Category: Tenure

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 [...]

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 3, who decides?

13 August, 2009 (14:04) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's part 2 and the previous Part1.]
 
Two days ago, we looked at Santa Rosa’s Country Mobile Home Park, whose owner wants to condo the land (at least as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle; the owner wouldn’t talk to the newspaper), and yesterday we saw that in a forced condo conversion, land value [...]

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 2, at what price?

12 August, 2009 (10:29) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

Yesterday we encountered Country Mobile Home Park, an estate in Santa Rosa whose park owner is adamant about converting the land to condominiums, and selling the individual plots to those whose homes rest atop those plots.

Plots? I love plots!

[Editorial note: park owners persist in calling the land 'spaces', [...]

Condo-ing mobile home parks: Part 1, unofficial affordable housing

11 August, 2009 (15:11) | California, Eminent domain, Local issues, Mobile homes, Tenure, US News | No comments

You own a mobile home. The land is owned by a third party landlord who likes nothing better than jacking up your rents.

Legally, mobile homes that lack land aren’t real estate, and you can’t finance one as real estate; instead you get a chattel loan. You can’t avail yourself of the legal protections of [...]