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by ch4s3 1919 days ago
They have a steeply progressive land value tax and further escalate taxes on vacant land. They also slashed taxes on development and construction. This encouraged productive use and efforts to keep assessments low which also drives down housing costs.
1 comments
giantg2 1919 days ago
Considering the article mentioned that the city was left leaning and also referenced Marx, I guess it's not surprise that they opted to tax people out of their property so that the city could acquire it.
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ch4s3 1919 days ago
Is that what they did? If by that you mean that they used the tax system to discourage the development of investment properties and undeveloped land as well, then yes I guess. However land value taxes aren't a marxist idea, in fact LVT has been advocated for by Smith, Ricardo, Friedman, Stiglitz, and so on. Even a lot of libertarians like LVT.
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giantg2 1919 days ago
It said they had a highly progressive land tax and additional tax on vacant land. This incentivizes utilization of land, but also makes it economically unfeasible to create apartments if you must pay the tax and compete with the government housing.

I'd love to see the data for Libertarians promoting land tax.

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ch4s3 1919 days ago
> I'd love to see the data for Libertarians promoting land tax.

You can Google this. There’s a lot of disagreement but some of them are for it.

I would imagine that the LVT would make it hard to compete with government housing at some price points, but I don’t know too much about Vienna in particular.

My understanding was they they were trying to write tax policy to maximize the private market production of housing affordable at some percentage of AMI (or rather however the measure median income). But I don’t have a sophisticated understanding.

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giantg2 1919 days ago
Of course you can find any opinion in a large enough group, but that doesn't make it representative of them. For example, you can find democrats that support gun rights over gun control, but that's not indicative of the party.

Considering the article said the government housing was run by non-profit cooperatives that put all ths money back into the building... I don't see how someone could operate a for profit apartment building and make any money once there was a majority market share by the government.

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