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Originally Posted by GGG
It isn’t weaponizing taxation to charge people based on best use. It’s charging people based on the amount of revenue the city should be making from a given property.
At grade Private Parking lots downtown probably shouldn’t exist. If they were taxed at the rate of the developed property the land value of that land would be substantially less and the holding time between acquisition and development would be less. The city would also be realizing the income through taxation from parking rather than the land owner due to the high tax levels.
Things like golf courses would be much more fairly taxed on a best use model and would encourage them to land swap with outskirts of cities and allow densification.
Your listing of traits is people who probably are willing to pay to stay where they live and aren’t moving to this low density bungalow community. Given that they want to continue to use a scarce resource the taxation level should reflect the opportunity cost. It isn’t that there is no place to meat there needs, it’s that the place they currently are meets their needs. The cost of development without density is too high to replicate what they are looking for
Your proposed solution doesn’t solve the development challange. It’s still going to be a hodge podge of infills propping up as people choose to leave their homes for other housing.
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It is weaponization of taxation. You are trying to use taxes to force people out of their home or force businesses to sell their land. This would be extra problematic when you start applying it across the board. For example, how do you build affordable housing when your taxation strategy is to charge everyone for what their land could be?
Also, where does this strategy stop? You are suggesting that bungalows should be taxed as if they could be infills. But what if someone else thinks the lots could all be taxed as $15M mansions? And someone else thinks every lot should be taxed as if they are 50 story towers? This could quickly turn into a tool to ensure that only the rich people can buy land and everyone else can be their serfs.
It is a lot like deploying tariffs to try to change businesses from making things offshore but in the wrong hands tariffs can also be used to do some crazy stuff that harms everyone and funnels money from the people.
Either way, we should never use taxes as a weapon against people and a government should never try to force a citizen out of their home. If it does need to happen that the government needs to move someone out of their home, it should be a last resort and it should be done directly through a robust process with many eyes on it.
As for the corporations owning at grade parking lots downtown, I completely agree that it is crazy and needs to stop. If we are indeed in a housing crisis, those plots of land should be looked at as immediately density opportunities and the city should take action there before considering any act that impacts the people (blanket re-zoning).
We do not need a new tool for this though as the city already has a tool to deal with that: The
Expropriation Act. Through the expropriation act, the city can declare that the city needs that inner city land to build condo towers to combat the housing crisis. The landowner can get fair compensation for the land through the process and then the city can begin immediate development of the land.
In my opinion, this would be another situation where it would make more sense for the city itself to be in the business of building homes. Once they are expropriating land from one corporation, they shouldn't be sitting on it waiting for another corporation to step in and do the development. They should build it within the public sector, sell the homes (or rent them out if we need affordable rental housing), make money and then use that money to fund other land development.
By the way, thanks for the discussion, it is fun to work through these thoughts and refine them.