| > It's also a mistake to say that a lot of land gets evaluated in isolation, because that's not even true with a the current property tax. Sorry, my sentence may have been confusingly worded. I don't mean for tax computation (which certainly uses neighborhood comparables), but I mean that every lot owner will evaluate the maximum profit for their own pocket only, without any regard to greater good of the town. So every lot owner will sell to the developer who'll make a highrise building. Let "someone else" sell a lot to build a library or a tennis court! But there is no "someone else", everyone will seek to maximize personal profit which means no nice places will exist, only tightly packed concrete highrises. > To your point though, would you say that an apartment building next to a park (or even within several blocks of a park) is worth more than an apartment building with no park in proximity? Absolutely! But to actually sacrifice short-term tax revenue for longer-term benefit would require forward-thinking politicians. You mention being in Canada so those might exist there, but here in the US, there are none. > homelessness, it would seem to me like a large group of people without housing would benefit from a system that incentivizes building more housing I hesitated to mention homeless because my comment has nothing to do with the homeless issue per se. Only using it as a very real example where we can see that town governments are completely willing to ruin quality of life for everyone (fencing off parks, etc) just to save a few dollars short term. Even though it would be immensely better to spend a bit more upfront, to raise the quality of life for the whole town, which will bring in more prosperity and more property value and more tax later on. |