It can take 30 years for the tenants to pay it off. Landlords aren’t paying for that out of the goodness of their hearts. It’s instead ultimately the tenants.
Throughout all that time they are responsible for maintenance, insurance and a litany of other things to keep it from falling into disrepair.
They hire people to do that, they don’t do it themselves.
Yup. I’m ok with some kinds, just not the kind that fucks over the creation/distribution of basic necessities.
So you’re okay with some rich person owning acreage as long as it’s for their own enjoyment
Yeah that’s bullshit too and shouldn’t be allowed. Even for personal use/enjoyment there should be a hard limit.
but not for a normal dude who has an investment property and is holding out for a renter that will adequately cover his costs and generate some profit?
People should still be able to own land for their own personal use. Land used to extract wealth on the other hand should be more tightly controlled. We should ideally implement georgism to free up the land that the rich own and to increase land use efficiency. After that ownership should look pretty much identical.
I see you’re one of the famed georgists. First I’ve seen in the wild!
If you have a criticism of georgism I’d love to hear it, because so far I’ve heard basically none. And I don’t think I would go quite so far as to call myself a georgist. It’s only something I learned about relatively recently, but the more I learn about it the better it sounds than the current dog shit we are dealing with that we somehow call a tax system. Is georgism perfect? Almost certainly not, but it’s a massive step in the right direction.
you’d make the turn to “politically only possible with a socialist government”
You are correct in that the solution to the housing crisis is only possible with a socialist government. Socialism and georgism are not mutually exclusive.
I’m lucky enough to live in a place that is a little bit walkable (7 eleven, pizza shop, beer store 2 min walking with a grocer 15 walk), there is so much more that could be done. I wish I didn’t have to get a car, and I am so close to basically ditching mine for an e-bike. The only thing stopping me is that my city’s bike safety is not the best.
You know, so long as we can agree that lack of supply is the core issue
It’s one of the core issues. I think there is a lot more baked into this, but if this is one of the things we can agree on then so be it.
I’m not hugely confident of public housing
While I do think public housing is a part of the solution, and has a lot of mistakes to learn from, I think co-ops should be the main workhorse/end goal for government built housing.
public housing or just loosening zoning and allowing the market to actually meet demand, I don’t really care so long as there are units.
I say, all of the above. Any possible way to increase the supply is a good thing.
You’re going to fund all the social programs of a modern government via, essentially, no taxes?
No, it would be funded through land value and carbon taxes. Those two tax types should be the only valid form of taxation. We should still have enough tax to pay for it (after we ditch the bloat our government has. Example).
If you want the government to provide a robust social safety net, including housing, you’ll be looking at Nordics level taxation.
People always complain about such a system but they actually have healthcare, so seems like a moot point to me.
You can be wrong if you want to be.
First off, there’s no need to be a dick about it. Second, that definition says person, whereas you said entity.
“In either event the entity that owns your house, that isn’t you, is your landlord.”
“a person who rents land, a building, or an apartment to a tenant.”
Where there’s an opportunity to game the system, those with means will.
Absolutely. It’s one of my few gripes with georgism. And at the end of the day a shitty implementation of georgism is better than our current shit show of billionaires and mega corps paying $0 or next to $0 in taxes. Sometimes they even get paid instead.
But anyways, I haven’t seen much detail about how to fairly valuate land, but I’ve had some thoughts on it. The number one thing should be that all land is taxed at the same percentage, but each plot is valued differently. I think one of the ways to do this would be to simply calculate how far a given plot is from the nearest city center, and factor in how big the population of that city is.
It’s something that can be objectively measured, should be roughly correlated with what we could subjectively agree on is valuable, and isn’t something that could be gamed easily.
I would like to see working examples first, if possible.
The Netherlands has a land value tax, though it is not the sole income source for their government.
My understanding is that the government employs people to assign a value to each plot, and from there the use case of the land is considered. Land owners can then appeal the judgement if they like. I know there are some other countries besides the Netherlands that have a LVT system, but the Netherlands is the first that comes to mind. I’d honestly be ok with either of these systems of determining land value, either the one I made up or the Netherland’s. At the end of the day it’s pretty much the only way to tax the rich without them just moving their money elsewhere. You can’t move land after all, and much of their wealth is tied up in land.
Here is a research paper into the effects that might interest you.