From an article in The Telegraph about those online crime statistics:
Estate Agents said the new tool will be welcomed by homebuyers but warned that people in some areas could see the value of their properties drop. David Dalby, a director at the Royal Institution for Chartered Surveyors, said: "Taken out of context these crime statistics could have an affect on house prices."
So, people aren't too fussed about being robbed or burgled, as long as potential buyers don't find out and bid house prices down?
UPDATE: The Guardian runs a whole article of such Home-Owner-Ist drivel.
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On a more serious note, one of the 'Killer arguments against LVT, not' is that land ownership is just private property like any other private property, like a car or a lawnmower. From this false premise comes the straw man argument "If you propose taxing me on the value of land which I 'own', merely because the State* respects and protects my right to exclusive possession, then this is the same as taxing me on the value of my car or my lawnmower".
This is quite clearly a stupid argument as cars and lawnmowers are patently not 'land' and therefore couldn't possibly be subject to LVT, that's like saying that alcohol duty would apply to insurance premiums. And as the above excerpt illustrates, crime levels directly influence land values.
Even though the police (in theory) also go after muggers, rapists, murderers, burglars, car thieves etc, in practice there is little they can do; they can't un-mug or un-rape you; bring a murder victim back to life; and neither do they recover many stolen goods or cars - that's why we have insurance.
We therefore note that good policing/low crime levels do not feed through into higher car prices (although it keeps your insurance down). The value of a car is a constant and is the same wherever it is parked - if the likelihood of your car being stolen is low, then this does not add to the value of the car, it adds to the rental value of a home in that area.
* By which I do not mean 'politicians', I mean 'nearly all citizens abiding by an agreed set of rules, as enforced by the police'.
Tuesday 1 February 2011
Home-Owner-Ist Fun
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9 comments:
We hope that being the only house around here without a burglar alarm will give us some measure of security. That and the 17 year old car in the drive.
I see the Tegrelaph's subs haven't got any better; perhaps it will affect house prices, or have an effect on them. It will not have an affect on house prices.
Aaarrgghh. Sorry to intrude with pedantry but it does piss me off. One's entitled to expect better from a so-called quality newspaper.
Next, the differences between "less" and "fewer", and "amount" and "number"..........
Right. Grumpy hat off.
D, I'd worry about parking your car in your drive. Apparently insurance companies demand higher premiums for that, because if a burglar finds your car keys, he knows in which one he can drive off.
FT, well spotted. I didn't notice that.
"Estate Agents said the new tool will be welcomed by homebuyers but warned that people in some areas could see the value of their properties drop."
I suppose what it really means is that more of the "fools rush in" brigade will now be checking on the price of insurance before they put in an offer and those who didn't and are now hoping to offload their property on someone equally improvident are going to be disappointed.
The worst part about this project is the government spending a fortune building a website when they could have just provided the redacted data (which they are also doing) and let a load of geeks build the site for them.
I know all sorts of sites where geeks just decided to rip data out of public sites and make it useful. And knocking up a mapping site query against a database just isn't that complicated.
Pity they hired a bloody ad agency to do it rather than software engineering specialists. I've got a suspicion about the software they used, and based on my experience, the performance is just not suitable for a major website.
"Estate Agents said the new tool will be welcomed by homebuyers... I thought, just for a moment, that they might be talking about a new employee...
@Mark
On your update...
I was just such a person; reading your blog and a few long back and forward threads with yourself have persuaded me to the logic of LVT.
Now I understand more, I think that it is still true. Land is property, just like a car or a lawnmower, and it would be unjust to tax land. However, it's not the land that is being taxed... it is the location of that land.
"Location Value Tax" would perhaps be a better title for it. Those who object to paying high tax on their land in prime locations have a simple option: move your land somewhere else. It's easy to do: you simply trade X square meters here for X square meters there. When they find that they value "there" less than "here", then they will understand what it is that is being taxed.
OP, it's not just location, it's also desirability. More people want land to live on (i.e. land that either has a house on it, or permission to have a house on it) than want it to grow crops, therefore a piece of land you can live on will always be worth more than a piece you can only grow crops on. But yes, if you say that "agricultural" (including wasteland like moors, cliffs etc.) land attracts zero LVT, then it isn't the actual land that's being taxed.
OP, agreed. Which is why some LVT'ers prefer the term 'site value rating'. Land in itself is nigh worthless, it is [location x generosity of planning] that gives land its value.
Both variables, the 'desirability' of the location and the 'generosity of planning' are social contracts; conversely, if you buy a car or get paid for doing you job it is a private contract.
B, you can call it 'desirability' if you wish. The key is the price that people will pay for exclusive possession thereof (i.e. the right to exclude everybody else in society from that land, which is yet another social contract).
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