Call for land tax to compel developers to build on vacant sites
1 Like
A lot of people here have been calling for a Site Value Tax for the last 6 or 7 years, and Iām fairly sure the ESRI was also voicing in favour of it when the current Property Tax was introduced.
The ESRI can see the sense of it, and the NTMA, and the National Competitiveness Council.
Developers waiting to make a killing threaten recovery, Arthur Beesley (Irish Times)
Is there any political will to undermine the property class? Not a chance. It wonāt happen with FG in power.
Sure doesnt NAMA own most of the vacant sitesā¦ not going to happen
McWilliams was just on RTE Radio 1 with Keelin Shanley calling for āUse it of Lose itā on development land. Further discussion to follow now with two FF/FG reps. Edit:- No further mention of it.
Are the locations and size of these hoarded parcels of land (in Dublin area) in the public domain?
Will this apply to land attached to peopleās homes, e.g. a field beside your house? If so, it will be a great way for developers to force people to sell up. Get the County Council to rezone the land you want to buy and then wait until the owners crack under the tax pressure.
Is there any evidence that a lack of land is really a block on the development or that it is preventing building? Surely the price of land is determined by the market, which is determined by the amount people can borrow to buy houses? That is why I think the other banks were every bit as culpable as Anglo in the crash. Anglo didnāt give out the home-loans to the people buying the houses, and the bubble could not have inflated without those loans.
At least thatās way better than the current situation of buying the land then rezoning it so the developer gets the windfall.
I donāt think thatās useful as sometimes these things take time (objections and appeals could become a land-grab mechanism). I would rather a site value tax starting for land for development and once established replacing both residential property tax and most of business rates. All administered by the Revenue.
Land and property taxes are the ultimate government wet dream.
Itās basic feudal enslavement with the peasant owners bearing the brunt of their masters desires.
No to this.
No to any of the establishment parties.
We have enough taxes as is anyways, more than enough 
Anyways some of the posters here are rather simplistic, no one just āsits on the land for the laugh of itā, most often there are reasons for underdevelopment, usually due to banks or planningā¦
Speaking of planning, Dublin does not need to sprawl outward anymore, the m50 and other main routes are already bursting, what is needed is to build up more densely, there is even will todo so but planners and residents in various areas do not want that.
Wasnāt sitting on land for the laugh of it (or at least until site values went up) basically Gerry Gannonās business model? Land speculation is certainly a thing.
In the lead article above they admit the problem will be resolved by doing . . . . nothing
And what did we learn from the boom? . . . . nothing. So now we have calls to optimise the construction industry with incentives to produce more units, trouble is no politician wants it to stop once they open that particular Pandoras box. A site tax is just another cost that works itās way into the price of the end product, why not analyse the existing costs involved in completing a building project, everything from finance, to regulatory compliance to actual construction, insurance and marketing has a cost associated with it. Where is the innovation to bring costs down?
Then again this is coming from the ESRI and there is an election underway, so we must ask ourselves what are the politics behind this? remember the ESRIs raison dāĆŖtre is to provide the government of the day with the justification it needs to do what it was planning anyway.
You can buy land in most parts of this country and you may as well be burning money (farming certainly wouldnt pay for capital used)
More than likely some brown envelopes and rezoning was involved in any cunning land deals in past, land tax wont fix corruptionā¦
The windfall tax will though. Or would have, rather, if FG hadnāt poured tipp-ex all over that legislation at the first available opportunity.
AK47 was on radio this AM discussing the smaller apt sizes and why he did itā¦Developers wouldnāt build under current guidelines he said.
So Tax development land more, said Lorcan Sirr of DIT.
I brought in the Land tax said AK47 and itās just kicking in now.
Itās a very small tax said the Presenter.
Thats the highest I could bring it in at said AK47. Legal advice and Constitutional issues meant it couldnāt be any higher- I would have gone higher if I could.
I love when the guys who make the laws claim they couldnāt do the right thing because the laws (which they are empowered to change) wonāt let them.
Also Iād love to see what the legal basis is for saying that you can tax land, but āonly a little bitā.
The party that taxes land hoarding will get my vote
There are many ways of delivering housing and many ownership possibilities within this structure, but ultimately the State needs to do deals with developers, who are the only people capable of building.
Therefore, the bricklayers and bookkeepers need to do a housing deal ā but there must be a quid quo pro. If the bookkeepers use historically low interest rates to release capital to the bricklayers, in order to achieve the ultimate goal of building more housing, then there must be a āhoardingā tax.
Land that is being hoarded and not used should be taxed so heavily that it becomes impossible to hoard. In a new deal between bricklayers and bookkeepers, hoarding must be penalised ā and penalised aggressively. This will drive down the price of land because it will cause a surge of land to be brought into use to avoid the heavy penalty of the new tax.
http://www.davidmcwilliams.ie/the-party-that-taxes-land-hoarding-will-get-my-vote/
That means that the land tax has to be higher than any possible appreciation in value. At the moment itās nowhere near that and in any case its not being collected. This should have been imposed a decade ago - but we have a huge morality gap in our political class when it comes to property - largely based on their own self interest. I donāt see that changing in the next election - itās all words from all of the parties.
Apparently a load of developers who got planning in the last year or so under the new Strategic Housing Developments, which bypasses local council and goes straight to An Bord Pleanala for decision, have not started those developments.
Some are hoarding waiting for prices to go up. Some just got planning so they could sell their site on with a profit as it is now pp approved. Gov caught on the hop there