Population and Housing

[ijmorlan]

So in addition to zoning reform, property tax reform (lower density pays more), and government built housing, the real estate bubble bursting (crashing, if you prefer that framing) is going to be a necessary thing.

How would this result in more housing being constructed? Instead of people being priced out, they would have to queue for access to housing.

It doesn't do anything get housing built, it's not for that. That's for other policies to do, like upzoning or public housing or differential property taxes.

As I said, this is to eliminate or at least significantly reduce the speculation that is one of the big factors that got us into  this crisis in the first place. If inflation ios 2% and house goes up 3%? OK, but not 5% or 10% or 20% or 40%.

I suppose if we believe that so much existing housing is sitting empty that flushing speculators out of the market and bringing it into use would give a significant increase in effective housing supply, then maybe this sort of tinkering with pricing rules could have an impact. I’m skeptical of this however: I’m pretty sure the only way out is to do things which cause more housing to be built.

I didn't say anything about empty housing.

This guy explains it well. https://www.tiktok.com/@sweetbbluke/vide..._webapp=v1

I think I may have responded to the wrong paragraph. My main point is that any proposal which involves any sort of regulation on pricing won’t do anything other than to make things more complicated and harder to navigate.

But adjusting the tax system to encourage development may help. Some of the ideas here sound a bit like Georgism:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

I think this is interesting and worth investigating. I’m a bit concerned about the situation of somebody who is forced to move from an inheritance due to the rising value of their land; but on the other hand, maybe that is the whole point. So that may be more a matter of something we need to be clear and honest about, rather than an actual counter-argument.

Another scenario which occurs to me is somebody who has a naturalized area in the city. They would be incentivized to develop it, which isn’t necessarily what is wanted. On the other hand, if they want to keep it naturalized, maybe they should dedicate it to a land trust or to the city’s parks department. Again, maybe something we need to be clear and honest about rather than an actual counterargument.

Also consider cases like the Erb-Kumpf house: https://www.historicplaces.ca/en/rep-reg...x?id=11185

For an owner to keep it as it is would become infeasible if property were taxed based on potential development; no owner could afford to leave a 2 story house in place on a property that could be used to build a skyscraper. But again, maybe there would be a process for permanently dedicating a property as being a heritage property, giving up the right to redevelop in return for being taxed on a much lower basis. This could be enforced by granting the air rights to the city along with other measures to ensure no shenanigans happen.

Another thing to consider: maybe we don’t need wholesale reform of the tax system, but just a reform of the assessment methods. If I understand correctly, a house is assessed based on its value as a house. But in the scenario where the house is right on the edge of downtown, its market value has nothing to do with its value as a house; instead, it is the value of the land as a building site which is controlling. It’s weird in a tax system supposedly based on market value taxation to ignore the actual determinants of market value when making a tax assessment of a property. Maybe just changing the system to actually be what it is called would do the job. If anybody understands better and can explain our tax assessments, I’d be interested.