For one week, can Canadians please talk about land instead of housing?
For one week, can Canadians please talk about land instead of housing?
canadiandimension.com
For one week, can Canadians please talk about land instead of housing?
16 comments
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Really great article. One point I particularly love:
[Increase in land value] isn’t inherently a problem if the community that produces that land value also controls it. If the land value is being extracted by a landlord, however, it creates a gaping and growing hole in the economy. The landlord—who neither created the land nor produced its value—is collecting unearned income.
There is no place for leeches in housing.
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I liked that bit, but the argument that most resonated with me is that property taxes disincentivize development, but land value taxes encourage density.
Rosedale, the wealthy single-family-homes community with massive lots close to downtown Toronto, should not exist. It's insane. A single person should not reasonably be able to afford to own an acre of land close to an urban core. That whole neighbourhood wouldn't exist if land value taxes had slowly increased over the last century.
I think we need a 10-20 year plan to shift from property taxes to land-value taxes, at maybe 5% a year. Give the market enough time to respond, to buy up and develop the land.
Throw in minimum mixed zoning requirements to get commercial spaces embedded in the new communities, too, while you're at it, so we can actually get some walkability.
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So I'm a leech because I bought a single family house?
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If you or your family live in it, no. If you're renting it out to someone or flipping it for profit, absolutely yes.
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Another piece of evidence! Leeches have many brains but the overall reading & comprehension capability remains remarkably insufficient.
Being facetious here, though. I don't think landlords are leeches, but I do think the government should work hard on bankrupting them as much as possible.
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Everyone else is saying no, but yes you are.
It's a leach of resources to maintain the utilities to it.
It also prevents its use by other people who also need the land, and who gave anyone the land to start with? Exclusive ownership of land can be seen as the removing access to that land to other people, depriving them of their rights to use the land for survival or improving their condition. You can be OK with this and that's fine, but it doesn't make it untrue. It's just accepted in our society as a matter of how things are, and by those accepting of the status-quo, how things must be.
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Inefficient and a little hoard-y on land, but not a leech.
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16 comments
I feel like this post is a good time to remind people that the average single family, low density development costs its community more to maintain (roads, sewer etc.) than it generates in property taxes.
Single family homes should be allowed to exist, they should also be taxed appropiately and not subsidized while denser developments are not subject to the same subsidizing.