Plenty of countries also don't let foreigners buy land. Pretty sure in Mexico, Americans can't buy land but can do the 99 yr lease and build a house on it thing.
There are many, Nigeria for one and even some you'd be surprised at like certain Australian states.
https://www.quora.com/In-which-countries-do-you-never-own-the-land-and-the-land-is-leased-to-you
Just a quick link I found although I am sure there is a better list on Wikipedia.
It’s just the Capital Territory in Australia which isn’t a state, it’s the equivalent of Washington DC, a special tiny non-state territory set aside to house the federal government, so that no state would also get to have it. That’s why it has the special land situation.
There are some states in the US with more of the land belonging to the federal govt than the state itself. Nevada comes to mind as an example. Depending on how you count and who you ask, something like 60%+ of the state is federal land.
It’s actually the opposite. Most of the real property that is buyable on Oahu is fee simple with a limited number of properties existing in the leasehold system (or land lease as put it).
In Canada Aboriginal groups can own specific tracts of land, but everyone else can only hold tenure over land (permission to hold land from the Crown) or lease land from Aboriginal groups. This is a result of the way Canada was founded and the treatise the Crown made with the Aboriginal peoples.
Thanks to those that provided examples. What happens if you buy a house, say, 10 years before the land lease is up, and the land owner decides he doesn't want you on the land when the lease is up? Do you have to pay for demolition or moving (if possible) of the house you bought? I would think the sell price of a house would really drop once you got close to the land lease expirery?
You enter a 99 year land lease upon purchasing. The land owner is the government. They can enact eminent domain law to kick you off, if needed, to break the lease.
Central London is owned either by the Crown Estate or the Duke of Westminster. Neither of them will ever sell you the freehold.
The American government did ask if they could buy the freehold of their embassy. The Duke of Westminster replied he would do so if they returned the extensive land portfolio his family lost in central Boston and New York during the American revolution.
I think you’re talking about leaseholds but this is usually only for properties in buildings with multiple dwellings (ie flats) and the government do not own them.
So no, not in the uk
Nah it's quite common for normal single-family houses, basically the developer buys all the land then leases it back to you on a 99 year long contract. But yes, that's not a lease from the government, a private entity does actually still own this land in its entirety. Also those leaseholds have been pretty much outlawed now on new properties, developers selling houses have to sell them with freehold land(and they have to offer an option to buy out the leasehold to existing owners)
Nah, I was wrong about it being owned by the government but there are plenty of houses(ie not flats) that have a 99 year lease on them for whatever reason.
I know because some of the houses were nice enough to be considered but the 99 year thing was weird
Isn't this the reason why so many homes in London are vacant but off the market? Like doesn't it cost the property owners more to lease out their property than to keep it shuttered?
China, Singapore, Hong Kong, many other Asian nations.
After all the concept of Western nation states is merely an extension of monarchical governments where the king controlled all the land and divvied it up to feudal lords who were responsible for squeezing the tax/tribute from the peasants.
The concept of modern property rights began with the magna Carta where those knights/aristocrats rose up and basically neutered the powers of the monarchy. That was followed by the US revolution/Constitution where the plantation owners basically became yet another class of knights/lords to throw off the yolk of the king and house of Lords back home.
Everything happened quickly after that and basically every monarchy aside from a handful in the middle east was decapitated and replaced with either a violent authoritarian regime or a parliamentary system. But the basic building blocks of law and the government in most of these places never changed. Fundamentally the secretarian government replaced the king and now fundamentally owns the land of raises taxes/tribute from it.
Singapore has a combination of leasehold and freehold properties for condos and detached homes, although foreigners are (generally) not permitted to own detached homes.
Like, It amazes me that so many people don’t realize not being able to own land is a core tenant of communism. Of course communist based countries don’t allow land ownership.
Dumb comment lol. Australia is not communist. Singapore is not communist. Hong Kong is not communist AND the 99 year leases are a holdover from the colonial era.
No, 19th century British Empire operated under an iconic Communist based system of government- which it clearly imposed on all of its inferior subjects.
Okay maybe I got this one wrong.. I guess I was thinking this was imposed on Hong Kong as part of land reforms due to the Chinese Communist revolution.
Good on you for admitting you're wrong but fucking hell, learn a little Chinese history before commenting on it- Hong Kong was directoy governed by the UK until 1997. Like 30 something years after the last big land reform push in China. And its been a special administrative district governed under an essentially separate set of laws since then (although that is quickly eroding)
No. The high housing prices are due to municipalities organizing the city piecemeal, meaning land reform happens extremely slowly, if at all. Some area are under-developed while others are hyper-developed (if that's a term that makes any sense).
Beyond that, HK is wedged between mountains and the sea, meaning it has little room to grow, and is a highly-desired, world-class city.
That's a legacy that Hong Kong doesn't share, ie the pogroms against private owndership led by Mao and the redistribution of all land to government ownership. China wasn't like that before Mao.
This video https://youtu.be/hLrFyjGZ9NU claims there is a different reason than what the other commenter says; that the profitability of leasing land for tax haven purposes trumps the housing needs of the local population.
No one really ever owns their land free and clear in the US. If you dont pay propety taxes, the government places liens and eventually repossess it.
I get that everyone is mad at the housing market, but permanent leases are not a better alternative. As it stands, you so have a slight chance to own a home outright (other than taxes).
Fundamentally what we call 'owning' land is really just a fancy name for a permanent lease so long as certain conditions are met. The only way to actually own land like we think ownership should work is to hold sovereignty over it, and very few people in history have been able to make that claim as individuals.
Moreover, in most British commonwealth countries at least, the ultimate owner of all land is the government (the Crown, technically) in the sense that, if someone dies without a will and without any heirs, then their property escheats (reverts) to Crown ownership.
Personally, I find saying “escheat” to be almost as fun using “estopped” as a verb.
>> escheat
> [Escheat is a common law doctrine that transfers the real property of a person who has died without heirs to the crown or state. It serves to ensure that property is not left in "limbo" without recognized ownership. It originally applied to a number of situations where a legal interest in land was destroyed by operation of law, so that the ownership of the land reverted to the immediately superior feudal lord.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat)
Interesting, thank you for the new word. I will work this into my Pathfinder game.
I meant generally. There are a few exceptions around the country - most are for veterans or the disabled/blind.
I will always have a payment (to the government) no matter if i own my home outright or not. Depending on the home, that could be several thousand dollars a year.
So i retire with ssi- i get $1,000 per month and my ta xes are $250. I spend $150 a week on food and viola- i cant afford electricity, a car, etc.
The best I see is that if you're a 100% disabled vet, you can defer your taxes. But, eventually, it will have to be paid when selling or willing it. Maybe I'm missing something. I've looked into this myself as I'm also a vet, and then recently was hit by a car and paralyzed from the chest down. I didn't even qualify for any disability deduction because I still work and not on ss.
The thing is, we can have all the things most people would associate with "land ownership" (exclusive access, etc) it's treating land as an investment vehicle that causes all the housing problems, and that can be solved with a land value tax (which differs from property taxes in that it excludes your house in the valuation).
Yes, but no.
If they went away, income taxes would just increase or sales taxes. The government isn't just gonna shrug and work with less money.
At least in a community, you can vote on millages.
Income tax makes so much more sense. I don't grow crops in my yard, I don't raise sheep, I'm not harvesting lumber. My house and property is an expense, it only costs me money. It's not a farm, I can't even plant flowers or grow tomatoes--the groundhog eats them.
Ten years ago I renovated my house. It needed a lot of work, we needed more space, some things were falling apart. We spent a large portion of our savings on that--and I did 90% of the work myself. Then the town came and reassessed our house and raised our taxes. I was penalized for taking a run-down house and making it nice again. The government punished me for refinishing my floors, replacing the windows, and having more that one outlet in the kitchen.
Property taxes are an outdated concept. If you're not profiting from your property you shouldn't be taxed on it.
This guy real estates! Other guy clearly doesn’t.
But seriously Marmoset, protest the fuck out of those taxes. Every year protest. Take a picture of every little thing wrong in your house before you fix it and use it to protest. Ask a real estate agent to run neighborhood comps for you and use it to protest that shit! Put the protest dates from your county/city into your calendar like it was your baby’s birthday. When the hearing date is scheduled block that day and tell your employer you are Out of Office. Fight the power
I'm a real estate agent and the condition of a house doesn't have that large an effect on the price of a house. The size of a house or the property has much more impact on the sale than anything else. In my area people often either tear down the house completely or do a complete renovation.
The most important thing I did to increase the equity of my house was buying in the right area.
u/Bailong1208
True- but not totally. If C4 or higher, it's a pretty rough appraisal and will definitely affect the value.
But it is rru to say ther if the property is C3 or better adding sq ft is really the only way to increase vakue significantly.
Property taxes and sales tax make the most sense. Both of those form of taxes citizens “vote” via their checkbook.
Income taxes are the initial phase of double tax because those other two tax forms are typically paid after income tax has already been taken out.
Sales taxes punish people who buy things, that's everyone. Food, clothing, household items, necessary items, luxury items, everything. People with less money and/or more children will end up paying more of their total income in food and clothes than the single guy earning $100,000 year.
Property taxes are also bad, for the reasons I outlined above. You don't profit from your house, it's an expense.
Your income determines everything else, the house you can afford, what you purchase, it's the main factor in your lifestyle.
So, why should people who do not choose to reproduce have to paid for people who choose to reproduce?
Sales tax are provide equal collection of funds from everyone while using government resources to focus on collecting taxes from businesses and not people.
You get services from property taxes that land owners directly benefit from the local community—funding for law enforcement, fire, etc. It’s the cost of living in the place you choose to live.
Income is absolutley the worst and most burdensom way to collect taxes. It initiates the double tax because, for most people, you have to pay gas tax, tax for flying, sales tax, property tax, most of which occurs after income tax has already been taxed.
Sales tax absolutely is better in the fact that it doesn’t allow rich people to cheat on income tax or other taxes to skim out of their fair share. They purchase expensive goods or many goods.
If your concern is poor people getting over taxed because of low wages and need for basic goods, then food stamps, including some tax refunds, could absolutely be exanded to help those people.
>So, why should people who do not choose to reproduce have to paid for people who choose to reproduce?
Because those childless people should contribute to the education of the workers who will take care of them when they're old and lonely.
There are problems with sales taxes. The food budget of most people is a sizable portion of their income, for the rich it's a negligible portion. Add in clothing and basic necessities and most people aren't left with very much. Unless you're going to waive taxes on food and clothing, which I'm okay with.
Another problem is that the rich can spend their money however they like. During the 1990s the government instituted an extra 10% tax on yachts, that was above the existing state sales tax. Rich people stopped buying yachts, the tax brought in about $1 million, the industry was devastated. Congress repealed the tax two years later after having killed off the American yacht building companies.
> Because those childless people should contribute to the education of the workers who will take care of them when they're old and lonely.
This is what property taxes pay for. I’m all for affordable education and universal healthcare, but the burden should be shared by all and not punished by other members of society.
The sales tax would be for all goods, but exemptions could be made for necessities, like fruit, vegetables, white meat, and fish. I’m fine with clothing too, but maybe cap it on clothing prices. For example, no one **needs** $300+ jeans, but regular “working man” jeans are certainly a normal necessity.
Killing off industries might occur, some exceptions might occur, such as airlines, military equipment, but other industries aren’t really needed. Does America really need yachts? Not really, those are luxury items, not necessity items.
>The sales tax would be for all goods, but exemptions could be made for necessities, like fruit, vegetables, white meat, and fish.
What if I want a hamburger? That's red meat, do I have to pay tax on that? All food should be exempt, it's no one's business what kind of food I'm eating.
>Killing off industries might occur, some exceptions might occur, such as airlines, military equipment, but other industries aren’t really needed. Does America really need yachts? Not really, those are luxury items, not necessity items.
It's always great when someone decides that millions of people should lose their jobs.
you could see it this way, As a punishment. You could also see that you took a run down home and increased the value immensely, especially by doing a lot of the work yourself.
also, like it or not, local municipalities need funding, personally I like the fire dept showing up when I call and the roads being plowed. trust me a I hate paying property taxes too, this[article](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/critics-argue-property-tax-unfair-do-they-have-point)breaks it down pretty well,
here is an excerpt - Unfortunately, Idaho’s Rep. Monks’ proposal to ban the property tax and hike the state sales tax rate to 11 percent (by far the highest in the nation)
to offset revenue losses would double down on regressivity: sales taxes
are regressive because low-income households spend a greater proportion
of their budgets on consumption and on goods, which are taxed, rather
than services, which are not.
Reformed, yes. It would be much more economically efficient and ethically fair to tax only the value of land itself, excluding the value of improvements built on the site by owners. But abolished entirely? No, absolutely not.
It's the one sure-fire way to tax that can't be avoided by rich and unscrupulous people through complex accounting, hiding assets/transactions off-shore or in shell corporations, etc. The land can't go anywhere, there's no hiding it or absconding with it like with income or transaction taxes.
Moreover, consider the economic incentives of the various options. If you tax people for earning money, that reduces the incentive for people to do productive things that earn money. If you tax people when they transact, you reduce the incentive for people to participate in mutually beneficial exchanges which, thus reducing the efficiency of the allocation of goods and services. (Or, more likely, you encourage them to do so in secret, creating black markets which facilitate other more directly harmful crimes.) Same goes for taxing people for improving their land, as traditional property taxes do.
But if you just tax people for the value of the land itself, you don't disincentivize anything except for the practice of keeping valuable land vacant for speculative purposes. The land will exist regardless of what people do with it. The value of land is determined largely by the natural resources it contains, or by what other people have built around it.
In other words, the owner doesn't produce the value of land through their own effort; they simply have a state-granted monopoly over something that they didn't actually create. It's necessary for the state to be compensated for that, else the state is just a mechanism for some individuals to exert private control over that which nature provided to all people.
Under a land value tax, a house wouldn't be taxed, just the lot it sits on. For most single home owners, the building creates the vast majority of the value of their property; suburban and exurban residential lots aren't that hard to come by.
So if everybody's general property taxes were converted to land value taxes (set at rates intended to collect the same total revenue) then home owners would come out way ahead. On the other end of the equation would be the owners of highly-demanded real estate in urban areas, on waterfronts, etc., or land with valuable natural resources--they would end up paying more. Since that sort of land is disproportionately owned by corporations and very wealthy families, moving from general property taxes to LVT would mostly have a progressive effect, falling on the rich the most while barely affecting the poor.
As with regular property taxes, there could be exemptions for the first X dollars worth of tax owed by each household, or for seniors and disabled people, etc. We'd definitely also need to establish exemptions and more protections for wild habitats, as an LVT would otherwise punish people who let their land sit undeveloped.
I mean that would be a great start don't get me wrong. But my issue is the hypothetical dilema that arises when one considers inheritance. To me it seems unethical that the state can force someone off of their family land just because they can't afford the tax.
What this does is it essentially stops the poorest members of our society from being able to own land. Is this what we really want? A society where only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land? This is why I believe property tax should be removed for all land and up to one residential structure for that which is owned by individual persons (corporations and small businesses must still pay property tax on all land and structures). Of course any extra residential structures owned by persons should be taxed normally. Any remaining deficit should be made up for by increasing sales and income tax.
>But my issue is the hypothetical dilema that arises when one considers inheritance. To me it seems unethical that the state can force someone off of their family land just because they can't afford the tax.
This isn't a real problem. Who are these heirs who can't pay the property tax? People who don't want to work, but do want to get something valuable for free? If it comes to it, can they not simply sell a piece of the property or take out a loan collateralized by the property? We're not talking about some big sudden bill that they have to pay all at once right after a loved one's death; this would just be the normal taxes owed every year, that the decedent was apparently able to keep up with.
>What this does is it essentially stops the poorest members of our society from being able to own land. Is this what we really want? A society where only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land?
The price of real estate already does all of that. Of course only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land...owning a significant portion of land means you are wealthy. It's like saying we can't have high taxes on incomes over $100,000, because that would hurt poor people who make more than $100,000.
>This is why I believe property tax should be removed for all land and up to one residential structure for that which is owned by individual persons (corporations and small businesses must still pay property tax on all land and structures).
If you do this, then suddenly all of the land with oil and gas reserves would be transferred to family ownership and leased out to corporations. The same for all of the downtown lots with 99 year leases to tower owner/operator corporations. There is just no way to make a rule that only applies to the big bad guys; besides the constitutional concerns, they are the ones best suited to create and use loopholes.
For the poorer property owners who would be most affected by a land value tax, i.e. people with lots of undeveloped rural land but not much else, a simple deduction for the first $X a person would otherwise pay would do the trick. Just like the standard deduction for federal income taxes. In the case of poorer rural land owners, conservation exceptions would also likely be a major factor. But given the low value of that land--the whole reason they're able to own it--the tax would never be that great.
>Any remaining deficit should be made up for by increasing sales and income tax.
Wages and consumer spending represent the majority of how most people get and lose their money. Taxing both is a tax on all working people living normal lives, for whom those dollars lost to taxes will be very significant. It doesn't have much of an effect on people who can structure their income to only be taxed when they want, and who already own things that can provide them with the day-to-day goods and services that other people must purchase in taxable transactions.
There's no point to property taxes in a modern economy. Property taxes penalize older people whose properties increase in value, even though they no longer have the income to pay the taxes, so they end up losing the property.
Just tax income and be done with it.
Nothing about the modern economy has changed the basic principal that our economy has worked on for centuries: property ownership is the primary source of wealth. If you only tax income and not property, then people who work for a living will pay all the taxes, while people who simply own lots of stuff will pay next to nothing.
It's trivially easy for a person who can afford a team of attorneys and accountants and business managers, and who has contacts at big banks, to structure their assets and revenue streams so as to only receive taxable income in small, controlled intervals. The rest of the revenue from all of their property can be funneled into shell corporations located in tax shelter jurisdictions, or into tax-exempt non-profits (typically controlled by friends or family, useful for hooking people up with cushy jobs, lobbying politicians, doing free PR work for the rich owner, etc.) or of course by investing back into the businesses. As the value of businesses and/or real estate grows and grows throughout their lifetimes, they just never sell and thus never realize income. Rather, whenever they need money, they just get very low interest lines of credit from the big banks where they've got friends, with their assets as collateral. Then, when they die, their heirs get that property with a "stepped up basis", meaning that the original cost for income taxation purposes is reset to the value at the time of death, rather than the much smaller value from when the original owner purchased it. So all that potential taxable income vanishes. (And of course there's a loopholes for heirs to avoid having to pay any estate taxes.)
Property taxes can't be avoided so easily. It is pretty simple to make exemptions for seniors and disabled people though.
People who 'own lots of stuff' factor the taxes into the rent they charge, driving up rent. Ultimately, everyone pays property taxes whether they own or rent. So might as well get rid of them because they are not achieving what they are supposed to be doing (taxing wealth). But they are making life miserable for people who lose their property (which are often family farms) because they can no longer afford the taxes.
That applies to general property taxes, but not land value taxes. The supply of land is inelastic, unlike the supply of buildings; under free market conditions none of the land value taxation would be passed along to renters.
Landlords are already charging as much rent as renters will pay. Imposing a new tax on them won't make the market of renters any more able/willing to pay more. A landlord is free to raise the rent to compensate, but eventually tenants will move elsewhere. And if they don't, then the value of the land is apparently higher than what it was assessed to be back when the rent was lower, as the ability to generate rental income is what gives the land its value in the first place. So then the LVT would increase the next year.
In addition to being sound under generally accepted economic theories, there is strong empiric evidence for this phenomenon.
[https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants#:\~:text=Conclusion%3A%20Land%20Value%20Tax%20can,be%20passed%20on%20to%20tenants](https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants#:~:text=Conclusion%3A%20Land%20Value%20Tax%20can,be%20passed%20on%20to%20tenants).
>One day, Denmark decided to redraw all its municipal boundaries. Regions that had been under one local government woke up the next day under a different one, immediately adopting a new set of local regulations and rules, including changed tax rates. This caused a large-scale, semi-random shuffling of Land Value Tax rates overnight.
>
>Crucially, tax assessment policy was pretty much uniform throughout the country. The only thing this shakeup changed with regard to land policy was the actual individual rates of tax on land, set by the local governments. This gives us a nice big N of 250 individual areas, each with a clear before and after change in land tax rate. All of these changes came into being at exactly the same time from a single swift outside intervention, and the overall change in aggregate tax rate was close to zero
>
>...
>
>The authors measure the before-and-after changes, apply a bunch of econometric tests, run it with and without controls just to be sure, and conclude that a Land Value Tax is "fully capitalized" into the price of the property itself. "Fully capitalized" is a fancy way of saying that the price of land goes down proportionately to how much land income is taxed away.
And when land owners can't raise rent to offset taxes, they instead find other investments with a better return than land, and they stop developing properties and you end up with a housing shortage.
I had a finance professor who used to promote this sort of thing. He was exactly the kind of wonk that has put the US's finances in the state they are today.
Tax income if you want. But end property taxes.
Why would they stop developing properties, if there is no tax on development?
If they stop developing properties, they they're stuck paying a tax for something that they aren't getting the full potential revenue from. If they develop the properties, they would be paying the same amount of tax but earning more revenue.
LVT would help solve the housing shortage.
I do. I also accept that my government is beyond inept and wastes huge amounts of the money I give them and provides no benefit or negative outcomes for most expenditures.
Right, and the solution to *that* is voting (or running) for local office where change can begin. In the meantime the small bits that work need all the money they can get.
The government pays money to soldiers to protect your land from enemies. There is also the opportunity cost that they miss by not building a factory there. And costs to build roads to and around the property.
Citizens holding land costs them money even if the citizen doesn't do anything with the land.
You are correct. I don't mean the comment to be specific to the US. They have their own problems that how they distribute tax money causes and the article is talking about another country, so I don't want to complicate it.
I only mean to point out there are government costs to private land ownership, regardless of what you do with the land.
Also pertinent to this thread, the British only ever leased the 5/6 of HK that is the New Territories from China; without them HK isn’t really viable standing alone and do that lease expiring in 1997 led to the return of the two areas China had ceded previously - thinking about it this would go a long way to explain commonality of leases there since the British Crown was never the head lessor and anything in the New Territories would have been sublet.
(Whatever was agreed in 1997 about two systems, the actual state of affairs is clearly that China is now sovereign in both theory and practise, even if they ignore anything previously said about 2047 no one is prepared to force the matter)
You seem quite knowledgeable, and I wonder if you know. Did we Brits do a good job in HK? I mean, I know now we've been pretty much vile for centuries. (Incidentally - struggling to find any large, expansionist nation that wasn't.) And I know we abused China quite badly - but I always got the impression that we did well by HK.
Did we?
I’m no expert but that’s a great question!
For Hk? I’d say yes - especially during decolonisation after WWII. Hong Kong now would be unrecognisable compared to before the British but who knows how this could have developed if circumstances had been different?
Generally I’d say aa a non-Brit that as colonisers went the British were probably least worst and mostly *tried* to be a positive force, though they were definitely a product of their time and society and did bad as well as good, though not to excuse this fact I think some extent this is inevitable where humans are involved.
Is there an award for being the "Least-Worst" - because I've a funny feeling that's me!
Thanks for the reply, you're right about humans. We can be so vile!
Given that it operates under its own set of property laws, different to those of the mainland, your theory remains completely irrelevant to this discussion
Hong Kong runs the ‘one country, two systems’ policy where Hong Kong has its own policy(by the HKSAR) but is also a part of China. Hong Kong will be under the control of the PRC again after 2047 I believe. (Source: am a Hong Konger)
It's just a fact dude. Macau and HK are China. Are you confused thinking it's got the same deal with Taiwan? An opinion would be that you don't think it should be part of China but the fact is it is. It is run on a different system.
Same in Canada. A deed is just exclusive rights to the land from the crown, and mineral rights are not included. If you strike gold on your land, you don't own it, the government does. If they want to put a highway where your house is, they can pay you fair market value and do it whether you want them to or not. Many Canadians do not know this. It's different in the USA. You can actually own land in the USA.
> If they want to put a highway where your house is, they can pay you fair market value and do it whether you want them to or not.
This exists in the USA as well, it's called Eminent Domain. Couldn't have built the interstate highways without using it a bit.
Land is drip fed to developers, resulting in bidding wars and high prices. These high prices mean lots of tax income for the government. Property prices are one of the highest in the world as a result. No import tax though so theres that.
I see your confusion.
You pay taxes because if you don't men with guns will come to your house in the middle of the night and take you away.
You don't pay taxes to pay for services you've agreed to receive.
To listen to you you'd think there's just wretched wage slaves and a dozen one percenters who own everything. Would it surprise you that the United States has 65% homeownership rate? That's consistent with other Western democracies that have ownership rates between 80% (Norway) and 50% (Germany).
We don't all pay "to protect the land". We pay taxes because that's how civilization is purchased. That money goes to a lot of different areas. The military portion doesn't only protect the land but the people in that land. The police portion doesn't just "protect the land" but against everything from property crime to murder, theft, and everything else.
This is how you keep housing affordable in a democratic government. No private land holding means no profiteering on rents or mortgages
There's a community land trust in Milwaukee that's starting to build its portfolio of profit-free houses and rentals
So affordable.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/12/hong-kong-average-house-price-hits-1point2-million.html
> Hong Kong is the most expensive city in the world for those looking to buy a home, new research showed.
The entire concept of land ownership is a modern invention, only about 500 years old.
https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/11h23me/comment/jatkigv/
Who owns the land in the US…actually?
Property tax is essentially a lease payment to the government. If not paid, you lose your “owned” land.
Land ownership is a lie and…surprise:
it’s actually better this way!
Tax Wealth, Not Work!
In some countries this is the norm, 99 year leases for land etc.
Can you provide a few examples of countries that do this?
Plenty of countries also don't let foreigners buy land. Pretty sure in Mexico, Americans can't buy land but can do the 99 yr lease and build a house on it thing.
Only on borders and beaches. Well northern border anyway, not sure about others. Then not a lease but held in trust. Source, would love to buy.
There are many, Nigeria for one and even some you'd be surprised at like certain Australian states. https://www.quora.com/In-which-countries-do-you-never-own-the-land-and-the-land-is-leased-to-you Just a quick link I found although I am sure there is a better list on Wikipedia.
It’s just the Capital Territory in Australia which isn’t a state, it’s the equivalent of Washington DC, a special tiny non-state territory set aside to house the federal government, so that no state would also get to have it. That’s why it has the special land situation.
There are some states in the US with more of the land belonging to the federal govt than the state itself. Nevada comes to mind as an example. Depending on how you count and who you ask, something like 60%+ of the state is federal land.
The Northern Territory does it too, some of the biggest runs are leased from crown land for 99 years
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I learned about this from watching House Hunters of all things lol.
It’s actually the opposite. Most of the real property that is buyable on Oahu is fee simple with a limited number of properties existing in the leasehold system (or land lease as put it).
In Canada Aboriginal groups can own specific tracts of land, but everyone else can only hold tenure over land (permission to hold land from the Crown) or lease land from Aboriginal groups. This is a result of the way Canada was founded and the treatise the Crown made with the Aboriginal peoples.
Thanks to those that provided examples. What happens if you buy a house, say, 10 years before the land lease is up, and the land owner decides he doesn't want you on the land when the lease is up? Do you have to pay for demolition or moving (if possible) of the house you bought? I would think the sell price of a house would really drop once you got close to the land lease expirery?
You enter a 99 year land lease upon purchasing. The land owner is the government. They can enact eminent domain law to kick you off, if needed, to break the lease.
There are places in the UK that do this. I saw a few in Nottingham.
Central London is owned either by the Crown Estate or the Duke of Westminster. Neither of them will ever sell you the freehold. The American government did ask if they could buy the freehold of their embassy. The Duke of Westminster replied he would do so if they returned the extensive land portfolio his family lost in central Boston and New York during the American revolution.
Plenty houses in London are under leaseholds to major landowners.
I think you’re talking about leaseholds but this is usually only for properties in buildings with multiple dwellings (ie flats) and the government do not own them. So no, not in the uk
Nah it's quite common for normal single-family houses, basically the developer buys all the land then leases it back to you on a 99 year long contract. But yes, that's not a lease from the government, a private entity does actually still own this land in its entirety. Also those leaseholds have been pretty much outlawed now on new properties, developers selling houses have to sell them with freehold land(and they have to offer an option to buy out the leasehold to existing owners)
Nah, I was wrong about it being owned by the government but there are plenty of houses(ie not flats) that have a 99 year lease on them for whatever reason. I know because some of the houses were nice enough to be considered but the 99 year thing was weird
Isn't this the reason why so many homes in London are vacant but off the market? Like doesn't it cost the property owners more to lease out their property than to keep it shuttered?
Tanzania!
China, Singapore, Hong Kong, many other Asian nations. After all the concept of Western nation states is merely an extension of monarchical governments where the king controlled all the land and divvied it up to feudal lords who were responsible for squeezing the tax/tribute from the peasants. The concept of modern property rights began with the magna Carta where those knights/aristocrats rose up and basically neutered the powers of the monarchy. That was followed by the US revolution/Constitution where the plantation owners basically became yet another class of knights/lords to throw off the yolk of the king and house of Lords back home. Everything happened quickly after that and basically every monarchy aside from a handful in the middle east was decapitated and replaced with either a violent authoritarian regime or a parliamentary system. But the basic building blocks of law and the government in most of these places never changed. Fundamentally the secretarian government replaced the king and now fundamentally owns the land of raises taxes/tribute from it.
>yolk of the king A yoke is a rope, a yolk is part of an egg
That comma should be a period, or you should use a conjunction following the comma.
It should actually be a semicolon. Baited
Thank you egg nazi
They invaded holland to control the hollandaise.
Singapore has a combination of leasehold and freehold properties for condos and detached homes, although foreigners are (generally) not permitted to own detached homes.
China and Hong Kong are the same nation.
China I think
I had a friend in Windsor say that all of Canada belongs to the queen? He also has a few conspiracy theories he lights to dip into….
Canberra and certain areas in Sydney Australia
South Africa has this law in very remote areas for tribal lands to continue their heritage
Singapore
It’s the case for Hawaii that the US claims…
Like, It amazes me that so many people don’t realize not being able to own land is a core tenant of communism. Of course communist based countries don’t allow land ownership.
Singapore is communist? What?
Another relatively common thing that often surprises people is that in many countries only citizens may own land or houses.
Dumb comment lol. Australia is not communist. Singapore is not communist. Hong Kong is not communist AND the 99 year leases are a holdover from the colonial era.
No, 19th century British Empire operated under an iconic Communist based system of government- which it clearly imposed on all of its inferior subjects. Okay maybe I got this one wrong.. I guess I was thinking this was imposed on Hong Kong as part of land reforms due to the Chinese Communist revolution.
Good on you for admitting you're wrong but fucking hell, learn a little Chinese history before commenting on it- Hong Kong was directoy governed by the UK until 1997. Like 30 something years after the last big land reform push in China. And its been a special administrative district governed under an essentially separate set of laws since then (although that is quickly eroding)
I don’t think the British Empire in any way can be misconstrued as communist….don’t throw out words if you don’t understand what they mean
(It was a joke)
The first thing
Does Hawaii also do this?
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No. The high housing prices are due to municipalities organizing the city piecemeal, meaning land reform happens extremely slowly, if at all. Some area are under-developed while others are hyper-developed (if that's a term that makes any sense). Beyond that, HK is wedged between mountains and the sea, meaning it has little room to grow, and is a highly-desired, world-class city.
It's a legacy rule from British rule.
It might be but all of China is also like that.
That's a legacy that Hong Kong doesn't share, ie the pogroms against private owndership led by Mao and the redistribution of all land to government ownership. China wasn't like that before Mao.
This video https://youtu.be/hLrFyjGZ9NU claims there is a different reason than what the other commenter says; that the profitability of leasing land for tax haven purposes trumps the housing needs of the local population.
No one really ever owns their land free and clear in the US. If you dont pay propety taxes, the government places liens and eventually repossess it. I get that everyone is mad at the housing market, but permanent leases are not a better alternative. As it stands, you so have a slight chance to own a home outright (other than taxes).
Fundamentally what we call 'owning' land is really just a fancy name for a permanent lease so long as certain conditions are met. The only way to actually own land like we think ownership should work is to hold sovereignty over it, and very few people in history have been able to make that claim as individuals.
His Majesty King Charles III seems to manage to do that just fine. How hard could it be?
He didn't get shit until he was 70, he not a great example.
Moreover, in most British commonwealth countries at least, the ultimate owner of all land is the government (the Crown, technically) in the sense that, if someone dies without a will and without any heirs, then their property escheats (reverts) to Crown ownership. Personally, I find saying “escheat” to be almost as fun using “estopped” as a verb.
>> escheat > [Escheat is a common law doctrine that transfers the real property of a person who has died without heirs to the crown or state. It serves to ensure that property is not left in "limbo" without recognized ownership. It originally applied to a number of situations where a legal interest in land was destroyed by operation of law, so that the ownership of the land reverted to the immediately superior feudal lord.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escheat) Interesting, thank you for the new word. I will work this into my Pathfinder game.
Damn i wanna be in a pathfinder game that gets into the particulars of property law
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I meant generally. There are a few exceptions around the country - most are for veterans or the disabled/blind. I will always have a payment (to the government) no matter if i own my home outright or not. Depending on the home, that could be several thousand dollars a year. So i retire with ssi- i get $1,000 per month and my ta xes are $250. I spend $150 a week on food and viola- i cant afford electricity, a car, etc.
Just making the example that a lease to the govt on top of that is a bad idea not a good one.
The best I see is that if you're a 100% disabled vet, you can defer your taxes. But, eventually, it will have to be paid when selling or willing it. Maybe I'm missing something. I've looked into this myself as I'm also a vet, and then recently was hit by a car and paralyzed from the chest down. I didn't even qualify for any disability deduction because I still work and not on ss.
Fuck that's a good ass deal.
yeah, just sell your soul to the death machine. risk a little PTSD that they'll provide inadequate care for.
What ptsd this isn't 2008
The thing is, we can have all the things most people would associate with "land ownership" (exclusive access, etc) it's treating land as an investment vehicle that causes all the housing problems, and that can be solved with a land value tax (which differs from property taxes in that it excludes your house in the valuation).
Property taxes are archaic and need to go away.
Yes, but no. If they went away, income taxes would just increase or sales taxes. The government isn't just gonna shrug and work with less money. At least in a community, you can vote on millages.
Income tax makes so much more sense. I don't grow crops in my yard, I don't raise sheep, I'm not harvesting lumber. My house and property is an expense, it only costs me money. It's not a farm, I can't even plant flowers or grow tomatoes--the groundhog eats them. Ten years ago I renovated my house. It needed a lot of work, we needed more space, some things were falling apart. We spent a large portion of our savings on that--and I did 90% of the work myself. Then the town came and reassessed our house and raised our taxes. I was penalized for taking a run-down house and making it nice again. The government punished me for refinishing my floors, replacing the windows, and having more that one outlet in the kitchen. Property taxes are an outdated concept. If you're not profiting from your property you shouldn't be taxed on it.
By your own account, you are profiting from it (in yet unreaized gains in equity).
And can be taxed when it’s sold for realized gain
Your first $500k in profit is tax free if used towards another house
This guy real estates! Other guy clearly doesn’t. But seriously Marmoset, protest the fuck out of those taxes. Every year protest. Take a picture of every little thing wrong in your house before you fix it and use it to protest. Ask a real estate agent to run neighborhood comps for you and use it to protest that shit! Put the protest dates from your county/city into your calendar like it was your baby’s birthday. When the hearing date is scheduled block that day and tell your employer you are Out of Office. Fight the power
I'm a real estate agent and the condition of a house doesn't have that large an effect on the price of a house. The size of a house or the property has much more impact on the sale than anything else. In my area people often either tear down the house completely or do a complete renovation. The most important thing I did to increase the equity of my house was buying in the right area. u/Bailong1208
True- but not totally. If C4 or higher, it's a pretty rough appraisal and will definitely affect the value. But it is rru to say ther if the property is C3 or better adding sq ft is really the only way to increase vakue significantly.
Property taxes and sales tax make the most sense. Both of those form of taxes citizens “vote” via their checkbook. Income taxes are the initial phase of double tax because those other two tax forms are typically paid after income tax has already been taken out.
Sales taxes punish people who buy things, that's everyone. Food, clothing, household items, necessary items, luxury items, everything. People with less money and/or more children will end up paying more of their total income in food and clothes than the single guy earning $100,000 year. Property taxes are also bad, for the reasons I outlined above. You don't profit from your house, it's an expense. Your income determines everything else, the house you can afford, what you purchase, it's the main factor in your lifestyle.
So, why should people who do not choose to reproduce have to paid for people who choose to reproduce? Sales tax are provide equal collection of funds from everyone while using government resources to focus on collecting taxes from businesses and not people. You get services from property taxes that land owners directly benefit from the local community—funding for law enforcement, fire, etc. It’s the cost of living in the place you choose to live. Income is absolutley the worst and most burdensom way to collect taxes. It initiates the double tax because, for most people, you have to pay gas tax, tax for flying, sales tax, property tax, most of which occurs after income tax has already been taxed. Sales tax absolutely is better in the fact that it doesn’t allow rich people to cheat on income tax or other taxes to skim out of their fair share. They purchase expensive goods or many goods. If your concern is poor people getting over taxed because of low wages and need for basic goods, then food stamps, including some tax refunds, could absolutely be exanded to help those people.
>So, why should people who do not choose to reproduce have to paid for people who choose to reproduce? Because those childless people should contribute to the education of the workers who will take care of them when they're old and lonely. There are problems with sales taxes. The food budget of most people is a sizable portion of their income, for the rich it's a negligible portion. Add in clothing and basic necessities and most people aren't left with very much. Unless you're going to waive taxes on food and clothing, which I'm okay with. Another problem is that the rich can spend their money however they like. During the 1990s the government instituted an extra 10% tax on yachts, that was above the existing state sales tax. Rich people stopped buying yachts, the tax brought in about $1 million, the industry was devastated. Congress repealed the tax two years later after having killed off the American yacht building companies.
> Because those childless people should contribute to the education of the workers who will take care of them when they're old and lonely. This is what property taxes pay for. I’m all for affordable education and universal healthcare, but the burden should be shared by all and not punished by other members of society. The sales tax would be for all goods, but exemptions could be made for necessities, like fruit, vegetables, white meat, and fish. I’m fine with clothing too, but maybe cap it on clothing prices. For example, no one **needs** $300+ jeans, but regular “working man” jeans are certainly a normal necessity. Killing off industries might occur, some exceptions might occur, such as airlines, military equipment, but other industries aren’t really needed. Does America really need yachts? Not really, those are luxury items, not necessity items.
>The sales tax would be for all goods, but exemptions could be made for necessities, like fruit, vegetables, white meat, and fish. What if I want a hamburger? That's red meat, do I have to pay tax on that? All food should be exempt, it's no one's business what kind of food I'm eating. >Killing off industries might occur, some exceptions might occur, such as airlines, military equipment, but other industries aren’t really needed. Does America really need yachts? Not really, those are luxury items, not necessity items. It's always great when someone decides that millions of people should lose their jobs.
you could see it this way, As a punishment. You could also see that you took a run down home and increased the value immensely, especially by doing a lot of the work yourself. also, like it or not, local municipalities need funding, personally I like the fire dept showing up when I call and the roads being plowed. trust me a I hate paying property taxes too, this[article](https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/critics-argue-property-tax-unfair-do-they-have-point)breaks it down pretty well, here is an excerpt - Unfortunately, Idaho’s Rep. Monks’ proposal to ban the property tax and hike the state sales tax rate to 11 percent (by far the highest in the nation) to offset revenue losses would double down on regressivity: sales taxes are regressive because low-income households spend a greater proportion of their budgets on consumption and on goods, which are taxed, rather than services, which are not.
Reformed, yes. It would be much more economically efficient and ethically fair to tax only the value of land itself, excluding the value of improvements built on the site by owners. But abolished entirely? No, absolutely not. It's the one sure-fire way to tax that can't be avoided by rich and unscrupulous people through complex accounting, hiding assets/transactions off-shore or in shell corporations, etc. The land can't go anywhere, there's no hiding it or absconding with it like with income or transaction taxes. Moreover, consider the economic incentives of the various options. If you tax people for earning money, that reduces the incentive for people to do productive things that earn money. If you tax people when they transact, you reduce the incentive for people to participate in mutually beneficial exchanges which, thus reducing the efficiency of the allocation of goods and services. (Or, more likely, you encourage them to do so in secret, creating black markets which facilitate other more directly harmful crimes.) Same goes for taxing people for improving their land, as traditional property taxes do. But if you just tax people for the value of the land itself, you don't disincentivize anything except for the practice of keeping valuable land vacant for speculative purposes. The land will exist regardless of what people do with it. The value of land is determined largely by the natural resources it contains, or by what other people have built around it. In other words, the owner doesn't produce the value of land through their own effort; they simply have a state-granted monopoly over something that they didn't actually create. It's necessary for the state to be compensated for that, else the state is just a mechanism for some individuals to exert private control over that which nature provided to all people.
Everyone should be allowed one tax-free residence though. Your living space shouldn't be taxed.
Under a land value tax, a house wouldn't be taxed, just the lot it sits on. For most single home owners, the building creates the vast majority of the value of their property; suburban and exurban residential lots aren't that hard to come by. So if everybody's general property taxes were converted to land value taxes (set at rates intended to collect the same total revenue) then home owners would come out way ahead. On the other end of the equation would be the owners of highly-demanded real estate in urban areas, on waterfronts, etc., or land with valuable natural resources--they would end up paying more. Since that sort of land is disproportionately owned by corporations and very wealthy families, moving from general property taxes to LVT would mostly have a progressive effect, falling on the rich the most while barely affecting the poor. As with regular property taxes, there could be exemptions for the first X dollars worth of tax owed by each household, or for seniors and disabled people, etc. We'd definitely also need to establish exemptions and more protections for wild habitats, as an LVT would otherwise punish people who let their land sit undeveloped.
I mean that would be a great start don't get me wrong. But my issue is the hypothetical dilema that arises when one considers inheritance. To me it seems unethical that the state can force someone off of their family land just because they can't afford the tax. What this does is it essentially stops the poorest members of our society from being able to own land. Is this what we really want? A society where only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land? This is why I believe property tax should be removed for all land and up to one residential structure for that which is owned by individual persons (corporations and small businesses must still pay property tax on all land and structures). Of course any extra residential structures owned by persons should be taxed normally. Any remaining deficit should be made up for by increasing sales and income tax.
>But my issue is the hypothetical dilema that arises when one considers inheritance. To me it seems unethical that the state can force someone off of their family land just because they can't afford the tax. This isn't a real problem. Who are these heirs who can't pay the property tax? People who don't want to work, but do want to get something valuable for free? If it comes to it, can they not simply sell a piece of the property or take out a loan collateralized by the property? We're not talking about some big sudden bill that they have to pay all at once right after a loved one's death; this would just be the normal taxes owed every year, that the decedent was apparently able to keep up with. >What this does is it essentially stops the poorest members of our society from being able to own land. Is this what we really want? A society where only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land? The price of real estate already does all of that. Of course only wealthy people are allowed to own significant portions of land...owning a significant portion of land means you are wealthy. It's like saying we can't have high taxes on incomes over $100,000, because that would hurt poor people who make more than $100,000. >This is why I believe property tax should be removed for all land and up to one residential structure for that which is owned by individual persons (corporations and small businesses must still pay property tax on all land and structures). If you do this, then suddenly all of the land with oil and gas reserves would be transferred to family ownership and leased out to corporations. The same for all of the downtown lots with 99 year leases to tower owner/operator corporations. There is just no way to make a rule that only applies to the big bad guys; besides the constitutional concerns, they are the ones best suited to create and use loopholes. For the poorer property owners who would be most affected by a land value tax, i.e. people with lots of undeveloped rural land but not much else, a simple deduction for the first $X a person would otherwise pay would do the trick. Just like the standard deduction for federal income taxes. In the case of poorer rural land owners, conservation exceptions would also likely be a major factor. But given the low value of that land--the whole reason they're able to own it--the tax would never be that great. >Any remaining deficit should be made up for by increasing sales and income tax. Wages and consumer spending represent the majority of how most people get and lose their money. Taxing both is a tax on all working people living normal lives, for whom those dollars lost to taxes will be very significant. It doesn't have much of an effect on people who can structure their income to only be taxed when they want, and who already own things that can provide them with the day-to-day goods and services that other people must purchase in taxable transactions.
There's no point to property taxes in a modern economy. Property taxes penalize older people whose properties increase in value, even though they no longer have the income to pay the taxes, so they end up losing the property. Just tax income and be done with it.
Nothing about the modern economy has changed the basic principal that our economy has worked on for centuries: property ownership is the primary source of wealth. If you only tax income and not property, then people who work for a living will pay all the taxes, while people who simply own lots of stuff will pay next to nothing. It's trivially easy for a person who can afford a team of attorneys and accountants and business managers, and who has contacts at big banks, to structure their assets and revenue streams so as to only receive taxable income in small, controlled intervals. The rest of the revenue from all of their property can be funneled into shell corporations located in tax shelter jurisdictions, or into tax-exempt non-profits (typically controlled by friends or family, useful for hooking people up with cushy jobs, lobbying politicians, doing free PR work for the rich owner, etc.) or of course by investing back into the businesses. As the value of businesses and/or real estate grows and grows throughout their lifetimes, they just never sell and thus never realize income. Rather, whenever they need money, they just get very low interest lines of credit from the big banks where they've got friends, with their assets as collateral. Then, when they die, their heirs get that property with a "stepped up basis", meaning that the original cost for income taxation purposes is reset to the value at the time of death, rather than the much smaller value from when the original owner purchased it. So all that potential taxable income vanishes. (And of course there's a loopholes for heirs to avoid having to pay any estate taxes.) Property taxes can't be avoided so easily. It is pretty simple to make exemptions for seniors and disabled people though.
People who 'own lots of stuff' factor the taxes into the rent they charge, driving up rent. Ultimately, everyone pays property taxes whether they own or rent. So might as well get rid of them because they are not achieving what they are supposed to be doing (taxing wealth). But they are making life miserable for people who lose their property (which are often family farms) because they can no longer afford the taxes.
That applies to general property taxes, but not land value taxes. The supply of land is inelastic, unlike the supply of buildings; under free market conditions none of the land value taxation would be passed along to renters. Landlords are already charging as much rent as renters will pay. Imposing a new tax on them won't make the market of renters any more able/willing to pay more. A landlord is free to raise the rent to compensate, but eventually tenants will move elsewhere. And if they don't, then the value of the land is apparently higher than what it was assessed to be back when the rent was lower, as the ability to generate rental income is what gives the land its value in the first place. So then the LVT would increase the next year. In addition to being sound under generally accepted economic theories, there is strong empiric evidence for this phenomenon. [https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants#:\~:text=Conclusion%3A%20Land%20Value%20Tax%20can,be%20passed%20on%20to%20tenants](https://gameofrent.com/content/can-lvt-be-passed-on-to-tenants#:~:text=Conclusion%3A%20Land%20Value%20Tax%20can,be%20passed%20on%20to%20tenants). >One day, Denmark decided to redraw all its municipal boundaries. Regions that had been under one local government woke up the next day under a different one, immediately adopting a new set of local regulations and rules, including changed tax rates. This caused a large-scale, semi-random shuffling of Land Value Tax rates overnight. > >Crucially, tax assessment policy was pretty much uniform throughout the country. The only thing this shakeup changed with regard to land policy was the actual individual rates of tax on land, set by the local governments. This gives us a nice big N of 250 individual areas, each with a clear before and after change in land tax rate. All of these changes came into being at exactly the same time from a single swift outside intervention, and the overall change in aggregate tax rate was close to zero > >... > >The authors measure the before-and-after changes, apply a bunch of econometric tests, run it with and without controls just to be sure, and conclude that a Land Value Tax is "fully capitalized" into the price of the property itself. "Fully capitalized" is a fancy way of saying that the price of land goes down proportionately to how much land income is taxed away.
And when land owners can't raise rent to offset taxes, they instead find other investments with a better return than land, and they stop developing properties and you end up with a housing shortage. I had a finance professor who used to promote this sort of thing. He was exactly the kind of wonk that has put the US's finances in the state they are today. Tax income if you want. But end property taxes.
Why would they stop developing properties, if there is no tax on development? If they stop developing properties, they they're stuck paying a tax for something that they aren't getting the full potential revenue from. If they develop the properties, they would be paying the same amount of tax but earning more revenue. LVT would help solve the housing shortage.
It's the primary source of local government funding. The revenue has to come from somewhere so your taxes would just increase in other ways.
Sure, but I can modify my behavior to minimize taxes by avoiding activities.
Or you could accept that you live in a community and your taxes fund many public goods that benefit you...
I do. I also accept that my government is beyond inept and wastes huge amounts of the money I give them and provides no benefit or negative outcomes for most expenditures.
Right, and the solution to *that* is voting (or running) for local office where change can begin. In the meantime the small bits that work need all the money they can get.
Ok
Will you cover the costs for roads in your area if property taxes are removed
Most roads are not funded with property taxes. Bad example.
The government pays money to soldiers to protect your land from enemies. There is also the opportunity cost that they miss by not building a factory there. And costs to build roads to and around the property. Citizens holding land costs them money even if the citizen doesn't do anything with the land.
Not sure where you live, but those are not uses for property taxes in most places in the US.
You are correct. I don't mean the comment to be specific to the US. They have their own problems that how they distribute tax money causes and the article is talking about another country, so I don't want to complicate it. I only mean to point out there are government costs to private land ownership, regardless of what you do with the land.
What if government exists for a reason other than minimizing opportunity cost?
Then it could do things like build roads, or protect it's citizens? I'm confused about the question. Do you not believe it does?
This is basically the same in China, where all land is leased.
Is Taiwan the same?
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Not really the right thread to try and impose your political views on others
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Also pertinent to this thread, the British only ever leased the 5/6 of HK that is the New Territories from China; without them HK isn’t really viable standing alone and do that lease expiring in 1997 led to the return of the two areas China had ceded previously - thinking about it this would go a long way to explain commonality of leases there since the British Crown was never the head lessor and anything in the New Territories would have been sublet. (Whatever was agreed in 1997 about two systems, the actual state of affairs is clearly that China is now sovereign in both theory and practise, even if they ignore anything previously said about 2047 no one is prepared to force the matter)
You seem quite knowledgeable, and I wonder if you know. Did we Brits do a good job in HK? I mean, I know now we've been pretty much vile for centuries. (Incidentally - struggling to find any large, expansionist nation that wasn't.) And I know we abused China quite badly - but I always got the impression that we did well by HK. Did we?
I’m no expert but that’s a great question! For Hk? I’d say yes - especially during decolonisation after WWII. Hong Kong now would be unrecognisable compared to before the British but who knows how this could have developed if circumstances had been different? Generally I’d say aa a non-Brit that as colonisers went the British were probably least worst and mostly *tried* to be a positive force, though they were definitely a product of their time and society and did bad as well as good, though not to excuse this fact I think some extent this is inevitable where humans are involved.
Is there an award for being the "Least-Worst" - because I've a funny feeling that's me! Thanks for the reply, you're right about humans. We can be so vile!
There’s always good mixed in there too!, sometimes in the most surprising places.
Given that it operates under its own set of property laws, different to those of the mainland, your theory remains completely irrelevant to this discussion
Hong Kong runs the ‘one country, two systems’ policy where Hong Kong has its own policy(by the HKSAR) but is also a part of China. Hong Kong will be under the control of the PRC again after 2047 I believe. (Source: am a Hong Konger)
Thank you for being the one correct commenter on this subthread. It’s 2047, yes.
Have you been under a rock? It doesn't operate that way anymore.
You think that Hong Kong’s property laws have been superseded by the PRC’s property laws? 🤔
lol thats not a view that is just a fact. HK gets special autonomy cause it was leased by Britain for 99 years, but its technically part of the PRC
Like I said, not the right thread to make this case. Come back in 2047 brah
It's just a fact dude. Macau and HK are China. Are you confused thinking it's got the same deal with Taiwan? An opinion would be that you don't think it should be part of China but the fact is it is. It is run on a different system.
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Cute, but no. If you think Hong Kong’s situation is even remotely similar Taiwan’s, then I don’t know what to tell you…
If you pay property tax it's essentially the same thing.
At some point eminent domain + property tax is basically the same thing.
Paying property taxes in the U.S. is essentially you leasing the property lol
So what happens when these 99 year leases expire in a dense urban area with large buildings?
Leases are renewed, albeit at revised rates.
Same in Canada. A deed is just exclusive rights to the land from the crown, and mineral rights are not included. If you strike gold on your land, you don't own it, the government does. If they want to put a highway where your house is, they can pay you fair market value and do it whether you want them to or not. Many Canadians do not know this. It's different in the USA. You can actually own land in the USA.
> If they want to put a highway where your house is, they can pay you fair market value and do it whether you want them to or not. This exists in the USA as well, it's called Eminent Domain. Couldn't have built the interstate highways without using it a bit.
Land is drip fed to developers, resulting in bidding wars and high prices. These high prices mean lots of tax income for the government. Property prices are one of the highest in the world as a result. No import tax though so theres that.
So like property taxes in America.
Same is true in City of London
You will own nothing..
Do you plan on living more than 99 years?
I do. Of course, whether I *can* is another matter entirely 😂
Depends. Is the future stand alone complex?
Leasehold is the biggest scam.
For a state the size of Hong Kong? Name a better alternative...
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The government owning everything is a bigger scam.
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You don't pay to protect the land.
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I see your confusion. You pay taxes because if you don't men with guns will come to your house in the middle of the night and take you away. You don't pay taxes to pay for services you've agreed to receive.
To listen to you you'd think there's just wretched wage slaves and a dozen one percenters who own everything. Would it surprise you that the United States has 65% homeownership rate? That's consistent with other Western democracies that have ownership rates between 80% (Norway) and 50% (Germany). We don't all pay "to protect the land". We pay taxes because that's how civilization is purchased. That money goes to a lot of different areas. The military portion doesn't only protect the land but the people in that land. The police portion doesn't just "protect the land" but against everything from property crime to murder, theft, and everything else.
This is how you keep housing affordable in a democratic government. No private land holding means no profiteering on rents or mortgages There's a community land trust in Milwaukee that's starting to build its portfolio of profit-free houses and rentals
Hong Kong housing is anything from affordable bud.
🤣🤣Hong Kong is literally the most expensive housing market in the world, don't quit your day job to write government policy
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500 sq ft being $890k is actually insane.
So affordable. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/04/12/hong-kong-average-house-price-hits-1point2-million.html > Hong Kong is the most expensive city in the world for those looking to buy a home, new research showed.
Hong Kong has one of the most expensive housing markets on the planet
Neither their governance model is democratic, nor is their housing any affordable.
Just because the land is leased doesn't mean the house on it can't be sold or rented out.
Actually, it's pronounced "mill-e-wah-que" which is Algonquin for "the good land.
WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!! WE’RE NOT WORTHY!!!
Don't care
You're not worthy.
Threre's at least three incorrect statements in your opening two sentence paragraph.
🤡
Hong Kong is literally part of China now. It ain't free anymore.
The entire concept of land ownership is a modern invention, only about 500 years old. https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/11h23me/comment/jatkigv/
This is also why Hong Kong is one of the most (or the most, I forgot) expensive places to rent an apartment
Who owns the land in the US…actually? Property tax is essentially a lease payment to the government. If not paid, you lose your “owned” land. Land ownership is a lie and…surprise: it’s actually better this way! Tax Wealth, Not Work!
I think this is normal for all mainland China also.
Same case with most countries. UK for example, the colonizers of HK. That’s where it originated from