Rules Without Enforcement
One issue several people pointed to with regard to efforts to use the property tax to discourage owners from sitting on vacant property is that the rules are useless unless they’re enforced. L.G. sent a link to this post:
Unfortunately, the reality in Washington DC is that many vacant properties never get on the vacant property lists, many receive waivers so that they do not have to pay the higher tax rates and surprisingly, many continue to receive homestead exemptions even though the properties are considered vacant by the DC government.
The author of the post was spearheading an effort to develop a better list of vacants in his neighborhood. That kind of community action could work. But thinking about the issue, the punitive approach of putting an extra tax on vacants has this kind of inherent enforcement problem in that it’s in the interests of the owner to keep the authorities ill-informed about the state of his property. The basic shape of the issue, however, is that there are positive externalities associated with developing abandoned or vacant lots. It’s impossible for early movers to fully capture the value of their activities to the community at large. Consequently, we get less early movement on redeveloping these areas than we should. Penalizing those who are slow to act could work if you got the enforcement right, but it’s hard to enforce. Some kind of mechanism to provide adequate incentive to early movers, by contrast, would have fewer compliance problems since the eligible recipients would obviously be eager to draw attention to themselves.
34 Responses to “Rules Without Enforcement”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
August 19th, 2008 at 1:13 pm
Of course, if some of the bodies Snoop and Chris been dropping turn up in those vacants, then we might see some action…..
August 19th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
One of the standard answers to the enforcement problem is to give people an incentive to rat out their vacant neighbors–say a tax credit for every unregistered vacant property they identify for the authorities.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
Are you still doing open questions threads? I’d really like your perspective on why there was such a significant increase in violence in Iraq in the first half of 2006. Here’s a chart:
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/database/
I know you mention completion of ethnic cleansing as one of the reasons violence went down around the same time as the surge, but why wasn’t this cleansing happening in full until 3 years after the start of the war?
August 19th, 2008 at 1:22 pm
Off topic, but keeping with Stefan’s allusion to The Wire, I saw a commercial for the new Beverly Hills 90210 series and, lo and behold, there was Michael floating on a raft in a pool. Not exactly what I hoped he’d do next after The Wire…
August 19th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
Carmelo Anthony does not support your land-use policies, DTM.
August 19th, 2008 at 1:51 pm
Alternatively, maybe DC should just cut the period for adverse possession to one year.
August 19th, 2008 at 2:00 pm
How hard is this to check, though? Where I live, the police have quotas to fill on speeding tickets. What a stupid way to raise revenue. How about have some of those guys looking for vacant properties? I’ll bet the tax revenue would pay for itself.
August 19th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
Speaking of vacant buildings, how is it that the retail area around the Cleveland Park metro stop can have (at least) 3 vacancies currently, one of which has been vacant for two years?
August 19th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
How much higher are the tax rates for vacant property as compared to the regular rate? I know sometimes a property owner will sit on a vacant building and let it deteriorate because the depriciation in property value can be written off against income tax. Wouldn’t the vacant property rate have to be pretty high to disincentivize that practice?
August 19th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
This always confuses me. An externality is a cost that and individual actor does not pay but passes on (externalizes) to the public.
Now that’s negative, insofar as I don’t want to pay someone else’s cost through a public means (versus me paying because I buy something from them), but what is a negative (or positive) externality?
August 19th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Speaking of suggested topics, I’m surprised that MY has now managed three posts on this narrow issue, and who knows how many posts on the general subject, without mentioning that many of the most strident opponents of development friendly policies are progressives.
They don’t say that they’re opposed to development, of course. What they say is that they’re opposed to gentrification. For myself, and speaking as a progressive, I’ve never quite understood the distinction. Nor have I understood what was supposed to be so wrong about gentrification.
Anyway, this is something I’d like to see MY take a swing at.
August 19th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
My building isn’t vacant. It’s a self-serve petshop specializing in rodents.
August 19th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I’m sorry, but the moaning about DC and it’s vacant/abandoned properties is a bit silly to me.
First, unlike most other cities with significant poverty, DC has a very low vacancy/abandonment rate. Even if this does not bear our in official statistics, there are no vast stretches of empy land that you find in Northeastern cities or Midwestern cities(say Detroit or Chicago).
Second, the spaces that Matt is complaining about will only be fixed up for purposes of gentrifying the neighborhood. The mixed-income/ racial utopias we dream of will not be reached by fixing up abandoned properties on U street as hip coffee shops or other spaces catering to the new populace. This inevitably drives up the property value and results in an exodus of “natives.”
Three, if we want to talk about serious efforts to combat vacancies, the focus should be more on neighborhoods in greater need where vacancies cause greater problems (ivy city, trinidad, anacostia, congress heights etc.) and development is scarce.
I often think, and this is actually not directed at the author mind you–whom I believe is actually quite sincere on these issues–that many of the people that move to DC and bemoan the vacancies and the crime or dereliction of their particular gentrified enclave had very little contact with cities in their previous lives. At least the less attractive parts of them.
August 19th, 2008 at 8:08 pm
We probably do need to subsidize the kind of development we want where we want it. We can see the same sort of problem where it becomes obvious that rail will be built in Seattle suburbs in the next ten years. The developer can’t just wait for ten years to come up with a good plan.
Of course, if we hadn’t become a nation of knee-jerk rightwing slogan knuckle-draggers, the government could just buy the land at the low slum price, put in the improvements, and then sell the land at the new improved price.
Some of this came out of the fact that urban renewal, public housing, and the building of the freeways was incredibly corrupt, run by gangs like that of Richard Daley of Chicago. Yup, it turned out that after you ruled the Reds, the gays, the women, and the blacks out of order, what you were left with was Boobus Americanus.
Well, as the saying goes, we’d better evolve quickly, because the asteroid is coming and we’re the dinosaurs.
March 1st, 2009 at 5:59 am
viagra
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 11th, 2009 at 4:50 am
Incredible site!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:33 am
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
xanax
March 17th, 2009 at 2:30 am
I bookmarked this site. Thank you for good job!
tramadol
March 18th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
Keep up the good work
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:27 am
tramadol
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:29 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:19 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 6:48 am
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 4:51 pm
I can tell that this is not the first time you write about this topic. Why have you chosen it again?