I tend to think that a lot of migration trends are obscured by currency-based accounting rather than looking at numbers of people and their preferences.
I don't know a lot about the US, but here in the UK, in a city like London I don't think it's useful, for example, to say people are being 'priced out'.
What's actually happening is that those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it's just full. You have suburbs full of families that will never move out, and if they do move out, will just rent the building out rather than selling.
The indirect effect of that is that prices go up, but you're really just seeing that the commuter belt of semi-detached homes is full and that's that.
It's common to talk about knocking down homes or building more homes or whatever. The thing is that for the most part, only non-residents actually want that (because for them the choice is between high density or not living there). If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you're just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats. It's a strict downgrade in every sense of the word, even if the square footage is the same.
No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
So yeah, the answer is to go elsewhere. Go to a city that actually welcomes newcomers. Places like London are no longer income-based, they're wealth-based. Starting from scratch here you're at an enormous disadvantage.
> If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you're just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats.
Sure you are, if someone pays you enough for your property to make it worth your while. That’s why it is illegal for property owners to build high density on their own property. Otherwise, people would cash out and allow higher density locations to be built.
We cannot decarbonize the energy supply fast enough to prevent a total humanitarian nightmare. We must also reduce energy consumption through both efficiency gains and fundamental shifts in cultural values, such as the entitlement people feel to not having to share space with their fellow man.
I am a TSLA shareholder, I am very glad that EVs and solar power and batteries are going to play an important role in the overall solution, but it is simply bad math to think its a solution. The land use, infrastructure costs, and energy demands of sprawling detached housing are not currently priced into the market. They are externalized onto the people who are already suffering in a 0.75C world, and we're on a screaming path to a 4C world.
Believing magic technology will save us is simply the naive liberal version of denialism.
your first sentence is an extremely disingenuous and bad faith argument. we did not have anything remotely like two car family quarter acre lot suburban sprawl. we also had nearly a full order of magnitude fewer people.
I also never said "everyone". this is very common response from people who feel personally attacked, they respond defensively with an extreme re-formulation of what was said.
you're posting on HN so i'm hoping I can appeal to whatever piece of your brain is capable of reasoning in the abstract. look at both lines of your response. think about them.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
That’s a pretty extreme. Appartments have a ton of advantages; whatever one values in an independant house can be turned into a disadvantage.
For instance an appartment is easier to secure, maintenance fees can be split, commodity fees can also be split which makes it very affordable to have good infra (high speed internet, central heating, automatic post boxes etc), concierge services become an option. Then superb views, lack of surrounding noise, clean air are advantages on the higher floors.
I say that as a kid who grew up in houses and wildly prefer appartments as I moved away.
I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
> maintenance fees can be split, commodity fees can also be split which makes it very affordable to have good infra
This is all cost-based argumentation. If you own a family home with a garden you've already solved that. Maintenance costs in London are utterly trivial.
I think it’s a matter of getting what you pay for. That’s why I see it mainly as a matter of cost.
A middle level appartment goes roughly for the same price as a low tier house where I live. There is a healthy market for good apartments in the suburbs, it’s just not a cheap choice (but way less expensive as a dame tier house in the same locations)
I am not swimming in money, so I also understand people who already own expensive properties will have different priorities.
in an apartment. can't speak to the US but most apartments in western europe are really poor when it comes to sound.
neighbours above/beside/behind all making noise/water pumps/washing machines.
Old appartments in europe are horrible, yes. And in so many ways.
We had to see 20~30 appartments last time we moved, and ended up just filtering from the start anything older that 30 years. It’s just not worth it, even for rental.
The worse was the electrical wiring that was at best impractical. And water pipes that needed serious revision.
I just can’t imagine how it goes for 100+ years old houses.
Dealing with an old house that you own is often much easier than dealing with an apartment. It’s yours. You don’t have a huge collective of people to deal with. The piping only affects your house. Same with the wiring, HVAC, insulation, windows, whatever. You can pay a professional, they’ll get some permits if necessary, and it’s done within some agreed upon timeframe, and will only inconvenience you and your family during that time. Some projects you might even be able to do yourself - good luck with that in an apartment. The worst thing about older homes can be some of the building materials like lead and asbestos - which will also be present in older apartments
In London I used to live in one of those flats by Tower Bridge, by the water, and one day my neighbour apologized to me while we were in the lift about the noise her kids had been making all weekend. I'd been sick that weekend and stayed home and heard not a thing.
Most of the time, the most noise was the Thames lapping against the wharf. Quite pleasant, really. I never actually heard my neighbours, to be honest, except if we were both out on the balcony talking.
The new construction buildings I've lived in in the US definitely solved the neighbor noise issue except when the guy next door would have loud parties on the balcony -- I'd hear that through the windows even if closed. But while higher floors have nice views, they also came with a lot more white noise from distant highways.
Having lived in a home and in high density high rises I couldn’t disagree more about the perspective that it’s a downgrade.
24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages.
A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry.
Big communities tend to have nice amenities that you’d only find in a country club all inclusive.
Maintenance of the high rise unit is often included in the fees or rent.
These communities tend to get better access to interconnect technologies like fiber.
There will tend to be more options for healthy foods, increased opportunities for walkable restaurants and other forms of entertainment as the population density of the area increases.
And more...
Basically, my preference 10/10 times would be to live in a high density tall building over a single family home in a neighborhood.
I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
I think you're getting downvoted here or at least misunderstood because in America, suburban apartments are usually very nice in their own regard. So people don't see them as downgrades unless you actually need the space of a full house (eg. For raising a family)
There is also a cultural difference. While at Oxford, the family that I stayed with had a garden. British people love their gardens. It wasn't much of a garden, but it was in Oxford, and it was their little piece of barely green soil.
Americans have their land of course. I have my own equivalent garden. The difference is scarcity. I can travel a continent and still buy a garden relatively cheap. The UK? Not so much.
Green is relative. Florida has much more greenery that Oxford. Plus, these owners ran a house of protection for Africans that survived their village being slaughtered. They had a bit more pressing things to worry about than making a great garden.
I think the misunderstanding comes from making a comparison that I obviously haven't attempted to, and that no reasonable person would (basically, a strawman).
I can't see how a suburban apartment can be as nice as a suburban house unless you're making a cost argument.
Yes, perhaps an apartment at price X is better than a house at price X. (Perhaps at price X a house doesn't even exist).
The point is that someone who already owns a decent home doesn't have to make that decision, and that describes huge swathes of the city. The financial decision is for newcomers who are attempting to push these people out (or push them in to inferior conditions).
If you have a 4 bedroom semi in Zone 4 London then I cannot see an equivalent apartment. It doesn't even make sense to me. No apartment block on the same street could be nicer.
Only if you compared it with, say, some skyscraper in the City does it make sense to even talk about it, and that's a complete lifestyle change.
Saying it’s suburban housing, or detached homes is a pure straw man argument as people can move from a suburban home to an apartment in the city very easily.
If you can sell a house, move to an apartment and net X00,000 $ that’s very attractive. So price difference are really part of the equation.
Also, people might prefer a detached home for ~30 years when having kids, but their is a constant stream of people exiting that life stage. How and where to downsize is a real question people deal with daily.
I grew up in a sort of building style you don't see in America. High rise flats built around a courtyard/park. Lots of room for kids to play in, lots of built-in friends of all ages groups for the kids, flats big enough for families (shared rooms for younger kids is fine). Honestly, if those existed in America I could think of nothing better to raise children in.
Interesting, so that style was practised mostly in social housing projects? I could see how that could lead to problems especially with drug crime and guns and whatnot. About the worst thing that ever happened where I grew up was a foul on the basketball court.
Yes I believe housing projects were the first/main use of that style here. I know I have an instinctive negative reaction to them (mainly though from TV shows focusing on the horrors of projects).
Very interesting. Thank you for sharing. I live in America too, now, but I haven’t ever actually seen the projects and the ones in The Wire aren’t quite what I was thinking of. Those look ugly and run down.
The most famous implementation of the social housing "towers in the park" model - the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago - has been torn down. One of the many problems with the project was (in my opinion) that the tower:park proportions were way off, giving the complex an inhuman scale. I blame the influence of Le Corbusier, who does not seem to have ever met a human aesthetic instinct he did not try to subvert.
The mid-rise courtyard+playground styles I see in central and northern Europe today, on the other hand, are pretty much ideal for family life. Just enough density to support a walkable daily life with lots of serendipitous social encounters, eyes on the street, a view on the kids playing with enough proximity to intervene if something goes wrong, and the opportunity for first-floor private garden space and aesthetic personalization throughout.
You can blame the architect if you want, the aesthetic was certainly...austere. But I find a different argument far more compelling. The city politicians knew exactly what they were doing in housing large swaths of the urban poor in a small section of the city.
Not only that they used those projects as a way to punish independent political adversaries in the city government. Everyone who originally conceived of the programs tried to build mixed density communities spread throughout the city that were only partially social housing, but racism & power politics prevented that.
Then the city doubled down & didn’t provide services appropriate for the number of people now densely packed in one place.
The book “Blueprint for Disaster” outlines the history of this very well.
Agree. I certainly don't think the architecture was the primary cause of the dysfunction at RTH, but rather a visible symptom of Chicago's ill-considered, politicized, and often malevolent housing policy.
If I decide to buy a place, my preference would be a small, functional, well lit, very well designed place in a dense urban center with good public transit.
>A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry.
A community of people that rarely interact the way neighbors in nearby homes do.
>There will tend to be more options for healthy foods
Assuming these people regularly eat outside, which automatically lowers the health factor of their food compared to home cooked.
It's completely unsupported to say that people in apartments socialize less than people in houses, and likely opposite the truth. Neigbors pas each other constantly, and can visit easily regardless of weather. Children have more peers to play with.
Cities have more options for groceries and grocery delivery.
>It's completely unsupported to say that people in apartments socialize less than people in houses, and likely opposite the truth.
I've never seen apartment residents socialize more than suburban neighbors anywhere I lived or visited.
I don't have numbers, but the isolation of apartment living in cities is a common trope in movies and literature, and a constant complaint of people moving to cities or going away from them.
I've never understood this complaint. Do these people not have hobbies? Just use Google and Facebook and you'll find a group or ten of kindred spirits to join.
They also have jobs and families and city commutes and other such stuff. It's also easy to see someone with a common interest during some 1-2 hour weekly session, and only that.
In the end, the closed door few common areas of apartment buildings (not talking about expensive condos with shared pools and stuff), means people see each other and interact less than some neighbors in a rural/suburban neighborhood.
> > 24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages.
> Sounds like the most insignificant of concerns.
If you're away from home any significant portion of the time, this can be really useful. An Amazon Prime membership, for instance, becomes less useful if 1) you don't know that you're going to be home at a certain time every single day and 2) your packages are likely to disappear if you don't collect them in a timely manner.
> A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you
Societywide, that's a huge bug, not a feature, but suburbs have the same problem, and cities mitigate it by having all classes cllose together in public.
> If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you're just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats. It's a strict downgrade in every sense of the word, even if the square footage is the same.
I appreciate that this is probably true for the majority of people (at least in the west?) but it certainly doesn't apply to me, nor some of my friends.
I like not having a front/back yard to maintain (I don't enjoy gardening). I like the views that you can only get from higher floors, especially city views. I've even come to rely on some of the conveniences, like having a mail room with someone that'll sign for packages while I'm away.
And that's not to mention the many benefits of living in a higher-density neighborhood, which would be impossible in a place full of semi-/fully-detached houses.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
I almost have the opposite view to you, which is that I wouldn't give up my apartment lifestyle unless I was priced out of the city, and could only afford a house in the suburbs.
In the end it's up to personal preference, and you're certainly welcome to prefer a house. But don't assume that everyone has the same preference as you.
I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
I feel that often the complaints associated with loving in urban apartments has less to do with the apartments themselves, and more societal trends that have arisen out of rich people sticking to suburbs over multiple generations.
Schools are the #1 example of this.
Badly maintained rental apartments and higher crime rates are some other examples of the same.
Not just badly maintained but badly designed as well.
I've live in flats (apartments) since 2003 and off the two I actually liked there was a single distinguishing characteristic - They where quiet.
One was a department store that was converted so the floors where thick rebar concrete and the current one was just well designed in terms of noise.
Noise is an absolute determining factor on where I choose to live (as a life long insomniac it makes the difference between half decent sleep when I'm really tired and not).
Based on conversations with some of my neighbors, it's less accidentally forgetting to save for those expenses and more purposely hoping to dump the place on someone else before it becomes their problem.
Agreed, but the scale-up of banks and spreading of risk that makes credit easy to get makes poor maintenance easy to get away with. You can still get a loan on a collapsed hovel!
I like not having a front/back yard to maintain (I don't enjoy gardening).
I don’t either. That’s what lawn service is for.
And that's not to mention the many benefits of living in a higher-density neighborhood, which would be impossible in a place full of semi-/fully-detached houses.
I moved from house to apartment for 3 years and hated every minute of it. Noisy neighbors, no garage, bad WiFi with everyone having the same apartment mandated internet and cable package, and a gym with unmaintained equipment.
Not to mention rent that went up from $1200 to $1600 within three years. Now the same place is $2000 just 3 years later.
Unfortunately owning a home doesn't insulate you from that. My homeowners insurance jumped from about 350/year to about 1400/year during the last recession. And property taxes jumped from 5K to nearly 9K. This is over a 10 year period.
Just curious do you love in a "blue state"... Supporting the pensions of the gym teacher who retired at 55 drawing $100k+ for the rest of his/her life?
If property taxes and homeowners insurance jumped for your home by that much, they probably also jumped for the owners of the rental property you would have alternatively been staying in. The landlord would have passed that cost on to thier tenants. So you still have to worry about that and them raising the rent at the drop of a dime.
Not necessarily. One basis for rates and taxes can be the proportion of an individual's unimproved land value. Typically apartment dwellers end up paying far less rates and taxes under such a scheme. (ignoring any question of economics such as rent-demand elasticity and whether landlords can just pass the full cost of any tax increase onto tennants).
I also know that my comparative insurance is less because I live off the ground floor in an apartment block with restricted/limited access and hard concrete construction.
Any desire to tax non-dense/dense properties at similar or different rates is a particular policy choice, and on a cost ratio basis the denser living choice often ends up being cheaper because resources can be pooled and shared.
You do know that you can own an apartment, right? Conflating the two issues is a bit parochial; at most, the complaint should be that you don't happen to have a decent choice of apartments for sale in the specific place you want to live.
At least in the US, apartments are typically owned on a per-building basis, and generally by a company or investor. Buildings where each unit has an individual owner are typically referred to as condominiums. Buying a condo unit also entails buying an ownership share in the condo association that maintains common areas and such. In an apartment, you just pay your rent and utilities and the landlord is responsible for everything else.
Also not to be confused with town houses, which are just houses shoved right next to each other, often with an association to cover expenses in the shared areas, but you own the house itself and the property it sits on.
We moved into a townhouse a year ago, and the number of people (including our neighbors) that think we live in a condo association is startling. I'm pretty sure part of it is that the realtors here don't understand the difference.
I didn’t think about that. I understand a condo as individually owned apartments. But what makes a separate house a “condo”? Honest question, not trying to be argumentative.
The condo association owns the land and building exterior, is responsible for landscaping, etc. Usually in a development with a lot of similar-looking houses close together.
Another reply already stated apartment vs condominium distinction at least in the US. But even if you own your apartment/condominium it still doesn’t address the concern of noisy neighbors and now you have to deal with a condo association.
In London you have share of freehold apartments in the outer boroughs, but in Central London it's almost all leasehold. You have a long lease, but ultimately you have a superior landlord, pay a service charge which can vary, the exterior of the building isn't yours, etc.
A huge benefit of buying a house over an apartment here is that you can actually meaningfully own it. Repairs are up to you, the postbox is up to you, if you want a thing done you just do it (no negotiation or cost sharing), the land is yours forever and the superior landlord can't change to one who's less amenable, etc.
I suppose this could fall under your:
> happen to have a decent choice of apartments for sale
comment, but it's really more that the legal structures in the UK hugely favour owning a house. (I'm not really sure it could ever be different, an apartment is always going to be "closer to renting" because it's communal to a degree).
At least in the US, this ownership can come with caveats. Namely, you can be kicked out if a majority of condo association owners want you out. Such as if a big company comes along and wants the building. It takes a lot more to forcefully move someone out of a house.
>In the end it's up to personal preference, and you're certainly welcome to prefer a house. But don't assume that everyone has the same preference as you.
Likewise, don't assume that preferences are equally distributed among options.
In most demographics, and especially after having a family, the "apartment lifestyle" thing is in the minority.
US has a sizeable renter population. Rent tracks housing prices pretty reliably, and when people complain about being priced out they mean 'rent went up again.' And historically, banks didn't lend to black people or black neighborhoods.
> those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it's just full.
In theory, property taxes should nudge people. In California, those are severely capped via ballot initiative Prop 13. People that should be paying $20k a year in tax on a $1.8 million dollar home are paying perhaps $2k. Long term residents have won some sort of cosmic lottery that they probably would have cashed in on and left town with if not for Prop 13. Or, if they value the community and services, would have found a way to borrow against the property appreciation, instead of effectively defunding state and local government.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
Some of this is driven in the US by tax policy. Owners get a variety of tax breaks renters do not. In effect there's a sorting process by which people who cannot afford a downpayment rent by necessity, and the well off who want to avoid poor people for as neighbors can buy a home. This effect of paying to buy "good" neighbors is self-perpetuating and reinforcing -- people might be okay with having one sketchy neighbor but not be okay being the only non-sketch. It's a classist (and often racist) attitude, but is probably a decent model of the american population.
I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it were instituted at anything other than a token rate I'd leave.
If someone buys a home and lives in it, they should not have to care a single jot how it's valued externally. It is their home and their castle and they have every right to live in it.
The idea that, say, my grandmother should just get kicked out of her hometown that she's lived in forever, that she bloody _built_, because a bunch of kids decided they like her city is completely absurd.
Financialization needs to end somewhere. Let people earn their opt out.
Council tax isn't property tax because it's not percentage based. It's also not levied on the owner of the property but the occupier.
The valuation of your flat could quadruple and the council tax would stay the same.
I think it makes sense. Council tax pays for amenities. The rent in London might be five times higher than $insert_northern_town but it doesn't cost five times as much for the bins to be taken out.
It's percentage-based but against a fixed basis in the year 1991. Sort of like if everyone in California had access to a variant of Prop 13.
US states usually have percentage based against a variable basis.
I prefer the UK method, personally, but the US method that California uses is quite something to behold. It freezes your property tax to the date you bought your property except for a 1% change per year.
Someone working at the Cambridge Science Park across Kings Hedges Road might be living in Kings Hedges area and pay GBP 1500/year to the local government. It's a substantial amount.
Council tax pays for services like the roads and the bins being taken out.
Having an expensive house doesn't mean you use more of those.
(It increases a bit up to a cap, because you probably do use them more if you have more money, but it obviously doesn't linearly scale).
A flat in London might cost 5-10x a flat in the North, but both individuals use the bins and roads roughly the same amount so their council taxes are about the same.
That would depend on if you view the land as yours completely and in all sovreignty. Or if you view it as a license for you to use exclusively until such time that society deems its worth it to take back or charge you for it. Should a few people be able to hold back economic development or relegate everyone born after them to living in the country? It's not a black and white issue when you ask the entirety of society to weigh in on it
I'm not talking about some abstract concept of "land".
I'm talking about _homes_. You know, where David took his first steps, or where the swing used to be in the garden, or whatever else.
I despise this abstraction, sorry. My grandmother's home in which she raised her family is not some abstract piece of "land" to be stolen from her because you think it meets some economic goal.
You know full well that this idea of future individuals being relegated to 'living in the country' is complete nonsense.
What you really mean is that everyone can't just pile in to the same ten or so 'alpha cities' and expect to just completely disregard those already living there.
Except that those _homes_ take up land which we are currently incapable of creating more of. It's great that your grandmother has a place with all those memories. Does that mean that everyone my age and younger is no longer allowed to live near their work, so that your grandma can reminisce when she looks around?
Thats the trade-off that is happening right now, when people can make a decision 40 years ago and get to control scarce resources from that point until they die.
>You know full well that this idea of future individuals being relegated to 'living in the country' is complete nonsense.
I don't think that's complete nonsense at all. I live in the Boston area and the majority of people I know making over 6 figures either have roommates or a 1+ hour commute.
Grandma living in a detached home on a quarter acre of land in the city means that 20+ people can not live near jobs because of the apartment building that is not there.
It is a perfectly valid opinion to think that this is an acceptable trade-off, but to act like the trade-off is not happening is just sticking your head in the sand.
Additionally a land value tax is not "stealing" the home from anyone. It's accepting that there are scarce resources and there needs to be a pressure to use them in the most efficient manner. If you can provide the value to keep your home on it's own, then fine you get to live there. If you can't you get to sell your highly valued home and reap the benefits of that value. That is capitalism at it's core. If Grandma thinks she should be protected from economic forces and isn't voting for socialist policies to give similar protections to others, then that's just pulling up the ladder after you which is not a viewpoint I'd give any consideration to when I vote
You can hide it behind fancy words but what you want to do is force existing residents who own their homes out in the name of 'economic growth'.
I don't have to agree with that.
> when people can make a decision 40 years ago and get to control scarce resources from that point until they die.
Yes, that's what buying something is. I don't want to live in a world in which everything is simply rented. We should be helping people get _out_ of that, not dragging them in to it.
What is want is for retirees to not be able to keep subsequent generations far away from the same opportunities they enjoyed when they were the same age and raising families. Economic growth is the lever I happen to think can accomplish this best. If you've got a personal issue with that idea, then I'd be just as fine with not allowing you to live within city limits once you retire/reach 65/some similar metric.
The older generation is strangling the subsequent ones, and their countries, because they refuse to change anything about their lives. This is forcing the younger generations to miss out on all the aspects of life that the older generations thought we're important and enjoyed in their youth.
When I hear a retire complain about proposed housing _and_ ask their 30 year old children why they haven't given them grandkids yet, all I can think is that brought that on themselves. They don't live on an island, and the choices they are making have downstream affects on everyone
There are policies that allow for taxation while still not evicting people from their homes. For example, some states let property taxes accrue as a lien against the property that needs to be paid when the property changes ownership. This keeps people in their homes without locking in generations of the same family without compensating the public for the use of that public resource (and yes, land is a public resource of the state, regardless of some piece of paper that grants ownership to some resident.
But the theory on taxation of monopoly rents is quite well fleshed out and that kind of tax has a number of positive effects on society. The fact that most of California’s housing woes can be traced back to a policy that limits this kind of tax is telling and there’s no way I’d want to live anywhere without reasonable land tax policy. That said, taxes should be based on square footage and not assessed resale value to encourage high-density building.
Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist.
> I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it were instituted at anything other than a token rate I'd leave.
Depends on what a 'token rate' is. Cities I've lived in have set it at around 1 percent a year, and is used to fund the emergency services, schools, roads and parks in the area. In most places in the US, that's a $1-2k annual expense. Houses around here, largely built in the 1950's, sell for around $1.4 million, and thus taxes would be around 15k a year. Complaining that you can't afford taxes on a million dollar home is perhaps the epitome of First World Problems. Moreover, higher taxation is simply one effect of high rents. Labor here is expensive; fast food joints here aggressively advertise help wanted signs at 15 dollars an hour. I can only imagine what in-home health care costs, and there's a neverending stream of interviews with public service workers who cannot afford to live near the communities they serve.
However, there is a second order effect -- if a fraction of the people who felt better off in Sacramento or anywhere else in the 1k tax regions moved out, prices in SF would fall. And if owners were more directly impacted by refusals to build high density housing, they'd probably be more in favor of new construction on average.
> The idea that, say, my grandmother should just get kicked out of her hometown that she's lived in forever, that she bloody _built_, because a bunch of kids decided they like her city is completely absurd.
Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy.
> Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist.
There's a post further down in which it's explained how CT is nothing like a property tax. It's levied on the occupier not the owner and it's not percentage based. It's ostensibly for services rendered e.g. bins taken out, roads etc.
Your home and all the homes in your town could quadruple in externally assessed value and the absolute amount paid would remain static because it's formulated in such a way that it's paid based on relative home value within an area (rather than absolute).
> Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy.
I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here.
My grandmother is not wealthy. Neither is my mother. Neither would they become wealthy if the town around them suddenly turned into an SF/London.
The external valuation of their home that they live in would increase which is a completely different matter entirely.
It's an injection of financialization into a situation where none exists. I won't be dragged in to that game, sorry.
I think it's just a misunderstanding. You're talking about a situation where your grandmother owns the place and he/she is talking about a situation where your grandmother rents the place.
Na, the inflation index has a thing called 'rent or rent equivalent' for a reason. The parallel I'm drawing here is between rent control and prop 13, which runs along comparable lines, ie: evicting grandma because she can't afford ( rent | afford property taxes ) because $demographic wants to live nearby is an affront to people's rights to be secure in their home and life. The rhetoric is the same, just with more bootstrapping.
It sounds like some US cities have a situation more like shared ownership, in which you can't actually own a home because there's no way to pay (or set aside) the full future stream of property taxes.
It seems bonkers to me because it would make settling down completely impossible, hence my comments about moving away to somewhere where homeownership exists.
In the place I already live (UK) we don't have that, so I'm not calling for any change.
In any case it seems that me (and people like me) moving out in this hypothetical situation of ownership being converted retroactively into rental gives you what you want anyway.
No. The external valuation of your house is wealth. A long-tenured homeowner in an expensive area is a millionaire and has the social obligations of any other kind of millionaire. More, even, since their wealth comes from squatting on assets rather than labor or productive investment.
We wouldn’t humor a stock market investor in denial about his wealth; we shouldn’t humor a real estate investor. The preferential treatment of housing as an asset class is a big part of why it’s so inflated in the first place!
If someone doesn’t want to be accountable for their house’s appreciation, they can give up the right to benefit from it at sale. Capital gains and deferred property taxes coming due at sale is probably the fairest proposal - doesn’t force anyone out, doesn’t let them free ride either.
US politicians in the postwar era were very concerned about having a proletariat on their hands, and embarked on a program of mass homeownership to make little capitalists of us all. It worked. A bit too well.
Owning a house while it appreciates is less socially useful than working or investing in productive businesses, and sometimes more lucrative. Why should it be taxed at a lower rate?
If it’s not an investment, what do you care about the return?
I appreciate that lots of people like suburbia, and I wish them well too. Only that government policy will also allow urbanism to thrive.
> Owning a house while it appreciates is less socially useful than working or investing in productive businesses, and sometimes more lucrative. Why should it be taxed at a lower rate?
In the UK, real estate investors are taxed. A significant number of individuals here believe they should be taxed more.
A family or individual living in their single home (whether it be a house, apartment, shed, or whatever else) are not real estate investors. Very few people believe they should be paying taxes on their primary residence.
So, yes, a businessman, conglomerate, or just an 'accidental landlord' who owns a building and derives rent from it in perpetuity is taxed in a different way to someone who just lives in and owns their primary home; people want that to be the case, and for the most part it is. (We have our share of loopholes as every taxation system does).
Is it different in the US?
It feels like I'm missing something fundamentally obvious in our discussion here, so maybe that's it?
In the US, you can deduct your mortgage interest and pocket 100% of your profit upon sale. In a place like California with property tax assessments frozen upon purchase, the explosion of housing prices is pure tax-free upside. You don’t get that kind of deal from stocks or bonds. So people pay more
than they otherwise would for houses, and are more incentivized than they otherwise would be to keep housing prices high. As a side effect, municipal tax revenues don’t scale with the now-inflated costs of provisioning municipal services.
My larger point is that either a) your house is an investment, so your returns come with social responsibilities, or b) your house is not an investment, so you’re not entitled to returns beyond having a place to live. The current regime, where you can make tax-free millions for being in the right place at the right time, is not a good one.
> your house is not an investment, so you’re not entitled to returns beyond having a place to live. The current regime, where you can make tax-free millions for being in the right place at the right time, is not a good one.
I agree with this.
In the UK - as earlier stated, we don't have property tax. No capital gains tax is charged on disposal of a primary residence.
The CGT situation makes sense in the event that the entirety of the gain is re-invested in another home.
Otherwise, you end up in the absurd situation in which a person moving between two identical homes on the same street would take a loss of 20%, incentivising them to never move.
It might make sense to require that the proceeds of the sale be put towards another primary private residence (and have anything left over taxed).
It seems to me like that's not really your issue though.
> As a side effect, municipal tax revenues don’t scale with the now-inflated costs of provisioning municipal services.
This is a question of overall taxation, no? It's not relevant whether the money comes from a property tax on everyone, or an income tax on those that are of working age, or a general wealth tax, or corporation tax, or whatever else - it just needs to be paid for.
Again, I'm assuming here, but I think your argument is that increasing property taxes would decrease the cost of property.
It's pretty obvious that this is the case because it's effectively turning homeownership into a 'shared ownership' scenario whereby you pay rent to the state.
In the US the property tax is balanced somewhat by mortgage subsidies deducted from income tax. Also the property tax itself is deducted from federal tax.
Nevertheless I agree with you, it is a pernicious wealth tax and should rightly be moved to a VAT or sales tax.
> If someone buys a home and lives in it, they should not have to care a single jot how it's valued externally. It is their home and their castle and they have every right to live in it.
If the city puts police in the block the house is in, cleans the street, puts a bus, and a subway, maintains parks, etc etc, they are all being perpetually funded by taxes, that if the landlord is not paying, he is mooching off someone else.
It's just not linearly proportional to the value of the home with no cap, because that makes no sense.
Cleaning the street doesn't become more expensive because your house became more expensive. Same for almost every other council-run service.
In a very indirect sense, it might cost more to employ street cleaners eventually if rent increases within a 30min-1h radius, but that's not in any reasonable sense linearly proportional to the value of a home in a specific area.
> In a very indirect sense, it might cost more to employ street cleaners eventually if rent increases within a 30min-1h radius, but that's not in any reasonable sense linearly proportional to the value of a home in a specific area.
It's very direct: the same house 100 miles away into the wilderness will not be worth nearly the same. Its construction/capital value might be more fix to the cost of materials + labor, but the value of the land is very much related to what services and other externalities affect it.
In any case I'd agree that the tax shouldnt be on the value of the house, but on the value of the land it would be much more representative of the externalities.
Yes, the externally assessed value of the house will vary depending on where it is.
The cost of public services apportioned to the house is not linearly correlated to its' externally assessed value.
If you move a suburban flat into the centre, slice it into the middle of a skyscraper say, it'd be worth way more, but it'd cost about the same to maintain the roads and take the bins out.
(Actually it'd probably cost less in the city, so in that particular case the public costs would be inversely proportional to value...)
We can perform an intuivite verification of this by dividing the city revenue/expenditures over 1. residences, 2. area, 3. people.
Example:
San francisco has an 11 billion tax revenue[1]
It has 880.000 residents [2]
It has 121 km2 [3]
It has 345,811 Households [3] (note this is an old census, the number has probably gone up a bit)
11 billion / 880.000 = 12.500 U$S
This means that every resident in the city would have to pay 1040U$S a month (including babies and elderly) just to pay for the city revenues.
11 billion / 121km ~= 91 million in expenditures per square km.
11 billion / 350k household ~= 31,500: each household has to pay 2625 a month just to maintain the city revenues.
I've a certain amount of sympathy for this view. But you have to accept that it's building a moat to preserve the class system, at a time when people are finding homeownership harder and harder to achieve.
Presumably your grandmother isn't living entirely independent of society - still reliant on social services, police, NHS and so on. Most of these are locally funded and badly paid. Plus the private sector: shop workers etc. Do you think they should be paid enough to achieve homeownership themselves? Where should that come from?
The council tax capping system is ridiculous, especially in London. I would quite happily swap council tax+stamp duty for a realistic property tax. Preferably with a bit more national redistribution so we can tax mansions in Kensington to pay for buses in Burnley.
I think these things are a problem but can be solved by alternate means.
We've completely stopped building council homes for no apparent reason, for example. I'd pay more in taxation to support that - hell, if we did it properly and treated it like a New Deal-style thing I'd be proud to come along and help build. We owe it to people. The fact that there are massive fields everywhere that people aren't allowed to build on because a man with a gun says no is asinine.
We can make transport faster and better as well.
At some point I think the population of London needs to be limited somehow because having 20 million residents would make it hellish to navigate under any system. The central bits would turn into a gridlock of pedestrians.
> Do you think they should be paid enough to achieve homeownership themselves? Where should that come from?
I think this gets the directionality confused. If people agree to work for a low wage, the low wage is going to persist.
I think people should refuse to work jobs that don't pay enough to exist. Individually or collectively, doesn't matter.
Personally I don't understand how London's service industry works at all.
I'd have left yesterday if I felt my options were limited to working in the local supermarket. The wages are farcical - literally _funny_ - can't afford a studio flat within the entire M25.
Meanwhile, as you know well, there are cities <5 hours drive away where one can buy a terraced house with a garden on a single minimum wage.
If people refused these silly conditions, wages would rise, residents would pay a bit more for services and it'd all work out.
It's funny because this is a really common (probably the overwhelming) opinion in my hometown. London is bloody expensive, no-one understands why anyone would live there unless they're rich. It's only people who have the idea that they "must" live there regardless of resources that get into trouble.
> We've completely stopped building council homes for no apparent reason
Decades of Tory policy, that one. Councils were forced by central government to sell it off way below market value and prevented from using the resulting money from building more houses.
> The fact that there are massive fields everywhere that people aren't allowed to build on
Greenfield building is hugely unpopular with voters, especially Tory voters. Planning restrictions have popular support.
> We can make transport faster and better as well
I'd like to see that, but decades of privatisation have preferred "cheaper".
> I think people should refuse to work jobs that don't pay enough to exist. Individually or collectively, doesn't matter.
And how should they eat and live in the meantime? Refusing jobs will get you taken off JSA, and possibly sent on the unpaid work programme.
> Personally I don't understand how London's service industry works at all.
Overwhelmingly staffed by immigrants and children of immigrants, often living in cramped conditions.
> "must" live there regardless of resources
For a lot of people in the peripheral towns, it's the other way round: if you want to better yourself and get a professional job, that's where you've got to be. The networking effects are huge.
> I'd have left yesterday if I felt my options were limited to working in the local supermarket
Every day hundreds of people leave peripheral towns and head to London because that's the choice they face.
I feel like this would be better done as a pub chat. We basically agree but are picking apart points.
Yes, we're not building council homes because our political system is broken. That's what I mean by 'no apparent reason'. Laziness on my behalf, sorry.
Your JSA point is silly, you know I'm not suggesting people starve, please don't do that.
We need to solve centralization of everything in London, yes.
"You have suburbs full of families that will never move out, and if they do move out, will just rent the building out rather than selling."
Exactly. This is what property taxes helped with. Taxes should be increased to keep houses out of the investment game. Once a house is an investment: it is rented out (increased each year), city councils vote no on all new housing,etc, --- it all gets nimby fast.
> Places like London are no longer income-based, they're wealth-based.
The weird thing about living in San Diego is that it's incredibly expensive to live here, but there are THOUSANDS of people here who don't work whatsoever. It feels a bit like a retirement community, except for the ultra-wealthy.
They're only wealthy if their primary family home, often surrounded by their other family, places of employment, and friends are available for them to sell. If they have no intention of moving then it is indeed odd to count that as part of their wealth in the same way as cash or shares.
Incidentally this is the same reason why the Catholic Church is not rich. It looks like it if you value the land on which their churches sit at the development value they would fetch if sold... but running those churches is their primary purpose! So they could only realise that value by shutting down their only reason for existing.
It's funny, the very mild - some consider it perfect - weather of San Diego attracts the very wealthy and the very poor. That's the case, though, with several mild-weather tourist destination cities on the California coast, including Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo, etc.
Many homes in those areas are only occupied a portion of the year, by people with other homes elsewhere. Others are owned and rented out by family trusts.
I've talked to many people of mid-high means who are in or near retirement that have made such arrangements part of their financial and estate plans.
I think the city being “full” is a much better way to explain it than saying for example you need to make $300,000 to afford a house in San Francisco, as if there were an arbitrary amount of housing that available just waiting for people who can pay that much. The people who moved there earlier weren’t that well off its just that they’re holding on so the available supply at any one time is small. Journalism should emphsize the supply side more imo.
Fairly unconvincing if disused warehouses must lie empty because people who live miles away don't want anyone else to move into their city. How can SF be 'full' when there are industrial warehouses far from where people live that are abandoned?
What exactly is full here? The warehouse isn't. The land is only full of warehouse skeleton.
What warehouses are you talking about? South SF? Those definitely are not abandoned and have people working in them. It’s a dying workforce that gets paid minimum wage but they’re around.
There is abandoned property in Hunters Point but it’s radioactive.
Urban condos are routinely more valuable than houses in the same city. Plenty of people do want a level of walkability and street life that is not available in suburbia.
It may have been true in the midst of suburban flight that only the desperate would live in urban conditions, but it isn’t any longer. Urbanism is the premium commodity now.
Yes, it is. The nature of the place is determined by its density, which is determined by its mix of housing types. There is no such thing as a lively downtown bock of single family detached houses.
It might be nice to have a house anachronistically in the middle of a dense area, or right on the edge of one, but it’s not geometrically possible for many people to do that.
Loads of London is the latter half of your comment.
Most streets I've lived on have a mix of family homes, new build apartment blocks, weird split-up family homes that now house multiple individuals, etc.
Apparently (at least compared to the US) we're quite unique in mixing rich and poor in this way though.
I've lived in London. The city suffers from long transit times due to poor (low density) planning. It was bad enough to make me leave. If I wanted to do anything or go anywhere not in my neighbourhood (stockwell/Brixton) or the centre it took an hour at least.
You’re describing feudalism. Your station in life depends on your family’s ownership of the right hereditary lands. In 50 years, “were you born with access to a productive city or not” will dominate race, gender, etc. in determining life outcomes.
I think it's more likely that access will always be available, however 'immigrants' quality of life will be far lower.
That's already the way it plays out here as far as I can tell.
Young people with regular jobs live in single rooms in flatshares or their parents' homes (if they have that access).
In middle age I expect them to live in small flats whilst their parents lived in large homes.
Over longer time periods, quality of life will decrease across the board and most will be in worse accommodation than the previous generation.
The issue we're facing I think is more that this sort of centralization of productive work is unsustainable. You can't* just stuff the entire population of the UK into London, or the entire population of the US into SF, NY, etc. They'd be bloody awful places to live.
I don’t think one enormous city is a great idea, but yes, most of the US should end up living in a handful of places that look more like Manhattan than postwar suburbia. Automobile-scaled development does incredible damage to our physical and social environments.
This is why remote work is going to become increasing necessarily, and why bosses/managers/CEOs need to give up the whole 'everyone in the same building between 9-5' idea once and for all.
Software engineers, marketers and other folks with similar service jobs do not need to be in the same building as the rest of their team.
That'd fix a few issues right away:
1. It'd fix Silicon Valley's housing prices, since tech workers wouldn't be buying all the houses/apartments. This would remove a pool of people making hundreds of thousands a year from the equation, and ideally causing prices to drop down to an affordable value.
2. It'd mean the actual workers who need to live their work (teachers, nurses, retail staff, etc) would likely be able to afford more, since they wouldn't be competing with software engineers for the same properties).
3. It'd give people an incentive to move to smaller towns/cities/not end up crammed into a single area. Does that mean sprawl? Not necessarily, it could mean other large towns and cities in the UK and US could benefit from a higher population rather than the likes of London/New York/San Francisco sucking up new residents by the million.
4. And in future, maybe it could kill off the idea of immigration/emigration too, at least for the most part. The fact you have to live in a wealthy country to get a high paying job is one of the things that makes stuff like the H1B scheme so lucrative.
The idea employees have to be watched over in the same building like prisoners or school students is one of the reasons these house prices are so high and everything is becoming so centralised.
Videoconferencing is still drastically higher friction than circling in front of a whiteboard. Heads-down coding is only part of the job; it’s also to work through ideas with other people.
More realistically, tech workers will be able to live in cheaper cities a couple hours away (ie Sacramento) and commute only 1-2 days a week
There's no apriori reason that the landed gentry should keep their homes without paying a land value tax that makes it not worth their while to keep them. This is the stuff revolutions are made of, when the larger outsider population collectively decides its had enough of landowner privilege. Landowners can go to outer space if they want private ownership of a frontier.
It wouldn't be a problem at all if opportunity weren't so concentrated. I don't know about the UK but in the US opportunity is very concentrated in a few cities.
Your argument is, to paraphrase, “it’s less that people are priced out of London, it’s just that London is full”. This argument assumes that the property market is a free market, which it is not. It’s subsidised and manipulated by government and banks. Here we go:
1. Planning laws constrain building out into the green belt and upwards into the skies. There’s a lot of space above and around London that could be built on and in. But we don’t. This throttles supply with price consequences.
2. Tax laws privilege home ownership in the UK. Better to hold your wealth in property than cash or shares because it’s (a) capital gains tax expempt (first home) and (b) inheritance tax efficient. You pay a premium for that perk.
3. Foreign ownership laws leading to London property becoming a global asset class and wealth stash. Again - this creates a premium. Many people would think a Russian oligarch buying up a few luxury flats in London does not a housing crisis make. Economists would however say that all impact is at the margin, and this is probably amplified in a sticky market like London property.
4. Help-to-buy. WTF. This was the government priming the demand pump ahead of an election.
5. Banks realizing that the London property market is basically the magic money tree: increase credit limits, increase loan size, increase profits, rinse and repeat. And the governement will bail them out if there’s a crash. Go figure.
So in short, I think a statement that London is full also needs to recognize the extent to which governments use property prices to boost popularity- and its also one of the reasons the UK economy is looking problematic - for far too long property rather than productive investment has sucked up spare cash.
I think a lot of this is true too. In particular I think lending is out of control (HTB is indeed a complete farce).
In the UK we could basically fix this stuff overnight by just building council houses on a trivial amount of the green belt and bringing back the idea that everyone just gets a family home. It won't happen because we have a broken political system.
But I also think a major pressure relief valve would be somehow eliminating this idea that everyone has to live in SF/NYC/London/etc.
It just doesn't make sense on any level. We can't just have every part of the world outside of a few capital or capital-like cities turn into an economic wasteland.
This sentiment I don’t understand. What’s the problem with aggregating most of the population in a few urban centers? It makes sense to me from an economic point of view where the productivity of clusters benefits greatly from density. It also makes sense from an environmental perspective because it reduces sprawl and using elevators instead of cars should significantly lower carbon emissions. More importantly, unlike other environmentally friendly policies, like carbon taxes or not eating beef, people actually want to move to the more successful cities. Although every individual is familiar with the downsides of cities the economies seem to be large enough to overcome them.
High density housing in the UK has a bad rep. It has not been done well in the past. Now only 8% of Londoners live in a high rise, and very few live in mid rise (3-6 storeys, as common in many European cities)
Few seem to want to live in high density housing beyond their 30s. As soon as families are being thought about thoughts turn to having safe places to play, quality of air and schools, thoughts of the logistics of pram, a couple of children, nappies and bottles being manoeuvred up and down 10 floors. It's bad enough doing that when the car is on the street in front of your house.
That's the point people are trying, to the extent their finances allow, de-aggregating themselves to a house in the suburbs or somewhere pleasant and rural.
Those are problems of bad architecture, not high density. Apartment buildings offer great value -- you don't need to deal with baby seats in cars. Children can walk to school and social life, often without leaving the building, which is great in winter. Mass transit it easy to build efficiently. Overall families in balc hours of their week from the bane of driving. Greenways can be built and well appointed close in to the city when there isn't housing sprawl. Everyone has wealthier to afford luxuries because they aren't wasting money on low-density utility systems that bankrupt suburbs. Arts and culture and special services for the disabled are on abundance.
I've never encountered high density housing that had an attached school in the building in any of the places I've visited. Neither does it avoid the need to travel, or have a car. Mass transit may be efficient, but travelling with a toddler by bus and train is a nightmare on crowded city services. Unless it's a short trip when you don't need much beyond the buggy.
Sure the schools may be nearer in a city, but they often come with a poor reputation, or the nearby ones are full so you have to travel just as far anyway. Air quality and neighbours aren't a problem of bad architecture either.
Perhaps if we went back and levelled the place and rebuilt with some of the values of pre-war times we could create high density housing that worked. We'd need local shops, services, transport hubs and schools. The very things that have been consolidating away from local hubs throughout the past 50 years.
The UK is already fairly urbanized. Basically everyone lives in or around a city. You could densify the cities if the residents actually want that.
What's being discussed here is not that though, it's the problem that everyone seems to want to go to alpha cities like London/SF/NYC and treats elsewhere as "inferior".
You can't just stuff the entire population of the UK in to London because it would be a hellscape regardless of how much you improve infrastructure.
Yes, we can and should return most land outside of dense urban centers to nature. It’s rarely if ever reasonable to have significant development beyond the walkable radius of a neighborhood center or transit stop.
Adam Smith pointed out that people go live in cities because then they can specialize in their trades; you are not going to be a shoemaker in a hamlet, nor a porter in a village.
Given that the trend goes that far back, it is not really strange that we see more of it now, when even fewer people are working the land.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
I live in an apartment and wouldn't move to house even if I got it for free.
That's mostly due simply to the different environment where you find appartments and houses: almost by definition, the former has higher density.
And while I grew up in something like a suburb and can appreciate its advantages to some degree, it would be a sad day in my life when I started to value the comfort of a garden higher than the excitement a city has to offer: theatres, clubs, strange art events by the weirdo crowd this city (Berlin) currently attracts, far more choices for high-quality groceries, et. Plus it sometimes feels like a front-row seat to history.
It also helps that apartments are mostly in art deco buildings: heigh ceilings, wooden floors etc. Houses are either new new or (even worse) from the 50s/60s.
From my time in the US I remember the rest of the disadvantages: spending an hour commuting, where it takes me 10min on a bike now. Eating out is another 30min drive, and the restaurants, like everything else, look like airport lounges in the middle of a parking lot exhibition. Neighbours that call the police when they see anyone on the sidewalk, because such activity is unusual and suspicious...
What I could imagine at some point is a community sort of like the oldschool US towns that still exist here and there, namely a Main Street with a residential area of about a 1-mile radius around it. With a bit of luck (i. e. a few people with initiative) these communities can be lively enough, and the familiarity of a small community compensates for the loss of choice.
> I don't think it's useful, for example, to say people are being 'priced out'.
Perhaps not useful, but accurate. There was no way I could afford to stay in London when I lived there. I know several other people who left or are in the process of leaving for exactly that purpose. London is a playground for the rich and a struggle for everyone else.
Away from anecdotes, "social cleansing" is a byword for the fact that people are being priced out of London.
For how long, I wonder. Many of those cities are intensely adverse to new taxes and public works that make larger cities livable. If they keep growing, they'll end up in a similar if not worse situation as the coastal cities. A big reason the coastal cities (LA, SF etc) are unlivable is due to a lack of investment in mass transit and housing.
People escaping high costs are typically moving to a place where they will probably have few roots and connections, so there will be little reason to stick around if costs rise again
>new taxes and public works that make larger cities livable
I thought people are moving specifically because large cities are unliveable. The article actually cites a more lax regulatory and tax environment as one of the reasons for why people and businesses are moving.
Sure, and then the realization that cities need to pay for things like infrastructure and transit to support their growing (and increasingly dense) population, and either way a a possibly unlivable situation develops. High taxes/high rents, or low taxes but zero infrastructure or support. No US city has managed to figure out the formula. That low tax situation has only lasted because there was previously no need for real serious spending.
That's not true, the largest slices of California's state budget goes to healthcare, with education next in line. Pensions are 3rd and account for 18% of the state budget. I'm not denying pensions aren't a significant chunk, but the "your taxes do nothing" argument is getting pretty old.
My point remains...you're not paying for infrastructure.
You also missed the chicken/egg...high taxes a component of the high cost of living that causes people to move in the first place.
California's poverty rate has risen with the population...the poor are moving in and they are not impacted by most tax measures, so they have no reason to oppose them.
Taxes are just one side of the same coin, the high cost of living is really just a density issue. Lots of high paying jobs, lots of Nimby building practices and little density and transit investment. Tokyo is a city of 20 million people yet is far more affordable and even has higher taxes.
California didn't build to support it's population. If these secondary cities make the same mistake, they too will be high cost/unlivable places.
Wouldn't the cost of infrastructure scale with the increased tax revenue from the increased population? I would also assume that infrastructure is actually cheaper per capita if population density increases, which would imply lower tax rates.
It depends on how the infrastructure is funded. In some states, that budget is based on property taxes. In some states, income and state taxes. It's not really a one size fits all problem. In some cases, the money is there but the voter will is not because there's a real "tax is theft" movement in many states.
I think electric scooters and autonomous vehicles (which in a bus version can also double as privatised mass transport) will solve that problem.
Public Tram, Bus and Rail systems are obsolete because they need a permanent human driver (expensive, difficult to operate 24/7) or dedicated infrastructure (expensive). They cannot operate point to point or modify their route in response to demand. They cannot discriminate against who they accept (no female-only busses, or upper-class only busses, etc.)
What we should be looking at is what kind of changes to the physical road system do we need to accelerate autonomous vehicles - road/lane markings? Digital traffic signs? Inter-vehicle data transmission standards?
How do you handle the increased demand without even more dedicated infrastructure for roads? How much cheaper is it than dedicated infrastructure for buses and rails which have far more capacity?
Autonomous private busses, with routes auto-calculated based on the start and end point that passengers enter via smartphone, will take cars off the road.
Cars off the road will speed up those busses, making them more attractive.
Operating on the basis that one scooter rider is one less car driver, there is an immediate benefit. Scooters have an even smaller footprint than a bicycle.
I'm not sure why we would accept that assumption. Isn't it just as likely that one scooter rider is one less bus rider, train passenger or walker? In those cases, overall road congestion increases.
People have been moving out of high-cost urban centers to cheaper areas since at least the 50s. And the "secondary" cities the author mentions are quite massive cities. Second, the authors narrative that people are moving "from coastal cities to “secondary” cities" is not factually accurate in the narrowest sense: LA, NYC, and San Francisco (which was a secondary city not that long ago) continue to have population growth. People are still moving to these cities, except NYC which has leveled off a bit. And most of the secondary cities the author mentions are also coastal cities, they're just different coastal cities. The only phenomenon is one that's as old as the industrial revolution: increased urbanization.
There is a very large amount of out-migration from NYC. The city’s population keeps growing because of births and immigration, but many more people move from NYC to the rest of the US than the other way around.
I see this going one of two ways. Either tech decentralizes and spreads out into places like Atlanta, Austin, and Nashville, or these jobs continue to further concentrate in SF/NYC/Seattle and the other cities fall way behind.
In the first case, I think it's likely that inequality will continue to increase across the U.S. and the median American will be worse off for it; i.e., there will be a positive feedback loop where winner cities take all.
In the second case, I think inequality will decrease, and the tech industry (and similar "big city" industries) can play to each region’s cultural strengths. I think this inter-city competition would be a positive effect and lead to accelerating innovation across a variety of different fields. Judging by recent Amazon/Google news though, I fear the first case is more likely to happen.
I agree, I'll also note that it seems with all of the modern communication tools that satellite offices in secondary and tertiary markets wouldn't be as big of a deal now as it would have been 20 years ago.
It’s also no longer necessary for satellite offices to duplicate headquarters functions. The work done at HQ is infinitely reusable. HQ has near-perfect visibility into the goings-on at each office, so they no longer need independent decision making capability. And the economics have changed to favor quality over quantity: 100 top engineers are better than 1,000 cheap ones. Where are you find the highest concentrations of top talent?
I guess it depends on what you value. I pay more than $1500 in SF for half a house, but I don’t have a car and my commute downtown is very easy on public transit. I don’t have a lot of stuff so don’t need a big, new place either. If I saved 25% on rent by moving to a city with non-existent poor public transit (like Atlanta) I’d just end up paying close to what I pay now by upgrading my living situation (new construction apt and no roommate) and factoring in a car and commute time.
It also very much depends on your situation. If you're a single young tech worker, SF is great. If you've got kids or you're not working in tech, SF is the kind of place most people will actively avoid.
Yeah, very much situation dependent. I started working remotely while in the US and then decided I would just move out of the country. 2br apt for 750$ per month. I paid that much for a room in Boston in a Apt that I had to share with 2 other people that was old and had no amenties… yeah not going back to that. My working motto now is "make my money in/from the US, spend it elsewhere".
In the US, a lot of these secondary cities are in states run by conservatives. As someone who cares about reproductive rights, that concerns me. I have a friend who had her amniotic sac rupture while in Arizona, and had to wait 72 hours before she could have the no-longer-viable fetus removed. I wouldn't wish that on anyone, and I worry about what laws I would be subject to in states like that, even if the city or neighborhood I lived in was populated with people who valued those rights in the same way I do.
There are plenty of people who feel the same way about the laws in New York and California. Having strong talent pools, and economies, in cities with different political climates means more people can live somewhere they're politically aligned and still have decent jobs.
I do not know nearly nothing about USA real estate market however in most part of Europe the number of people think cities as a workplace or an interim location for students, young workers or people who can't afford anything better is skyrocketing, in few EU countries there is already a reasonably developed "distributed economy" but in others (like Germany, Italy, Spain) there isn't so many choose small towns because being distributed means also have far less services and "urban comfort" nearby.
I suspect that this situation start to be common in any western/developed world. Perhaps the USA are a bit late since their cities are generally "newer" than EU so they are probably "less compressed"/with a lower mean density that allow more green spaces and generally a little bit better mean life quality (something like you do not need 10' to go from A to B + 20' to find a park place around B or it does not take 40' for 15Km trip in peek hours).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 241 ms ] threadI don't know a lot about the US, but here in the UK, in a city like London I don't think it's useful, for example, to say people are being 'priced out'.
What's actually happening is that those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it's just full. You have suburbs full of families that will never move out, and if they do move out, will just rent the building out rather than selling.
The indirect effect of that is that prices go up, but you're really just seeing that the commuter belt of semi-detached homes is full and that's that.
It's common to talk about knocking down homes or building more homes or whatever. The thing is that for the most part, only non-residents actually want that (because for them the choice is between high density or not living there). If you own a decently sized family home with a garden you're just not going to give it up and move into a block of flats. It's a strict downgrade in every sense of the word, even if the square footage is the same.
No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
So yeah, the answer is to go elsewhere. Go to a city that actually welcomes newcomers. Places like London are no longer income-based, they're wealth-based. Starting from scratch here you're at an enormous disadvantage.
Sure you are, if someone pays you enough for your property to make it worth your while. That’s why it is illegal for property owners to build high density on their own property. Otherwise, people would cash out and allow higher density locations to be built.
(Which I think you've addressed in your comment.)
if you want the long answer this is a good book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004Z2NQCS/
The fact that cars currently produce large amounts of CO2 is a contributor to that.
As soon as we get clean energy that disappears. If we don't get clean energy we're fucked anyway.
We cannot decarbonize the energy supply fast enough to prevent a total humanitarian nightmare. We must also reduce energy consumption through both efficiency gains and fundamental shifts in cultural values, such as the entitlement people feel to not having to share space with their fellow man.
I am a TSLA shareholder, I am very glad that EVs and solar power and batteries are going to play an important role in the overall solution, but it is simply bad math to think its a solution. The land use, infrastructure costs, and energy demands of sprawling detached housing are not currently priced into the market. They are externalized onto the people who are already suffering in a 0.75C world, and we're on a screaming path to a 4C world.
Believing magic technology will save us is simply the naive liberal version of denialism.
It's farcical to suggest that in order to stop burning fossil fuels everyone has to move on top of each other.
I also never said "everyone". this is very common response from people who feel personally attacked, they respond defensively with an extreme re-formulation of what was said.
you're posting on HN so i'm hoping I can appeal to whatever piece of your brain is capable of reasoning in the abstract. look at both lines of your response. think about them.
That’s a pretty extreme. Appartments have a ton of advantages; whatever one values in an independant house can be turned into a disadvantage.
For instance an appartment is easier to secure, maintenance fees can be split, commodity fees can also be split which makes it very affordable to have good infra (high speed internet, central heating, automatic post boxes etc), concierge services become an option. Then superb views, lack of surrounding noise, clean air are advantages on the higher floors.
I say that as a kid who grew up in houses and wildly prefer appartments as I moved away.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
> maintenance fees can be split, commodity fees can also be split which makes it very affordable to have good infra
This is all cost-based argumentation. If you own a family home with a garden you've already solved that. Maintenance costs in London are utterly trivial.
A middle level appartment goes roughly for the same price as a low tier house where I live. There is a healthy market for good apartments in the suburbs, it’s just not a cheap choice (but way less expensive as a dame tier house in the same locations)
I am not swimming in money, so I also understand people who already own expensive properties will have different priorities.
in an apartment. can't speak to the US but most apartments in western europe are really poor when it comes to sound. neighbours above/beside/behind all making noise/water pumps/washing machines.
near impossible to get a moments peace.
We had to see 20~30 appartments last time we moved, and ended up just filtering from the start anything older that 30 years. It’s just not worth it, even for rental.
The worse was the electrical wiring that was at best impractical. And water pipes that needed serious revision.
I just can’t imagine how it goes for 100+ years old houses.
Most of the time, the most noise was the Thames lapping against the wharf. Quite pleasant, really. I never actually heard my neighbours, to be honest, except if we were both out on the balcony talking.
24/7 doorman means someone to sign for packages.
A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry.
Big communities tend to have nice amenities that you’d only find in a country club all inclusive.
Maintenance of the high rise unit is often included in the fees or rent.
These communities tend to get better access to interconnect technologies like fiber.
There will tend to be more options for healthy foods, increased opportunities for walkable restaurants and other forms of entertainment as the population density of the area increases.
And more...
Basically, my preference 10/10 times would be to live in a high density tall building over a single family home in a neighborhood.
I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
Americans have their land of course. I have my own equivalent garden. The difference is scarcity. I can travel a continent and still buy a garden relatively cheap. The UK? Not so much.
I'm not sure about this "barely green" thing. Haven't been to Oxford, but I've visited Cambridge, and the gardens there are magnificently green.
I think the misunderstanding comes from making a comparison that I obviously haven't attempted to, and that no reasonable person would (basically, a strawman).
I can't see how a suburban apartment can be as nice as a suburban house unless you're making a cost argument.
Yes, perhaps an apartment at price X is better than a house at price X. (Perhaps at price X a house doesn't even exist).
The point is that someone who already owns a decent home doesn't have to make that decision, and that describes huge swathes of the city. The financial decision is for newcomers who are attempting to push these people out (or push them in to inferior conditions).
If you have a 4 bedroom semi in Zone 4 London then I cannot see an equivalent apartment. It doesn't even make sense to me. No apartment block on the same street could be nicer.
Only if you compared it with, say, some skyscraper in the City does it make sense to even talk about it, and that's a complete lifestyle change.
In the UK (and most of Europe) the suburban apartment is most akin to a concrete box.
If you can sell a house, move to an apartment and net X00,000 $ that’s very attractive. So price difference are really part of the equation.
Also, people might prefer a detached home for ~30 years when having kids, but their is a constant stream of people exiting that life stage. How and where to downsize is a real question people deal with daily.
The mid-rise courtyard+playground styles I see in central and northern Europe today, on the other hand, are pretty much ideal for family life. Just enough density to support a walkable daily life with lots of serendipitous social encounters, eyes on the street, a view on the kids playing with enough proximity to intervene if something goes wrong, and the opportunity for first-floor private garden space and aesthetic personalization throughout.
Not only that they used those projects as a way to punish independent political adversaries in the city government. Everyone who originally conceived of the programs tried to build mixed density communities spread throughout the city that were only partially social housing, but racism & power politics prevented that.
Then the city doubled down & didn’t provide services appropriate for the number of people now densely packed in one place.
The book “Blueprint for Disaster” outlines the history of this very well.
Sounds like the most insignificant of concerns.
>A community of people who presumably are in your socioeconomic class will be living with you. These are folks you can interact with and depending on your stage in life you may potentially do business with, befriend, start children’s play groups with, or even date/marry.
A community of people that rarely interact the way neighbors in nearby homes do.
>There will tend to be more options for healthy foods
Assuming these people regularly eat outside, which automatically lowers the health factor of their food compared to home cooked.
Cities have more options for groceries and grocery delivery.
I've never seen apartment residents socialize more than suburban neighbors anywhere I lived or visited.
I don't have numbers, but the isolation of apartment living in cities is a common trope in movies and literature, and a constant complaint of people moving to cities or going away from them.
In the end, the closed door few common areas of apartment buildings (not talking about expensive condos with shared pools and stuff), means people see each other and interact less than some neighbors in a rural/suburban neighborhood.
> Sounds like the most insignificant of concerns.
If you're away from home any significant portion of the time, this can be really useful. An Amazon Prime membership, for instance, becomes less useful if 1) you don't know that you're going to be home at a certain time every single day and 2) your packages are likely to disappear if you don't collect them in a timely manner.
Societywide, that's a huge bug, not a feature, but suburbs have the same problem, and cities mitigate it by having all classes cllose together in public.
I appreciate that this is probably true for the majority of people (at least in the west?) but it certainly doesn't apply to me, nor some of my friends.
I like not having a front/back yard to maintain (I don't enjoy gardening). I like the views that you can only get from higher floors, especially city views. I've even come to rely on some of the conveniences, like having a mail room with someone that'll sign for packages while I'm away.
And that's not to mention the many benefits of living in a higher-density neighborhood, which would be impossible in a place full of semi-/fully-detached houses.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
I almost have the opposite view to you, which is that I wouldn't give up my apartment lifestyle unless I was priced out of the city, and could only afford a house in the suburbs.
In the end it's up to personal preference, and you're certainly welcome to prefer a house. But don't assume that everyone has the same preference as you.
I'm obviously simplifying. Luxury apartments downtown are different to the sort of monstrosities you see in suburbs.
Moving from a family home in a suburb into the city =/= moving from a family home into a block of flats on the same street. The latter is what I am calling a 'strict downgrade'.
Schools are the #1 example of this.
Badly maintained rental apartments and higher crime rates are some other examples of the same.
Not just badly maintained but badly designed as well.
I've live in flats (apartments) since 2003 and off the two I actually liked there was a single distinguishing characteristic - They where quiet.
One was a department store that was converted so the floors where thick rebar concrete and the current one was just well designed in terms of noise.
Noise is an absolute determining factor on where I choose to live (as a life long insomniac it makes the difference between half decent sleep when I'm really tired and not).
Modern mid rises are usually a single concrete story, then wood.
A low floor on a high rise is often higher quality and competitively priced with a mid rise.
In my area older folks are leaving 30-40 year old suburban tract homes that needs roofs, hvac, etc and moving to condos in or near the city.
I don’t either. That’s what lawn service is for.
And that's not to mention the many benefits of living in a higher-density neighborhood, which would be impossible in a place full of semi-/fully-detached houses.
I moved from house to apartment for 3 years and hated every minute of it. Noisy neighbors, no garage, bad WiFi with everyone having the same apartment mandated internet and cable package, and a gym with unmaintained equipment.
Not to mention rent that went up from $1200 to $1600 within three years. Now the same place is $2000 just 3 years later.
I also know that my comparative insurance is less because I live off the ground floor in an apartment block with restricted/limited access and hard concrete construction.
Any desire to tax non-dense/dense properties at similar or different rates is a particular policy choice, and on a cost ratio basis the denser living choice often ends up being cheaper because resources can be pooled and shared.
We moved into a townhouse a year ago, and the number of people (including our neighbors) that think we live in a condo association is startling. I'm pretty sure part of it is that the realtors here don't understand the difference.
In London you have share of freehold apartments in the outer boroughs, but in Central London it's almost all leasehold. You have a long lease, but ultimately you have a superior landlord, pay a service charge which can vary, the exterior of the building isn't yours, etc.
A huge benefit of buying a house over an apartment here is that you can actually meaningfully own it. Repairs are up to you, the postbox is up to you, if you want a thing done you just do it (no negotiation or cost sharing), the land is yours forever and the superior landlord can't change to one who's less amenable, etc.
I suppose this could fall under your: > happen to have a decent choice of apartments for sale
comment, but it's really more that the legal structures in the UK hugely favour owning a house. (I'm not really sure it could ever be different, an apartment is always going to be "closer to renting" because it's communal to a degree).
Likewise, don't assume that preferences are equally distributed among options.
In most demographics, and especially after having a family, the "apartment lifestyle" thing is in the minority.
> those that own property as of N years ago are permanent residents, and will never really sell their properties, so it's just full.
In theory, property taxes should nudge people. In California, those are severely capped via ballot initiative Prop 13. People that should be paying $20k a year in tax on a $1.8 million dollar home are paying perhaps $2k. Long term residents have won some sort of cosmic lottery that they probably would have cashed in on and left town with if not for Prop 13. Or, if they value the community and services, would have found a way to borrow against the property appreciation, instead of effectively defunding state and local government.
> No-one wants to live in a block of flats unless they're too poor to afford a house.
Some of this is driven in the US by tax policy. Owners get a variety of tax breaks renters do not. In effect there's a sorting process by which people who cannot afford a downpayment rent by necessity, and the well off who want to avoid poor people for as neighbors can buy a home. This effect of paying to buy "good" neighbors is self-perpetuating and reinforcing -- people might be okay with having one sketchy neighbor but not be okay being the only non-sketch. It's a classist (and often racist) attitude, but is probably a decent model of the american population.
We don't have property tax in the UK.
I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it were instituted at anything other than a token rate I'd leave.
If someone buys a home and lives in it, they should not have to care a single jot how it's valued externally. It is their home and their castle and they have every right to live in it.
The idea that, say, my grandmother should just get kicked out of her hometown that she's lived in forever, that she bloody _built_, because a bunch of kids decided they like her city is completely absurd.
Financialization needs to end somewhere. Let people earn their opt out.
The valuation of your flat could quadruple and the council tax would stay the same.
I think it makes sense. Council tax pays for amenities. The rent in London might be five times higher than $insert_northern_town but it doesn't cost five times as much for the bins to be taken out.
US states usually have percentage based against a variable basis.
I prefer the UK method, personally, but the US method that California uses is quite something to behold. It freezes your property tax to the date you bought your property except for a 1% change per year.
There's an upper band beyond which the tax rate is fixed regardless of how much the property cost in '91.
Also, see the above poster's comment for an example table:
https://www.cambridge.gov.uk/council-tax-bands-and-charges
A 200K (assessed in '91) property pays about 2.5x what a 40K (assessed in '91) property does. Not 5x.
Someone working at the Cambridge Science Park across Kings Hedges Road might be living in Kings Hedges area and pay GBP 1500/year to the local government. It's a substantial amount.
You could own a multi-million pound property in Kensington, and the sum of taxes you pay each year would be £2,246.14 [1]
[1] https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/council-tax/band-values-and-charges
Council tax pays for services like the roads and the bins being taken out.
Having an expensive house doesn't mean you use more of those.
(It increases a bit up to a cap, because you probably do use them more if you have more money, but it obviously doesn't linearly scale).
A flat in London might cost 5-10x a flat in the North, but both individuals use the bins and roads roughly the same amount so their council taxes are about the same.
I'm talking about _homes_. You know, where David took his first steps, or where the swing used to be in the garden, or whatever else.
I despise this abstraction, sorry. My grandmother's home in which she raised her family is not some abstract piece of "land" to be stolen from her because you think it meets some economic goal.
You know full well that this idea of future individuals being relegated to 'living in the country' is complete nonsense.
What you really mean is that everyone can't just pile in to the same ten or so 'alpha cities' and expect to just completely disregard those already living there.
Thats the trade-off that is happening right now, when people can make a decision 40 years ago and get to control scarce resources from that point until they die.
>You know full well that this idea of future individuals being relegated to 'living in the country' is complete nonsense.
I don't think that's complete nonsense at all. I live in the Boston area and the majority of people I know making over 6 figures either have roommates or a 1+ hour commute.
Grandma living in a detached home on a quarter acre of land in the city means that 20+ people can not live near jobs because of the apartment building that is not there.
It is a perfectly valid opinion to think that this is an acceptable trade-off, but to act like the trade-off is not happening is just sticking your head in the sand.
Additionally a land value tax is not "stealing" the home from anyone. It's accepting that there are scarce resources and there needs to be a pressure to use them in the most efficient manner. If you can provide the value to keep your home on it's own, then fine you get to live there. If you can't you get to sell your highly valued home and reap the benefits of that value. That is capitalism at it's core. If Grandma thinks she should be protected from economic forces and isn't voting for socialist policies to give similar protections to others, then that's just pulling up the ladder after you which is not a viewpoint I'd give any consideration to when I vote
You can hide it behind fancy words but what you want to do is force existing residents who own their homes out in the name of 'economic growth'.
I don't have to agree with that.
> when people can make a decision 40 years ago and get to control scarce resources from that point until they die.
Yes, that's what buying something is. I don't want to live in a world in which everything is simply rented. We should be helping people get _out_ of that, not dragging them in to it.
The older generation is strangling the subsequent ones, and their countries, because they refuse to change anything about their lives. This is forcing the younger generations to miss out on all the aspects of life that the older generations thought we're important and enjoyed in their youth.
When I hear a retire complain about proposed housing _and_ ask their 30 year old children why they haven't given them grandkids yet, all I can think is that brought that on themselves. They don't live on an island, and the choices they are making have downstream affects on everyone
But the theory on taxation of monopoly rents is quite well fleshed out and that kind of tax has a number of positive effects on society. The fact that most of California’s housing woes can be traced back to a policy that limits this kind of tax is telling and there’s no way I’d want to live anywhere without reasonable land tax policy. That said, taxes should be based on square footage and not assessed resale value to encourage high-density building.
Well, the council tax looks an awful lot like one, but if you insist.
> I'm frankly quite glad that we don't. If it were instituted at anything other than a token rate I'd leave.
Depends on what a 'token rate' is. Cities I've lived in have set it at around 1 percent a year, and is used to fund the emergency services, schools, roads and parks in the area. In most places in the US, that's a $1-2k annual expense. Houses around here, largely built in the 1950's, sell for around $1.4 million, and thus taxes would be around 15k a year. Complaining that you can't afford taxes on a million dollar home is perhaps the epitome of First World Problems. Moreover, higher taxation is simply one effect of high rents. Labor here is expensive; fast food joints here aggressively advertise help wanted signs at 15 dollars an hour. I can only imagine what in-home health care costs, and there's a neverending stream of interviews with public service workers who cannot afford to live near the communities they serve.
However, there is a second order effect -- if a fraction of the people who felt better off in Sacramento or anywhere else in the 1k tax regions moved out, prices in SF would fall. And if owners were more directly impacted by refusals to build high density housing, they'd probably be more in favor of new construction on average.
> The idea that, say, my grandmother should just get kicked out of her hometown that she's lived in forever, that she bloody _built_, because a bunch of kids decided they like her city is completely absurd.
Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy.
There's a post further down in which it's explained how CT is nothing like a property tax. It's levied on the occupier not the owner and it's not percentage based. It's ostensibly for services rendered e.g. bins taken out, roads etc.
Your home and all the homes in your town could quadruple in externally assessed value and the absolute amount paid would remain static because it's formulated in such a way that it's paid based on relative home value within an area (rather than absolute).
> Sounds a lot like you're asking for rent control for the wealthy.
I'm pretty much baffled by what you mean here.
My grandmother is not wealthy. Neither is my mother. Neither would they become wealthy if the town around them suddenly turned into an SF/London.
The external valuation of their home that they live in would increase which is a completely different matter entirely.
It's an injection of financialization into a situation where none exists. I won't be dragged in to that game, sorry.
I think it's just a misunderstanding. You're talking about a situation where your grandmother owns the place and he/she is talking about a situation where your grandmother rents the place.
It sounds like some US cities have a situation more like shared ownership, in which you can't actually own a home because there's no way to pay (or set aside) the full future stream of property taxes.
It seems bonkers to me because it would make settling down completely impossible, hence my comments about moving away to somewhere where homeownership exists.
In the place I already live (UK) we don't have that, so I'm not calling for any change.
In any case it seems that me (and people like me) moving out in this hypothetical situation of ownership being converted retroactively into rental gives you what you want anyway.
We wouldn’t humor a stock market investor in denial about his wealth; we shouldn’t humor a real estate investor. The preferential treatment of housing as an asset class is a big part of why it’s so inflated in the first place!
If someone doesn’t want to be accountable for their house’s appreciation, they can give up the right to benefit from it at sale. Capital gains and deferred property taxes coming due at sale is probably the fairest proposal - doesn’t force anyone out, doesn’t let them free ride either.
I don't mean to misquote you, and apologies if so, but you seem to have decided that homes should be rented and not owned.
If that's your viewpoint, fine. I don't agree with it at all, and I'll go and live somewhere in which ownership of property is permitted.
I wish you the best of luck with whatever you're trying to do in your corner of the world.
Owning a house while it appreciates is less socially useful than working or investing in productive businesses, and sometimes more lucrative. Why should it be taxed at a lower rate?
If it’s not an investment, what do you care about the return?
I appreciate that lots of people like suburbia, and I wish them well too. Only that government policy will also allow urbanism to thrive.
In the UK, real estate investors are taxed. A significant number of individuals here believe they should be taxed more.
A family or individual living in their single home (whether it be a house, apartment, shed, or whatever else) are not real estate investors. Very few people believe they should be paying taxes on their primary residence.
So, yes, a businessman, conglomerate, or just an 'accidental landlord' who owns a building and derives rent from it in perpetuity is taxed in a different way to someone who just lives in and owns their primary home; people want that to be the case, and for the most part it is. (We have our share of loopholes as every taxation system does).
Is it different in the US?
It feels like I'm missing something fundamentally obvious in our discussion here, so maybe that's it?
My larger point is that either a) your house is an investment, so your returns come with social responsibilities, or b) your house is not an investment, so you’re not entitled to returns beyond having a place to live. The current regime, where you can make tax-free millions for being in the right place at the right time, is not a good one.
I agree with this.
In the UK - as earlier stated, we don't have property tax. No capital gains tax is charged on disposal of a primary residence.
The CGT situation makes sense in the event that the entirety of the gain is re-invested in another home.
Otherwise, you end up in the absurd situation in which a person moving between two identical homes on the same street would take a loss of 20%, incentivising them to never move.
It might make sense to require that the proceeds of the sale be put towards another primary private residence (and have anything left over taxed).
It seems to me like that's not really your issue though.
> As a side effect, municipal tax revenues don’t scale with the now-inflated costs of provisioning municipal services.
This is a question of overall taxation, no? It's not relevant whether the money comes from a property tax on everyone, or an income tax on those that are of working age, or a general wealth tax, or corporation tax, or whatever else - it just needs to be paid for.
Again, I'm assuming here, but I think your argument is that increasing property taxes would decrease the cost of property.
It's pretty obvious that this is the case because it's effectively turning homeownership into a 'shared ownership' scenario whereby you pay rent to the state.
Nevertheless I agree with you, it is a pernicious wealth tax and should rightly be moved to a VAT or sales tax.
If the city puts police in the block the house is in, cleans the street, puts a bus, and a subway, maintains parks, etc etc, they are all being perpetually funded by taxes, that if the landlord is not paying, he is mooching off someone else.
It's just not linearly proportional to the value of the home with no cap, because that makes no sense.
Cleaning the street doesn't become more expensive because your house became more expensive. Same for almost every other council-run service.
In a very indirect sense, it might cost more to employ street cleaners eventually if rent increases within a 30min-1h radius, but that's not in any reasonable sense linearly proportional to the value of a home in a specific area.
It's very direct: the same house 100 miles away into the wilderness will not be worth nearly the same. Its construction/capital value might be more fix to the cost of materials + labor, but the value of the land is very much related to what services and other externalities affect it.
In any case I'd agree that the tax shouldnt be on the value of the house, but on the value of the land it would be much more representative of the externalities.
Yes, the externally assessed value of the house will vary depending on where it is.
The cost of public services apportioned to the house is not linearly correlated to its' externally assessed value.
If you move a suburban flat into the centre, slice it into the middle of a skyscraper say, it'd be worth way more, but it'd cost about the same to maintain the roads and take the bins out.
(Actually it'd probably cost less in the city, so in that particular case the public costs would be inversely proportional to value...)
Example: San francisco has an 11 billion tax revenue[1] It has 880.000 residents [2] It has 121 km2 [3] It has 345,811 Households [3] (note this is an old census, the number has probably gone up a bit)
11 billion / 880.000 = 12.500 U$S This means that every resident in the city would have to pay 1040U$S a month (including babies and elderly) just to pay for the city revenues.
11 billion / 121km ~= 91 million in expenditures per square km.
11 billion / 350k household ~= 31,500: each household has to pay 2625 a month just to maintain the city revenues.
Kind of impressive isnt it!
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/SF-s-budget-soar... [2] http://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/san-francisco-pop... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_San_Francisco#...
Presumably your grandmother isn't living entirely independent of society - still reliant on social services, police, NHS and so on. Most of these are locally funded and badly paid. Plus the private sector: shop workers etc. Do you think they should be paid enough to achieve homeownership themselves? Where should that come from?
The council tax capping system is ridiculous, especially in London. I would quite happily swap council tax+stamp duty for a realistic property tax. Preferably with a bit more national redistribution so we can tax mansions in Kensington to pay for buses in Burnley.
We've completely stopped building council homes for no apparent reason, for example. I'd pay more in taxation to support that - hell, if we did it properly and treated it like a New Deal-style thing I'd be proud to come along and help build. We owe it to people. The fact that there are massive fields everywhere that people aren't allowed to build on because a man with a gun says no is asinine.
We can make transport faster and better as well.
At some point I think the population of London needs to be limited somehow because having 20 million residents would make it hellish to navigate under any system. The central bits would turn into a gridlock of pedestrians.
> Do you think they should be paid enough to achieve homeownership themselves? Where should that come from?
I think this gets the directionality confused. If people agree to work for a low wage, the low wage is going to persist.
I think people should refuse to work jobs that don't pay enough to exist. Individually or collectively, doesn't matter.
Personally I don't understand how London's service industry works at all.
I'd have left yesterday if I felt my options were limited to working in the local supermarket. The wages are farcical - literally _funny_ - can't afford a studio flat within the entire M25.
Meanwhile, as you know well, there are cities <5 hours drive away where one can buy a terraced house with a garden on a single minimum wage.
If people refused these silly conditions, wages would rise, residents would pay a bit more for services and it'd all work out.
It's funny because this is a really common (probably the overwhelming) opinion in my hometown. London is bloody expensive, no-one understands why anyone would live there unless they're rich. It's only people who have the idea that they "must" live there regardless of resources that get into trouble.
Decades of Tory policy, that one. Councils were forced by central government to sell it off way below market value and prevented from using the resulting money from building more houses.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/aug/26/right-to-buy...
> The fact that there are massive fields everywhere that people aren't allowed to build on
Greenfield building is hugely unpopular with voters, especially Tory voters. Planning restrictions have popular support.
> We can make transport faster and better as well
I'd like to see that, but decades of privatisation have preferred "cheaper".
> I think people should refuse to work jobs that don't pay enough to exist. Individually or collectively, doesn't matter.
And how should they eat and live in the meantime? Refusing jobs will get you taken off JSA, and possibly sent on the unpaid work programme.
> Personally I don't understand how London's service industry works at all.
Overwhelmingly staffed by immigrants and children of immigrants, often living in cramped conditions.
> "must" live there regardless of resources
For a lot of people in the peripheral towns, it's the other way round: if you want to better yourself and get a professional job, that's where you've got to be. The networking effects are huge.
> I'd have left yesterday if I felt my options were limited to working in the local supermarket
Every day hundreds of people leave peripheral towns and head to London because that's the choice they face.
Yes, we're not building council homes because our political system is broken. That's what I mean by 'no apparent reason'. Laziness on my behalf, sorry.
Your JSA point is silly, you know I'm not suggesting people starve, please don't do that.
We need to solve centralization of everything in London, yes.
Exactly. This is what property taxes helped with. Taxes should be increased to keep houses out of the investment game. Once a house is an investment: it is rented out (increased each year), city councils vote no on all new housing,etc, --- it all gets nimby fast.
The weird thing about living in San Diego is that it's incredibly expensive to live here, but there are THOUSANDS of people here who don't work whatsoever. It feels a bit like a retirement community, except for the ultra-wealthy.
In London a lot of families own homes or have mortgages that are very small compared to current wages (so effectively owned if not quite yet).
They're only 'wealthy' because external observers are valuing their home at silly amounts. Generally they're of very modest means otherwise.
I think it's weird to call a family that bought a home 30 years ago in Inner London "ultra-wealthy".
It basically just shows how odd the financial system is that we're attempting to put values on family homes this way.
Incidentally this is the same reason why the Catholic Church is not rich. It looks like it if you value the land on which their churches sit at the development value they would fetch if sold... but running those churches is their primary purpose! So they could only realise that value by shutting down their only reason for existing.
Many homes in those areas are only occupied a portion of the year, by people with other homes elsewhere. Others are owned and rented out by family trusts.
I've talked to many people of mid-high means who are in or near retirement that have made such arrangements part of their financial and estate plans.
What exactly is full here? The warehouse isn't. The land is only full of warehouse skeleton.
There is abandoned property in Hunters Point but it’s radioactive.
It may have been true in the midst of suburban flight that only the desperate would live in urban conditions, but it isn’t any longer. Urbanism is the premium commodity now.
Obviously there are advantages and disadvantages of living in different _places_.
Replacing homes with apartments is not related to that.
If you could live in the exact same place, but with a house instead of in an apartment, it would be a fairly radical position to take to refuse that.
It might be nice to have a house anachronistically in the middle of a dense area, or right on the edge of one, but it’s not geometrically possible for many people to do that.
Most streets I've lived on have a mix of family homes, new build apartment blocks, weird split-up family homes that now house multiple individuals, etc.
Apparently (at least compared to the US) we're quite unique in mixing rich and poor in this way though.
That's already the way it plays out here as far as I can tell.
Young people with regular jobs live in single rooms in flatshares or their parents' homes (if they have that access).
In middle age I expect them to live in small flats whilst their parents lived in large homes.
Over longer time periods, quality of life will decrease across the board and most will be in worse accommodation than the previous generation.
The issue we're facing I think is more that this sort of centralization of productive work is unsustainable. You can't* just stuff the entire population of the UK into London, or the entire population of the US into SF, NY, etc. They'd be bloody awful places to live.
* well, you can. I don't think we should.
Software engineers, marketers and other folks with similar service jobs do not need to be in the same building as the rest of their team.
That'd fix a few issues right away:
1. It'd fix Silicon Valley's housing prices, since tech workers wouldn't be buying all the houses/apartments. This would remove a pool of people making hundreds of thousands a year from the equation, and ideally causing prices to drop down to an affordable value.
2. It'd mean the actual workers who need to live their work (teachers, nurses, retail staff, etc) would likely be able to afford more, since they wouldn't be competing with software engineers for the same properties).
3. It'd give people an incentive to move to smaller towns/cities/not end up crammed into a single area. Does that mean sprawl? Not necessarily, it could mean other large towns and cities in the UK and US could benefit from a higher population rather than the likes of London/New York/San Francisco sucking up new residents by the million.
4. And in future, maybe it could kill off the idea of immigration/emigration too, at least for the most part. The fact you have to live in a wealthy country to get a high paying job is one of the things that makes stuff like the H1B scheme so lucrative.
The idea employees have to be watched over in the same building like prisoners or school students is one of the reasons these house prices are so high and everything is becoming so centralised.
More realistically, tech workers will be able to live in cheaper cities a couple hours away (ie Sacramento) and commute only 1-2 days a week
In (parts of) China, for example, land is leased to private parties (20-year and 70-year terms), not owned. https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahsu/2017/03/21/good-news-fo...
So in short, I think a statement that London is full also needs to recognize the extent to which governments use property prices to boost popularity- and its also one of the reasons the UK economy is looking problematic - for far too long property rather than productive investment has sucked up spare cash.
In the UK we could basically fix this stuff overnight by just building council houses on a trivial amount of the green belt and bringing back the idea that everyone just gets a family home. It won't happen because we have a broken political system.
But I also think a major pressure relief valve would be somehow eliminating this idea that everyone has to live in SF/NYC/London/etc.
It just doesn't make sense on any level. We can't just have every part of the world outside of a few capital or capital-like cities turn into an economic wasteland.
Walk about in Central London on a weekday and tell me if you doubled the population that'd be fine and dandy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_blocks_in_Great_Britain
Few seem to want to live in high density housing beyond their 30s. As soon as families are being thought about thoughts turn to having safe places to play, quality of air and schools, thoughts of the logistics of pram, a couple of children, nappies and bottles being manoeuvred up and down 10 floors. It's bad enough doing that when the car is on the street in front of your house.
That's the point people are trying, to the extent their finances allow, de-aggregating themselves to a house in the suburbs or somewhere pleasant and rural.
Sure the schools may be nearer in a city, but they often come with a poor reputation, or the nearby ones are full so you have to travel just as far anyway. Air quality and neighbours aren't a problem of bad architecture either.
Perhaps if we went back and levelled the place and rebuilt with some of the values of pre-war times we could create high density housing that worked. We'd need local shops, services, transport hubs and schools. The very things that have been consolidating away from local hubs throughout the past 50 years.
The UK is already fairly urbanized. Basically everyone lives in or around a city. You could densify the cities if the residents actually want that.
What's being discussed here is not that though, it's the problem that everyone seems to want to go to alpha cities like London/SF/NYC and treats elsewhere as "inferior".
You can't just stuff the entire population of the UK in to London because it would be a hellscape regardless of how much you improve infrastructure.
Given that the trend goes that far back, it is not really strange that we see more of it now, when even fewer people are working the land.
I live in an apartment and wouldn't move to house even if I got it for free.
That's mostly due simply to the different environment where you find appartments and houses: almost by definition, the former has higher density.
And while I grew up in something like a suburb and can appreciate its advantages to some degree, it would be a sad day in my life when I started to value the comfort of a garden higher than the excitement a city has to offer: theatres, clubs, strange art events by the weirdo crowd this city (Berlin) currently attracts, far more choices for high-quality groceries, et. Plus it sometimes feels like a front-row seat to history.
It also helps that apartments are mostly in art deco buildings: heigh ceilings, wooden floors etc. Houses are either new new or (even worse) from the 50s/60s.
From my time in the US I remember the rest of the disadvantages: spending an hour commuting, where it takes me 10min on a bike now. Eating out is another 30min drive, and the restaurants, like everything else, look like airport lounges in the middle of a parking lot exhibition. Neighbours that call the police when they see anyone on the sidewalk, because such activity is unusual and suspicious...
What I could imagine at some point is a community sort of like the oldschool US towns that still exist here and there, namely a Main Street with a residential area of about a 1-mile radius around it. With a bit of luck (i. e. a few people with initiative) these communities can be lively enough, and the familiarity of a small community compensates for the loss of choice.
Perhaps not useful, but accurate. There was no way I could afford to stay in London when I lived there. I know several other people who left or are in the process of leaving for exactly that purpose. London is a playground for the rich and a struggle for everyone else.
Away from anecdotes, "social cleansing" is a byword for the fact that people are being priced out of London.
http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2017/09/14/social-cleansing-h...
People escaping high costs are typically moving to a place where they will probably have few roots and connections, so there will be little reason to stick around if costs rise again
I thought people are moving specifically because large cities are unliveable. The article actually cites a more lax regulatory and tax environment as one of the reasons for why people and businesses are moving.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/california_state_spendi...
You also missed the chicken/egg...high taxes a component of the high cost of living that causes people to move in the first place.
California's poverty rate has risen with the population...the poor are moving in and they are not impacted by most tax measures, so they have no reason to oppose them.
https://www.usgovernmentspending.com/spending_chart_2009_202...
Taxes are just one side of the same coin, the high cost of living is really just a density issue. Lots of high paying jobs, lots of Nimby building practices and little density and transit investment. Tokyo is a city of 20 million people yet is far more affordable and even has higher taxes.
California didn't build to support it's population. If these secondary cities make the same mistake, they too will be high cost/unlivable places.
Public Tram, Bus and Rail systems are obsolete because they need a permanent human driver (expensive, difficult to operate 24/7) or dedicated infrastructure (expensive). They cannot operate point to point or modify their route in response to demand. They cannot discriminate against who they accept (no female-only busses, or upper-class only busses, etc.)
What we should be looking at is what kind of changes to the physical road system do we need to accelerate autonomous vehicles - road/lane markings? Digital traffic signs? Inter-vehicle data transmission standards?
Autonomous private busses, with routes auto-calculated based on the start and end point that passengers enter via smartphone, will take cars off the road.
Cars off the road will speed up those busses, making them more attractive.
Etc.
Wouldn’t all the new scooter riders take up a lot of that real estate on the road?
How will the road operate with both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles sharing space?
[1] https://lao.ca.gov/laoecontax/article/detail/265
In the first case, I think it's likely that inequality will continue to increase across the U.S. and the median American will be worse off for it; i.e., there will be a positive feedback loop where winner cities take all.
In the second case, I think inequality will decrease, and the tech industry (and similar "big city" industries) can play to each region’s cultural strengths. I think this inter-city competition would be a positive effect and lead to accelerating innovation across a variety of different fields. Judging by recent Amazon/Google news though, I fear the first case is more likely to happen.
I suspect that this situation start to be common in any western/developed world. Perhaps the USA are a bit late since their cities are generally "newer" than EU so they are probably "less compressed"/with a lower mean density that allow more green spaces and generally a little bit better mean life quality (something like you do not need 10' to go from A to B + 20' to find a park place around B or it does not take 40' for 15Km trip in peek hours).