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by killtimeatwork 2016 days ago
> Imagine property tax is 0. Why would anyone ever sell? All the land would effectively be owned by hereditary feudal lords.

You'd sell for the usual reason, i.e. you'd prefer having money rather than that particular piece of land? That money would be then spent on either consumption or an investment with higher yield than land-holding.

In my home country Poland the land tax is negligible and yet the market for land exists, it's not held forever by "feudal lords".

1 comments

Your home country Poland is primarily agricultural - at least compared to the BA - and has much lower demand for housing.

I suspect if you pick apart of the BA housing market you'll see some very large landlords with huge property portfolios. While they're not literally "feudal lords" they might as well be in terms of their self-serving influence on housing policy.

Perhaps not coincidentally, some of them are FAANGs.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/11/03/meet-silicon-valleys-...

But the logic still holds - it there's huge demand for housing, then presumably the land prices are off the charts and the land owners can still be enticed to sell for huge amounts of money and invest into something with higher returns. The market shouldn't be dead.