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Comment by impossiblefork | Hacker News Reader

I actually see a reverse problem.

Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.

Well, that group is rewarded by this system.

I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.

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I don’t see how the people building ugly things would benefit really. If the goal is a factory or something that necessarily has to be ugly building it on low value land makes more sense then lowering the value of high value land. If the goal is just to be a dick, well people already do that by leaving these lots vacant.

Well, if ugliness weren't enough, imagine if they instead did everything to make things unpleasant for people living nearby.

Since that would reduce demand in the area, there's a real risk that we'd infer that the neighbourhood is more inherently undesirable and drop the rates there, even though we shouldn't.

I think you're really basically just saying "but no one would do this". People would absolutely do this. People even do this today in inter-group conflict about who is to live in specific neighbourhoods.

What's the end goal of this "build ugly things and depress land values" strategy? If it's to drive out current residents and buy cheap, to what goal? If, once you have bought cheap, you stop building ugly things and start doing high value things.....then land values go back up and you have defeated your own purpose.

Yes and no. You can even do this as a group, to other groups for the group's benefit.

Imagine a group that chucks rocks at everyone else who lives in the place where they want to live, then try to buy the people living there out. It's the same strategy.

Yeah sure the taxes would go back to normal later, but the people left with deflated property values and a worse neighborhood and potentially leave because of decreasing property values aren't going to feel very good about it.

Also the asshole still saves on the purchase. The taxes go back up, but the sale price of the land was artificially low still. Which benefits the asshole and hurts the original owners.

The only way it doesn't benefit the asshole is if the property is worth zero dollars to sell.

I'm not an LVT expert but I think you are still conflating it with property values and market rates.

The LVT assessment doesn't have to consider whether it is a "desirable place to live" or what the neighbors are like. Only the potential for the land.

A key factor in LVT is the local control of the process. That is the part that can be more easily swung by coalitions with money/power.

Yea on second thought I see it. One of the gentrifying neighborhoods in my city has a large group of longtime residents who are doing everything they can to slow down gentrification by making the area a worse place to live. They’d probably be working even harder if there was an lvt.

They don't need to build anything at all. Just leave the lot unoccupied and uncared for, and it'll turn into blight. The city will reward them for this by reducing their property taxes.

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