It's fundamentally a long bet that basically the same people (demographically if not often individually) who are complaining about this will turn around and pass legislation that makes development even more onerous and therefore makes their existing cheap 30-60yo building with a simple uninterrupted parking lot and un-engineered drainage ditches (the typical form vacant commercial RE seems to take) even more valuable.
The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
But there are no neighborhoods like that because we have regulated incremental development out of existence. There is no gradual redevelopment anymore because nobody can afford to get kicked in the dick by huge amounts of of compliance cost bullshit (all of which the useful idiots and those with financial motive are more than capable of justifying in abstract, no one droplet feels responsible for the flood and all that) to just take an incremental step. The only way to make the math make sense is to go whole hog, seek a variance and put up something huge and make back the costs.
This is why it "looks" like local residents care. They'd be fine with triple deckers organically filling in as well as subdivisions, back lot houses, etc, etc. They just don't want a N-over-1 in their suburban neighborhood. This is exacerbated by the fact that anyone who could be living in such a place at such a time when that conversation is happen is rich enough to have no other real problems.
Allowing more floorspace on a given lot of land in an in a place people want to live, increases land value solely because the status quo mandates floorspace scarcity in those places. In a world where everyone had all the interior floorspace they could ever desire, rezoning a random vacant lot for an infinite height building would have no effect whatsoever because there would be no demand the additional floorspace.
Allowing vast quantities of floorspace on every lot within city limits would surely enrich some homeowner-occupiers who own land, but only those whose land was in locations ppl actually wanted to live. Those in other locations, whose only current draw is “you aren’t allow to live/build in the place You want to be, so come here instead” would lose value.
Seriously tho, I once tried tracking all transactions in a nearby 4 storey condo building (these transactions are public where I live). I tried graphing $/sqft by the floor of the building and there was definitely a revealed preference in the form of higher $/sqft but it was for higher floors rather than lower. However on an infinite scale, I'm sure your point stands, that at some point the inconvenience would outweigh other considerations.
That's 1/4th of a Liechtenstein.
Surely no one can just simply be betting their vacant building will become valuable with so much competition?
If they have low grade tenants off and on for 10yr they'll be in the black. The big money cash out is when some company who's expansion is being strangled somewhere else decides that they're gonna open a new site. And if you look at the macro trends this is slowly what's happening.
It's like the big boy version of how self storage can be a speculative RE investment rather than a income stream producing investment.
Since this is such a large contributor to the heat problem in the Houston area they should tear down the abandoned buildings and build Olympic-sized swimming pools on each of these locations. By my calculations, seeing that a pool occupies 0.31 acres, they could replace these abandoned buildings with up to 32258 swimming pools which would immediately improve the quality of life in the Houston area. The water is available if you just use one of those MIT condensation gizmos that passively pulls moisture from the air. That would mitigate some of the horrendous humidity issues that Houstononianites feel during their two seasons (warm and humid followed by hot and humid). Houston could be a veritable seaside paradise with this one simple change.
But land that is classified by each appraisal district as “Ag” is only taxed on the value it derives from agricultural activity. Consequently, you’ll see large plots of land in the middle of the suburbs and the city that are bailed for hay or that contain a corn field. So then the owner is only subject to pay taxes on the amount the hay or corn produced.
This is meant to protect and encourage agricultural operations, incentivize the maintenance of rural land, and shield residents that are subject to being overtaken by sprawl. But it’s also used to protect land investment, including large ranches owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals.
If the land is sold and developed, some back taxes are owed when the land is no longer city considered Agricultural. But that gets passed on the purchaser and is rarely assessed against the seller.
It’s possible this land is subject to delinquent taxes that, in Texas, incur significant interest.
Also, I’d want to know about zoning to see if the city has restricted the use of the land. Zoning is a double-edged sword as well.
Why wouldn't this land immediately be forfeited to the city?
Yes, hence the point of a vacancy tax, but that’s not relevant in the scenario here where they’re not paying. Having a short period, especially for non-residential property, is a good way to discourage tax cheating and it also helps with cleanup: the best time to deal with toxic waste was when it was generated but the second best time is now and absentee owners aren’t going to volunteer to do that. Seizing the land at least lets the government plan to do something useful with in an orderly manner before it starts causing problems too big to ignore.
There is no zoning, that would be kind of dumb and self-defeating in Houston.
Houston was a planned industrial community.
Basically the real story is just that trees make shade (yes, we know already) and "vacant or abandoned" isn't much involved (yes, but we want to discuss zoning/taxes/urbanism things)
The main lesson I draw is that everything would improve by taxing externalities: the land is vacant because the property owners doesn’t have enough incentive to do something useful with it and we have a lot of inefficiency in our housing and transportation which a carbon tax would go a long way towards reducing.
Texas is bigger than that.
They have always taxed more carbon and more land in ways that make them rich as hell, at the average citizen's expense.
To the envy of other states' greedy taxing entities.
That wasn't so bad when there was still enough widespread prosperity for the average citizen to be able to afford it.
The land is vacant after they tore down the buildings because the taxes were already too high, and rising too fast.
No brag, just fact.
"How far up is the river now, Ma?"
"Six feet deep, and rising . . ."
Roger?
Well, if Roger's not here somebody's going to have to do the thermodynamics their own self, and it's good to take the initiative plus show it can be done wihtout scaring anybody by using equations or any of that complicated stuff :)
If not, you cannot make the land cold with air condition. You can just move heat around, with AC from the inside to the outside, but that costs extra energy -> more heat
County does not want to seize the land because they know they can't get tax amount owed and would be stuck with worthless property it has to maintain.
Probably need some form of tax amnesty system where counties can seize these properties, sell them off for any amount and wipe tax bill clean. However, that's process would be ripe for corruption which thinking about TX, I'm surprised they haven't allowed that.
In Washington state, tax foreclosure has a minimum bid of the taxes due and if there is no bid, the county takes title. Then there are procedures to sell those 'tax title' properties, my county says typically the minimum price is 80% of assessed value ... which would typically be more than the tax debt, so maybe better to participate in the tax foreclosure auction.
I don't know that the county has a duty to maintain tax title lands. Vacant land is probably going to get emergency maintenance by a government agency of last resort anyway.
"finds that vacant lots with vegetation can help cool surrounding areas. Abandoned buildings and paved lots do the opposite"
The hottest temperatures get to be about the same, but the trees don't hold heat like the concrete does. It falls off so much faster up here. It seems you can cool these houses with barely half the HVAC capacity that the other ones tend to require. Which is wild because the power grid up here is also much cheaper.
>On a scorching Texas afternoon,
Something I'm very familiar with, and the drone data speaks for itself as far as what it's like in the hot sun of southeast Texas.
Then how about at night?
Those buildings can then act like heat islands that can take more than one night for the heat to dissipate too.
Some cool off that much, some don't. Thermodynamics at work.
Based on heated mass is how long it takes to cool back off to ambient temp by morning. Good air circulation can help a lot too.
If everybody's roof is soaking up heat all day, the structures underneath that are being actively cooled at the same time are not expected to have nearly as much heated mass that needs to dissipate, and the only time for that might be at night.
But maybe that same amount of heat was actively dispersed into the surrounding air all day by the air conditioning units of the cooled structures, plus some of the night. And how efficient are A/C units anyway? That's got to make a difference too so it's not just abandoned buildings but any time people are not running A/C even while dwelling there. At least the windows are open then.
So the drone data on the buildings looks realistic so far, but everything else is just beginning to trickle in.
Regardless, I'm just fine without A/C in the summer in Houston if I'm in a proper place like a 100-year-old home that was built for it.
But I grew up in Florida when about the only places with A/C were supermarkets and banks, not even most college dorms or classrooms had it when I got there.
You just sweat more in Florida, because it may not reach 100 Fahrenheit all summer but the humidity makes Houston feel like a desert by comparison, and it sure doesn't cool off as much at night like it does in Houston with its milder type of "Northern Living" :)
Plant.
This brings up a lot of other questions: what about water and sewage infrastructure, electrical and fiber? What about maintenance of the vegetation? But it seems to me like a really cool idea, maybe even within the setting of a single homestead, where the basic setting is a forest, with some buildings nested within it.
It's nice to build a house under a tree. It's a bad idea to buy a house that was built under a tree.
"Sir, your house is too hot, which makes you subject to the 'hot house tax'", coming to a road near you in 2028.
shortrounddev2•1h ago
tirant•1h ago
larsiusprime•1h ago
fuzzfactor•55m ago
Remember the purpose of property tax to begin with is for the owner to lose the property in case they are not as wealthy as someone else who might be interested someday. Or in case the property itself can not provide more than enough income to pay the tax in a timely way.
Another problem is that taxes were always high but they didn't actually start skyrocketing until a few decades ago, after one of the key stabilizing anti-Carpetbagger laws which prevented home equity loans, was repealed.
And the sky's the limit whenever untapped wealth is unleashed, to be audited and appraised.
So it's been kind of a race between property appreciation, available equity to borrow against as values increase, versus tax rates and appraisals trying to capture more of that in ways that can only result in owners becoming less whole that it ever has been.
Revenue-neutral or not, anything that makes it worse makes it worse.
shortrounddev2•1h ago
appreciatorBus•1h ago