I’m pretty sure it’s a bad idea because it’s pretty much a historical accident in California and implemented just about nowhere else. California can’t get rid of it because the policy creates a huge amount of inertia but people have tried on many occasions because the policy is also extremely bad.
The solutions to property tax rising are myriad. A person can take a mortgage out against the gains in property value. Since property taxes are well under 1%, this can pay for the property tax for 50 years easily and the only drawback is not owning 100% of the property. A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options. Ultimately, your community is losing someone because they decided the best option was to cash in the value of their home, take their profits and leave. They also decided there best bet for cheaper housing was elsewhere, which is something the community could have done something about with better policy. People should have that choice. The problem in this scenario is not property taxes going up with land value increases.
Lastly, artificially keeping communities together through massive subsidies to people who’ve been there a long time is just as much social engineering as having a property tax that’s based on current market value.
You’ve invented this idea whole-cloth.
We’re not subsidizing someone’s existence just because we could derive much more value from their land if we forced them to sell it to us.
> A person can also downsize to a smaller home or condo in the community, providing the community gets its act together enough on housing to provide said options.
We’re not obligated to pave over our community and turn our population into a permanent rental class, pouring wealth into the pockets of rent-seeking developers that will extract it from the local economy, just because you don’t like how we live.
I realize this is a bit inappropriate for yc, but just about everything you’ve said demonstrates a gross moral failing inherent in believing you have a rightful interest in forcing others to behave the way you want them to, instead of the way they’ve chosen to live.
You went to ad hominem very quickly on having your ideas challenged. It’s not a gross moral failing to want property tax to work the way it’s supposed to and does in nearly every jurisdiction on the planet. Except California because of weird historical accident.
There’s no such thing as a “market rate” when you’re discussing invented taxation schemes.
> You went to ad hominem very quickly on having your ideas challenged.
No, I went very quickly to calling out the immorality of your position upon your succinctly demonstrating the same.
> It’s not a gross moral failing to want property tax to work the way it’s supposed to …
Taxation schemes are an arbitrary invention. They’re not supposed to do anything other than whatever they’re designed to do.
Furthermore, the LVT scheme you proposed is not how property tax works in nearly every jurisdiction on the planet, and is designed to force people from their homes, coerce them into selling their property, and control how that property may be used under penalty of ruinous taxation for a failure to comply.
A $500,000 home is taxed $12,500 a year or a little over $1,000 per month in New Jersey the state with the highest property tax in the United States.
However that is an extreme example given few homes outside of super dense urban areas are worth that much and most states have much lower property taxes.
If we replace it with a $300,000 home and a tax rate of 1% (which is representative of most of the country) you instead get $3,000 a year or $250 a month. HoA fees are higher than that in many communities. That isn't ruinous at all.
That seems immoral to me, and I’m not convinced you’ve actually thought through the implications of your idealized grand vision.
“Your lost decades-long community members will be replaced by brand new people” is not the argument you seem to think it is, and could only be made by someone who had no experience building a functioning community.