[jeffbee]

TL;DR taking properties off the tax roll costs the remaining taxpayers more. Pretty basic stuff. I've been talking this up to local electeds for decades, with very little progress. The only success I've had is ending the local program that makes "historic" properties tax exempt, but the huge whale exemptions for hospitals and whatnot remain.

[elektronika]

Universities are just as bad or worse on this front. They will buy up properties with no plan simply because they have the cash to throw around and don't have to pay tax.

[jeffbee]

People say that in Berkeley but usually the specifics of the deal they are taking about are incorrect, so I generally ignore such people. For example the properties owned by the U.C. wealth fund are taxed like any other.

[BobaFloutist]

It does kind of suck for Albany though that something like 10% of its population lives in the untaxable University Village.

[jeffbee]

Let's be real. Albany could double its tax base with duplexes, or any buildings taller than 10 feet, but they don't and don't want to.

[BobaFloutist]

That's also true.

[larsiusprime]

Although they key thing here is that it's not just that effect, but emergent unintended consequences. In the article, it describes how non profit healthcare institutions have an incentive to buy for profit clinics, because (alongside the other incentives), when they do so, the real estate becomes tax exempt because now it's owned by a non profit, even if the work being performed stays the same.

[jeffbee]

That's not "unintended" that is the core of what they call the NPIC, the non-profit industrial complex. They do the same activity, with the same financial outcome, but they do it under a different corporate form and pay no taxes. The public does not benefit. Medical care is not the only player in this game. You also get it with "community land trusts" that take a property off the tax roll but don't lower rents.

[kiba]

The irony of not treating land as a communal resource and letting private actors such as non-profits privatize the gains.

[mothballed]

Only if you keep the things those taxes were paying for. I have no public roads anywhere near me, ~no police, no fire service, no public utilities, basically no county services -- maybe it is not for everybody but once I experienced it I would never go back to having these public services. I basically pay a pittance for the local school and that is it. Once property taxes are eliminated the other voters can push to not have their taxes raised and just shitcan what property taxes were paying for.

[etrautmann]

You seem clearly aware that this is relevant to a small subset of the population.

[kiba]

Property tax is an emerging issue. There are movement to end property taxes or limit them across the US.

There is some opposite momentum toward the land value tax, which is a good thing, but these are less visible and likely weaker than a tax revolt by landowners.

Eventually, if the current trend continue for property taxes, we will see a disruption in government funding for basic service, and the contraction of the economy through increased taxation of economic activity to compensate for lost revenue from property taxes. It will be a disaster.

This is the endgame of the expansion of land ownership in the post WW2 era. Exemption from property taxes worsen this crisis.

[epistasis]

> There is some opposite momentum toward the land value tax, which is a good thing, but these are less visible and likely weaker than a tax revolt by landowners.

You're breaking my heart here. A land value tax is embraced by anti-tax advocates like Milton Friedman as the "least bad tax" as well as by actual Marxists. However, it does seem like in the current moment a land-owner tax revolt is the likeliest end game.

And if there is a big push towards eliminating property tax, those states will rush towards California-like real estate disasters.

I just wish that all the people who had a hard time purchasing a home or paying rent would act on their own self-interest in reducing the share of our economy that flows to the rentierism of the land owner. Rentierism is bad in all economies, yet we have enabled an overclass to exploit young people and the poor. We live in an asset economy, where there's a big class divide between those who must work to survive, and those who own real estate (especially if it's their own home) and those who own financial assets like stocks. Making capitalism work better requires more class mobility and less inequality than we currently have.

[mothballed]

I'm more convinced that the LVT is the least invasive than it being the least bad in economic action, although I can somewhat understand the argument for it. If you eliminated all the other taxes and only used LVT then a large part of the financial surveillance apparatus wouldn't have a leg to stand on. The part about bean counting every bit of income, profit, and gain and then being made to report it to the government under the auspices of just paying your tax is absolutely dystopic compared to LVT.

The biggest challenges of Georgism are that it is basically communism for land (George straight up admits this in one of his books) and creates some issues with efficiently allocating land resources, especially bad with the fact that it can wipe out land speculators which perform an important role in doing time-allocation of land. But it's probably worth the tradeoff if you can eliminate the other taxes.

[epistasis]

> creates some issues with efficiently allocating land resources, especially bad with the fact that it can wipe out land speculators which perform an important role in doing time-allocation of land

Interesting, I have always thought the opposite. My undertsanding/reasoning: It's extremely difficult to find land for good purposes because speculators maintain land banks, preventing better uses of it. The speculator causes a ton of market friction, and the tendency for people to hold onto land because of limited supply are a fundamental hindrance to so much economic activity.

If there's a high carrying cost to land, a lot more of it will be on the market and available for people to use when they need it. Especially as land values rise, which is the most important time to reallocate land. Rising land values are exactly the time that the land speculator holds tightest, because they want to sell at the peak, not on the way up.

[kiba]

It is the only tax without deadweight loss. Speculators are detrimental in this case because they make land more expensive without increasing supply and are loathe to make efficient use of the land.

[mothballed]

Taxes going up for shittier and shittier return is unfortunately something we are seeing across the US. Regardless of ideological viewpoint, the relative advantages of just buying the services you need on your own rather than playing into a broken system will appeal to larger and larger subsets. I was in the majority "subset" until I was tired of being squeezed dry by a system that always squandered my tax money.

Maybe the government can be fixed, or even "must" be fixed for the sake of the poors that we always pretend we're thinking about (no doubt some are, but most are just using them as a prop for political persuasion), but in the meanwhile contingency plans must be made.

[concinds]

It'll get worse. The US has lived above its means for a while, and it would need a big tax increase to only maintain the current level of service, no fancy extras.

[idiotsecant]

reducing or removing property taxes for legitimate historic properties seems like a good thing to me. I don't want every community to look like a slightly randomized version of every other community. Historic stuff is interesting. If we can encourage it to stay interesting and not get torn down to build a TGI fridays that sounds like a good thing to me. How much did your crusade to tax local historic structures save the average taxpayer? How many of those places will be lost?

[jeffbee]

None of the covered properties in Berkeley are legitimate landmarks of genuine architectural merit or historical importance. Every one of them was established by flim-flam for the purpose of claiming the tax abatement. Over the years this lovely property claimed more tax breaks than any other. Judge for yourself whether the public interest was served.

https://www.google.com/maps/@37.8567746,-122.2550107,3a,60y,...

[idiotsecant]

Seems like the problem is that the system is bad at identifying historic properties with genuine value.

[jeffbee]

Have you heard the news about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

[idiotsecant]

This phrase is stupid and it gets repeated so much. It's pure vapid mangement consultant dreck. Imagine I told you that my car was running kind of hot and I needed to replace old coolant to make the system work better. If you told me 'ThE PuRpOsE oF a SyStEm Is WhAt It DoEs' I would think you were missing some braincells.

Sometimes the purpose of a system is what it's supposed to do and it needs some small maintenance to make it work right.

[stephen_cagle]

Strong disagree. If something has value, then the community should decide to preserve it as a group or the state should preserve it for us. I suspect that most of these schemes are some form of tax avoidance for wealthier people. The idea that some politically connected and likely wealthy group of people need some sort of help "preserving" historic buildings seems... dubious.

[idiotsecant]

What do you think the community deciding to preserve it looks like? The government is the community. It's made out of the community. It's elected by the community. What mechanism are you suggesting?

[kiba]

Then they should be owned by governments outright. Provided that the community consent to it and are aware of the cost.

Government provides crucial services that increases land value, offsetting any losses in tax revenue through public utility. Perhaps the same thing can happen with historical buildings.

However, let us note that cities are for living in. It is not a museum.

Ultimately, only the public can determine the balance of concerns to be struck.