On the contrary: as a single-family homeowner, I'm being massively subsidized compared to the amount of city services and infrastructure I consume. (It could be worse: I could have a large lot in a car-dependent suburb instead of a small lot in a streetcar suburb and therefore be even more of a leech -- i.e., like those rich fucks you're talking about -- but still, I'm definitely not paying my fair share of taxes.)

If you want to know who's really getting ripped off, it's all the renters in dense apartments. Not only are they paying extra so their landlords can profit, they're paying even more because they're the ones funding the subsidy for single-family homeowners like me. Basically, I'm exploiting them via the skewed way property taxes are assessed. Thanks for funding my privileged lifestyle, people too poor/unluckly to be able to buy a house! 🤑

(But seriously, it really is very unfair and we need to reform the property tax code and, even more importantly, the zoning code.)

[–] FireRetardant@lemmy.world 7 points 3 months ago

It is so messed up how every part of our society is secretly tuned to make being poor trapped yet every rung up the ladder to being wealthy, the journey gets a little easier by hidden subsidies like this.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The problem is that property value of homes has nothing to do with cost of building out city services. In many areas the value of homes is going up much faster than the cost of maintaining the roads and services around them.

Property taxes should be tied to things like acreage, road access, zoning type, and the city's budget. Not the free market value of the home, which is unrelated.

Housing prices have gone up roughly double in the last 10 years, while inflation has only gone up 35%.

It is extremely unfair to single homeowners to be paying for the housing demand increase, and I say this as someone who's only able to rent. Those property taxes get passed right along to me through rent increases.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 4 points 3 months ago (1 children)

TL; DR: Just. Tax. Land!

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

I watched the entire linked Not Just Bikes video, but I only read the first few paragraphs of that article. Linking to a full article like that is like the opposite of TL;DR.

I think we can agree urban sprawl is a problem. It forces a cities resources to get spread thinner and thinner as things are built out, and like your link video stated, it leaches from the downtown areas that are self-sustaining.

In my opinion the taxes should exactly reflect the expenses such that it incentives more efficient land use. What that would actually look like from a legal sense, I'm not going to pretend I know enough to write.

[–] grue@lemmy.world 2 points 3 months ago

I only read the first few paragraphs of that article. Linking to a full article like that is like the opposite of TL;DR.

It's even worse than you realized: each word was a separate link. 😅

I did write this relatively-short comment about land value taxes yesterday though, if it helps:

No, [land value taxes are] not like property taxes.

The important difference is that when you tax only the land and not the value of the improvements on top, it doesn’t discourage improving the land to its highest and best use the way that property taxes do.

For example, downtown properties with surface parking lots on them (or similarly underdeveloped uses, like self-storage warehouses) ought to pay the same tax as the skyscrapers next door. That’s how you make it stop being profitable to build shitty surface parking lots and self-storage warehouses on prime real estate.

Ditto for building McMansions on 1-acre lots instead of bungalows on 1/9-acre lots (or better yet, townhouses or small apartment buildings) in neighborhoods just outside of downtown.