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Comment by softwaredoug | Hacker News Reader

It’s hard to find a more important moral, economic, and environmental cause these days more actionable than just building more housing.

There’s an increasing class of unhoused, transitory people. Not just in the US, but plenty of people around the world who are hard working decent people who have become refugees due to war, climate, or economic pressures. Not to mention the people who have to commute great distances for middle class jobs who would love to live nearby. Yet, we’re forced sadly, to hire teachers and essential personnel essentially as mercenaries with no connection to their community.

The upside to housing in terms of fewer commutes, connected communities, a healthier humanity, and supporting sustainable businesses can’t be overstated.

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There is a lot of housing in places like Buffalo and Detroit but it seems that humans are like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz and can't stand to live anywhere in that has water. Instead, rich and poor, they want to dogpile in places where water supply is problematic.

Certainly the carbon footprint of putting people into housing that exists has to be less than building whole new buildings.

It’s not quite that simple. A teacher for a Silicon Valley school can’t yet easily commute from Buffalo. And the limited housing in Silicon Valley will be consumed by techies.

Yet I agree that more tech businesses being in places with lower costs of living would help a ton. And I’d be up for anything that - in addition to housing in places that need it - tried to draw the highest paying businesses to places like Buffalo.

Yet, it’s not that simple still, given remote work. People still are going towards more attractive locations and buying up the housing. And that’s very hard to legislate against.

Lets put it this way. If "Big Tech" relocated 50,000 jobs into swing states it would be the end of the Trumpist Republican party. And it wouldn't cost billions of dollars, it would save billions of dollars.

If Apple, Google and such weren't near-monopolies that can afford to burn billion dollar bills they might well be forced to move their operations to somewhere cost competitive.

But then their taxes would go up. They are happy to give to both political parties, but they ultimately don't want to pay much of anything to support any kind of social progress.

If you really believe the story that there is something uniquely productive about SV then it is really the land and community that are valuable and that community would be justified in raising taxes drastically until “Big Tech” started to move away.

Maybe 35 years ago read an article about a study of the reasons corporations move their head quarters. The biggest reason was to be close to where the CEO and VP's want to live. That sticks with me more and more. Because if true we're spending an enormous amount of resources on that.

My snide comment about unaffordable housing in San Francisco has been, maybe those VC's can point their fire hose of money somewhere else for a while.

The best way to get people to build more housing? Tax the land that it's built on. Not the building, like we do now. The way our property taxes currently function, any development is disincentivized and increases your tax bill for daring to improve the world around you. If you instead tax the land, people who sit around and do nothing with $1 lots will actually have to do something, or sell it to someone who will.

That seems to make sense. Are there any cities or states that have tried that? If not, why not?

Detroit is considering it. Nobody else has tried it, so far as I know.

Why not? Well, it's a... let's call it a "heterodox" economic theory. It's not mainstream.

And, if a state were to do it, it would probably have negative effects on farming. (A city, not so much, unless there was significant farmland within the city limits.) Making most of the farms in your state less economically viable is probably not a formula for winning elections, so a state is probably not going to go for it.

> And, if a state were to do it, it would probably have negative effects on farming.

So create a different tax system for farmland, or exempt them from taxes. It's not like giving farmers subsidies and tax relief is unprecedented.

Sure. It just blows some of the "one simple trick" aura around a land tax. "One simple trick... except we have to exempt farmland from it... and there may be some other fiddles we need to keep it from ruining other groups by unintended consequences... and then everybody and their dog are going to claim that it's unfairly disadvantaging their group...." That's a much messier sell than "just tax land".

Anyone who tries to sell you a simple, cure-all solution is lying. Exemptions, incentives, edge cases, and more all have to be taken into account - ESPECIALLY when you are dealing with something as sensitive as people's money. The tax code is already super complicated as it is for a reason.

Well, to agree with you (am I allowed?) and say a word on your side of the question: A land use tax could have a number of exceptions and complications and still be far simpler than what we have now.

The best way to get housing built is to build it. The government could pay for it to get built directly. We have an aversion to that, so there's no political will to do so, but why bullshit around with weird taxes and hope "market forces" result in what we wish for, like a Republican that genuinely believes in trickle down economics?

Just build the damn housing.

This has been tried and has both worked and failed. Failed in some cases where governments built large clusters of apartment towers without much heed to community or spaces for urban renewal and local business. And succeeded when there were more comprehensive plans than "just build housing". See for example many European countries and Singapore.

It needs be an intelligent holistic approach or it can lead to fractured failed communities.

Most people do not want the US government to be their landlord.

If the choice is between sleeping on the sidewalk owned by Uncle Sam or the bed-under-a-roof owned by Uncle Sam, most people will take the latter.

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