[hotpotamus]

Old people in Texas get their property taxes frozen I believe at 65. But honestly it might be better for them to downsize into something more appropriate and perhaps free up the larger houses for families. My mother has basically just turned my parents' house into an eBay warehouse full of junk that she intends to sell one day. I can't say that I have any big problem with that at the end of the day, but if you think getting young families into housing is a more important goal for society, then it does seem like a waste.

Meanwhile, I'm pretty sore about the 10% year over year thing, particularly when I hear about how Republicans run a low-tax state or that a wealth tax is unconstitutional/infeasible. I pay my wealth tax every year, but I suspect I'm too poor for the kind of wealth tax they mean. I can at least enjoy the irony.

[conductr]

> Old people in Texas get their property taxes frozen I believe at 65.

True but if you're turning 65 after you're tax bill has grown 10% for over a decade as your transitioning to your fixed income years; it's not a good thing just to freeze the tax bill. You might not have time to earn and save enough to cover the value it gets frozen at. It does help soften the blow for many though.

> But honestly it might be better for them to downsize into something more appropriate and perhaps free up the larger houses for families.

I wholeheartedly despise this line of thought, unless it's coming from their individual decision to downsize. You're basically treating the house like a commodity. It's a Home this person lived in, raised family in, hopes to continue hosting holidays in, where grandchildren can go to visit, etc. They should be able to use it until they decide to leave. On average, they only have another decade or so of life left anyway after their taxes get frozen at 65, let them enjoy their home.

[no_wizard]

If you despise that thinking, then we need to regulate the housing market to discourage seeing housing as an investment as we see it today. Everyone expects, more or less, for real estate to climb in value but nobody wants to square that with these other emotional ideas attached to housing.

It either is an asset or it’s a commodity as far as the market goes. If you want generational housing and for housing to be generally affordable something has to give. Kill it as an asset class and you get what you’re looking for.

10 years is a long time in the housing market. Assets sitting for 10 years under utilized is another way to think about it.

These two ideas - that housing is an investment and that people shouldn’t be incurring tax burdens on them like this - do not square

[conductr]

It's fine to be an investment. It can climb in value. But it doesn't need to be such a need to force the liquidity. Your example of "under utilized asset" and downsizing must then translate down to some metric of square-footage per resident. How exactly to you propose to regulate the housing market with this in mind, in a reasonable manner. Because, to me I think of the 2 sides. Growing households and shrinking ones. On the shrinking side, we want the government enforcing laws requiring homes get sold as each child moves out to adult hood? Then again as each spouse dies? On the growing family side, they get to move into a bigger house only as each child is born? This is just insane right?

I personally do not think 10 years is that long in housing. Sure a lot can change in housing over that time but at any given moment, If I'm in need of housing and supply doesn't exist, I can build a custom home in less than 2 years. I can buy in a development basically immediately. This might not be a global truth but it's the state of things in Texas specifically, and has been for a long time. Affordability is the limiting factor, not time.

I think the property taxes in Texas make sense if RE grows at rate of inflation. For a long time, we had affordable housing and now that's not necessarily the case. So the rules/laws need to change to protect people from getting priced out due to taxes is all. It's an issue that didn't bother anyone before because they were assuming their raise in income would cover the raise in taxes. But wages don't increase 10% annually like our taxes do (whole other topic LOL!) so they get put in a hole. Anyone coming into the market now knows the prices, it's all available information, and they can decided if they want to move here or not. It could all be a bubble that pops and corrects one day, but not until inbound population growth slows down.

[no_wizard]

market churn (which is in part informed by time) matter with affordability.

I don’t propose what you’re saying either. A land value tax is more than sufficient, by any research I’ve seen on this topic. It doesn’t in any sense mean what you’re saying here. Only that under utilized land (usually classified as unbuilt or vacant) is taxed more heavily. Thats one facet. The other is that it shifts the property tax off of building values and onto land values can make both buildings and land less expensive. This has a knock off affect of reducing the value of real estate holdings to varying degrees in terms of value in the short term but stabilizes in the medium and long term.

That would be better in my view but as it exists today, we instead have to rely on building more housing or putting more existing supply in the market, neither of which in broad strokes are happening in a way that keeps pace with demand unfortunately

Also: not everyone who can afford to buy a home can buy a home built from scratch. There are different classes of home buyers and the vast majority aren’t moving into custom homes like that. Its unreasonable to think that it’s common place in aggregate

[stale2002]

> It's fine to be an investment. It can climb in value.

No, housing is a cost, not an productive investment.

What we actually want, as a society, is for housing prices to go down so people can live places.

[no_wizard]

I don’t know that it’s possible to intrinsically make real estate non appreciable per se, but you can shift it to be more commodity like and stop treating it special and pass regulations that encourage selling and discourages holding, which as a land value tax, would be a good start. Removing the mortgage interest deduction would be another

Removal of sub class zoning for housing would also be beneficial. Its one thing to zone an area for industrial vs housing but it should not be permitted that when land is zoned for housing they can zone specifically for single occupancy homes for example.

[angra_mainyu]

> If you despise that thinking, then we need to regulate the housing market to discourage seeing housing as an investment as we see it today

Quite the opposite, regulation of the housing market rarely ends well. There's quite a few countries that can speak to the horrible deadlocks that occur when regulation suffocates the housing market.

There's nothing particularly wrong with investment per se, now if you make the market so regulated such that there's no competition, you're destroying any kind of forces that push the price down, or if you make the investment so costly the prices go up to compensante.

Heck, there's even countries where the regulation was so insane it was far better to hold an empty home than to actually rent it out.

[ddingus]

Not sure everyone expects values to rise or rise as much as they currently do.

Fact is, everyone needs that to happen right now.

If we change the latter, expectations related to the former will change too.

[hotpotamus]

I live with them rent-free so it would probably go against my own interest as well to force them out via pricing.