this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
1204 points (86.6% liked)
Fuck Cars
9817 readers
656 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.
Yeah fuck lawns too, they aren’t meant to exist
We can thank England for those damn things.
We used to be a great nation... Invading... Murdering... Stealing... Imposing grass deserts... Now we have left the EU, are implementing government spyware and have no plans to make anything better...
I don't remember what my point was, but England is shit and I don't want to be here anymore.
https://youtu.be/XQaMr3UHOWE
I don't know. They seem pretty natural in a lot of places.
I didn't plant my lawn. I don't water it. It has just always been there.
That might be true for you but the US uses 9 Billion gallons of water per day on residential irrigation. As of 2017 https://19january2017snapshot.epa.gov/www3/watersense/pubs/outdoor.html#
Of course you probably mow and trim. So still pretty unnatural. Natural Flora tends to look better even without obsessive maintenance. A robot mower was critical for me to actually not mind having to have a grass lawn.
Sucks for pollinators though....
We do keep a couple patches of wildflowers.
You just made my hoa froth at the mouth a little.
But you still need way more infrastructure for the Houses.
Yup, tons more parking and tons more road space per capita as well. Low-density sprawl just needs a lot more stuff per capita.
They should pay a significant land tax instead of leeching off the high-density dwellers.
Funny you say that as I'm the creator and mod of [email protected]
For others curious about land value taxes:
Further, it can't be passed on to tenants, both in economic theory and in observed practice, and even a milquetoast LVT -- such as in the Australian Capital Territory -- can have positive impacts:
At least give some kind of mention to Henry George for being the magnificent bastard that came up with this. His history is fascinating and most people don't know who he is because he pissed off all the major landowners (ivy league colleges) who blackballed even mention of his name.
A fellow georgist, I see! But yeah, the legacy section on his wikipedia page is absolutely insane, and yet I had never even heard of him before about 2 years ago (which of course led to me promptly becoming georgist). Not a whole lot of people learn about the guy and about georgism without swiftly becoming a georgist themselves lol.
Sounds like it could have a lot of loopholes like any tax scheme but as long as those are addressed, this looks like a reasonable proposal.
That's actually the beauty of LVT -- the government already knows who owns what land (the landowner has the deed), and land can't be hidden or offshored. You may try having shell companies, but the tax bill comes due regardless. The reason shell companies work for avoiding other taxes is because they can allow you to offshore your on-paper profits to tax havens. LVT doesn't tax you on profits, so it doesn't matter where the profits are on paper. Similar for income or sales taxes, income and sales can be done cash-only and hidden.
To somebody else’s point, how would this compare to the what single family home owners pay now?
Where I live we have about .09 acres of land our house sits on and we pay ~$3000/year.
You might live in a place which already has some form of land value tax. Although a key distinction is that LVT is a tax on just the value of the land, not the value of the entire property that includes buildings, landscaping, ect. ...
It really depends on where the land is as it's based on value. If you are talking about replacing property taxes with land value taxes typically it's just a rate on the value but in this case it's just the land value so a higher rate but only applies to land. If you could figure out the total land value in your neighbourhood you could figure it out.
As for who is affected, single family homes on the outskirts probably see a drop in taxes while those in the inner city and vacant plots see a large increase.
So it disincentivizes living in an urban setting an penalized fixed income people already in those homes?
Not necessarily the first as long as it's done in land efficient way and the second if they are unwilling to move but otherwise yes.
Oh boy! I guess I see why people are against it. Probably should come up with a better plan.
Yeah you aren't wrong there. Figuring our a way to placated those groups is required to get it to be implemented.
The people who will be impacted first will be people who own vacant lots and parking lots in and around downtowns. If you're concerned about people getting booted out of their homes, consider Estonia:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_value_tax
In general, LVT should increase overall housing supply, improve affordability, and can be used to reduce other taxes such as property, income, and sales taxes. Most serious proposals I have seen have been to replace property taxes with LVT. These factors should make it easier on average households generally, and also allow them more flexibility to downsize (once your kids have moved out, do you really need a jumbo house all to yourself?), rather than locking you into the only place you can afford.
That was one concern. Another is our specific situation. Our foundation square footage is 972, our lot is 3,991 in total, none of it yard, half is all wild growth and weed trees, the rest is clover we planted to replace the grass and support pollinators. Our property tax is $3,750 this year, our land value is $46,400. I understand the calculation would be different on LVT but if I’d end up paying more on an LVT scheme then I wouldn’t want to have it in place.
I’d be more in favor if the county determined it’s annual budget costs and then divided that by the total acreage of privately owned land and you paid the percentage equal to your total land value.
I may be misunderstanding but it reads like .09 acres I have may be assessed as more valuable because of where it is than .09 acres 20 miles away in Tre same state and county.
Seems like a good way to get a lot of retired folk to lose their property over taxes, as land value rises above their means
Sounds like they should sell their house - which has netted them a nice profit - and downsize. Or do a reverse mortgage.
And move where? Why have retired people (who are most likely on a fixed income and have paid off their home in some cases) to move from a home they've paid off to an apartment/living center with obscene monthly payments? Or introduce another ever rising tax on something they should have been able to age peacefully in without as much financial worry? That seems cruel. I'm no fan of boomers, but damn.
I feel like best plan here would be to impose steeper taxes on second-plus properties. You can have your primary residence, but every home after that accrues a higher and higher tax. Especially on LLCs.
If tax goes up, it's because the value of your asset has gone up. Either sell it or do a reverse mortgage. I have no pity for those profiting from the system, regardless of their age. Fuck you, Grandma, pay your taxes.
That's definitely part of it, and more important than taxes on primary residence. But we should do both.
I think we have that where I live, although after 20+ years of owning I still don’t really understand property taxes here.
Anyhow, the property tax has a basic definition but I believe you get a reduction in assessed value for primary residence. That effectively taxes second homes more
There won't be any other taxes for them to pay, so they will have more purchasing power. Chances are, they're still going to have the same place unless that retired guy decides to build a hotel or something on it.
The one on the left has no communal space. The one on the right does.
I don't really care. As a lifelong apartment dweller; I hate people and want nothing to do with them. Get me a house far away from civilisation and I'll be happy. Communal space, my arsehole.
This is the insanity of people who advocate for densified housing, IMO. I loathe apartments and attached dwellings. It's like a dystopian future where you can't own anything or have private space. If I never have to share a wall or floor with someone again, it will be too soon.
That's our dystopian, low-density present.
I've lived in 4 major cities including NYC, and several small cities. The small cities and green suburbs are light years better than the dense urban hellscapes, without exception. Apartment living is also universally awful. There's nothing desirable to me about what you idealize.
Don't bother. The regulars on this sub are totally out of touch with reality and normal people.
I guess if I really wanted to scream at a wall, I'd make a c/fuck-fuckcars. These people are beyond help, but I hope they grow out of it so I don't have to live in high density hell because infinite growth is just accepted as normal.
Yeah, they're welcome to go live in a box surrounded by crazy people - personally I'd rather be in a box six feel under than crammed in with them.
In this case, the communal space is a forest far from housing. You can avoid people by walking alone through the forest.
I think that's a better experience than walking around your backyard
I suppose since my country is very low population but very large I don't really see the problem. Everyone could have a house here and we'd still have plenty of room to space.
Sweden has a population of 10.5 million, ish, and an area of 447k square kilometres. Germany by contrast, has a population of around 80 million, and an area of 357k square kliometres.
That said, I believe low density can work just fine. You don't need highrises to improve population storage efficiency. Simple two-three story buildings work just fine too.
You could also lower the population, something modern society is managing just fine right now anyway. I personally really don't believe overpopulation is going to be a significant problem in the long run.
You may not run out of wildlands, but if everyone is in large enough houses, it becomes difficult to get to the wildlands (or anywhere else you need to go) without using a car. For various reasons, [email protected], is against designing cities around cars.
I agree. The problem comes when you have large houses with big yards. If you instead have rowhouses, you have plenty of density to avoid car dependency (if the city is designed properly).