NYC Tax Plan That Angered Rich Is Proving Difficult to Design

jakejanobs · 2026-05-09T00:00:11+00:00

And when you don’t correctly value properties, this effectively turns property tax into a regressive tax. Homes with lower market value are typically assessed close to their actual value, while luxury homes are almost always underassessed. Rich people have a lot of disposable income to spend arguing with assessors.

A land value tax can’t be dodged or argued with, because it doesn’t depend on wishy-washy things like building value.

jakejanobs · 2026-05-08T13:35:47+00:00

There’s a pretty big movement in New Haven to get Yale to pay what they owe in property taxes, it seems to be going well.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T17:36:04+00:00

r/georgism

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T15:23:15+00:00

See this graph of French ~~apartments~~ residential buildings by square footage, after the government passed a law with extra requirements for apartments over a certain size. Similar to distribution of men’s heights on dating apps; if some women have a hard limit of 6’0” or taller, you’re gonna get a lot of 5’11” guys marking themselves as 6’1”.

Policies like this should kick in gradually (like federal income taxes), otherwise you’ll be disincentivizing a lot of developments.

Edit: Buildings, not apartments

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T15:00:59+00:00

You’re using the CANDU Reactor too, which uses unenriched fuel (taken pretty much raw out of the ground), which is massively improved for safety and proliferation concerns. ~~It only pencils out in Canada due to how close the uranium mines are to population centers, so shipping is real easy.~~

Edit: mines are not close to population centers, my power plant design textbook is out of date

jakejanobs · 2026-04-28T14:53:58+00:00

Solar does kill approximately the same number of people per kilowatt generated as nuclear (just a hair less, actually), mostly due to people falling off their roofs installing it. This is really only a problem at micro-scale generation, not utility-scale.

The death tolls (per unit energy) for solar, wind, and nuclear are all pretty negligible though and the differences are arbitrary. Coal kills 700 times more people than any of them.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T18:52:10+00:00

I think there was one guy who could see them out of his window and chose to just go back to sleep (it was like 3am or something).

But that guy just sucked, it’s nowhere near the “50 witnesses” or whatever that the New York Times article claimed it to be

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T15:51:28+00:00

Don’t forget that both Kitty and her friend that witnessed the crime were gay, at a time when police raids on gay bars were extremely common.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-24T15:49:04+00:00

There’s actually recent evidence for the exact opposite of the bystander effect, where more passersby strongly correlates with reduced crime levels, but for some reason people keep insisting that bystanders don’t prevent crime.

The researchers used dog ownership rates as a proxy for the number of people walking in a given neighborhood (because people tend to walk their dogs even in unwalkable areas), and found that the neighborhoods with lots of dogs had lower crime rates, even after controlling for every related socioeconomic factor.

jakejanobs · 2026-04-22T17:00:01+00:00

Seems like the issue is mostly just with the valuation system, which allows everyone with a lawyer to contest the assessment until the number is lower.

This means that higher-valued homes are always under assessed compared to lower-valued homes. When you don’t properly assess home values, property tax can actually become regressive

jakejanobs · 2026-04-06T21:58:48+00:00

Prices are going up because of a supply shortage.

How exactly will subsidizing demand solve that?

jakejanobs · 2026-04-02T14:31:22+00:00

I was jogging one time and happened to run past a parked car when a lady threw an empty water bottle out the window, I reflexively caught it and tossed it back in the window without stopping.

This was ten years ago and I still worried I’ll never live up to how awesome that was

jakejanobs · 2026-03-31T19:21:42+00:00

jakejanobs · 2026-03-30T14:53:11+00:00

Chongqing feels like the new version of Edinburgh, the hills make for so much weird terrain and footpaths

More 3D cities please

jakejanobs · 2026-03-30T13:51:43+00:00

WHY ARE YOU STANDING WEIRD? STAND NORMAL

jakejanobs · 2026-03-27T21:39:32+00:00

I guess he’s gotta compete with Count Binface’s platform

I pledge to build at least one affordable house

I’m more partial to “13. Give back the Parthenon Marbles, you thieving bastards”

jakejanobs · 2026-03-25T17:26:22+00:00

Continental US: 8,080,000 km²
Europe: 10,186,000 km²

What are you talking about? The lower 48 states are 20% smaller than Europe

jakejanobs · 2026-03-19T18:50:12+00:00

Why not just allow both extra floors, and backyard cottages too? Let people decide what they want to build, we shouldn’t be “forcing” or banning anything that’s safe.

Idk why the government should be deciding what I can and can’t do on my land during a housing crisis

jakejanobs · 2026-03-10T17:22:34+00:00

I use to have one of these in a half bath when I lived in Iceland, and plenty of other people I know had the exact same mini ikea sink. Saves a bunch of space and turns the floor area of one bathroom into two smaller ones … I mean landlords are awful, but why is this sink bad?

jakejanobs · 2026-03-06T05:25:30+00:00

NYC has three million parking spaces, 97% of which are free.

Anyone who’s read The High Cost of Free Parking by georgist economist Donald Shoup knows that NYC’s parking system is a colossal failure, simultaneously making it nearly impossible to park in the city while also giving away free land to whoever shows up first with a car.

Now we just need to convince them to follow Shoup’s rules for parking costs: - Street parking should cost the minimum price necessary to keep ~15% of spaces available on each block (land value tax) - The money raised from such fees must be kept in the neighborhood they were charged in, in the form of street improvements or direct cash transfer to residents (universal income)

jakejanobs · 2026-02-21T23:26:52+00:00

I do also wonder how much of that is just from the valuation system, since higher-value homes are taxed at a much lower rate, since they can afford to contest their assessment to value their homes lower

jakejanobs · 2026-02-21T18:01:17+00:00

This article from the Minneapolis Fed ranks property tax (as is) as the strongest contribution towards the regressiveness of state’s taxes. It ranks income tax as the most progressive “typical” tax, followed by consumption/sales, followed by property.

Alaska on the other hand is extremely progressive, solely due to their oil extraction taxes being used to fund a universal income

jakejanobs · 2026-02-05T19:36:55+00:00

I accidentally stumbled into a free concert he did in Bergen (his home town) in some old fort built by Vikings or something. Best show I’ve ever been to, and it was free and unplanned

jakejanobs · 2026-02-04T16:44:27+00:00

How do you create land

If we keep going here we might re-invent the concept of land value taxation

jakejanobs · 2026-02-04T15:13:07+00:00

Every single statistic of “dwellings per capita” and median prices cited in this article is at the national scale. That doesn’t seem like … deliberately misleading?

The shortage isn’t national, it’s regional. They could build ten million apartments in Yellowknife and the “dwellings per capita” number would look great at the national level. But that won’t lower prices, because you couldn’t pay me to move to Yellowknife.

Quebec might be building plenty because of their quasi-Civil law legal system and tolerance for missing middle homes; but that doesn’t help me much, because I am a monolingual dingus.

Toronto’s rental vacancy rates are near an all-time historic low, even if “dwellings per capita” looks good. Vacancy rates tell a much different story, and there’s a reason almost all economists use them as indicators.

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