When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.
Need to be clear on this as theres a lot of bad assumptions below
The best answer is not a standard 'tax' but a payment that is required when land surrounding new transit is redeveloped to higher density. This is the clearest, cleanest solution. Homeowners dont have to pay if they stay and developers just factor the cost in when buying property which removes the problem of money just ending up with existing landowners when they sell the land.
This idea has been around for a long time but not widely implemented in the west yet because the politics is hard. Whichever country does it first will have a massive head start for the future imo
The director of the Switzerland rail real estate told me they went around the world studying existing systems and copied the Japanese way of building stations.
The government owned the stations and leased retail spaces out to businesses in a repeatable templated way. Their goal was for users to never have to leave the station on their way to and from work. So they standardized metro/train stations to have a grocery store, dry cleaning, etc. This was highly profitable and successful.
A lot of rail systems focus on the costs but don’t think about how to design it so that humans want to use rail.
Isn’t this a disincentive to densifying the land? It seems like the tax should occur at least on any sale, not just when redevelopment happens.
A single family home near transit is far more valuable than a single family home away from transit. There’s no reason existing homeowners should capture all of the value of that increase when they’ve paid nothing and done no work to make it happen.
95% of the time the only difference will be developers pay less for the land to start with and then pay this saving to government at time of development.
A small amount of cases the owners wont want to sell for those lower prices. So yes its a disincentive but only a minor one.
Yes existing homeowners get benefit without paying for it but the usual argument is we cant tax them as they didnt ask for it and some will not be able to pay. Forcing pensioners out of lifelong homes is not seen well
In broader terms we are always looking for some way to deliver owners rights as well as socialised community outcomes. No system can deliver all but this is as clear a compromise as can be made in the view of most I've seen who have looked into it in detail
Imagine a railway line/station is built 10 mins walk from me.
I'm not interested in the railway line. So I rent out my home and use the proceeds to buy or rent a larger one in a different location without said railway line.
Trying to capture that value I think would result in some sort of weird rent control / rent tax central planning nightmare that would have pretty bad side effects. It'd probably end up looking a bit like California's Prop 13(?) where people just stay put.
Personally I don't want to live in a society in which homeownership is not possible. I could get behind an LVT on holiday homes, second parcels of land, etc. I wouldn't like it, but I can see why it may be needed.
But a primary residence being subject to an annual tax which can change and outstrip the ability of the owner to pay just means that there's no meaningful way to build stability. I think that's a pretty awful side effect of a flat LVT on everything; I'm invested in my neighbourhood and improving it based on the fact that it's actually mine for life (rather than being temporarily mine).
How stable should property ownership be in an area experiencing growth? I think this could be tunable with short term price increase caps that expire 5-10 years out, and reset when the property is sold or the owner starts paying the full market LVT again.
People take risk buying undeveloped land. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You want to build transit where people live and people want to live where there’s transit. The party that makes the first plunge will potentially make a lot of money.
This is correct - I think it's called R+P (Rail + Property). The government doesn't pay for the project at all and grants exclusive development right to the transit operator, which in case for Hong Kong is MTR. They then negotiate revenue sharing with commercial and residential developers on rent etc.
This works well and these transit operators make more money from real estate (about 2/3) than transit fare (about 1/3). The tricky thing (other than population density) is that the developer will have to assume the risk of the revenue forecast not panning out. I doubt that any transit operators in North America would be willing to do this.
It is worth noting that the HK model only works because of artificially high land prices. Virtually all land in Hong Kong is leasehold and the government uses lease revenues to keep taxes low.
Hong Kong’s projects are also not immune to cost issues. Per km they have the same cost issues described in the article. Recent projects have had massive cost blowouts, and even before then scope was dropped from projects to save money. The recent Sha Tin to Central Link dropped a station in Central to save money, and the new stations were only built to handle 9 cars instead of the rest of the line’s 12 cars to save money.
> The recent Sha Tin to Central Link dropped a station in Central to save money, and the new stations were only built to handle 9 cars instead of the rest of the line’s 12 cars to save money.
One speculation is that, it is harder to move 12 cars uphill, than to move 9 cars uphill, after the train crossed the harbor.
The trains are multiple units, so each car has its own powered motors. (Other than trailer cars, but it's pretty trivial to just add more motors.)
The logic is pretty simple. Less train cars means less people per train, which means you can have shorter/narrower platforms, less escalators, fewer exits, etc. and significantly reduce the structure size.
So in this case, the project cost rise is born by MTR, rather than the government (aka tax payer) which would often be the case in North America. I think it would be much easier for public to back transit projects with setup such as this.
Vail Resorts uses this model of ski lifts on (generally) leased national forest land to drive the money making base area timeshare real estate development.
That is if the land there actually wants the traffic and is ready to adapt. Here in SF it feels like no one wants public transport to get to them, and they definitely don't want to build housing or reserve ground units for shops and restaurants
I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable... walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home. It's not like these are intractable problems - other major cities manage to keep their subway stops and surrounding areas clean & pleasant to use.
The case against BART expansion is made by the experience & externalities of existing BART.
Except most BART stations are fine. Even 24th and Mission, the most notorious, is actually really not that bad. Once people use it, they'll hate it less. However, most people will steer clear for their entire lives.
Man, that's not even remotely close to my experience. I used that station (and 16th st) regularly and saw:
- frequent drug use
- frequent drug sales
- congested and filthy station entrances/exits
- zonked out naked dudes starting fights on the platform (yes more than once or twice)
- liquid poop on station stairs
I wish I was exaggerating but... this is just how it is around those stations.
Depends on your definition of bad. Urine smells, homeless people, and knowledge that muggings typically happen around that area?
I’d call that bad. I’m with you - we need more public transit in the bay. But there’s a huge swath of people where that Bart experience just isn’t going to work.
> knowledge that muggings typically happen around that area
I witnessed one in a bus near tartine in the mission. Safety is really this thing that only becomes an issue after you witness it or become victim of it.
Not that bad? Hate it less? What an exciting pitch for the new nuisance in your neighborhood.
I'm not familiar with that area but I can infer that it must be pretty miserable for people who care about their surroundings, respect public spaces, and work hard to maintain a high standard in the environments they occupy. More power to them.
I feel like it changed noticeably around 2012-2014. Before then it was okay, and since then it's terribad. Basically, in lockstep with the skyrocketing cost-of-living in SF associated with the city's tech boom.
It's pretty simple - don't tolerate this sort of behavior around public transit stations. Transit riders deserve a safe and clean commute. In the absence of that, they'll retreat to the safe clean cocoon of their cars.
No one thinks “hey every place should not be safe”. That’s obviously what everyone wants. However, given that in practice we have huge swathes of places that are in bad condition you need to start by prioritizing. And it obviously makes a lot of sense to prioritize a public transit station, which not only has much higher usage than a random sidewalk, and is far easier and cheaper to keep safe because it has a much more limited geographic footprint and the major sections are not wide open easily accessible spaces but are controlled by gates that require tickets, than it is to do a wide open sidewalk.
It obviously makes sense to start with the space that gives you the most return for the lowest cost and that would be any public space that has the highest usage and density, such as public transit stations.
Even better, imposing safety in those transit stations will also have a significant effect in improving safety through the length of the actual BART train ride because access to the train is limited to the few stations.
Well the people who smoke fent off of a piece of foil aren't going to disappear so you have to put them somewhere. If you were to put them somewhere in Pac Heights where the residents actively work against public transit that'd displease them, so they go where the community is less civically engaged and less powerful, like next to public transit. In effect there's a feedback loop where the area next to BART is only going to get grimier and Pac Heights are going to get NIMBYer.
You're correct, of course, but the public good from improving the safety/cleanliness of shared infrastructure like transit has a much higher ROI than your "average" public space. Both have societal good but improving transit stops (especially rail) deserves higher priority than your average sidewalk
Our eldest (just turned 13 :eek:) walks down an "average sidewalk" to the railway station, rides a train (alone) into town, and walks an "average sidewalk" to his school, and back. Every weekday. He commented on drunks hanging around the (in-town) station in the late afternoon just a few days ago.
That's pretty much me. I tried public transport when I moved to SF (came from Europe, didn't even have a driver license) and ended up being like "nope". Got my driver license and use uber mostly. I'm not putting myself in danger, fuck it, I'll just spend my money on a car + uber.
> It's pretty simple - don't tolerate this sort of behavior around public transit stations.
IIUC, it's only that simple at a very superficial level. I.e., the complexity arises when you have to answer what you do about the offenders.
TL;DR:
(I'm not actually from SF, so apologies if I've misunderstood residents' views on this.)
Do you punish them? I get the impression most San Franciscans see drug addicts as pitiable victims of bad choices or the opioid epidemic. So behavior modification via punishment would be evil.
Do you put imprison the drug users for the safety of others? That sounds like punishment, which again most SF'ers reject.
Do you put the drug users in mental institutions / forced rehab? I suspect this reminds people of the dark days of abusive mental institutions, and is therefore rejected.
And what about people who are clean and sober, aren't homeless by choice, but for whom public housing isn't available? I.e., they're not mugging anyone, but they can't find anywhere else to sleep, poop, or pee? You have the sticky question of whether or not residents are legally obligated to have a home.
> I feel like SF residents' aversion to new transit projects is unfortunate but totally reasonable
SF residents don't have an aversion to funding transit and transit projects, see measure L that just passed with 2-1 support.
> walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home
Singling out BART subway stops in your anecdote is disingenuous when you consider that there are only 8 BART stops in San Francisco, 3 of which are similar to what you describe, but there are _113 MUNI stops_. Additionally, MUNI has ~90 million annual riders while BART only has ~27 million while covering a geographic area 10X the size of MUNI
Only Civic Center and 16th Mission are like this. 24th can be a bit gross, but not always. The rest of the system is fairly clean. The problem is that everyone judges the BART by its worst stations but nobody decides whether or not to drive by the horror of a car crash, and that's a cultural issue. Americans culturally erase car trauma but amplify transit trauma.
It's reasonable to judge a transit system based on its worst stations. If those happen to be the stations that a traveler will be using, then what's going on at those stations will have a significant impact on that traveler's experience.
Sure but those stations generally don't have "nice folks" (hate using that term, given that I grew up in an area that would be avoided by these nice folks, but most on HN are generationally upper-middle class so) living near them. 16th and Mission is the exception because of the rapidly gentrified Valencia street, but Civic Center is very much not where upper-middle class folks live. The BART station nearest to me is clean and nice. Proximity to BART generally increases property values and rents.
Huh? This is publicly available information published by BART. Civic Center is used a lot, but isn't in the top 3. 16th St is more on par with stops in Berkeley or Oakland and isn't used much. 24th St is used even less. Civic Center is used much more often as an exit station (e.g. to commute to) than an entry station (e.g. where people live.) The most used stops are Embarcadero, Montgomery, and Powell.
I’m curious, have you waked near a BART station recently? If so, which?
If you go to an average BART station, say, Balboa Park, or North Berkley they are completely fine, not noticeable different then other areas in the same neighborhood. If you go to a newer stations (say Dublin / Pleasanton) this is even less so.
And for that matter I’m not sure your parent is actually providing any correct insights. I’m not aware of much backlash from immediate residents against new transit projects in their neighborhood (such as the muni realignment near SF state or the Van Ness BRT lane).
> I’m not aware of much backlash from immediate residents against new transit projects in their neighborhood
The Geary Bart extension was famously killed by local opposition. Although that was more a reaction to the store closures caused by the market street subway construction, not drug use or crime.
> walk anywhere in SF near a BART (subway) stop and you face open drug use, trash, and other problems nobody wants in the neighborhood they call home.
Is there any evidence these problems are actually related to BART? The Tenderloin district has equally bad or worse sections away from the Civic Center station. Market Street as a whole below Castro has had serious issues for decades.
I would posit that if the city had a direct interest in the land value immediately surrounding the transit station -- as is the case in many successful Asian transit projects -- they would have a much stronger incentive to make that land value go up, by making it cleaner and safer and more well maintained.
the case against BART expansion is that the urban core is underserved, as a direct result of BART hoovering up all transit funding and available ROWs
what you're describing is a you problem. SF residents who are well served by transit overwhelming favor transit expansion, it's the residents who are underserved (sunset, outer richmond) who oppose
In NYC, all the places along the new Second Avenue line shot up immediately once it looked like construction was beginning again, and shot up even more once it opened.
We do tax them, but it's indirect, because property taxes go up. You could do it by say taking 25% of increased property taxes and remitting them to transit costs. That's an interesting idea I never heard of before.
In California this is broken -- property taxes are assessed using the price when last sold, plus a 2% annual increase. Any property in California that hasn't changed hands recently is likely very under-taxed. Basically it amounts to a subsidy for sitting on property and not developing it.
Basically it amounts to a protection to people so that they won't be forced to sell their home just because property values go up, something that happened quite often before prop 13 went into effect. But hey, let's kick out people from their homes, that they can afford, because they can't afford to pay the Sheriff of Nottingham when he comes to collect his taxes.
That reasoning is how it was sold to the Californian voter in the 70s during the era of popular rebellion against taxes. The writers and underwriters of that ballot initiative knew what they were doing, keeping grandma in her house was merely a pretext.
The average homeowner benefits directly from Prop 13 and fails to see how it has impacted other aspects of their life.
The implications for the municipal governments have been disastrous. Municipal tax inflows went from being ~95% property taxes to being closer to 40% in the present day. The rest of the income comes from new taxes and fees invented to fill the gaps.
Prop 13 is a major (but not sole) reason why CA has underbuilt housing for the last four decades. The tax assessed has no relation to the value of the land it sits on, so the trend is to underuse and underdevelop land. If your house is taxed at $1500 a year and keeps appreciating, why sell? Have that 4br/2ba to yourself, or rent it out and make a net gain of $60,000/yr. Either way it makes no sense to sell the property and allow it to be redeveloped into something that could house 10x the people.
I know property owners who bought for $40k in Berkeley and are now sitting on 2.4MM$ in value, doing the minimum in repairs while renting the unit for $6k/mo. This is not unusual. These people do not deserve your pity, and they do not deserve a massive systemic wealth transfer in their direction.
Unfortunately I think the dysfunction in California will have to reach catastrophic levels before Prop 13 repeal becomes politically^Wemotionally feasible for CA voters. The knock-on effects of P13 are too far removed from the average voter -- most won't connect increased crime, failing schools and public services, increased cost of living all the way back to it.
Even if the "old lady gets kicked out" were a major issue, you could at least repeal Prop 13 for commercial properties, and implement other "prevent from being kicked out" rules.
But Prop 13 will never change, it's a political 3rd rail now.
Which leads to rent control, which leads to a reduce in supply of rental properties.
Being fair to the people already here leads to being unfair to people newly moving in, which effectively includes young people just starting out and looking for places of their own.
No, I believe the way it's done in Asian countries is that public transportation is run by (usually) private companies that have the right to develop the land. Thus the incentive is to put things on top of transit which align with what commuters need. In Singapore, for example the pad around every station typically has a hawker stand (food court), drugstore, supermarket, which are the things you might need on your way home.
This will have to be handled very carefully, lest people catch on and vote against rail expansions for this reason. Maybe don't raise taxes on residential properties, only commercial and industrial.
luckily it does solve it, because most of the cost is due to low volume.
construction in the US is very labor intensive and has low-productivity.
plus the permitting process is also very low-throughput. (too many possibilities to stop the process by appeal/suing, and the whole jurisprudence of what is considered a sufficiently detailed environmental assessment is fucked up. the law needs a bit of tweaking to focus more on cost-benefit, include cost of rejecting a project, etc.)
and this is also why nuclear power plants are super expensive.
I mean, there is correlation -- whatever we do spend on is extremely expensive, so we get less, whereas other nations that spend more efficiently get more, and therefore there is a correlation between efficiency of spending and quantity obtained, but that's not an argument that if we spent a lot more, we would get better value. A case needs to be made beyond this correlation.
A good example is bus service. One can't plausibly argue that US cities have no experience with bus service. Or that it's a difficult engineering problem (unless maybe, you are talking about trolleylines in the Swiss Alps) - but let's see how efficient they are. San Francisco spends 1.3 Billion on SFMTA, with 5700 employees and average weekday ridership (pre-pandemic) of 800K. That's 1 employee per 140 weekday riders.
Let's compare to the canton of Zurich, which has 1.5 million people, and 670 square miles (of Swiss mountains). VBZ (Verkehrsbetriebe Zürich) is responsible for all of the transit in this canton - bus, trolley, light rail. It provides rides to 900K daily riders (post-pandemic) that travel 1.7 million kilometers per day, but this is achieved with only 2300 employees, or 1 employee per 390 daily riders, and a budget of $560 million dollars (converted to USD).
Now maybe it's "like a nuclear power plant" and if San Francisco were to spend a lot more on bus service, they'd eventually figure out how to deliver it efficiently.
But my guess is that if San Francisco were to spend a lot more on bus service, they would deliver it even less efficiently than they are now.
So you still have a problem of inefficient delivery in the U.S. Then we can talk about why it cost the city over $300 million to create a single BRT line along Van Ness. Perhaps painting a lane red is like building a nuclear power plant, but I suspect that's not the issue here. https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-s-Van-Ness-transi...
But it's very much like that. The approval process is extremely inefficient in the US. As you said, "building" the red line is not hard, but getting it through the permitting gauntlet is.
After a certain level of saturation these things just get easier. See road construction, expansion, etc. It's the default, yet it's clear that "just one more lane" won't solve traffic.
Regarding buses (and public transport in general): what's the utilization of the existing capacity for SF and Zürich? It would be interesting to compare number of buses, total distance driven, and other parameters for these rider numbers. Also do you happen to know anything about cost breakdown? (My guess is that Zürich is simply a lot more dense, and public transport is just the default there, whereas it's not in SF.)
> The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values.
No. The governing body needs to not burn taxpayer funds like it's candy.
Justifying the grotesque over-spending and timelines of these projects by saying "we'll come up with a way to charge you more money in taxes to make-up the difference is the root of all problems with so many projects.
Why is it that the first reaction isn't to say do not spend my money that way!
EDIT:
Interesting to see how this is misunderstood. Let's see if I can make it simpler to understand.
1- There is nothing wrong with demanding that government use our money efficiently. This should not be controversial at all. Would you pay 4x or 10x for someone to build you home or sell you a car? Why not? Why can't we demand the same fairness from government?
2- Do not give more drugs to a drug addict. You are not going to improve the cost-effectiveness of government projects by giving them ore taxes. First make them more efficient. Then we can talk about using the savings for other projects.
3- No. Our (people) reason for existing isn't to pay taxes. Taxes should be the minimum required to do the business we require, not a cent more.
That's the problem. Nobody is interested in holding government accountable for the way they conduct business.
Fun fact -- if we were to tax non-produced assets like land -- which nobody made, and the value of which is created by its neighbors and surrounding community rather than its owner -- then we could LOWER taxes on things like income and sales. So we could make transit pay for itself by taxing land values, instead of bankrupting the city with unaffordable boondoggles through bond initiatives and income and sales taxes, all of which are drags on the economy in one way or another.
I don't know where you live, but I have never lived any place (all in the USA) that doesn't tax land already.
I for one enjoy having open spaces that are not developed - raising taxes on vacant land so high, and thus, force the owners to sell to someone who will develop it seems like a really bad idea.
Trees and open space provide a lot of value to everyone - those that live nearby, even if they don't own it, and to everyone that likes to breath fresh air.
> I don't know where you live, but I have never lived any place (all in the USA) that doesn't tax land already.
The issue is that we tax the land and the buildings together. We should tax only the land. And we're often not taxing it enough.
> I for one enjoy having open spaces that are not developed
I enjoy those spaces too! You know what we have right now? SPRAWL. For miles in every direction. Pavement that gobbles up more and more greenfield spaces, for low-density, low-value uses. Outlying wilderness land is not very valuable, but land in urban centers is very valuable. Because we don't tax that land appropriately, we just encourage people to sprawl out further and further, and because we tax buildings, we discourage people from building densely. This leads to more land consumption and less of the open undeveloped space you like.
Those trees you love? They're being cut down to make way for parking lots and strip malls and self-storage units. Really wasteful uses of land. Denser building would make it so demand for housing, commerce, and amenities are fulfilled on a much smaller footprint.
If we taxed land appropriately, we would have way more undeveloped land, and more appropriate density in the city, and you wouldn't have to commute nearly as far to get to the wilderness.
It’s not about undeveloped land. It’s about low value assets that take up a lot of space such as surface level parking lots or single level big box stores. The more of that stuff you condense into the same space the less traffic you have because everything is closer together and the more viable mass transit becomes.
Not everything needs to be a mega city, but sprawl has massive externalities.
The market determines what’s low value, more specifically peoples willingness to pay land taxes determines what’s low value.
Suppose the annual tax is 100,000$/acre, a warehouse may or may not be worth it depending on how profitable owning it was. Similarly, a billionaire could decide spending 2 million every year for their 20 acre property is reasonable or a waste of money.
Where such scheme’s fail is really the implementation. Few local governments could stick with such a system rather than carving out exclusions.
> The market determines what’s low value, more specifically peoples willingness to pay land taxes determines what’s low value.
How does the market determine the value of something that isn't for sale as well as being relatively unique and difficult to compare? I would think the value of something like that to the market would be zero.
If someone decides to sell then the market determines what a property is worth. If someone doesn’t sell then it’s clearly worth enough to pay the taxes on it.
For a single property it doesn’t give much information, but across a city the market is providing a great deal of information.
> If someone doesn’t sell then it’s clearly worth enough to pay the taxes on it.
That's not a good argument. People don't sell the clothes they have in their closet when they're not using it and it would be laughable to argue for an annual tax on one's closet. Why should this be any different for land? Monetary value isn't the same as worth. There's much more to ownership of land that isn't reflected in "market worth" (however that would be assessed in the cases of purchased land).
> For a single property it doesn’t give much information, but across a city the market is providing a great deal of information.
Cities are few and far between. That wouldn't apply to someone who built a house in the middle of Montana or decided to squat in a ghost town.
It’s easy to assume a dead means you “own” some land, but national borders also define ownership of land by nation states which need things like militaries to defend them but also systems to manage that land such as deed registries, road networks, police and court systems to handle trespassers, and so forth.
Understanding what a deed actually is rather than what it seems like it should help clarify what’s going on here. It’s a landlord setting rent, however governments have more concerns than maximizing revenue.
A government defining what an appropriate rent for land should be has real economic implications for nation states. Under charge and land ends up wasted, charge too much and it ends up abandoned. The sweet spot isn’t about maximizing income it’s about maximizing benefit for society.
Often property taxes are based on total value of the land plus improvements on it which discourages improvements or even maintenance. Thus a sweet spot based on the lands inherent value Aka a land value tax.
In the end land is a finite resource, any nation that wastes it runs into massive problems.
> It’s easy to assume a dead means you “own” some land, but national borders also define ownership of land by nation states which need things like militaries to defend them
For nations, treaties function as the equivalent of deeds and those have enough recognition in and of themselves without paying, say, the UN or some such organization to enforce them on a nation's behalf. That militaries defend their land borders is no different than a well-armed land owner defending the border of his property. In addition, the military isn't funded by property taxes.
> but also systems to manage that land such as deed registries, road networks, police and court systems to handle trespassers, and so forth.
These can all be itemized, and chosen a la carte. Certain states require payment of land registry fees upon purchase of a house. Road networks are paid with gas taxes, and tolls. Police officers are already paid via fines and free money from Washington. Court systems are paid through filing fees and also free money from Washington. Why do I need to pay land/property taxes for a service I'm already charged for either as another tax or as a fee upon use? And if I don't use them, why should I be made a forced rider?
The value (or lack thereof) of these services are distinct from the value of land. Land value shouldn't be determined by people who are in a position or have an incentive to self-deal by threat of force. Either there's an objective value or there isn't. Under any other circumstances, these tactics would be considered racketeering undertaken by mafiosos, but when it comes to government (whether local, state, or federal), the tune changes to deference for the sake of a nebulously defined "society".
> Understanding what a deed actually is rather than what it seems like it should help clarify what’s going on here. It’s a landlord setting rent, however governments have more concerns than maximizing revenue.
A government defining what an appropriate rent for land should be has real economic implications for nation states. Under charge and land ends up wasted, charge too much and it ends up abandoned.
I understand what a deed is [1]. My underlying contention is with the dishonest approach of how local governments are able to get the numbers they do and why they do it. I recognize that governments are are essentially Hobbesian fiefdom but I fail to see the need to preach unsubstantiated drivel about "bettering" society or falsely claiming objectivity. It would be easy enough to claim that the value assessed by the municipality has little to do with the market and everything with how much government can get away with charging you. So peddle fantasy?
> The sweet spot isn’t about maximizing income it’s about maximizing benefit for society.
The latter is often the means to the former and both come at the expense of the individual. .
> Often property taxes are based on total value of the land plus improvements on it which discourages improvements or even maintenance. Thus a sweet spot based on the lands inherent value Aka a land value tax.
Then this "sweet spot" isn't based on inherent value if a third party must rely on a subjective valuation.
>In the end land is a finite resource, any nation that wastes it runs into massive problems.
But the who gets to define waste? One could say that national parks are a waste as the land could be put to better use for property development. One could say that most military bases are a waste as the country hasn't fought foreign invaders on American soil since 1815. One could even say that major metropolitan areas are a waste, as they "rob" tax dollars from rural and suburban areas while benefitting from tax regimes (like SALT) that subsize high state-level taxation at expense of other states competing on low cost of living.
Once again, leaving these choices to government usually results in self-dealing. In such a scenario, there is no objective valuation.
[1] Despite what you claim, it's not just a document that exists to recognize the government as rentier. Deeds, like treaties are contracts and they can have all sorts of arrangements. There have been many that still precede the US government and that are still upheld today, some of which even recognize residence in a separate political sovereignty within US borders.
Because people believe, look at religion or the prevalence of gambling addiction. Humanity isn’t a collection of rational actors optimizing their long term self interest it’s a collection of fools lead around by the best storytellers.
A dictator who wants to maximize their personal power will peddle fantasy just as quickly as anyone running for office because it works.
> not just a document that exists to recognize the government as rentier
Eminent domain means the government can kick anyone off any property to be sold to the government or private party, the deed holder is compensated but they don’t get to say no. So sure old deeds are respected as much as any of them are, but how is that different than maintaining existing leases when you buy a rental property?
Arguably renters have more rights with respect to their landlords than deed holders with respect to the government.
PS: As to your argument about funding for police etc, states vary wildly in stuff like income taxes and sales taxes but in the end they are simply extracting resources from a productive economy the specific form those taxes take are only really relevant due to knock on effects, money is fungible. Taxing fuel or taxing miles driven only matters when EV’s show up.
The combination of low tax rate and low property values is the sweet spot for people on a budget (example: A nearly-retired uncle of mine just moved to Alabama):
Yes! The entire community together actually, not just the immediately nearby neighbors. Land in the heart of New York is valuable because it's in the heart of New York, one of the most valuable cities in the world, a feat achieved by many more people than just the 10 land owners surrounding that particular parcel.
Isn’t it both that we should be more efficient AND contribution should be made locally for local improvements?
I think value capture addresses this somewhat in the sense that if these projects are funded more locally, more attention would be paid to costs and timeline as opposed to the relatively distant federal money for which nobody feels a responsibility.
Governments are not businesses - they should not be thinking about "capturing value." Ideally, projects like this are handled at the minimum level of government: your city's transit system is your city's responsibility, funded through local taxes. This aligns interests the best.
In practice, federal bureaucrats all over the world have figured out how to insert themselves into these kinds of local projects, which causes all sorts of conflict of interest problems, and divorces the person spending the money from the person funding the project (both the people who should be funding it and the people who are) and the person getting value from it.
It is necessary to cede some of your autonomy for cooperation. Cooperation is required for projects that benefit your environment which may serve other people. You have to cede some of your autonomy to serve other people. Anything less is a fantasy and it will hurt you.
When you put in a transit line, the surrounding land values go up -- it's as old as the railroads. The governing body needs to capture the increase in those land values. This is how transit is funded in many Asian countries -- the transit project goes from being a cost boondoggle to a profit center that pays for itself, either by taxing the uplift in land values, or the governing body owning that land and leasing it out to e.g. shops.