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by drtz 40 days ago
There's a lot of ground between gifting $3.3 billion in tax incentives to a megacorp for a short-term increase in construction employment and allowing a homeowner build a second dwelling on their lot.

Incidentally, that same $3.3 billion could build around 10,000 accessory dwellings in Baton Rouge.

2 comments

What are the details of the tax incentives? Some are "real loss" (e.g., the area produced $10k a year in property tax before, and now produces $0) and others are "lost future taxes" where it produces nothing now, and now will produce nothing for 10/20 years (this is the type often used to convince Walmart to build here rather than there).
ADU permits are a good idea but they're nowhere near impactful enough to provide housing for the number of people who need it in heavily housing constrained areas. The housing developments that need to happen are bigger in scale, much more like datacenters than like legalizing household construction of ADUs.

I actually would support giving tax breaks to housing developers on the same scale as those being given to tech companies building data centers, for exactly the same reason that it encourages construction of those buildings and I think that is a good thing. And NIMBYs, whether for housing or for data centers, are straightforwardly opposed to these structures existing at all, regardless of the way they are taxed. I want them to lose in both cases, which means that I'm in the position of wanting local government authorities to ignore the demands of a vocal set of their constituents and allow private industry to build.