Comment by greenie_beans
Comment by greenie_beans 3 days ago
you're contradicting yourself. you say it's "revenue neutral" but then admit people in areas with rising land values face higher carrying costs. that's exactly the displacement i'm describing.
your clarification on mechanics doesn't address my core concern: this policy forces people who bought affordable homes decades ago to either pay significantly more or sell when their neighborhoods gentrify. who benefits when they're forced to sell? developers who can afford both the LVT and development costs.
so we're transferring wealth from middle-class homeowners to wealthy developers and calling it progressive policy.
frame this as preventing "uncapped gains from appreciation," but these are people who just needed housing, not speculators. meanwhile, actual investors get to buy the forced sales.
you still haven't addressed how LVT solves the actual constraint. in my market, a major developer cancelled a project because of constructions cost. not land value. if land availability isn't the bottleneck, how does your policy help? construction costs are the real issue in most markets.
this remains a policy that sounds elegant in theory but would be politically impossible and harmful in practice.
"Revenue neutral" at time of implementation. It's not a bunch of people being jolted out of their houses by the policy.
> this policy forces people who bought affordable homes decades ago to either pay significantly more or sell when their neighborhoods gentrify.
Correct. The alternative is that these people freeze a region in time while prices continue to skyrocket due to the increasingly Sisyphean efforts of those around them to grow the local economy.
> who benefits when they're forced to sell? developers who can afford both the LVT and development costs.
All of the people who are moving into an area and developing its economy further? Yes, developers get a cut for the work that they do of developing the area to meet the new demands on it. What's wrong with that exactly?
> you still haven't addressed how LVT solves the actual constraint
Yes I have. LVT makes it cost-prohibitive not to develop land to its highest use. In a hot real estate market, highest use will be to build more units. It has nothing to do with land availability.