He didn’t: I was talking about Prop 13, which is not about land value taxes, but was sold to voters using an equivalent scenario as a rhetorical frame.
However, the same is generally true for land value taxes. The people who stand to lose most from land value taxes are large land owners who for whatever reason are sitting on unimproved or under-improved property.
Often, property just sits because the owner expects the value to continue rising, and wants to make sure to flip the property for as high a price as possible. There’s no pressure to immediately do anything useful with the property, so in extreme cases you end up with 50% parking lots. This image of Denver in the 70s would never occur with a proper land value tax: http://1p40p3gwj70rhpc423s8rzjaz.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-... A hard core libertarian might argue that all those property owners should have the right to build parking lots if they want to, and it’s nobody else’s business. In my opinion though, a city where blanketing downtown in parking lots is the rational behavior has a pathologically broken city planning / tax system.
Yeah, it’s too bad that under a land value tax some individual homeowners who really like the tiny house they bought 40 years ago for $50,000 now need to sell it for $1,000,000 because they can’t afford the tax anymore. But these folks are actually pretty rare, and they just received a giant cash windfall, so they probably won’t get too much sympathy. If they really want to stay, they can surely take out a loan against the property, as evgen suggested.
There are plenty of other folks in our society who get screwed much worse, and are more worthy of public attention and concern.
> A hard core libertarian might argue that all those property owners should have the right to build parking lots if they want to, and it’s nobody else’s business.
.. And this:
> In my opinion though, a city where blanketing downtown in parking lots is the rational behavior has a pathologically broken city planning / tax system.
You might also want to consider whether a property owner would "blanket downtown in parking lots", if there were no reason to believe that would be a good investment.
If someone makes a bad investment, that's his problem.
If there are way too many parking spots operated by a private enterprise, some of them will be removed to make way for more productive uses of the land.
Thats exactly analogous - both oversized parking lot and burning down forests for few years worth of farming are profitable, yet highly undesirable.
If you'd stuff european cities with low density parking lots it would make car owners life not FUCKING SUCK
At the cost of ruining the "ecosystem" - everything is spaced out by parking lots, so more and more people are using cars in turn needing more parking lots, hardly desirable outcome for a city, which would be better served by good public transport, which would be made less desirable if everything was distanced by parking lots
A simple metastable suboptimal state example is extreme income inequality - it took years to get out of another metastable state - more sensible income distribution. Now, it would take a lot of effort/change/work/whatever to switch the states.
> Thats exactly analogous - both oversized parking lot and burning down forests for few years worth of farming are profitable, yet highly undesirable.
I specifically talked about an oversized parking lot getting reduced due to it not being a good investment, so no, not exactly analogous.
The point is that the allocation of anything that's privately owned and used in/for some sort of production will get adjusted as necessary, purely out of its owner's self-interest.
But for starters, burning down a forest would not be a productive endeavour, and as such, not in its owner's interest. Already we can see you're not quite clear on what the problem is.
On the other hand, cutting down a forest to make room for a farm might well be a good idea, but probably not for only "a few years worth of farming".
Why would someone operate a farm for only a few years when it could produce him wealth indefinitely? Again, it's not clear what problem you're seeing here.
> everything is spaced out by parking lots, so more and more people are using cars in turn needing more parking lots
Here you're assuming that people will buy more cars if there's more parking space. I can't see how that would be the case.
If people notice that there are more bicycle parking spaces, will they buy more bicycles? If someone brings you an extra coat hanger, will that make you buy a new coat?
I don't see the connection. Can you point out a real problem related to any of this?
> hardly desirable outcome for a city, which would be better served by good public transport
Now you're talking about something that's not determined by market forces, but by government. Public transport is irrelevant to the earlier discussion. If bad decisions are made in that sphere, blame it on the government.
> A simple metastable suboptimal state example is extreme income inequality - it took years to get out of another metastable state - more sensible income distribution
"Metastable" sounds like a term some academic self-proclaimed philosopher might use. That means it's probably nonsense (or pointless).
> Now, it would take a lot of effort/change/work/whatever to switch the states.
I'm not sure what sort of effort you're imagining, but all it would take is for governments to not dictate what currency we're allowed to use.
However, the same is generally true for land value taxes. The people who stand to lose most from land value taxes are large land owners who for whatever reason are sitting on unimproved or under-improved property.
Often, property just sits because the owner expects the value to continue rising, and wants to make sure to flip the property for as high a price as possible. There’s no pressure to immediately do anything useful with the property, so in extreme cases you end up with 50% parking lots. This image of Denver in the 70s would never occur with a proper land value tax: http://1p40p3gwj70rhpc423s8rzjaz.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-... A hard core libertarian might argue that all those property owners should have the right to build parking lots if they want to, and it’s nobody else’s business. In my opinion though, a city where blanketing downtown in parking lots is the rational behavior has a pathologically broken city planning / tax system.
Yeah, it’s too bad that under a land value tax some individual homeowners who really like the tiny house they bought 40 years ago for $50,000 now need to sell it for $1,000,000 because they can’t afford the tax anymore. But these folks are actually pretty rare, and they just received a giant cash windfall, so they probably won’t get too much sympathy. If they really want to stay, they can surely take out a loan against the property, as evgen suggested.
There are plenty of other folks in our society who get screwed much worse, and are more worthy of public attention and concern.