Lowering or removing this disincentive would increase the amount of work that gets inspected.
As an owner-occupant, I want the inspections and am willing to pay one-time for an impartial second set of eyes.
As an owner-occupant, I do not want to pay a recurring subscription fee (in the form of higher property tax) as a result of the inspection.
Given how many properties have obviously recent remodels and no permits pulled in the last 30 years, it’s fair to say that at least some of the market has decided that permits aren’t worth the tax increases.
One thing the Bitcoin issue has shown me is just how pivotal that 'number go up' is to society. When 'number go up', that thing gets bought in, which brings more people to it. I think many look at the LVT like medicine, yes, this thing is good and important, but it tastes bad, so we can't get the collective buy-in, and never will. But we all know what's going to happen to Bitcoin, it's a bubble, and it will crash, crash hard. But so is the real estate market.
Real estate has gone up as interest rates have come down. With our interest rates at 0%, there is now no more room for the interest rates to go down, and thus real estate market to go up. We've reached the end, as we come out of CO-VID they might go up another 10% or so, but the easy money is gone - but the downside is now massive. If rates go back to 5% we will see real estate prices go back to where they were at when interest rates were last at 5%. Investors have a huge risk disparity.
And this is where the Land Value Tax can help. If we can implement the Land Value Tax, and at the same time implement a one-time tax credit equal to the price of the land, not only will no one lose out, but those that have the most at risk will now de-risk, and have the most to gain. All in the meantime instantly incentivizing the correct behavior.
as you probably know, AVMs (automated valuation models) have been the hotness over the past few decades, but zillow (recently, but all along too) has shown the real limitation of AVMs. in theory, the likes of google and apple have enough geospatial data to create good land value AVMs, but you really still need appraisers on the ground for hyperlocal adjustments that just don't get captured in the AVM data and/or model. and that's all before the politicians, bureaucrats, and competing public interests get involved.
That's what they said about the French Revolution, American democracy, the abolition of Russian serfdom, the abolition of US slavery, the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution, Prohibition, the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, the Great Leap Forward, the Iranian Revolution, etc.
I mean, that's also what they said about lots of other changes that actually didn't get implemented. And, as the examples above illustrate, it's easy for radical changes to have unintended effects...
This is actually very logical. Never understood why salaries are taxed so high. Always seemed to me like the governments are punishing workers for actively working.
Wouldn't that just mean those lots would stand empty? Its not like the car washes are there because there is a higher revenue option but people just dont want to do it.
In this specific example, what's preventing the land from being used for something more valuable than a car wash currently? I get that a land value tax would disincentivize hoarding land, but urban-sprawl-car wash hardly seems like a case of land hoarding. I think the parent was suggesting that these car washes would no longer exist because taxes would be too high under a land value tax regime - but that raises the question of what the more valuable usage is? Does there exist one, why isn't it currently being used that way, and is the reason something that lvt would rectify? If car washes are the most valuable usage, then they will either continue to exist or if the tax burden is too high in the new regime, they will stop existing and nothing will replace them.
I'm sure there are plenty of examples where lvt would encourage more efficient land usage, i'm just confused why this would be one of them.
Basically car washes are the slightly-harder version of land banking, but there is still enough value in the land that if the land was put up for sale, some other business would purchase it and utilise the land better.
If the car wash owner wanted to maximize returns they could set up a more profitable business today, sure. It's just more effort than they can be bothered with.
TL;DR: things that people produce such as labor, products, and services are not taxed at all. No payroll taxes, no sales tax, no income tax, and no capital gains tax on investments in productive activity or human-made capital.
Things that people did not produce such as land or the right to extract natural resources are taxed. For land the land value is taxed, but this does not include the value of things built on the land.
You're basically billed for the right to "own" things that existed before any of us were born. Since not much else is taxed, these taxes could be rather steep.
This strongly incentivizes efficient use of land and natural resources and discourages non-productive squatting on them. You would not see, for example, a bunch of self-storage places and gigantic sprawling car washes in Silicon Valley. The land value taxes in such an area would be far too high to justify anything but highly efficient productive uses of the land such as housing, manufacturing, offices, etc. Vertical construction would be highly incentivized in high value areas.