Category: Real estate taxes

Our fair city’s fair taxes

25 November, 2009 (11:18) | Cambridge, Local issues, Primer, Real estate taxes, Zoning | No comments

By: David A. Smith
 
In Our Fair City of Cambridge, as Click and Clack like to call it, nothing is as fair as our taxes are fair – and that’s fair enough, isn’t it?
 

Not just a law firm, a motto: the Harvard Square offices of Click and Clack
 
Roughly a month ago, there was mailed to our [...]

Nobody home?

27 August, 2009 (10:00) | Compulsory purchase, Eminent domain, Local issues, London, Real estate taxes, Rental, Speculation | No comments

Why would you buy an expensive home in a tony London neighborhood and then leave it empty?
 

Vacancies even in my tony neighborhood?
That concerns me.
 
Leave it to the Wall Street Journal to peep through Mayfair’s lace curtains:
 
LONDON — At an abandoned home with yellowing newspapers on its front stoop, Paul Palmer peeks through a mail slot [...]

Subsidy or surcharge? Part 2, should we?

20 August, 2009 (11:14) | Local issues, Massachusetts, Real estate taxes, Tenure, Theory, Zoning | No comments

[Continued from yesterday’s Part 1].
 
Yesterday’s post examined the hypothetical of raising property taxes while exempting a particular class of elderly homeowners from the increased costs they would vote to impose.  As shown in a fascinating quantitative analysis, Massachusetts Proposition 2½, Simulating Overrides with Low-Income Elderly Exemptions, published in the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston article in [...]

Subsidy or surcharge? Part 1, how much?

19 August, 2009 (09:53) | Local issues, Massachusetts, Real estate taxes, Tenure, Theory, Zoning | No comments

Once we have accepted the principle that tax burdens should vary by taxpayer group – and everyone except a few economists have so accepted, at least in the world of political reality – we must choose who gains the more favored treatment – and how we package it.

Long ago, when I matriculated to [...]

US property taxes: Part 2, local autonomy = local initiatives

24 July, 2009 (09:52) | Government, Ireland, Local issues, Primer Posts, Real estate taxes, Speculation, Theory, US News, Zoning and land use | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]
 
So there I was, mid-May in Dublin at the Foundation for Fiscal Studies’ 24th annual gathering, The Fiscal Treatment of Property, expanding on the topic Lessons from the United States and explaining US real estate taxation to a roomful of tax wonks. 
 

Class, can you say ‘locally autonomous control’?
 
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