The second order effect will be that rental properties are driven from places where this applies.

That has some not-fun generational aspects.

(1) If schools have lower taxes, their ability to attract good educators for children is reduced. That in turn leads to lower home values since the school quality factor is reduced.

(2) If munis are unable to collect a sufficient tax base, they must reduce services. There will be hemming and hawing about things like cutting the pensions promised decades ago to attract competent service workers, but those are harder to reduce rather than not fixing the fire trucks, the water pipes, and other hidden taxes citizens pay for by reduced services. So your property values will also be reduced in the long term. Small towns are prime examples of this happening, when towns fail.

Trying to build a community out of one socioeconomic class works about as well as trying to redline. It leads to a less vibrant community, less adaptable community, and people are poorer in life and in their finances for it.

I think that's true but in some cases it's also about making home ownership, in the sense of having a home you can't lose short of a destructive disaster, even possible. In a lot of cities property taxes are enough to get in the way of secure housing for, e.g., disabled people. It seems reasonable to want owning the house you live in to be a possibility for planning to eventually live on a fixed or low income.

Someone I know is trying to plan such a thing right now. She has a decent paying job and a degenerative, disability-inflicting illness. She'd like to see the possibility of a secure future in the city where she's lived for the past 10 years, but property taxes and HOA fees alone in her city can be multiple thousands of dollars per month in neighborhoods that from the outside you wouldn't think seem particularly new or posh or luxurious. It seems that if she's forced into early retirement by disability, she'll have no choice but to relocate. So instead she feels trapped in a job she hates because she got it before she became disabled because she's reasonably afraid that employment discrimination, which is terrible at her job that nominally espouses inclusive values, will be even worse most other places. And while she's already disabled, her disability will only continue to get more profound for the rest of her life. And property taxes for sole and lived-in-by-the-owner homes is one of the reason that owning a condo or apartment is so much more expensive than renting one for her.

Yeah, it’s nasty politics.

What’s happening is income inequality manifesting on the market. The middle and upper middle of the market is seeing accelerated appreciation as incomes rise for the upper quartile. Some places see >10% annualized appreciation over the last 20 years.

The lower part of the market is very different, and are basically depreciating away. Property taxes are the most fair tax for the most part — you basically pay a prorated share of the levy based on the market value of your home. So if the poorer property is getting less valuable proportionally, your share of the tax pie increases. Some states share Medicaid expenses at the county level so there’s demand pressure for more tax levy.

The problem is old people generally cannot afford their homes, and are usually profoundly ignorant about everything except tax avoidance, even when tax avoidance hurts them. The tax knob is one that can be turned, which makes the problems worse. Senior exemptions, veterans exemptions, all increase the overall share for everyone else.

The new Republican platform is accelerating that — pushing property taxes to non-homestead property and driving up sales tax. In other words, it just a consumption tax, which pushes the tax burden to families and inflates retail costs, so grandma can sit in her big house and her kids get to inherit the place at the stepped up cost basis.

Landlords charge what the market will bear and generally have little if any price elasticity of supply, so they bear nearly 100% of the economic incidence of the tax. This is especially true where housing supply is constrained by zoning policy rather than the price of expanding supply.

It's totally possible to prevent landlords from passing that tax onto renters--rent controls, income-based-rent-tier tax incentives for landlords, and so on.

"But that'll just put landlords out of busine--" no it won't. Margins have width. Commercial property ownership is an incredibly high-margin business if you want it to be. If you don't shrink your margins by expanding, you can make a shitload of money; this isn't like a goods-and-services business in which failure to grow is penalized. The cost of the services you do provide is either low (property management/leasing) or quickly amortized (purchase and development). And almost all of your business assets not only don't depreciate, but appreciate at incredible rates.

"But they'll find other ways to pass the costs on to tenan--" not if you write your regulations well. Regulation prevents all sorts of income increases in all sorts of industries whose participants have accepted that they'll stay within the lines, money to be made or not. There's no reason that a combination of increased taxes from landlords and controlled rent can't extract money from commercial property owners while shielding tenants from harms. Sure, implementing that is complex and fallible (e.g. you likely want to permit different kinds of rate flexibility for commercial renters like small businesses than for luxury apartment residents or low-income family residents), but so is everything.

Not exactly.

The little town I live in is growing about 22,000 people per year. That's 64-67 people per day or about 16 new households populated with new residents every single day. The rental population is growing dramatically faster than the owner population.

That growth trend has very little to do with wealth and is almost exclusively a factor of availability. Most single family households in this growth area are rental properties, because the most urgent buyers are rental corporations who buy many of these houses the earliest moment they hit the market. Sometimes they are buying the houses before they hit the market by working directly with the home builders. Home renters tend to pay more to access the property than home owners even before taxes are considered.

So, its not just about houses versus apartments.

Also, the school systems and local municipalities attempt to sell their multi-billion bond proposals by taxing future residents at the benefit of current residents. That also disproportionately hurts renters compared to owners. The moment I see a bond proposal that will be paid for almost exclusively by residents who aren't living here yet I vote for it... because why not. We need a lot of shit to accommodate this growth and somebody has to pay for it. We need new high schools every couple of years. We need new roads. We need more plumbing, sewage, and electricity before the data centers eat it all up. Somebody has to pay for all this.

I remember reading about california's Proposition 13, where both homeowners and commercial developers got a long-term lower property tax. The tax increases for continuous ownership would be modest, and only selling would reassess the tax value.

It was supposed to be for aging old people who were forced to move because they couldn't afford the taxes as their homes increased in valuation.

But commercial was also included, with the thought that lower taxes would let landlords pass the benefits onto the tenants.

But they never did, they just pocketed the savings.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...

In addition, commercial properties would be owned by immortal corporations, which would change hands without reassessing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_California_Proposition_13...

Around here, many renters are pretty well-off. It's really difficult to own a home in the city.

Brooklyn, for example, has seen an explosion of high-rent apartment buildings, occupied by nerds like us.

If you are lucky enough to own a home/apartment in the city, you are either crazy rich, or, more likely, brought the home before it exploded in value, making you "paper rich."

Many of the apartment-dwellers in the city make a lot more than homeowners.

I’m not sure that is true. More wealth is only useful if you can do something with it. If I buy my home for 300k and buy taxes on 300k, then that’s the level my income is calibrated for. If the value of my home rises to 900k with a similar increase in taxes, my tax burden increased by 3, but I still have the same amount of money and no way to get it out other than selling the house.

If you need thst money back at some point it makes much more sense to tax the sale or purchase of the property because nobody living there is affected until that sale actually happens.

> That sounds like shifting the property tax burden from homeowners to renters...

This is all obviously very specific to the locality where you live, but at least where I live, property values were recently reassessed to account for the large post-pandemic increases. Individual homeowners were generally stuck with these reassessments, while commercial properties, especially those managed by large property management groups, were organized and successfully petitioned to reduce those assessments in disproportionate numbers. So the balance of power was not equal to start with.

A lot of states have rent control laws though which would entirely shift the burden on the owner of the building.

It would also place a higher burden on investment home owners so it's not all bad.

> homeowners are generally wealthier than renters

on paper; remove the 'value' of the home and the typical home "owner" (mortgage means bank owns your home) is more likely to be paycheck-to-paycheck

Also robbing the future, consistent with a gerontocracy

That is what I think will happen at the end.

Wealth is not income.

You can be wealthy and still have poor cashflow, especially as a leveraged property owner

A major problem with decoupling property taxes on owner-occupied housing from market prices is that it removes the biggest incentive for a homeowner to vote for policies that keep the local real estate market in check. An owner occupied house in a desirable area where there is no disincentive to politically engineering a supply shortage becomes a financial investment. Any increase in housing value becomes profit for the owner (or their descendants). This leads to supply restrictions and escalating prices and an increasingly unhealthy society as the young and the poorer are pushed out of the city, county, or even state.

This is essentially what has happened in coastal California over the last 60 years.

> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.

My local government put exactly this on the ballot: a small percentage transfer tax on the sale price of the home, which would offset some of the costs we currently pay in ad valorem property taxes.

The local real estate community had a meltdown and poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into defeating it, which my neighbors obliged and did.

The issue with that is the disincentive to sell (or buy), which leads a lot of people to stay put in their oversized home during retirement, for example.

In the UK, 'stamp duty' is something that buyers pay (as opposed to sellers), but sellers also have to buy, so everyone pays to move and everyone stays put to avoid paying.

(And of course no one builds, which is the biggest issue).

I'd say it's OK to defer your property taxes until you sell (or die), but it shouldn't be the default, only something you apply for if you're in a vulnerable position.

I think it's a great idea to let land taxes create the incentives to build efficiently.

> value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house

Value is always relative - even if the experience hasn't changed, the rising house price does mean that same experience is being value more highly relative to other opportunities. (In most cases this is because the experience actually has changed: if your neighborhood gets nicer, you are indeed benefitting!)

The bigger fallacy in rising property taxes is that civic services don't necessarily get better or more expensive just because property rates rise. And the bigger unfairness is that homeowners with rising values but not rising income don't always have efficient access to the equity of their homes.

A fair property tax regime would avoid presuming budget increases just due to rising value of housing stock, and might subsidize HELOCs or similar structures for folks who need to access property value to pay taxes.

"the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house"

An owner can derive value from the house in one of three ways:

A) Occupy the whole place.

B) Receive rent from a tenant.

C) Something in between (e.g. airbnb one room).

When property prices double, it's likely that rents roughly double. This may not increase the value the owner can derive from (A) but it will sure change the value they can derive from (B).

So they might decide to switch from living in the place to renting it out. If they don't decide to switch, then it indicates the value they derive from living in the property has either gone up, or it was always way higher than the market rent.

It seems like market rent is a reasonable benchmark to use to calculate property taxes, and property value is a reasonable proxy for market rent.

This conveniently ignores all the gains in property value which they can benefit from by refinancing, selling or renting. If they don’t want to pay property taxes on higher values, and don’t care about the value, then we have a simple solution:

Freeze the property taxes and let the government take the entire value gain in the house when its sold.

> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale

Stamp duty in the UK, horrendous tax. It's better than nothing at offsetting the unearned increase in house (land) value, but far worse than a regular tax.

If you live somewhere for 10 years, then move, then repeat for 40 years, you pay far more than if you never move. This encourages people to live in less suitable houses for longer.

As to your worry about land values increasing -- the owner is deriving benefit. The higher the land value is, the more benefit the owner gets from the land.

> A major problem with property taxes on owner-occupied housing is that the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house

Your better believe it is when it comes time to sell.

Or would owners not mind having 0% property taxes in return for the state taking all gains at sale time

> Any gain in value cannot easily be realized since it’s not a liquid asset.

Reverse mortgage

Or just loosen supply side restrictions so much that houses typically don’t go up in value.

That's basic Econ101: households optimize for (subjective) utility, not for profit on some balance sheet. Taxing households for non-realized gains doesn't take into account liquidity nor the (subjective) negative utility and opportunity cost of selling your home and moving away.

> the value the owner derives from the house is not dependent on the resale value of the house

It often is, instead. Eg the resale value of my flat increased because the area where I live became a better place.

> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale

This is how it works for sales in Sweden, via the so called "reavinstskatt", or profit realisation tax. Funnily enough, it is mostly applied to individuals in practice. To avoid the taxation, companies package properties in subsidiaries, which can then be sold and traded like any other stock. The tax is then postponed until the de jure sale of the property, which never occurs. Individuals are not eligible because the loophole is closed if the legal owner also occupies the property they own.

> One way out could be to tax the value gain at the time of sale, or when the house gets rented out, thus no longer being “owner occupied”.

Forcing renters and buyers to pay for the local services instead of property owners seems extremely unfair.

> Any increase in housing value (and thus property taxes) is mostly an increase in the cost of living.

So? If the property values go up then cost of living is going up for renters too. Why should property owners be shielded from this by imposing local service costs on renters who generally have even lower incomes than owners.

Yes. It's a wealth tax on homeowners.

If I had billions of dollars of stock it would require a change in the law to tax me on its market value. But you can do exactly this to me if it's a house.

I disagree. In my country we are currently in a inheritance boom. Everyone who has parents is getting free money.

Fwiw, every municipality I've lived in has had some kind of program to help people who own and live in their house to afford property tax if they can't.

I think they're usually called "homestead exemption" or something like that.

This will drive rent up, punishing people who lack the credit to purchase.

> Neighbors who can afford and are willing to participate in ridiculously scaled housing markets also tend to take better care of their properties and local communities.

Whereas you take great care of your local community by even refusing to live around anyone not as well off as you ?

Imagine the horror of having to live within 10 miles of a low class smelly poor plebeian, you might have to lay your eyes on their 3 days overgrown lawn from time to time.

Someone is pocketing a large fraction of that $2500 while paying 2-3 people a minimum wage to get things done.

This works in other areas of life. A courtesy charge creates a better environment by giving participants skin in the game and filtering out actors who wouldn’t mind abusing you but wont pay to do so.

You should be concerned if you have 100+ psi water pressure. Anything above 70 is atypical for a residence.

I have heard way too many horror stories about obnoxious neighbors in HOAs to ever want to live in one, personally

Don't have HOA, have everything you have, AMA

all of those services are ones that should be realized by the city, from taxes paid to the city. If they are not, the problem is that people vote for wrong people

Wait until you get a tyrannical HOA board and realize you have to make a choice between dealing with them or moving. Dealing with them typically involves lawsuits which come out of your HOA fees, which will go up along with all your neighbors who are now angry that their fees have gone up as well. (Ask me about open records my HOA hasn’t delivered for over 350 days.

I pay my city for sewer, water, and trash. I pay an ISP for fiber to the home, a power company for electricity. If you get all those things for $2500/year from your HOA, congratulations.

You’re stilling paying taxes for nothing in addition to HOA fees. Another fee isn’t the answer.

Your comment makes it clear you're American. I just don't get why you guys torture yourselves by seeing your pre-tax income then having to pay taxes yourselves. In the UK most people pay tax via PAYE which means we don't even see our pre-tax income. It's just some numbers on a payslip, but your rarely need to look at. Consequently, I've never heard a single person in the UK ever say they "hate paying taxes" because we just don't think about it.

It's not necessarily that people forgot that reason for property taxes existing. Many voters fundamentally disagree with that as a valid reason. This is a matter of ideology and values as much as economics, and not everyone shares your priorities. You can label them as greedy hoarders or whatever but that won't change how they vote.

How is choosing to continue to live in a house you own “non economic wealth hoarding”?

People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.

The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.

I don't know about Austin, but where I am the single biggest source of rising costs for the city seems to be its pension fund. Which seems to have severely underperformed the market thanks to the efforts of hedge fund managers who were all hype about dotcoms in 1999, mortgage-backed securities in 2006, cryptocurrencies in 2018, and are probably pretty excited about AI right now.

Percentage increases are the result of your money being worth less. That’s why every good government fights inflation. Stable values of money make it easier to plan budgets, estimate costs, lure investors, and collect taxes.

It’s when the value of money decreases that government has to choose among reducing spending (often by reducing services), increasing tax rates, and electoral losses. Most choose incremental tax rate increases because it’s easiest and the people likely to complain are unwilling to run for office to replace the people who raised the taxes.

1. because taxes have trended downward for the ultra-rich. So they are just shifting.

2. Because overall, society's working class is working 90-year high hours for 130-year low effective wages. I don't know if the percentage taxes are absolutely lower, but it will feel like that under such conditions.

We've been boiling for a while now. I wonder if/when we'll collectively realize it.

> why do taxes generally trend upwards for the average person?

One-time money from development runs out, but services like sewers, roads, power, emergency services, snow removal, and so on, need to be paid or saved for every year. Most US cities are sprawling, low-density affairs, meaning they're developed (and paid for) once, but all those roads still need money to maintain. Quoting from [0] to draw attention to what I'm talking about:

> What the tax productivity data shows is that "rich-people housing" with big lots and plenty of room for cars, which were subsidized when the neighbourhood was developed, continue to be subsidized throughout their long existence. Suburban single-family houses on big lots simply do not cover the municipal expense of things like repairing all that asphalt and clearing all that snow

People have asked previously how, if this were true, we would see more cities declaring bankruptcy - and some do [1], while others do what you've noticed, and raised taxes. The car-centric, driving-as-the-only-transportation-method way of life is financially unsustainable.

I'm not going to yell death to the automobile, but to make it the default, and in many cases only way to get around, is not a good long-term plan for cities beyond a certain size.

[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/evs-cities-climate-column-d...

[1] https://wmtxlaw.com/cities-declared-bankruptcy/

In New York state half of property taxes is for county contributions to the state medicaid fund. This excludes the seperate schools tax which is property based. Health care costs drive up many costs in the US including all libality insurances. The second part of this tax mess comes from the excessive military budgets since the late 1970s most of our national debt as of the mid 1990s was from that waste of resources. I understand we shouldn't just cut abruptly but our spend on weapons needs to slowly decline while we fund the transfer of workers out of the military industrial complex. And there are a lot of structural accounting problems like how personal credit card and automobile financing isn't tax deductbable but leveraged buyout interest is. The tax exemption for share buybacks is another budget drain. My instinct is we need a universal national income tax along with a land tax that in some ways exempts housing up to some middle or upper middleclass level.

The maintenance costs on urban sprawl are driving many municipalities towards insolvency. Property taxes have to rise because the fiscal efficiency of land in sprawling US cities is very low.

This doesn't explain it all, but worth considering.

As the cost of living increases, so does the cost of providing public safety workers and their union-guaranteed pensions and benefits. In most cities, public safety eats up a large chunk of the operating/general fund budget (in Austin it's 71.2%)[1, pg. 30], and reducing public safety budgets kills your representative's clout. You yourself can advocate for lower hiring rates or pay and pensions if that's a concern. Any new hire comes with long-term costs for your local government, even after they've left service.

Extracurricular services are highly visible and therefore highly defended by the advocates that claim they reduce crime (by providing structure to youth with nothing else to do, for example). Representatives are typically replaced with those that defend those highly-visible services. They will instead reduce less-visible support services (like IT) that make public safety more efficient/effective.

Since you can't outlaw homelessness, citizens that complain about homeless activity motivate local governments to provide more services that make homelessness less visible/likely. Without those services, public safety budgets need to increase to address more desperation on the streets.

As the population ages and needs more medical care they can't afford, demand for EMS and senior services increases. I've seen arguments to freeze or eliminate property taxes for seniors, but balanced budgets mean non-seniors have to pay more to cover their service costs unless the local government finds additional revenue (fees, fines, more local sales tax that increases living costs, etc.)

You can outlaw abortion for unfit parents, but that also likely creates more welfare service demand over time.

To me, private businesses not increasing wages to meet a standard cost of living means an increase for demand of welfare and public safety services. Local governments can attempt to hold private businesses to a higher tax burden, but are usually preempted by state law in Republican-led states. Your local government has no control over that and has to respond somehow.

To me, the frustration is best placed with private businesses that can afford to provide for their workforce, but instead rely on welfare services to give their workers what they need to survive, so that executive officers can earn more and deliver more to their investors. ~55% of households in the U.S. earn less than $100,000 per year (before taxes). [2]

[1] https://austin.widen.net/s/x8q5hmnwtw/fy-2026-27-city-of-aus...

[2] https://data.census.gov/table/ACSST1Y2024.S1901

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Why should there be a cap? If you're so rich as to own some property, why do you need protection from paying a reasonable rate of tax?

Land-value taxation is an idea that only works because we restrict building homes. If we said, look starting tomorrow anyone who wants a permit to build housing can get it in 30 days and if the local control won't permit it we have a state-wide (I live in CA) office that will review your building permit (and zoning), issue you a building permit, and do the inspections, specifically for housing, there wouldn't be a housing shortage in 15 years.

Basically land-value scarcity is not because we lack the homebuilding capacity, its because we severely restrict building in places that have high demand

Get rid of the fixed mortgage rate. Owners will sell when they can't afford the mortgage rate; the new owner will pay property taxes at the current rate.

Apart from the US, there aren't may other countries that allow fixed rate mortgages, and not a 30-year fixed.

Land value taxation is the worst idea ever. I already don’t like the idea of property taxes, where you have to pay for a piece of land you own. The ideal should be that unless you’re making use of public services you can live a free life. You should not have to pay just to exist. I’d much rather that income is taxed for the higher tax brackets more.

Let’s say you wee solid middle class and bought your forever home, in what was at the time, the near suburbs. Now that neighbourhood is unaffordable. The city might set a percentage of the home value as their target but now your well placed forever home is beyond your what your pension can afford. This happened a lot in Canada.

The worst part is that for all these taxes, the level of service has dropped since that home was bought.

Depends on the jurisdiction. I've lived in both, budget based rates like you describe (Minnesota), and fixed rates with market based assessments (D.C.). I wonder which is more common.

Most people aren't capable of understanding numbers: https://politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/06/msnbc/bad-math.... You can't educate them to do it, any more than you can educate your average person to be able to reliably hit three pointers. It's a physical limitation.

That's why socialization is so important. You can't get voters to understand the difference between billions and trillions or put anything in context when the numbers get that big. All you can do is socialize them from an early age to have directionally correct gut feelings like, "there's no such thing as a free lunch" or "saving is good."

Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional.

Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely.

We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level.

Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas.

Scarcity of instructors competent to teach such subjects? Followed by the natural bureaucratic response: Pretend no such need exists.

Destruction? It's by design:

"One man gathers what another man spills."

If calculators had never been invented then perhaps arithmetic and economic literacy would be required of citizens. A big problem is that we invented a tool for something that's most powerful when you can do it easily and constantly in your head. People are not pulling out the tool to use it constantly because there's friction to that.

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True it's not a direct property tax, but house value is included in total wealth and is thus taxed through the general wealth tax.

> Buy in a VHCOL area like San Francisco

How does this work? VHCOL does not mean that prices will appreciate or even sustain.

I wouldn’t count somewhere I don’t want to live being cheaper as the prices of all other homes falling… ;) Nor as lack of need to stay either - if real estate prices were the only thing keeping people around, cities might not exist.

Just dont complain about loss of relationships and community while also advocating for policies that make lasting community ties impossible.

ATX real estate is still in free fall. You can win making a move within the state at this point.

That’s how it typically works in the US. Local government sets a revenue target, properties are assessed, and then a tax rate is computed from that to hit the revenue target.

We seem to have valued comfort for the landowning class over general productivity or creative endeavors in America, and now our tax systems reflect this. Whether comfort is the greatest virtue in the long term remains to be seen.

> There’s no reason the local government budget should increase at the same rate as the property values in the taxed area.

There's some reason. City workers may need to live in the area. If housing becomes more expensive, the city may need to pay higher wages.

Sure. But that’s why schools in California are underfunded.

But isn't it understandable? You work your whole life to buy a piece of property. But not just a piece of property anywhere. It's a specific one, in a specific neighborhood, in a specific zone. All of these things tie into the $ that you paid for that property. Regardless of the change in value, a change there impacts how you perceive living there.

If all of the sudden the neighborhood behind you gets rezoned to industrial and you get a datacenter nearby, everybody understands you're up in arms.

If at the same time the neighborhood behind you gets converted from 200 single-family homes to 200 8-plexes, complaining is NIMBY. Even though it has the same dramatic impact on the quality of life you bought into. Way more noise, way more street parking, cars racing late at night etc.

You need extremely high levels of trust and community to incentive the kind of behavior you are asking for. That is not reinforced or taught at any of our schools or government institutions. It only exists in small family or religious communities.

So absent of that, I think your personal incentives also lead you to your current housing policy preferences. Don’t you?

I'm of the opinion that these people are short sighted to begin with. I don't own a home and rent in the city, but I am strongly against high density development. I believe housing development should be spread out and the best way is to break up commercial and financial centers. Too many cities focus around a single "downtown" area that becomes the ground zero of high property prices.

Yeah, I view my house as a consumer good and I don't want the value of my home to increase relative to inflation - ignoring taxes if I have to sell it I'd just have to buy another house at an increased price which will take up any realized gains from the transaction. Plus the fees involved in the cost of buying/selling are higher now b/c they are usually a percentage of the transaction.

It's nice that you would like the world to be this way but it's time to put this tired old canard to bed. It's not individuals but the financial system that treats houses as assets. They do so by extending mortgages. Try getting one for your car.

If the value of a house doesn't increase, then the property taxes, upkeep, mortgage interest, and selling fees would make home ownership untenable and worse than renting. And then if you rent the problem gets pushed up to the landlords anyway.

School system and taxation for schools in NH is very specific to NH « low/no taxes » mantra. I am a resident of a neighbor state with several co-workers living in NH and I recall 15 years ago that there were massive school funding differences between towns. So there was an attempt at redistributing taxes to help pay for other schools from other towns, which was extended to all schools (freedom!) - so home schooling etc. Is NH state funding local schools in some form ? Typically it’s a mix of local, state and federal funds…

If you really want to rage, read about Hasidic cults in NY/NJ gaming government funds.

Fine, you win. We're all serfs. You've redefined "serfdom" to mean living in a modern civilization with public infrastructure, and the property tax tradeoff that comes with it. I'll choose this serfdom until a better viable option presents itself.

Is there any country where I can walk into town with a bag of money, buy a house in cash, and never have to pay taxes on it again? EU countries either have a property tax or a wealth tax that includes people's first homes.

They don’t evict you but put a lien on your home. When it’s sold the gov gets their taxes then. Also, a sheriff is an elected official and evicting an 80 year old because they can’t pay their taxes is not good for their career.

Surely one missed tax payment is not enough for the government to evict and assume ownership? I see these cases in SF occasionally and it takes years of non-payment.

> Is that true and how is this not perpetual serfdom if you can't ever really own a home?

https://phillipslytle.com/a-review-of-new-yorks-response-to-...

Until 2023, some (many?) would sell off your house and pocket the difference, even if it exceeded the tax liability!

Because Serfs didnt own the land. Lords did but had taxes.

Yes there is. You own a more valuable asset, so now even if you want to keep it you could take out a loan against it for a greater amount than if it hadn't appreciated.

It is basically the billionaire/ unrealized gains argument.

I can take a loan against or collateralized my home value.

I can have greater operational flexibility if I know I have a deep financial backup.

There is something to it, even if overstated

> If someone owns a collection of old paintings, why should they be taxed based on their value?

If someone owns a collection of paintings which they're not trying to leverage as an asset, there's no reason for their market value to be known. But if they're putting the paintings up as collateral for loans or something else that demands our participation, then they can pay the rest of us for that privilege by paying taxes on the value of the paintings. Otherwise what reason do we have to acknowledge their property rights?

Perhaps at one time you could've said: "they'll, in turn, acknowledge yours." But so many of us have no property, so that deal is deteriorating.

> You could easily imagine a flatrate per square meter.

This is a good idea since it doesn't distort economic decisions, but has not been implemented in many places.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax

> I'm a multi-homeowner and I'd love it if house prices fell, or at least stopped rising.

What does the phrase "Be the change you want to see" mean to you?

> Taxation based on the theoretical monetary value you could extract if you sold your primary domicile is probably the dumbest possible policy

Yes it is. At least with all other forms of taxation you can vote against/campaign against/run against the politicians who directly chose to vote for it.

> Because taxes are there to pay for services, there's absolutely no reason why they should increase just because the value of your property... Oh that's not how local governments see it?

Actually that often is how local governments see it in many places.

Local bond issues, which are paid for by property taxes, are often not a fixed rate. They are often a fixed amount (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years) or a fixed initial amount with some growth allowed (e.g., $2 million/year for 5 years with inflation adjustments, often capped at some maximum adjustment).

With these each year the rate changes to keep the amount collected on target. If aggregate property values go up the rate goes down and if aggregate property values go down the rate goes up. If everyone's property values went up or down by the same percentage the amount of tax each person paid would stay the same.

Your share of the tax is proportional to your share of the aggregate property value, so our individual taxes can change regardless of any changes in aggregate value. For example if aggregate value goes up 5%, but your assessed value us up 10% and mine is up 3% your tax for a fixed amount bond will go up and mine will go down.

If the price of housing the rises, the cost of living will rise, employees will demand raises, and the cost of providing services will increase. Even if housing prices remain flat, there will be inflation leading to the same result.

But I agree that pinning all hopes of class mobility or comfortable retirement on perpetually increasing housing costs cannot work for very much longer.

Why would government services not be subject to the same cost pressures due to inflation as the rest of society?

> We gotta eat the pain up front to find a better collective tomorrow for everyone

And by “we” you mean not you.

In so many ways it helps to focus more deeply on the fundamentals.

For one thing, in the 1970's lots of true "baby boomers" were still too young to vote.

Maybe what you mean is old folks in general, they were the ones in California who were desperate enough to support the proposition which might be able to save their homes.

They should know, lots of them had been through The Great Depression, and were so much older than boomers they could be their grandparents, well they actually were if you do the math.

And they did the math, getting by just by the skin of their teeth while those just a little bit older who had been on a fixed income earlier had already been taxed out beyond recovery before the proposition.

They already ate the pain, I guess it's difficult to remember how up-front it was if you never spent that many years among Depression survivors.

Nobody ever wanted a depression again, and losing your home through no fault of your own was one of the most visible outcomes that ordinary people could do something about before it got out of hand.

This was supposed to be big, and it is bigger than ever, this is by design.

The problem comes from trying to work against it when the entire economic system surrounding "real estate" was supposed to evolve by now to where nobody pays more tax by now than the most proposition-protected properties.

The idea was for it not to end up making any difference as the years went by, nothing could be more fair than that.

The pearl-clutching comes from the failure of following generations to evolve away from taxing properties or wealth, with all levies eventually falling exclusively onto commerce instead so that only those who are actively making big transactions at the time are logically expected to be able to afford anything at all at the time.

Otherwise things are going to stay as medieval as they can, and the torture will continue until the attitude improves.

Of course. Everyone wants the money they have to increase, the amount of services they receive increase or stay the same, and the money they pay to decrease or stay the same.

This isn't something special with taxes.

Yes that is generally what you get down to: you can’t really own land free and clear in a populated area. You depend on the government in many ways to enforce property rights, as well provide services for that property and in return you have to pay for that.

It makes me uncomfortable too actually but I can’t see any alternative that does not get back to a similar spot or violence. In addition if we shifted to a land value tax, it would push taxes onto the very dense developed areas encouraging better use.

Would highly recommend, will be doing it again soon :)

Piece of cake really, compared to getting lucky trying to lower taxes.

not my downvote btw