Hacker News Reader

Comment by _uy6i | Hacker News Reader

Property taxes are a bad idea too.

Not if people living in 'reasonable' properties are not taxed much at all. If a family lives in a 100sqm house, probably should be nothing additional. If they live in 2000sqm mansion, they probably can afford a decent sized tax.

Of course size is not the only factor, which makes it complicated. Land or property value is probably a good proxy. If you house is >$1M it probably means you are wealthy.

Now you get one of two things in each individual case: Either people downsizing (good, frees up property for other people) or people paying tax (good for society).

The problem with this logic is that real estate values are out of control. In my city not uncommon to see stories of families who have owned a home for generation or more being forced to sell it because the value of the land went from $200k to $800k in 10 years and is now taxed as such.

Then make it price adjusted for that to some extent. Use medians.

And being forced to sell to some degree is by design. One elderly lady hogging the land that could house 100 apartment dwellings in the middle of a city for example.

“Owning Land” is a human construct.

And it would be no worse than compulsory purchases by government for infrastructure.

Or someone leasing where the landlord wants more rent so they get kicked out.

Lol I’ll just be taking your bike or equity/stock, don’t like it, ugh you’re so naive, “ownership is just a human construct”

If the value of the land goes up with increased economic activity, but you're not economically active enough to continue living in the area, how is it unreasonable to be expected to sell?

The other side of every "family was forced to sell" is "another family was very happy to move in".

What's the purpose of buying a house if you can't stay in it more or less indefinitely? (Yes, I know people sometimes buy houses planning to only stay in one place a few years, but I would wager most don't.)

You can stay in that house as long as you pay the property taxes. If you can't pay the property taxes, that is a forcing function to get you to move. You aren't entitled to live somewhere all your life. You aren't entitled to have your taxes be subsidized by the next generation of folks so that you can keep living somewhere. It is placing the burden on the next generation of people because you happened to be there first and creates bad market incentives.

I agree with you mostly, even though it's somewhat heartless and maybe too black and white. I'm from an area where this exact scenario is happening to a lot of home owners.

There is a point where I think it's okay to factor an unexpected large housing market increase into the equation. To raise a community's property tax unrealistically because a mass influx of buyers are willing to overextend their credit doesn't make much sense to me.

Also, I think this applies even more to our current situation and the fact that a lot of these communities had nothing to do with the politically charged economic decisions our politicians made with close to zero debate, and ultimately, the economic fallout it has created.

In my home state in the Midwest I have always thought a better way to go about it in the future would be to factor median salary and wages into the mix. That, along with an unrealistic housing market increase. I'm not sure what unrealistic would be defined as, but median value increasing 2x in five years is definitely unrealistic. At the very least things like this should be debated.

Got it, so the widow living on a fixed income, in her modest home that was once in a lower middle class neighborhood that has now gentrified, is forced out so that someone really contributing to society (like FANG employee) can live closer to work? She now has to live somewhere else, what property was freed up exactly, (so no net new housing creation)? (Not even going to address paying tax = good for society)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com