Passing on the LVT option, North Carolina moves forward with slashing its flat income tax rate anyway. On September 20th, North Carolina House and Senate leaders put forth a long-anticipated two- year budget agreement. The agreement does not include the Land Value Tax that Resource… Read More »North Carolina moves forward with slashing its flat income tax rate
Climate change poses a significant threat to numerous regions in the United States, rendering them increasingly uninhabitable due to rising sea levels, flooding, wildfires, and more. As a response to this challenge, managed retreat has emerged as a strategy to relocate affected households, neighborhoods, and even communities away from harm’s way. Although managed retreat can involve a number of processes, the use of buyouts––the voluntary purchasing of private properties using public funds (which is intended to spur the relocation of at-risk households to lower risk locations), is a critical (and in many places, virtually the only) tool in a policy maker’s toolbox.
While physically moving people out of harm’s way makes intuitive sense, the real world applications of managed retreat-related buyouts are highly complex, emotional, and fraught with weighty fiscal and equity implications. Here we explore some basic financial considerations of managed retreat, shedding light on the challenges faced by affected municipalities and fundamental flaws in the system as a whole.
Fall is here once again. This change of seasons typically evokes thoughts of colorful leaves; nights by the fire, hot cocoa in hand; and the impending holiday season. This fall, however, larger, more distressing trends are overshadowing these fanciful notions in many people’s minds.
Inflation has us paying more – much more – for everything from the food we feed our families, to the gas we put in our cars, to the insurance policies we purchase to safeguard our assets. And when it comes to our homes (often cited as most Americans’ largest asset) more and more buyers find themselves priced out of a housing market that is increasingly dominated by corporate investors with all cash offers, looking to turn a dual profit as landlords and owners of physical assets that can be borrowed against with ease.
Article by Tom Gihring, Research Director – Common Ground OR/WA Consequences of Two Property Tax Systems For several years property tax reformers have been calling for a land value tax (LVT) to counteract rapidly rising home prices. A property tax system that raises the tax… Read More »Tax Induced Opportunities for Expanding Community Land Trust Housing in Portland, Oregon
LLCs are a way to combine the benefits of a traditional corporate structure with enhanced anonymity and reduced tax-liability, making them the ideal method for limiting risk while at the same time maximizing profits. This incentivizes land speculation rather than reinvestment in the land in… Read More »CPTR Mapping Tool: LLCs in New York City
So we’re left with these dual realities: the premise of property taxes is sound, but the execution is inequitable. And for us at the Center for Property Tax Reform this brings two questions immediately to mind: First, where does bias in property assessments come from? (After all, professional assessors’ primary objective is to create valuations that are “fair and equitable,” not for some property owners, but for all of them.) And second, recognizing that many current assessments fall short of meeting the fair and equitable standard, what can we do to fix them?
It was with these questions in mind that we created our “Bias in Assessments Handbook.” The Handbook combines an extensive literature review with data gathered through one-on-one interviews with professional assessors in some of the nation’s largest jurisdictions – assessors who have personally and professionally dedicated themselves to identifying and remedying regressivity and inequities in their jurisdictions’ assessments and can speak with authority about how to do it right.
The Robert Schalkenbach Foundation (RSF) is committed to supporting original research that carries the ideas of 19th century economist and social reformer Henry George into the 21st century and beyond. To this end, RSF supports the conduct of original research into topics of social justice,… Read More »Robert Schalkenbach Foundation Progress of Ideas Grant
Traditional views of fiscal policy focus on the role of government in providing benefits like safe and efficient transportation options, good schools, and public safety, financed through the collection of taxes, bonding, and other means of collecting revenues from members of the public. What is often overlooked, however, is that the beneficiaries of these investments are private: the developers, businesses, and homeowners who see their projects greenlighted as a result of infrastructure extensions, their customer bases swell because of new transit stops, or their property values soar as a result of enhanced public schooling.
Value capture strategies focus on reclaiming the incremental increase in private land values (not improvements like homes or businesses) that results from public investments and returning it to the public coffers. In this way, they close the fiscal loop, making those who benefit most from public investments pay the most to support them.
There’s a lot to love about RSF, but the thing I appreciate most is its fundamental autonomy. Having spent most of my career with much larger organizations, many of which were baked into almost inconceivably large matrices of federal and state grants and regulations, or… Read More »No Brainer
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