The effect of property taxes on urban areas

The effects of property taxes on urban areas are studied relative to a local wage tax. The changes in urban population and in the consumption and price of housing are determined in cities with various types of production sectors. Distortions in the composition of housing and residential density patterns are also reported. Examples are constructed to quantify the size of the changes and test whether property taxes are capitalized into land values.     

Pennsylvania's Success with Local Property Tax Reform

A bstract Fifteen cities in Pennsylvania are pioneering an innovative approach to local tax reform that harnesses market incentives for urban renewal .
Opting for the so-called "two-rate" or "split-rate" property tax , these cities are lowering taxes on buildings, thereby encouraging improvements and renovations , while raising the tax on land values, thus discouraging land speculation . The resulting infill development as indicated by increased building permits means downtown jobs , efficient use of urban infrastructure, an improved housing stock, and less urban sprawl .
Cities in other states are poised to follow Pennsylvania's example.     

Growth and Distributional Impacts of Urban Housing Supply: An Application of Urban Land Use and a CGE Model For Seoul

This paper assesses economic effects of housing supplies on the urban growth and income distribution of Seoul, using an urban land use and Computable General Equilibrium model of Seoul economy. The simulation shows that the housing development with the conversion of the green or the industrial land uses into the residential land use leads to an increase of the Gross Regional Product by approximately 1% at the worse income inequality. The aggregate welfare effects in terms of Hicksian Compensating Variation range from 1.746 trillion Korean Won to 1.768 trillion Korean Won on a ten-period average, depending on the type of the land conversion.     

Property Tax and Housing Returns

This paper evaluates the effects of property tax on housing. While land tax and capital gains tax are widely used for curbing hoarding of land and speculation, its effectiveness is inconclusive. The imposition of a capital gains tax will impair the liquidity of property transaction, lower the rate of return on property investment, and reduce revenue from land sales which represents an important tax resource for the communities. This paper shows that a capital gains tax is capitalized into housing prices. Individuals tend to postpone the purchase of houses because of transaction taxes. Using an impulse response function, we show that a transaction tax has a dynamic negative impact on housing returns. While this paper focuses on Hong kong, for the purpose of comparison Singapore and Taiwan are also discussed.     

Energy footprint of the city: Effects of urban land use and transportation policies

Urban land use and transportation policies have dramatic effects on the density and spatial distribution of residences in large cities. Effects of these policies have been analyzed using numerical urban simulation models. At the same time, the US Energy Information Administration’s Residential Energy Consumption Survey has allowed researchers to investigate the relation between household energy consumption and characteristics of housing units.This paper links these two lines of inquiry by demonstrating how simulation results on the implications of land use and transportation policies for the spatial form of cities can be used to compute implications for energy consumption. The resulting Urban Energy Footprint Model, “UEFM,” allows one to trace the implications of a change in land use zoning or transportation policy through its effects on housing markets and residential location to the resulting changes in energy use for residential and commuting purposes – i.e. to understand the energy footprint of transportation, housing, and land use policies. Accordingly, the UEFM provides, perhaps for the first time, a link between urban and energy economics, and can allow measurement of rebound effects of energy policies in a more general equilibrium context.     

A Simple General Test for Tax Bias

A bstract .   The paper infers the biasing effects of taxes from their differential effects on the present values of rival uses for given tracts of land. After-tax wage rates, interest rates, and commodity prices are exogenous, hence not affected by taxes, which are therefore all shifted to land rents and values. The effects are differential among rival uses, hence change their ranking in the eyes of the landowner-manager. Most taxes downgrade the highest use into a lower use, inducing quantum leaps away from higher and better uses into lower and worse uses. The paper uses forestry as an allegory for all land uses. It compares yield taxes, property taxes, income taxes, and site value taxes. It finds that a change from the first three to the site value tax would induce quantum leaps from lower to higher uses of land.     

Informal Housing in the United States

Research on informal housing tends to focus overwhelmingly on less developed countries, downplaying or ignoring entirely the presence of informality in United States housing markets. In actuality, a longstanding and widespread tradition of informal housing exists in the United States but is typically disregarded by scholars. In this article we draw on three definitions of informality—as non‐compliant, non‐enforced, or deregulated economic activity—to characterize examples of informality in US housing markets, focusing in particular on five institutions that govern housing market activity in this country: property rights law, property transfer law, land‐use and zoning, subdivision regulations, and building codes. The cases presented here challenge the notion that informality is absent from US housing markets and highlight the unique nature of informal housing, US style—namely, that informal housing in the US is geographically uneven, largely hidden and typically interwoven within formal markets. We conclude with a discussion of how research on informal housing in the US can inform research in the global South.     

房产税对房产市场影响的实证研究——上海模式和重庆模式的比较

文章首先运用HP滤波的方式分析了沪渝两地房产税对新房和二手房在价格和成交量上的影响,发现上海房地产市场对房产税的的征收反应更为理性,影响效果更好,但两地区新房和二手房市场的反映都存在差异;此外,利用房价对数模型,发现房产税都能有效的影响两地的房价,但由于影响两地房价的因素有很大的差异,效率并不一样,上海地区房产税每增加1%,房价将下降0.553%,重庆地区房产税每增加1%,房价将下降0.041%。因此国家需区别对待新房和二手房市场,并且因地制宜,推广不同的房产税模式。     

Spillover effects of human service facilities in a racially segmented housing market

Previous studies of human service facility spillovers on residential property values have been inconclusive, and have failed to take into account the effects of racial segmentation of housing markets. Likewise, studies of racial discrimination in urban housing markets and price differentials between white and nonwhite areas of the city have failed to consider the impacts of service facilities on prices. This study develops an hedonic price model of housing services in a racially segmented housing market, which considers a variety of human service facilities and their spillover effects. Model results for Oakland, California in 1976 indicate that facilities significantly affect housing prices both positively and negatively, and that these effects vary by racial submarket. Implications of these findings for the interpretation of past discrimination studies, facility impact studies, and social policy are considered.     

LAND MARKETS AND THE EFFECT OF REGULATION ON FORMAL-SECTOR DEVELOPMENT IN URBAN INDONESIA

Until recently, urban land and housing markets in Indonesia seemed to function well. Informal-sector development provided low-income housing affordably. Through government programs, formal-sector developers could build housing for all but the poor. Since 1989, however, daily conversation pictures land speculation as rampant and formal-sector housing as rising beyond the means of the middle class. Newspapers carry stories of conflicts between small landowners and large developers with government officials in between. This article investigates this situation by addressing two related questions: are urban land prices rising “too fast?”; how do land regulations and development practices affect costs, and who pays these costs? The article includes quantitative estimates of urban land prices, changes in urban land supply, movement of land through the permitting process, and the effect of development regulations on costs. Data come from a literature survey and interviews of some of the largest formal-sector developers in Indonesia. A principal finding concerns a development regulation called a “location permit” and the “social function” of land in Indonesian law. Although helpful as a means of assembling land in Indonesia's highly fragmented land markets, location permits allow formal-sector developers to hold land off the market and pay low prices to small landowners. Ultimately, the “social function” of land under Indonesian law holds down the price formal-sector developers pay for land, but not at the price at which they sell their product. The article concludes by proposing reforms to the regulatory process.     

The Risk Structure of Land Markets

Real property as an asset class represents over half of the wealth in the United States. Nevertheless, the structure of risk in real property markets is poorly understood. This paper develops a model of urban and agricultural land prices that integrates spatial and asset pricing theories and characterizes the spatial and temporal risk structure of the land market. Urban land is priced by a CAPM and agricultural land is priced by a real option to convert into urban land. We show that the price of land awaiting conversion increases with the growth rate of urban rents and unsystematic risk but decreases with risk aversion. However, it may be increasing or decreasing in systematic risk. The free boundary for exercise determines city size, which increases with the growth rate of urban rents but decreases with systematic and unsystematic risk.     

The spatial effects of a tax on housing and land

This paper analytically investigates the spatial consequences of a tax on housing and land. In general, a property tax is not spatially neutral; instead it disproportionately affects certain parts of the city. The property tax can therefore create distributional inequities and can distort the pattern of residential and industrial location. We derive conditions on locational preferences and housing production that determine which parts of a city will be disproportionately affected by a property tax. Empirical estimates suggest that central locations will be disproportionately affected by property taxes.     

The price responsiveness of housing supply in OECD countries

The responsiveness of housing supply to changes in prices bears important implications for the evolution of housing prices and the speed of adjustment of housing markets. Based on a stock-flow model of the housing market estimated within an error correction framework, this paper estimates the long-run price elasticity of new housing supply in 21 OECD countries. Estimates suggest that the responsiveness of housing supply to price changes varies substantially across countries. It is relatively more flexible in North America and some Nordic countries, while it is more rigid in continental European countries and in the United Kingdom. The responsiveness of housing supply depends not only on national geographical and urban characteristics but also on policies, such as land use and planning regulations.     

The effects of the property tax: A general equilibrium simulation

This paper uses a general equilibrium model of residential land use to study the effects of the property tax in a closed city. Two different specifications of the production technology for housing are used, and are found to yield similar results. The model is too complicated to be solved in closed form, but an efficient computational technique which utilizes a simplicial search algorithm was developed to solve it numerically. This type of model and computational technique can be applied to a wide variety of practical issues in urban economics.     

Land Prices and Tax Policy: A Study of Fiscal Impacts

A bstract . Various tax measures are in use in efforts to control the level of land prices and to moderate changes in them. These are the site value, vacant land, increment value and transfer taxes. Analysis indicates that sufficiently heavy site value taxes can help stem the rise in land prices and that relatively heavy vacant land taxes can be used to encourage the development of certain urban land. Both instruments may bring forward the time of development. Both are perhaps the best tax tools for controlling speculation. Significant problems seem likely to attend the use of land value increment and transfer taxes applied at high rates. Non-tax alternative or complementary measures are also analyzed.     

Eliminating Housing Tax Preferences: A Distributional Analysis

We examine the distributional impact of potential changes in the tax treatment of owner-occupied housing in this paper. In particular, we focus on the removal of mortgage interest and local property tax deductibility. A theoretical model of the demand for housing is developed that captures the impact of removing these deductions on housing demand. Then, we use a large cross section of individual income tax returns from the Internal Revenue Service for 1990 to estimate the distributional effects of removing housing deductions. Taxpayers are ranked by income and tax liability, both with and without the housing deductions. By comparing tax liability under the alternative regimes, and composing measures of the distributional impact of removing housing tax deductions using the classic Suits index, we assess both revenue neutral and nonrevenue neutral distributional effects. Results in both cases indicate that the removal of the tax deductibility of mortgage interest and property taxes would increase the progressivity of the income tax substantially.     

Economic Effects of Taxes on Land:

A bstract . Land taxes may not be neutral in their economic impacts due to liquidity effects. Liquidity effects of land taxes may be in the form of holding cost effects or capitalization effects. Holding cost effects may occur when land is being withheld from development for non-financial reasons, such as the direct benefits of landownership. Capitalization effects may occur when there are imperfections in capital markets which prevent the acquisition of land for otherwise viable projects. Contrary to the analysis by Bentick , no liquidity effects should be expected due to variations in streams of land rent generated by different hypothetical development projects for a given site. Bentick's analysis relies on a misunderstanding of the nature of land rent .     

Implications for food production potential of future urban expansion in Ontario

The paper describes the application of an evaluation system to assess the flexibility that would exist in the use of Ontario's agricultural land resources under alternative urban growth scenarios. A programming method is employed, but the analysis does not yield a “best” or “predicted” allocation of land use; rather, the system gauges the degree to which options in the use of land are affected by changes in conditions, and identifies those land areas which are strategically important for particular uses given the specified conditions. The conditions are specified to reflect possible patterns of urban and exurban development, both with and without policy controls. The analysis provides evaluations of both the pressures on the land resources if food production requirements are to be met, and the importance of particular land units for agriculture if the requirements are to be met, under the alternative urban growth scenarios.     

浅议征收房产税对未来房价的影响

房价包括房地产开发成本和开发商利润两部分,其中土地费用、建安成本和税费占房地产开发成本的90%左右,成本因素、供求关系和政策因素是影响房价上涨的主要因素.从短期来看,征收房产税会增加炒房、囤房者的投资持有成本,也会影响购房者对未来的预期,有利于遏制房价过快增长;但就长期而言,由于需求大于供给的总趋势没有变,居民对住房的...     

The effects of zoning on structure and land markets

Zoning takes three general forms: constraints on density, lot size, and allowable use. This paper demonstrates that the three restrictions differ in their effects on structure and land markets. Density zoning is equivalent to a monopoly restriction that can be used to raise all land values. Allowable use restrictions affect land values differentially. Large-lot restrictions affect the price for housing paid by individual households differentially. Considering externalities does not alter these basic differences. The implications for empirical studies of zoning are discussed.