If you save up money and buy a house to rent and your mortgage/interest/tax payment is 1100$ you will be charging 1100$, adding in a % to make sure that any routine maintenance and future renovation costs are covered.

If property taxes are raised and my mortgage/interest/tax payment are now 1350$ you will raise rent accordingly unless you are running a charity or expect a roof to repair itself. I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before.

> I don't need a theoretical analysis from a game developer who has to imagine himself as a landlord as I have personally owned rental property before, have known people who have owned rental property and rented property before.

Great, because I didn't provide you with a theoretical analysis, I provided you with an empirical analysis that actually looks at the evidence from the real world.

Regardless of my credentials or your credentials, I'm not particularly impressed with anyone who cites an N of 1 from their own personal experience and thinks it proves anything in particular.

It is theoretical because the analysis you provided and the the Vox article don't account for zoning in any meaningful way.

>Imagine I'm a landlord, and I have a vacant lot I'm renting to a tenant who's got a mobile home parked there. What's going to happen if a Land Value Tax is imposed on me? Well, I'm already charging as much as the market will bear. If I charge any more, my tenant will move out.

That's rich. As someone who is a landlord, I'm already charging what two owners ago was charging when they died and the city won't let raise the rent because of COVID and beyond that, there is a rent stabilization ordinance which will never allow my rents to catch up to market rate.

I would like to see zoning fixed before we add more market distortions. This really doesn't account for the cost of construction as well. If you have a property that can earn $2,500 per unit, and it costs $300k, you can break even in $10 years. Now the government is taking half, it takes 20 years to break even. You just eliminated people who would invest in new housing. Does the LVT magically affect construction costs?

So then land gets cheaper because the government is taking half the potential revenue (not even profit, which makes renting incredibly unprofitable considering expenses). What stops wealthy people from just buying it as single family homes then? You have just lowered the price of the land, so they will come in a scoop it up.

It seems insane to me that we have these distortions that ruin the housing market (zoning, rent control) and the answer is to add another distortion (LVT) rather than eliminating the ones currently in place. You're disincentivizing people from renting their land if you cut into the profit of doing so. Make building not a bureaucratic nightmare and I will build. Revoke RSO and I won't shut down my property and convert it to a SFH for myself.

LVT isn't a market distortion. Private landowners getting rich by not doing anything is a market distortion. If you buy a building (say that isn't rent controlled) and over 10 years the market rate for rents in the area doubles, you didn't make that happen basically at all but get to reap the rewards. That doesn't make any sense -- the community should get that money as the community created it!

On the other hand if you renovate a building and now can charge twice as much for rent, that hardly effects the land value at all -- it's one building in the area, it won't have a huge effect generally on the land value of adjacent buildings. So you'd get to reap the rewards of your work -- you improved the property and now get to make money from that improvement. LVT explicitly does not tax improvements, only the site-value of the land.

I'm certainly for eliminating rent control and massively liberalizing land use (you may still need very broad classes of zoning, ala Japan with 12 total zones all of which allow mixed use and multi-family dwellings and non of which except industrial zones restricts the minimum size/use in an area, but my preference would be to just have a separation between industrial and non-industrial use cases). That would help a lot! But it doesn't address the fact that when for instance Los Angeles installed the Expo Line for ~$3.5B the people who owned apartments nearby suddenly got a massive 20+% boost in the rent they could charge, a total value of which would have been large enough to pay for the line's construction & operation!

The value of that public investment ought to have come back to the city to be spent on yet more improvements, not pocketed by private property owners who happened to buy a building nearby a decade or more earlier.

Getting rich by not doing anything? Do you think bring a landlord is easy? Aren’t property owners providing housing to tenants which the tenants aren’t responsible for? Providing housing so tenants don’t have to come up with down payments or commit to living in a place long term? Taking on risk by being legally responsible for housing the tenant(s)? Making improvements and maintaining the property? Forgoing other investments they could be making?

It's amazing how poorly people here frame this. I just watched the Strong Towns video on LVT and it makes a ton of sense. It would effectively lower taxes on developed properties and raise taxes on empty properties. That sounds like a good deal that a lot of landlords would support.

>You didn't make that happen basically at all but get to reap the rewards.

The landlord did make that happen by making their property available for rent to others. Rents would be even higher if they took it off the market. Don't forget who owns the land.