continue to add to the homeless population, and maybe 30 to 40% more than there is now would be a good estimate.
Still only a few thousand families, which I guess some will figure is the least bad in a city this size.
Originaly, the Lords crafting the levy scheme didn't need the money at all. They just wanted a way to get the land.
And it only affected the very most unfortunate who sadly couldn't even afford to pay such an insignificant pittance.
Other than commerce, so far nobody has proposed any other way for any tax to more accurately track prosperity, and therefore the ability for all to pay as long as there is any prosperity left at all under the worst of conditions.
Without compromising or threatening any previous earnings or property which have always been completely unfair to tax more than once.
Probably a good time to mention that I always pay more than my fair share because I like to be more than fair. It's only a few percent so I just work a few percent more and then some so I'm fine. But not everybody can do that.
Perhaps the high-and-always-increasing-tax enthusiasts don't want anybody to have any permanent assets, ever.
One thing's for sure, when prosperity booms, the revenue from commerce alone booms in exact tandem with it.
Come up with anything else like that and I'm all ears :)
Certainly property taxes can even overshoot commerce in the case of a real estate bubble, but if that's the least bad it sure doesn't work out like the taxation tracks when actual money is made very much at all. Rather like taxing anything of value just because it exists. Who ever thought of that? If you whittle away at things over and over again eventually they cease to exist.
Not that I would want to repeal property tax overnight, I like stability for the prosperity that has already been earned more so than the (remote) possibility of future prosperity as a result of hare-brained schemes from dream salesmen.
Things like this which are too big to fail need to be carefully rolled back before they fail catastrophically from their own weight.
>all of which would have to be replaced with other taxes
Which would be ideal as long as earned assets could only be taxed once, when the commerce occurred. Repeat commerce would be paying all the bills as it repeats in an ongoing way as long as any wealth is being created. With no chipping away of anything else already built by long hard work.
With a revenue-neutral bottom line local operations would be no different, so the dramatically reduced risk to the working or retired homeowner would be without financial cost.
You can't get much cheaper than that :)
When people can't even see any way that a complete rollback could ever be set into motion, or any rollback, I take that as an indication they lack the responsible nature to steward prosperity to any net taxpayer benefit whatsoever. As has consistently been seen among politicians with no exceptions in Texas for decades.
This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.
The owners don't want to destroy the structures at all.
They've been holding onto the properties because appreciation was outpacing taxation, allowing a predictable path to remodeling and re-habitation.
Until that changed. Primarily from greedier investors not having enough low-hanging fruit to pick from so they're shaking the trees for all they have until they can give no more.
It's new buyers instead that want to swoop in if the landscape can be further tilted in their favor. Just a little bit is all it takes to yield a big return for a privileged few.
Other costs have risen too but the taxes are so high that's what triggers the final destruction.
Property tax has that extra-financial "property" that keeps your home positioned like dominos ready to fall. Like other skyrocketing costs don't do, even though the pressure from them is huge too.
This is by design.
LVT wont help you now. It's too late.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
For example, beekeeping as a hobby is expensive (you will never recoup in honey sales)... but in many states "worth it" for the agricultural exemption, alone.
"Sir, your house is too hot, which makes you subject to the 'hot house tax'", coming to a road near you in 2028.