this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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It's not a bad compromise, it's just a matter of finding a good value for X. And that's hard to do as housing prices continue to balloon and housing costs take up a greater percentage of people's incomes. Houses that would have cost one year's income in the 60s can easily cost 8 to 10 times that today.
I don't know, maybe you should have to pay property taxes if the land occupies more than a certain square footage. That could discourage suburban style development and promote greater population density, which could both act as a net positive.
Yeah, the devil would be in the details, of course, and to make sure there aren’t any obvious loopholes. Ideally it would be at increasing brackets as well.
Wouldn’t taxes on above-X value keep prices down? Buying fancy houses as investment could be countered by the additional running expense of taxes.
Basing it on square footage could also work, or as an additional parameter, but might make more sense in cities where space is more scarce.
Problem I see with price based rather than square footage is that it's going to vary by location and generation. A human being, or a family even, needs a certain amount of space, and beyond that there is some threshold across which one could say this family or person is undoubtedly taking up more than they actually need.
For example, how much housing does a family of 5 people reasonably expect if living a middle class lifestyle in America? I think that's something that changes generationally and regionally based on income and housing costs, but today I think such a family might expect ideally a house with five bedrooms, two or three baths, a kitchen, dining room, living room, laundry room, maybe also a den or other secondary communal room. I'm not saying all houses should be this big, or shouldn't be bigger, but that a house about this big could be a fair measuring stick for determining how much square footage a house could reasonably be without the owner-occupant paying property taxes.
Or it could be based on the number of kitchens. If a house is cut up into apartments as an investment strategy, it has to have more than one kitchen generally speaking.
For price based limits I just don't see how you avoid artificial inflation of assessments by governments or planned neglect by owners to keep houses on one side or the other of the threshold. It would also have very different impacts on different markets. And inflation and changes in the market would require whatever threshold you set to be revised fairly regularly or else fade into irrelevance.
Yeah, I agree it’s always harder to define than it seems at first glance. Square footage might be a better proxy with fewer loopholes. Problem is that a shitty rundown house will be taxed the same as a luxury house of the same size. That might be fine, I don’t know.
I think regardless of how you do it, taxes need to be adjusted for inflation or change of average living costs, like any tax brackets could/would. I think one of the goal should be to avoid artificially inflated living costs.
And also regardless of approach, tax limits should probably also depend on how many people live in the house. That can probably be abused too though.
Either way, I don’t know much about economy and taxes, this is just me thinking out loud on a complex topic.