Oh, oh, pick me…! 🙋🏻♂️ I think I have a suggestion.
And of course the fly in the ointment here is that the county is now bidding against everyone else for access to land…and what is a county but land?
The proposal also promises 300 new units of affordable rental housing that would be designed for people making less than 60% of area median income, about $48,600 for a single person.
Cities are for people, made of people, more or less, but counties are land, the bits that have not yet been incorporated. So those 300 units at whatever target price they have in mind will never happen at that price, forcing a shortfall in that goal or creating a need for another tax to fuel the speculative cycle. And of course, what income that 60% is pegged to will also change…it’s a losing strategy.
The solution is to tax the land itself, the value of the land when put to its highest and best use, using zoning and the value created by adjacent or nearby land to determine the value. County assessors already tax land as empty/unimproved but often ignore the value created by commercial activity on it or on nearby parcels.
The phrase “the least bad tax” is attributed to Milton Friedman and explained here:
The famous University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman once stated “the least bad tax is the property tax on the unimproved value of land”. Most popular with Georgist economists (followers of famous American political economist, Henry George), the Land Value Tax is the taxation on the value of land separate from the value of the structure on the property. In residential terms, taxation only on the land beneath the house, instead of the combined value of both. Many Americans might simply state: “Land Value Tax is close enough to property tax, and I already pay too much. We need less taxes!” However, it would be a mistake to not explore and understand the subtle differences in the two tax policies, as they have quite different economic implications. As with the review of any tax policy, one must understand the economic impact, unless you want to kill the goose that lays the golden egg.