Random thought. What if we taxed property based on the area per person of the property, as opposed to sale value? Edit and quick intro to those who mostly rent: most real property in the US,...
Random thought. What if we taxed property based on the area per person of the property, as opposed to sale value?
Edit and quick intro to those who mostly rent: most real property in the US, especially residential property, is taxed yearly based on some variation of something called "fair market value," usually assessed by a local tax assessor's office
I'm proposing that a property would be taxed for every square meter of space per person in the designated property unit. It can't be totally simplified, but should be fairly straightforward. There could also be progressive brackets. It might not make make sense to apply it strictly per person, but rather for a typical use. That is, we would assume "single family residential" properties to house 3.4 (totally made up number) people per house and property.
The goal of this is to find a fair, market-driven incentive to build density into urban cores.
A similar approach could be applied to commercial space (but probably not industrial).
It could be coupled with a sales tax (currently missing in most real property tax regimes, at least in the US) to capture runaway property valuations in certain jurisdictions.
Alternatively, we could drop the property value based tax rate (but not eliminate it), and then add a per person-area surcharge.
It's not meant to increase revenue, although it could certainly be used that way. It could also be use to decrease revenue, and maybe that would be a good way to sell it. But at the end of the day, developers and residents would both have an incentive to pursue as dense development as possible, even if there is not a density driving pressure of desirablity, which only exists in a few really cool urban cores.