> If someone buys a home and lives in it, they should not have to care a single jot how it's valued externally. It is their home and their castle and they have every right to live in it.
If the city puts police in the block the house is in, cleans the street, puts a bus, and a subway, maintains parks, etc etc, they are all being perpetually funded by taxes, that if the landlord is not paying, he is mooching off someone else.
It's just not linearly proportional to the value of the home with no cap, because that makes no sense.
Cleaning the street doesn't become more expensive because your house became more expensive. Same for almost every other council-run service.
In a very indirect sense, it might cost more to employ street cleaners eventually if rent increases within a 30min-1h radius, but that's not in any reasonable sense linearly proportional to the value of a home in a specific area.
> In a very indirect sense, it might cost more to employ street cleaners eventually if rent increases within a 30min-1h radius, but that's not in any reasonable sense linearly proportional to the value of a home in a specific area.
It's very direct: the same house 100 miles away into the wilderness will not be worth nearly the same. Its construction/capital value might be more fix to the cost of materials + labor, but the value of the land is very much related to what services and other externalities affect it.
In any case I'd agree that the tax shouldnt be on the value of the house, but on the value of the land it would be much more representative of the externalities.
Yes, the externally assessed value of the house will vary depending on where it is.
The cost of public services apportioned to the house is not linearly correlated to its' externally assessed value.
If you move a suburban flat into the centre, slice it into the middle of a skyscraper say, it'd be worth way more, but it'd cost about the same to maintain the roads and take the bins out.
(Actually it'd probably cost less in the city, so in that particular case the public costs would be inversely proportional to value...)
We can perform an intuivite verification of this by dividing the city revenue/expenditures over 1. residences, 2. area, 3. people.
Example:
San francisco has an 11 billion tax revenue[1]
It has 880.000 residents [2]
It has 121 km2 [3]
It has 345,811 Households [3] (note this is an old census, the number has probably gone up a bit)
11 billion / 880.000 = 12.500 U$S
This means that every resident in the city would have to pay 1040U$S a month (including babies and elderly) just to pay for the city revenues.
11 billion / 121km ~= 91 million in expenditures per square km.
11 billion / 350k household ~= 31,500: each household has to pay 2625 a month just to maintain the city revenues.
If the city puts police in the block the house is in, cleans the street, puts a bus, and a subway, maintains parks, etc etc, they are all being perpetually funded by taxes, that if the landlord is not paying, he is mooching off someone else.