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Comment by dwheeler | Hacker News Reader

That cost will, of course, be passed on to renters unless the rental prices cannot be raised at all.

If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson. That isn't hyperbole; this was a serious problem in the 1970s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_South_Bronx_building_fir...

That was obviously not acceptable... but it was predictable.

All legal proposals should be viewed like a chess move. Presume others will respond, and make sure you're ok with that response. In a sense that's also the point of the original article too, a law was passed without adequqtely thinking through what would happen.

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That’s one of the ideas of LVT actually: building apartments in land doesn’t increase tax burden, burning the apartments doesn’t lower it

I actually think there's a lot of positives in land value taxes. However, I was objecting to the phrase "The land value tax can’t be dodged by leaving nor can it be passed on to renters" because that is missing key issues.

Land's assessed value is based on what you could do with it. If can be rented at a profit, that's something you can do with it, and its potential matters. If it can't, then that is no longer a potential value of it.

That doesn't make lvt a bad idea, it's just that I think there's not enough acknowledgement of the trade-offs and limitations.

Burning down an apartment building doesn't change what could be done with the lot; an appropriate valuation method for LVT would not give a different valuation for the land depending on what is built on it.

> Burning down an apartment building doesn't change what could be done with the lot; an appropriate valuation method for LVT would not give a different valuation for the land depending on what is built on it.

True, but an LVT is a cost. Changes in cost can change what is financially viable to do with a property, regardless of what is currently done with the lot, and thus can impact the land value.

Actually no, land value tax is not a marginal cost so does not change the profit maximizing use of land.

The idea of cost-plus pricing is folk economics.

Tax incidence is very well understood in economics and has to do with relative supply and demand elasticity (supply of land is perfectly inelastic) and marginal costs which land value tax does not touch.

It's accurate to say LVT changes the price of land. But it doesn't change the profit maximizing productive use of land.

Other taxes that scale with production (sales tax, income tax, property tax) do change profit maximizing productive use.

And crucially, “rent it for 10 bucks” and “rent it for 20 bucks” are different uses such that the LVT can’t change which is optimal

Feel free to quote in the article what supports your summary given the article doesn't actually talk about that

In fact it mentions insurance fraud as the cause...

Additionally it certainly wasn't increasing cost but reduced income which is a very different issue

Yeah. Arson-induced insurance fraud. Hope this helps.

But that doesn't align with your phrasing above

If landlords can already raise the price of rent, why haven’t they?

>If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson

Landlords who have their entitlements to land rents or other natural resource rents they've captured ripped away from them would almost assuredly endorse the use of violence.

Land redistribution (of which this is a form) from the landed rentiers to the landless has historically resulted in brutal violence in order to protect their privileged claim on non-human created wealth.

Why shouldn't people's property be protected?

you mean their entitlement to natural non-man made wealth?

> they will find other solutions like mass arson.

Or the more likely option is they will no longer do investment properties as the return it too low vs the risk.

Arson would be irrelevant for land taxes.

It is quite disingenuous to attribute the South Bronx fires as a result of landlords unable to raise rental prices. I mean that is technically true, but your comment makes it sound like it was a result of a particular legal proposal. It was not. It was a period of urban decay in NYC and many cities in the United States. It was the continuation of white flight into suburbs that started in earlier decades. It was a large demographic change with complex causes.

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