Land value tax, please.
Granny gets to stay in her house and the market isn't distorted by perverse incentives. A win for everyone!
Moreover, granny might be a paper millionaire based on the current valuation of a principal asset but otherwise be eating cat food.
Why doesn't she just cash out? I think the below linked blog post has some insight into how each asset of a person isn't an isolated atom but represents a structure of complements.
For example, maybe Granny can't drive and walks down to the community center every day to help immigrant kindergarteners learn to code. If she moved maybe she loses exercise and a reason to live and her lives and those of others are negatively impacted in ways money from selling a house can't fix. Or maybe, since Halloween is coming up, she is a sadistic cat killer and if she sells her house and moves the whole neighborhood is overrun with feral felines reducing everyone's property value due to fears of cat scratch fever.
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/10/sel...
> Your feelings don’t matter
They do when the argument begins and ends with tugging at my heart strings. And I honestly don’t see these Jarvis arguments from the 70s holding up for much longer. Not when everyone else is hurting.
1) an empty lot, 2) a single family home, and 3) a 30 floor residential tower,
presuming they're equally-sized lots with equal land value.
If granny's taxes are high, the answer is to put her land to productive use like by adding rental units instead of growing zucchini. Or sell and buy better land for hobby zucchini gardening (or grow it on the roof of her new tower).
Regulations don't allow her to add rental units? Then it's the regulations that are bad, and finally land value taxes are aligning land owners' and renters' interests instead of dividing them.
Faux compassion for granny is how prop 13 got passed though, so sure, people fall for this shit.
Perhaps not in California, but it's worth noting that some places, England being among the forefront in this[0], do recognize the right to light is an important property right.
For Georgia: https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/2010/title-44/chapter-9...
For a well-functioning market that doesn't get bothered by protests and other political machinations, the government needs to provide an easy mechanism to pay for whatever it is you care about. Any market which is restricted to folks who can afford high-cost lawyers and custom legal contracts, that market will be inefficient. Saying, "put a building-height covenant on it" in effect means "let's spend money and time on political advertisements and protests so neither of us are happy."
Compromises can only be found where all parties are to gain something. If one group are to gain something - housing in this case - and whatever they can offer will reduce negative impact to others - local residents - there is simply no compromise to be found because whatever the state of neighborhood was when they moved in, it was the best compromise in their view.
But the radius within which homeowners gain is wider than the radius in which homeowners bear inconveniences (e.g. shade on their garden). So of course it's rational for a homeowner to be pro commercial development in their city and near their neighbourhood (as it would increase demand for housing, and hence increase property value), but against commercial development near enough to affect traffic and noise levels.
While increasing property value may seem rational to probably the majority, but given certain circumstances, preferences and goals the opposite can be easily argued to be rational. With modern metropolis lifestyle of changing home every some years based on workplace location, family size, etc. one is always in the market and increased real property value is quite favorable economically. For some groups changes in property value are seen as irrelevant in face of non-economic values.
OT, but:
"Taking actions toward increasing property value are only rational with intention to put the property into market"
No, even if you intend to die in your current home, increasing property values are great if (i) you can borrow against the value, to fund current expenditure and (ii) property taxes don't go up as a result (yay California).
"lifestyle of changing home every some years based on workplace location, family size, etc. one is always in the market and increased real property value is quite favorable"
I think that depends on whether you're trading up or trading down. If you want to buy a place double the size of your current one (e.g. to raise a family), then you'd want prices to be lower. As the differential between the sale price of your existing home, and the purchase price of the new one, would be lower.
Exactly, certain things can be argued to be either advantageous or disadvantageous, depending on mindset/worldview, focus duration (long-term vs short-term goals), focus population (single individual vs average/median of population), etc. and these are core to public policy making.
And that is my point: attempts to maximize quality of life for a single individual/family for a few years naturally lead to NIMBYs. And they are not inherently wrong - annoying with different focus (e.g. median citizen after few decades), but not wrong.
So many aspects of our society seem forced to either-or situations when some compromise would benefit all parties more.