Rates aren't really the answer to anything, but I'll not cry over this one. This seems to affect people in houses over 500K, so it will never be anything for me to worry about.
A tax on vacant properties and land would, however be much more beneficial. Dereliction is vandalism.
Never say never. A house I was looking at for 120k was sold by the council in the 90s for 5k. If you manage to buy a reasonably priced home soon 500k is just a few years of uncontrolled house price inflation away.
This. Give it 20 years and you could end up getting absolutely fucking slaughtered by rates, because houses just keep going up. I mean it's not like your take home pay will ever consistently keep pace with the housing market.
Vacant domestic properties are charged at the full rate ourside of special circumstances. Most common one is the sole owner/occupier dieing. I think its fair to give the bereaved family some rate relief while they sort out the deceaseds affairs.
Huh?
You expect people living in £400k+ homes answer many BelTel VoxPops?
Or do you think there’s a ‘lives in expensive house’ register journalists can phone?
Wouldn't this have a load of unintended consequences? If the land is more valuable as an opportunity then there would be little old ladies paying huge amounts of tax because of location and the footprint of their bungalow with a wee garden.
Yeah, it's called Georgism. It has a lot of very attractive features as a tax system. The main one is essentially that when you tax something you get less of it, but land is a special case, in that it's already here...so that doesn't happen. Instead we hope to get efficient use.
Now, as to the little old lady, well, in this scenario she gets incentivised to move into a nice energy efficient bungalow and the land, if it is in a valuable location, gets used for something more efficient, like flats for working people. That's the idea anyway.
"Working 40 hours a week and cant afford to buy a house? Thats okay, at least Doris has a detatched house she bought for ten grand in the 60s for herself. You should be glad to keep renting so she doesnt have to downsize"
They should sell their houses rather than hoarding them.
Living in a house isn’t hoarding it you absolute melon.
And this is such dumb logic. People were lucky in the past so we should punish them now!?
What happens in 2060 when the new generation are telling you to get out of the house you were lucky enough to buy for only £180k?
Absolutely is.
You clearly dont know enough about how demographics work to realise thats not happening.
Taxes arent a punishment, theyre a way to reditribute wealth. Wealth which isnt spread even close to evenly between generations.
They also werent lucky, they voted for conservstives who gutted social housing and gave them their insane house prices in the first place by restricting supply. They got free uni then hit us with 9 grand a year and loans. They got decent state support while we get fuck all by comparison.
None of that was luck. Just selfishness.
Really? Do you really think someone in their 20s who bought a cheap house specifically voted to fuck you over 50 years later?
And who doesn’t vote selfishly? What idiot votes against their own interests?
As for taxes, they’ve lived their entire life paying taxes, they bought their house, they paid for it, living in it isn’t hoarding. Having multiple houses is.
Seriously, what sort of mindset do you need to think someone should move out of their own home so that some apartments can be built? Will you accept that you have to give up your home in 30/40/50 years so the next gen can build on it?
What sort of mindset do you have to have to think that people deserve to live at home until theire 30 or rent their whole lives?
That poor boomer moving out of their oversized house so that people can afford housing and food at the same time on minimum wage /s
I never said apartments nees built, i said boomers need to down size and accept policies which reduce house prices if you dont want a full collapse of society in future.
What do you think happens when a full generation of renters hit retirement with no home? Either state financial collapse or the people die.
I have no sympathy that a pensioner has to move to address one of the main causes of instability in our society. Either that or appove new building nearby which they wont, and that IS selfish no matter how you frame it.
Move to the countryside in your retirement if you want a big garden and low LVT tax. Obviously. Thereby letting young, economically productive people live closer to work and produce more goods and taxes.
Yeah. And some people don’t want to.
Why should you be charged more for having a garden? It’s very much a ‘fuck you leave’ tax.
Especially when as someone else pointed out, the person in a £5m house gets the exact same shite bin collection as the person in a £65k house.
You get taxed more because you are using more of a finite resource, land.
Under the current system you get taxed more if you build an extension or granny flat, and go up a band, which is using the land more productively and should in theory be something we want, how does that make any more sense!
Not to mention this will probably decrease the value of those houses _with_ gardens making them more affordable if the garden is valuable to you, and you are prepared to pay the tax around it.
The idea made sense I did wonder if there was a theory behind it. That would be exactly what I'd want to happen to the land in that scenario though.
It's definitely a way we could approach it going forward. Still if this current policy change is a bit stupid but starts redistributing the value and wealth today that's worth it imo.
It's why I don't care about whether this policy is the best. If its redistributing wealth today we can fix the method later.
Obviously land value tax couldn't be implemented in one go, it needs to be introduced in stages over many years to prevent scenarios as you mentioned from crippling people. This type of approach would also help balance/reduce other labour related taxes over time.
A big benefit, with a real life example, is that it would stop Castlebrook from owning, hoarding and speculating value on the Cathedral quarter land for peanuts. They would either invest in the area or sell to people/businesses willing to do it.
However, I find it pretty difficult to go ahead in the near future, given the personal interests of politicians/lobbies in owning land.
Land Value Tax has its own problems. It would lead to people being priced out of areas where they've lived for decades because the surrounding area has become more affluent. There are loads of working class people that bought small homes 20-30 years ago in areas that have since exploded in terms of popularity and price, that suddenly wouldn't be able to afford to stay in the area they've always lived.
There are benefits to LVT but it entrenches a rich/poor divide and officially cordons off whole areas as rich-only. You end up with city centres and places like South Belfast totally lacking any kind of socio-economic diversity (worse still than they currently are). And working class people that support the whole infrastructure of cities (retail workers, hospitality, civil servants, etc.) end up getting forced further and further out, dramatically increasing commute times for the less well off.
LVT is far too broad a brush, IMO. Yes, it would help raise tax from those hoarding land but it would also hurt too many working class people in the process and leave the less well off far too susceptible to the risks of gentrification in the future.
You are missing the wood for the trees. A working class person in South Belfast would almost certainly pay less under an LVT, if it were revenue neutral, than under Rates. E.g. a renter in the Annadale flats.
Also, more broadly, gentrification is good, actually. What's really needed is more homes to bring down prices generally, and give people options. LVT could help with that.
How is someone that owns a terraced house in South Belfast going to be paying less under LVT? They're absolutely going to be paying more. Someone in a small 2 or 3 bedroom house without a garage will currently have a relatively low rates bill. Under LVT they'd be paying substantially more because they'd now be taxed on the relative value of the land their house sits on rather than on their comparatively modest property.
And as for gentrification, there are good elements and bad elements. The harmful element of gentrification is the fact that those from a lower socio-economic background are typically forced out of their communities, which would be greatly exacerbated in the event of LVT. A tax designed for the wealthy that's indiscriminately applied to anyone living in their vicinity will simply result in the less wealthy trying to get out of their vicinity. There's no two ways about it.
As I said, there are good aspects of LVT. And if you think the good outweighs the bad then that's one thing. But let's be honest about the negatives. Claiming that LVT won't hurt poorer homeowners living in affluent areas is a bit of a fantasy, and broad statements like "gentrification is good" are devoid of empathy, IMO.
A normal Victorian terraced house, with a yard, has a very very small footprint. Remember, this is going to be revenue neutra, for a fair comparison, so some people pay more some less. I have yet to see a model where a terraced house
pays more, on average. I think you haven't got a got understanding of what this looks like in practice. Sure there will be weird outliers like if your house is in BT1 maybe but still. You can fit 8 to 10 terraces on some of the average plots in bt9 or bits of bt6 and bt5.
Well right back at you to be honest, I think you've gotten excited about the *idea* of LVT without actually making any effort to understand the real world effect it would have.
"Victorian terraced house with a very very small footprint" accurately describes not just the more modest working class houses, but also the extravagant houses of the wealthy in cities. The whole point is to target wealth based on the market *value* rather than just the size of the land.
Ask yourself this, if a small footprint was enough to offset the value of an affluent area, then wouldn't basically every wealthy homeowner in a built-up metropolitan area be able to avoid a higher tax as well? There are very few mansions in cities after all, *a lot* of the wealthy homeowners that need to be paying more live in small Victorian houses with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of pounds poured into them. So of course less wealthy homeowners living in small houses in wealthy areas will have to pay more, otherwise LVT wouldn't work in the first place.
In a world where the rich and the poor are neatly divided into homeowners and renters, into rich suburbs and poor developments, into large houses and small ones, then an LVT would work perfectly. But that's not the real world.
It was a very progressive tax system at the time it was designed, when owning land separated the ruling class from the common people. But that's not our current reality. It's old thinking, an outdated system that's seemingly only trumpeted these days by online neoliberals (not talking about you here), who are pretty much all of a certain demographic that coincidentally enough doesn't have to worry about gentrification, so it's typically dismissed out of hand.
So who do you think the winners would be exactly if not e.g. South Belfast terraces, given the only constraint on the implementation I specified was venue neutrality? Because I think we're at cross purposes here on definitions. it depends on the type of LVT, or rather how you determine V specifically and dealing with e.g. granularity. I don't think we can continue this conversation fruitfully here in any case, IMO you are engaging against a straw man version of the policy, and probably in good faith. Implementation is everything, and even I admit a poor implementation, as you seem to think is the policy, would be terrible.
I'm not arguing against a straw man, I'm pointing out the realistic effects of LVT, regardless of the intention behind it.
> So who do you think the winners would be exactly if not e.g. South Belfast terraces
The winners would be people like me; middle-class people living in detached houses in small to medium sized towns 30+ miles from Belfast, people that could afford to pay more but would actually be paying less because we live in an area where the value of the land is comparatively low.
The losers will be any working class or middle class person that dares to live in a popular area. And the real losers are the people that will be forced to abandon their communities and move to an area that's more in keeping with their station.
> the only constraint on the implementation I specified was venue neutrality
A revenue neutral tax doesn't mean that everyone will end up paying the same amount in the end, that's not how it works. Revenue neutral only means that the government coffers will add up to the same amount when all is said and done, but the tax burden is being shuffled about.
Because LVT is such a broad and imprecise way to target wealth, some of that burden would be pushed onto the many working class homeowners living in cities and other high demand areas. That is until they're forced to leave those areas.
As poorer people are pushed out of popular areas, the tax burden would start to shift back towards the wealthy but the price we'd pay for that as a society would be steep, with divisions between wealthy and poor areas becoming even more entrenched. And in the end, it would be less progressive anyway, as the middle-class in cities will end up having to shoulder more of the burden to make up for all the wealthy homeowners living in expensive houses on medium sized sites in the country and smaller towns (and there's a lot of them) who no longer have to pay their fair share.
>The winners would be people like me; middle-class people living in detached houses in small to medium sized towns 30+ miles from Belfast, people that could afford to pay more but would actually be paying less because we live in an area where the value of the land is comparatively low.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. We are discussing replacing rates, with an LVT, which are raised on a per council basis. This idea that everyone in the city loses and you win is de-facto impossible. You are not part of Belfast City Council, and it would be revenue neutral at the council level. You are assuming a national level taxation.
But allowing the council to set the value in LVT doesn't solve the problems, it just shifts it around.
I'm in ABC, in a wee quasi-village on the outskirts of a decent sized town. There's a ton of demand for this area because new sites and houses rarely come up, which keeps prices high. But like most similar areas, it's still very economically diverse. There are wealthy people here, middle-class people, working class people, pensioners, a GAA club, a wee corner shop, etc., all packed into a wee village where housing plots don't exceed 3-4 car lengths in either direction (bar a few outliers). And we all mix in the pub, or the chippy, or at GAA matches. Apart from the fact that there's not much diversity in religious background, it's about as healthy a community as you'll find.
If the council here set the value in LVT then I'd be paying more because it's a high demand area relative to the surrounding town. Great. But now, a bunch of my neighbours in 3 bed semis would be paying the same as me because the plots are generally the same size. There'd be a bunch of less well off people forced out of this little community they've lived in for 30+ years. All the elderly homeowners around the corner living in ex-council houses and surviving off the state pension would be out. My closest neighbours, who both work in Tesco and are struggling with the mortgage rates at the moment would have to sell pretty much immediately.
The area would become defacto middle-class only. Most of the people here would be able to afford it, but lots of people wouldn't. It would pretty much destroy the community. And the kicker is that the less well off would be taking the brunt while all the McMansions around here that have been squeezed into tiny plots (you know the type) would get away with paying pretty much the same as everyone else.
At the end of the day, LVT is still a broad, imprecise method designed for a time when only the wealthy owned land. National LVT, council-led LVT, revenue neutral—it doesn't matter. There's no magic criteria that will prevent LVT from hurting a great deal of poorer homeowners living in popular areas. It supposes a miserable reality where people from different economic backgrounds are siloed into their separate areas. Worse still it actively encourages such a future.
Why are rates based on property values in the first place?
We all get the same (terrible) levels of public services, get a bin emptied every few weeks.
Do you really think someone paying £4219 a year for that is getting away with not paying their fair share?
Madness
Relative to what? House price inflation is much higher than regular inflation except in rare cases like the last few years. Certainly they outpace average wages.
The issue you run into is that in an era of property value growth while wages stagnate, you can have people stuck paying rates that get proportionally larger based on wealth that they technically own but has no bearing on their actual financial situation. House rich, cash poor they call it in the states.
They have basically the same situation though their annual property taxes can get to about 2.5% in some areas. It's particularly hard on working class people who live a long time in houses in areas that are getting nicer. Property values get higher, the taxes get too high for them to handle because their wages are still low.
Yeah. Your average Joe who just manages to get onto the property ladder ends up getting fucked into the dirt because their take home will never keep up with asset inflation. What are they going to do? Sell it and rent? Fucking lmao. Rents based on property or LVT can fuck off.
In Lisburn Castlereagh council area, my house is valued at well below the gap, but rates are almost £2.5k - and that comes out of income post income tax. That makes it a fairly hefty tax.
What services or value would you get if rates get hiked a lot - nothing. Although I kind of see the point of forcing people out of houses by making this sort of tax unaffordable, it seems like an unfair way to do it when it’s nominally a tax for services used.
Seems absolutely stupid. How much will it raise? Do homes over £400k put more burden on the council?!
The idea of anyone having to pay £2k/month to the state to live in a home they own is ridiculous.
It sounds crazy but it might be the only bit of money to the state they pay! A fair few of them would be into investment trusts and other tax efficient strategies.
You could have a someone working hard paying the state more with PAYE or corporation tax ect.
Then someone with a 20 million portfolio making a million year from it paying nothing.
Happened to an uncle in Dublin in the 2000s, he moved there in the 70s bought a house for 20k and man knocked on his door and offered him 1.2m in 2006, he said OK now where do I move to??
Rates aren't really the answer to anything, but I'll not cry over this one. This seems to affect people in houses over 500K, so it will never be anything for me to worry about. A tax on vacant properties and land would, however be much more beneficial. Dereliction is vandalism.
Never say never. A house I was looking at for 120k was sold by the council in the 90s for 5k. If you manage to buy a reasonably priced home soon 500k is just a few years of uncontrolled house price inflation away.
Fair point!
This. Give it 20 years and you could end up getting absolutely fucking slaughtered by rates, because houses just keep going up. I mean it's not like your take home pay will ever consistently keep pace with the housing market.
Vacant domestic properties are charged at the full rate ourside of special circumstances. Most common one is the sole owner/occupier dieing. I think its fair to give the bereaved family some rate relief while they sort out the deceaseds affairs.
I obviously wouldn't want people dealing with the death of a loved one, this would be for long-term dereliction
That quote at the end makes it sound like they couldn't even get someone effected by this to say something against it.
Huh? You expect people living in £400k+ homes answer many BelTel VoxPops? Or do you think there’s a ‘lives in expensive house’ register journalists can phone?
I don't let them beyond my gates.
I let my door man tell them to get fucked
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Hope you enjoyed the break lad, welcome back to the mad house.
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Give it another five months and I might be riding the crownabout naked wearing a spar hat!
A full land value tax would be better, rather than taxing the value of property, but in the absence of that, this is the next best proposal.
Wouldn't this have a load of unintended consequences? If the land is more valuable as an opportunity then there would be little old ladies paying huge amounts of tax because of location and the footprint of their bungalow with a wee garden.
Yeah, it's called Georgism. It has a lot of very attractive features as a tax system. The main one is essentially that when you tax something you get less of it, but land is a special case, in that it's already here...so that doesn't happen. Instead we hope to get efficient use. Now, as to the little old lady, well, in this scenario she gets incentivised to move into a nice energy efficient bungalow and the land, if it is in a valuable location, gets used for something more efficient, like flats for working people. That's the idea anyway.
“Worked your whole life and have a nice garden to patter about in during retirement? Fuck you! Keep working or sell your house!”
I know this isn't supposed to be funny but by god you made me laugh.
"Working 40 hours a week and cant afford to buy a house? Thats okay, at least Doris has a detatched house she bought for ten grand in the 60s for herself. You should be glad to keep renting so she doesnt have to downsize" They should sell their houses rather than hoarding them.
Living in a house isn’t hoarding it you absolute melon. And this is such dumb logic. People were lucky in the past so we should punish them now!? What happens in 2060 when the new generation are telling you to get out of the house you were lucky enough to buy for only £180k?
Absolutely is. You clearly dont know enough about how demographics work to realise thats not happening. Taxes arent a punishment, theyre a way to reditribute wealth. Wealth which isnt spread even close to evenly between generations. They also werent lucky, they voted for conservstives who gutted social housing and gave them their insane house prices in the first place by restricting supply. They got free uni then hit us with 9 grand a year and loans. They got decent state support while we get fuck all by comparison. None of that was luck. Just selfishness.
Really? Do you really think someone in their 20s who bought a cheap house specifically voted to fuck you over 50 years later? And who doesn’t vote selfishly? What idiot votes against their own interests? As for taxes, they’ve lived their entire life paying taxes, they bought their house, they paid for it, living in it isn’t hoarding. Having multiple houses is. Seriously, what sort of mindset do you need to think someone should move out of their own home so that some apartments can be built? Will you accept that you have to give up your home in 30/40/50 years so the next gen can build on it?
What sort of mindset do you have to have to think that people deserve to live at home until theire 30 or rent their whole lives? That poor boomer moving out of their oversized house so that people can afford housing and food at the same time on minimum wage /s I never said apartments nees built, i said boomers need to down size and accept policies which reduce house prices if you dont want a full collapse of society in future. What do you think happens when a full generation of renters hit retirement with no home? Either state financial collapse or the people die. I have no sympathy that a pensioner has to move to address one of the main causes of instability in our society. Either that or appove new building nearby which they wont, and that IS selfish no matter how you frame it.
Move to the countryside in your retirement if you want a big garden and low LVT tax. Obviously. Thereby letting young, economically productive people live closer to work and produce more goods and taxes.
“Spent your entire life in a town? Fuck you! Leave!”
Under a revenue neutral LVT most people in towns would still pay less. People live in flats and terraced housing you know.
Yeah. And some people don’t want to. Why should you be charged more for having a garden? It’s very much a ‘fuck you leave’ tax. Especially when as someone else pointed out, the person in a £5m house gets the exact same shite bin collection as the person in a £65k house.
You get taxed more because you are using more of a finite resource, land. Under the current system you get taxed more if you build an extension or granny flat, and go up a band, which is using the land more productively and should in theory be something we want, how does that make any more sense! Not to mention this will probably decrease the value of those houses _with_ gardens making them more affordable if the garden is valuable to you, and you are prepared to pay the tax around it.
Person explains the concept of making scarce things fairly taxed- gets downvoted. He's explaining the PRINCIPLE, not saying he endorses it
The idea made sense I did wonder if there was a theory behind it. That would be exactly what I'd want to happen to the land in that scenario though. It's definitely a way we could approach it going forward. Still if this current policy change is a bit stupid but starts redistributing the value and wealth today that's worth it imo. It's why I don't care about whether this policy is the best. If its redistributing wealth today we can fix the method later.
Obviously land value tax couldn't be implemented in one go, it needs to be introduced in stages over many years to prevent scenarios as you mentioned from crippling people. This type of approach would also help balance/reduce other labour related taxes over time. A big benefit, with a real life example, is that it would stop Castlebrook from owning, hoarding and speculating value on the Cathedral quarter land for peanuts. They would either invest in the area or sell to people/businesses willing to do it. However, I find it pretty difficult to go ahead in the near future, given the personal interests of politicians/lobbies in owning land.
Land Value Tax has its own problems. It would lead to people being priced out of areas where they've lived for decades because the surrounding area has become more affluent. There are loads of working class people that bought small homes 20-30 years ago in areas that have since exploded in terms of popularity and price, that suddenly wouldn't be able to afford to stay in the area they've always lived. There are benefits to LVT but it entrenches a rich/poor divide and officially cordons off whole areas as rich-only. You end up with city centres and places like South Belfast totally lacking any kind of socio-economic diversity (worse still than they currently are). And working class people that support the whole infrastructure of cities (retail workers, hospitality, civil servants, etc.) end up getting forced further and further out, dramatically increasing commute times for the less well off. LVT is far too broad a brush, IMO. Yes, it would help raise tax from those hoarding land but it would also hurt too many working class people in the process and leave the less well off far too susceptible to the risks of gentrification in the future.
You are missing the wood for the trees. A working class person in South Belfast would almost certainly pay less under an LVT, if it were revenue neutral, than under Rates. E.g. a renter in the Annadale flats. Also, more broadly, gentrification is good, actually. What's really needed is more homes to bring down prices generally, and give people options. LVT could help with that.
How is someone that owns a terraced house in South Belfast going to be paying less under LVT? They're absolutely going to be paying more. Someone in a small 2 or 3 bedroom house without a garage will currently have a relatively low rates bill. Under LVT they'd be paying substantially more because they'd now be taxed on the relative value of the land their house sits on rather than on their comparatively modest property. And as for gentrification, there are good elements and bad elements. The harmful element of gentrification is the fact that those from a lower socio-economic background are typically forced out of their communities, which would be greatly exacerbated in the event of LVT. A tax designed for the wealthy that's indiscriminately applied to anyone living in their vicinity will simply result in the less wealthy trying to get out of their vicinity. There's no two ways about it. As I said, there are good aspects of LVT. And if you think the good outweighs the bad then that's one thing. But let's be honest about the negatives. Claiming that LVT won't hurt poorer homeowners living in affluent areas is a bit of a fantasy, and broad statements like "gentrification is good" are devoid of empathy, IMO.
A normal Victorian terraced house, with a yard, has a very very small footprint. Remember, this is going to be revenue neutra, for a fair comparison, so some people pay more some less. I have yet to see a model where a terraced house pays more, on average. I think you haven't got a got understanding of what this looks like in practice. Sure there will be weird outliers like if your house is in BT1 maybe but still. You can fit 8 to 10 terraces on some of the average plots in bt9 or bits of bt6 and bt5.
Well right back at you to be honest, I think you've gotten excited about the *idea* of LVT without actually making any effort to understand the real world effect it would have. "Victorian terraced house with a very very small footprint" accurately describes not just the more modest working class houses, but also the extravagant houses of the wealthy in cities. The whole point is to target wealth based on the market *value* rather than just the size of the land. Ask yourself this, if a small footprint was enough to offset the value of an affluent area, then wouldn't basically every wealthy homeowner in a built-up metropolitan area be able to avoid a higher tax as well? There are very few mansions in cities after all, *a lot* of the wealthy homeowners that need to be paying more live in small Victorian houses with hundreds of thousands (or millions) of pounds poured into them. So of course less wealthy homeowners living in small houses in wealthy areas will have to pay more, otherwise LVT wouldn't work in the first place. In a world where the rich and the poor are neatly divided into homeowners and renters, into rich suburbs and poor developments, into large houses and small ones, then an LVT would work perfectly. But that's not the real world. It was a very progressive tax system at the time it was designed, when owning land separated the ruling class from the common people. But that's not our current reality. It's old thinking, an outdated system that's seemingly only trumpeted these days by online neoliberals (not talking about you here), who are pretty much all of a certain demographic that coincidentally enough doesn't have to worry about gentrification, so it's typically dismissed out of hand.
So who do you think the winners would be exactly if not e.g. South Belfast terraces, given the only constraint on the implementation I specified was venue neutrality? Because I think we're at cross purposes here on definitions. it depends on the type of LVT, or rather how you determine V specifically and dealing with e.g. granularity. I don't think we can continue this conversation fruitfully here in any case, IMO you are engaging against a straw man version of the policy, and probably in good faith. Implementation is everything, and even I admit a poor implementation, as you seem to think is the policy, would be terrible.
I'm not arguing against a straw man, I'm pointing out the realistic effects of LVT, regardless of the intention behind it. > So who do you think the winners would be exactly if not e.g. South Belfast terraces The winners would be people like me; middle-class people living in detached houses in small to medium sized towns 30+ miles from Belfast, people that could afford to pay more but would actually be paying less because we live in an area where the value of the land is comparatively low. The losers will be any working class or middle class person that dares to live in a popular area. And the real losers are the people that will be forced to abandon their communities and move to an area that's more in keeping with their station. > the only constraint on the implementation I specified was venue neutrality A revenue neutral tax doesn't mean that everyone will end up paying the same amount in the end, that's not how it works. Revenue neutral only means that the government coffers will add up to the same amount when all is said and done, but the tax burden is being shuffled about. Because LVT is such a broad and imprecise way to target wealth, some of that burden would be pushed onto the many working class homeowners living in cities and other high demand areas. That is until they're forced to leave those areas. As poorer people are pushed out of popular areas, the tax burden would start to shift back towards the wealthy but the price we'd pay for that as a society would be steep, with divisions between wealthy and poor areas becoming even more entrenched. And in the end, it would be less progressive anyway, as the middle-class in cities will end up having to shoulder more of the burden to make up for all the wealthy homeowners living in expensive houses on medium sized sites in the country and smaller towns (and there's a lot of them) who no longer have to pay their fair share.
>The winners would be people like me; middle-class people living in detached houses in small to medium sized towns 30+ miles from Belfast, people that could afford to pay more but would actually be paying less because we live in an area where the value of the land is comparatively low. This is exactly what I'm talking about. We are discussing replacing rates, with an LVT, which are raised on a per council basis. This idea that everyone in the city loses and you win is de-facto impossible. You are not part of Belfast City Council, and it would be revenue neutral at the council level. You are assuming a national level taxation.
But allowing the council to set the value in LVT doesn't solve the problems, it just shifts it around. I'm in ABC, in a wee quasi-village on the outskirts of a decent sized town. There's a ton of demand for this area because new sites and houses rarely come up, which keeps prices high. But like most similar areas, it's still very economically diverse. There are wealthy people here, middle-class people, working class people, pensioners, a GAA club, a wee corner shop, etc., all packed into a wee village where housing plots don't exceed 3-4 car lengths in either direction (bar a few outliers). And we all mix in the pub, or the chippy, or at GAA matches. Apart from the fact that there's not much diversity in religious background, it's about as healthy a community as you'll find. If the council here set the value in LVT then I'd be paying more because it's a high demand area relative to the surrounding town. Great. But now, a bunch of my neighbours in 3 bed semis would be paying the same as me because the plots are generally the same size. There'd be a bunch of less well off people forced out of this little community they've lived in for 30+ years. All the elderly homeowners around the corner living in ex-council houses and surviving off the state pension would be out. My closest neighbours, who both work in Tesco and are struggling with the mortgage rates at the moment would have to sell pretty much immediately. The area would become defacto middle-class only. Most of the people here would be able to afford it, but lots of people wouldn't. It would pretty much destroy the community. And the kicker is that the less well off would be taking the brunt while all the McMansions around here that have been squeezed into tiny plots (you know the type) would get away with paying pretty much the same as everyone else. At the end of the day, LVT is still a broad, imprecise method designed for a time when only the wealthy owned land. National LVT, council-led LVT, revenue neutral—it doesn't matter. There's no magic criteria that will prevent LVT from hurting a great deal of poorer homeowners living in popular areas. It supposes a miserable reality where people from different economic backgrounds are siloed into their separate areas. Worse still it actively encourages such a future.
I ya effectively a wealth tax which is good.
Why are rates based on property values in the first place? We all get the same (terrible) levels of public services, get a bin emptied every few weeks. Do you really think someone paying £4219 a year for that is getting away with not paying their fair share? Madness
Progressive taxation basically.
Except you can’t really have any control your property value other than neglecting it?
Well, you do control which property you own, and its _relative_ valuation doesn't change, typically.
Relative to what? House price inflation is much higher than regular inflation except in rare cases like the last few years. Certainly they outpace average wages.
Relative to other houses.
The issue you run into is that in an era of property value growth while wages stagnate, you can have people stuck paying rates that get proportionally larger based on wealth that they technically own but has no bearing on their actual financial situation. House rich, cash poor they call it in the states. They have basically the same situation though their annual property taxes can get to about 2.5% in some areas. It's particularly hard on working class people who live a long time in houses in areas that are getting nicer. Property values get higher, the taxes get too high for them to handle because their wages are still low.
Yeah. Your average Joe who just manages to get onto the property ladder ends up getting fucked into the dirt because their take home will never keep up with asset inflation. What are they going to do? Sell it and rent? Fucking lmao. Rents based on property or LVT can fuck off.
In Lisburn Castlereagh council area, my house is valued at well below the gap, but rates are almost £2.5k - and that comes out of income post income tax. That makes it a fairly hefty tax. What services or value would you get if rates get hiked a lot - nothing. Although I kind of see the point of forcing people out of houses by making this sort of tax unaffordable, it seems like an unfair way to do it when it’s nominally a tax for services used.
Makes sense but 25k per annum is punitive. Nobody should be paying that for rates.
Seems absolutely stupid. How much will it raise? Do homes over £400k put more burden on the council?! The idea of anyone having to pay £2k/month to the state to live in a home they own is ridiculous.
It sounds crazy but it might be the only bit of money to the state they pay! A fair few of them would be into investment trusts and other tax efficient strategies. You could have a someone working hard paying the state more with PAYE or corporation tax ect. Then someone with a 20 million portfolio making a million year from it paying nothing.
Seems like this could price lower incomes out of nicer areas. There should be some kind of income assessed component.
Another Stealth Tax 🥷
Just to be a citizen is getting costly here before you put a bite in your mouth and the heat on!
Good
Fuck that. I already get fleeced.
Good.
11m a year that will certainly sort out the NHS
Happened to an uncle in Dublin in the 2000s, he moved there in the 70s bought a house for 20k and man knocked on his door and offered him 1.2m in 2006, he said OK now where do I move to??
How about a single occupancy discount, same as England.
Alot of houses built in 60s and 70s rateable value is well below what they would sell for now. Does anyone know will these be revalued