Showing posts with label Site Value Tax Ireland. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Site Value Tax Ireland. Show all posts

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Economics 26/01/2010: House affordability in Ireland

Demographia International issued Housing Affordability Survey: 2010 (based on Q3 2009 data) (hat tip to Ronan Lyons).

Couple of interesting points highlighted below:
  1. Irish dynamics are improving, but not fast enough; and
  2. International evidence suggests that land (site) value taxation might be a better way of cooling the overheating markets than draconian planning and regulatory restrictions on land use.

The ratings are based on a house price relative to a median multiple of income, with table below showing the relative categories.The authors use gross median income, which, of course implies that taxes are not considered to be an impediment to affordability. Now, Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States are the markets considered, and in general Ireland stands out as the higher tax economy here.

The ratings are based on major urban centres' data for 272 markets surveyed across the countries listed above.

For the entire sample, the study found that in 2009 there were 103 affordable markets, 98 in the United States and 5 in Canada. None in Ireland.

Note that of 5 regional markets surveyed for Ireland, 3 were found to be moderately unaffordable and 2 were seriously unaffordable.

In other words, we are still way off from actually reaching affordability that would be consistent with our house price declines and income uncertainty (ca x2.5-2.75 multiple). Or, put differently, we are far away from getting support for this property market.

But what about regional variation?
Now, I am not going to pass a judgment as to whether Limerick is more desirable than Cork or Galway... One has to enjoy though a comparative: Limerick is ranked next to Portland (Oregon). I had a laugh. Galway is between Sacramento (California) and Austin (Texas). Cork is ranked next to Atlantic City (NJ) - somewhat reasonably, but more expensive than Quebec in Canada. Waterford is, apparently, comparable to Philadelphia and Tucson Arizona. Hmmm...


An interesting chart: relationship between housing affordability and land regulation. Notice the reds - these correspond with more prescriptive nature of land regulation - regulation based on more planning, stricter planning and more state/local authorities' controls. Predictably - greater controls, higher prices, lower affordability.
Unfortunately, I cannot tell out of this chart or the discussion in the report as to what exactly comprises prescriptive model of regulation. Only a glimpse:

"Severely Unaffordable Markets: There were 62 severely unaffordable markets this year, down from 64 in 2008. The least affordable markets were concentrated in Australia (22) the United Kingdom (19) and the United States (11). Nine of the 11 US severely unaffordable markets were in California. There were 5 severely unaffordable markets in New Zealand and 5 in Canada (Table ES-3). However, many of these severely unaffordable markets have experienced steep price declines in the last year. Among the major markets, Vancouver is the least affordable, with a Median Multiple of 9.3, followed by Sydney (9.1), Melbourne (8.0), Adelaide (7.4), London (7.1), New York (7.0) and San Francisco (7.0). As in the past, all of these markets were characterized by more prescriptive land use regulation (such as “compact city,” “urban consolidation,” “growth management” or “smart growth” policies), which materially increase the price of land, which makes housing unaffordable."

This is interesting, for it really does suggest that some other means - other than direct regulation/rationing of land - must be used to cool the markets at the times of excess demand. Not a restriction on supply, but, perhaps, a reduced incentive to speculatively invest in land? Indeed - bring on land (or site) value tax...

Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Site Value Tax proposal draws an army of 'authors'

One particular trait of Irish policy research community is a troubling one – once a policy proposal is adopted by the governing party, the jostling and positioning begins to align various research bodies and policy advocates to claim the credit.

And so it is with the latest Programme for Government – no sooner did the ink dry out on paper as various august organizations and individuals have managed to stake a claim to fame as the authors.

I don’t know which proposal was finally used by the Green party leaders. All I know is that there is only one current proposal for Site-Value / Land-Value Tax that was produced in 2008-2009 period. This proposal was authored by me, sponsored by a group of research NGOs and is available on the http://smarttaxes.org website - a link to it here.

The proposal was publicized at a conference in April 2009 and at a public seminar in May, made public in Business & Finance, mentioned and cited in the Sunday Times and the Irish Times. I made the presentation on LVT/SVT available on my blog since April 07, 2009, and was a subject of a briefing for the Department of Finance in April 2009 which I attended. (Some links to these public domains: here, here, here).

The proposal (constituting the first volume of research on the issue) contained detailed estimates of the likely effect of the LVT/SVT on budgetary dynamics and revenue stability, as well as broad assessment of expected economic impact of such a tax.

The proposal was also delivered to the Taxation Commission as an official (and presumably logged) submission and the Taxation Commission report draws extensively in its section on LVT/SVT from this submission.

A second submission (see here), dealing specifically with the issue of using LVT/SVT to raise public investment funding was completed by me in August 2009 and made public then. It is also available on the http://smarttaxes.org website.

Both documents formed the submission on the Programme for Government by the Environmental Pillar member group, Feasta which was delivered to the Green Party and launched publicly at an event.

These are the matters of public record.

In the mean time, it came to my attention that a certain leader of one of the Social Pillar organization in the Social Partnership has been claiming authorship of the proposal. The irony has it, his own organization’s website contains no serious proposals for SVT/LVT despite having many detailed position papers on other policies. Other ‘authoring experts’ have been reported sending their CVs to the Green Party leadership in a hope of gaining a slice of action.

My research on SVT/LVT has been sponsored, kindly, by a group of private and NGO sources, cited on the submissions.