I’d bet the farm the land in question is Ag value land. Property taxes are significant in Texas relative to most states, as there is no income tax. Consequently, it’s hard to sit in property indefinitely if you’re paying taxes on its fair market value.
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.
They may not be paying taxes. When I worked with this in other states, most of time, it's commercial property that property owner LLC just walked away from because it's worthless. LLC exists on paper owning the land but has no money/assets besides the land so nothing for government to take. Bills just go into shredder and arrears continuing piling up.
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.
> 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.
Worse than vacant land will be land with abandoned structures, which would need to be demolished at someone's expense. Especially industrial sites where there may be hazardous waste, underground tanks, etc. present as well.
There might not be a duty but I would say it's good policy. Tall grass is a fire risk and often a place to dump things. Also a source of weeds that spread to neighboring properties.
The taxing authority (city or county, generally) maintains a list of all the property in tax arrears. Once a year, there is an auction where they go around the room and each bidder can bid a rate for each property; the lowest rate wins a coupon that entitles the bearer to collect the tax plus the rate from the property owner, but requires the bearer to pay the base tax to the taxing authority.
If a few years go by without the property owner retiring the debt, the holder can send a notice with some time requirements and after that, they can sue for the title and then they own the property. Usually the owner pays at the last moment but then they owe attorney's fees.
Adverse possession is completely different and would require living in the tax-delinquent property for several years.
Whole problem is likely the value of the land is less than taxes owed. So any system where county is HAS to get the taxes owed means no one will touch the property.
If we fill those abandoned buildings with people, air-conditioning the inside of the building for them will obviously add even more heat to the outside? Parking lots that are full of cars aren't going to be that much cooler than empty ones?
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)
There are complex trade offs there: housing uses more power than a parking lot but it also provides far more significant social goods, housing can be built with very different levels of energy usage and external heat emissions, and while people need housing they don’t need cars the same way so you can offset a substantial fraction of the pollution from housing by reducing the number of cars used by residents.
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.
>air-conditioning the inside of the building for them will obviously add even more heat to the outside?
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
>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
Which is exactly what I've been saying since I was a teenager.
This is still just moving the heat around, but with metamaterials you can now passively convert the heat energy into wavelengths that do not get absorbed by the atmosphere and beam a decent chunk of it back into space.
I’d like to see how the land is classified, regardless. If it’s genuinely urban land, it should be taxed heavily enough to make it hurt if it is appraised correctly.
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.
If land is actually abandoned, taxation makes no difference. Land with abandoned biuldings can often cost more to redevelop than green fields (asbestos remediation, buried oil tanks etc). An owner dies, a holding company folds, and land sits vacant. Tax it all you want, nobody is around to pay. Of course the city or other government can take the land, but they dont want it either.
Nothing in land is ever immediate. Is it worth the legal efforts to force throufh a forfeiture? Does the city even want the land? Perhaps the land is tied up in a disputed estate. Such things can take a decade to resolve. Perhaps some holding company is using the land as an investment vehicle and is paying the taxes, if any are due. Owners have the right to let land sit.
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.
Too late to edit now, but it might help to remind that it's always possible for people to indicate they are not very aware of a subject by their superstitious or misleading behavior, without having anything factual to add whatsoever, or even anything at all.
Which is well recognized as even dumber.
You don't see anybody trying to point out when actual zoning was enacted, or that Houston was founded where it was when it was for any other reason than to be the industrial powerhouse of the independent nation of Texas.
Except to serve as the Capitol of the new Nation too, but those guys moved to higher ground one day, I wonder why.
No brag, just fact.
Enquiring minds wanted to know.
Remember what Davy Crockett said when he was going back to Texas that time?
We keep the happiest pet cows in the old field in front of the family farmhouse after the farm downsized and sold most of the land so the city and state wouldn’t try to include it in the house plot sorts front yard acreage.
Different state but I think a similar conundrum. They’re old dairy cows living their best life.
Beekeeping is popular, too. I know some wealthy people who pay a beekeeper to keep bees on their land and receive jarred honey with personalized labels as a little bonus on top of their tax break. "<Name>'s Honey" with a head shot.
I recently moved to the more forested biome just north of Houston and the difference in the actual temperature is remarkable. The city core area inside 610 loop is sitting at 77F right now. My back porch is right at 68F. I am not even 60 miles away.
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.
60 miles is the distance between downtown Seattle and the peak of Mt. Rainier. Downtown Tokyo to the peak of Mt. Fuji. The highest and lowest points in the contiguous US are Death Valley and Mt Whitney, only 80 miles apart, yes that's 20 more than 60 but you get the point here.
Even between places at roughly the same elevation, the climate can vary hugely within 60 miles of a coast. And a majority of the population of the US lives within 60 miles of a coast.
San Antonio and Austin are around 80 miles apart and have nearly identical climates. But they are both about the same distance from the coast, which is probably the main driver of climate in TX.
Really? Assuming similar elevation, I'd expect the temperature of two points 60 miles apart on earth to average the same with fairly low standard deviation.
Is there something specific to your geography that leads you to assume the temperature 60 miles away wouldn't "be anywhere close to yours"?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the temperature commonly varies dramatically between some places which are a quarter mile apart. And one side of a hill can be persistently foggy while the other side is usually sunny.
When I lived near downtown Houston, during the summer, I had to change into my work clothes after I got to the office. Just the 100 yd walk, at 8 am, from my house to the bus stop, left me sweaty. The city definitely holds a lot of heat.
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" :)
When I was younger (in the 1970s), I lived in the DC area (East Coast, USA). The summers were always tough, but they weren't obscene. We also got some really cold winters, with lots of snow.
During the 1980s, there was a huge development surge, all up and down the East Coast. Basically, the whole coast got paved.
The summers really seemed to get crazy hot, and we stopped getting extreme winters.
The summer shade makes sense, but a tree without leaves in the winter does not provide more sunlight than no tree at all.
We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.
But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.
Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.
Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.
A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...
... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.
Trees look great - from a distance.
It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).
Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.
I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.
That hasn't been my experience with many trees and homes. Lots of people live with trees around - maybe most people who are in houses. I don't personally know of anyone with these problems, though I've heard of things like it.
Maybe the tree doesn't need to be right next your structure?
> A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed.
A similar tirade can be made about rain, wind, sunshine, heat and cold. Entropy happens. I think the nature of what you're saying isn't universal. Different style foundations, different kinds of ground and different kinds of trees will mean different things. Some issues can be avoided with minimal foresight. Some won't happen for decades at which point the balance of benefit vs cost comes into question. Some issues are really just expectations that many would consider unnecessary, like having a flat lawn.
Where I live in the Midwest, trees around houses is incredibly common. I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood without them.
Yes! Search for a house without a tree in a neighborhood full of trees. Enjoy!
Having a flat lawn may be unnecessary, but generally, most people want a lawn that a lawnmower can cross w/o self-destructing [or that their oft-drunken uncle can walk across after dark without tripping on a root and passing before his time.]
A lawnmower blade is usually not adequate for a 4-inch root knuckle risen from the depths - that requires a chain saw. But then you're chain-sawing in dirt, mud and root, so neither safe nor easy. This is a contest the homeowner cannot win, merely survive.
How long is eventually, because in the Pacific Northwest, there are 100ft+ trees every which way and lots of houses built in between them. I have never heard of this lawn issue, nor any foundations ruined by the trees (not planted directly next to the house).
Lots of houses have decorative maples/plums/cherry/crabapples/fig in their front yard within 30ft of the foundation. I thought the rule of thumb was roots go as far as the circumference of the tree branches.
My experience is mostly in the southeast region of Texas where the land is flat and fertile. This would be considered good farmland by most people. It is in these regions, separated by mostly pine forests, that I have seen considerable housing development.
Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations. And I'm sure they're usually built by people knowledgeable about tree intrusion. By well-clear I mean half a football field away. I don't know about more densely-populated areas.
Smaller decorative trees are not usually a problem but nonetheless are best kept away from structures. It's the "nice old 50-year old oak tree" or the "30-year old pine tree" that is within 20 feet that will ruin your lawn and house.
I have a neighbor who simultaneously removed an oak tree from his back yard and a rather large young pine from his front yard ~12 years ago. The back yard is just starting to settle down. The front still looks bad. He mows his lawn in shifts: part at a time until he tires. During the rainy season you can still easily trace the oak tree's rotting roots as they steer the rainwater through the back yard. He saws and hacks at the roots, trying to keep the general flow toward the front yard and the street (as drainage is supposed to be in these neighborhoods). I know that he would be happier with a simple flat backyard of grass for his grandchildren to play on.
Every old tree near our lovely family home eventually had to be removed. This, despite the classic pier-and-beam construction. The shifting had gone too far to adjust the piers. It was time to adjust the trees: and my father, being an engineer, had to run the operation himself.
What an eye-opener that was: who knew that when an inch-thick braided steel cable holding an oak tree in suspension as it is sawed down could break, whip backward, slash and tear a 3-inch deep by 3-foot wound across the side of an even-larger pecan tree in less than the blink of an eye? Thank God no one was standing in the open area when the cable broke!
And no good reason not to, generally. Our house is elevated on 18 concrete piers, anchored onto the bedrock - because the soil is shallow and not stable. We have trees growing inches from the house.
I've been having this idea of designing a neighborhood where the proportions of natural and built-up areas are reversed. Instead of having a basically artificial setting where trees live in little holes in the sidewalk, the basic setting is natural soil and vegetation, and the buildings are situated between and under the trees.
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.
One of my neighbors has a sycamore tree that practically covers the entire house. It does look really nice, but I'm glad It's not my house, because the tree is constantly dropping debris on the roof, and if a branch fell of in a wind storm, it could do significant damage to the house.
Having a lot of buildings under trees brings up a big problem when heavy rainstorms, wind, or hail occur. Texas has all three. Old trees are particularly troublesome since heavy limbs can snap off with very gentle stimulation.
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.
This exists in many parts of the world. And is usually reserved for the ultra wealthy, especially if you want it to be near a big city. One famous example is Karuizawa.
I went into a “bamboo maze” the other day and it was wild how dark and cool it was under all that dense bamboo, it grows super fast, they should plant bamboo forests on the vacant lots to promote cooler air.
> “Houston is famous as an unwalkable city,” Ren said… “Google Maps said it was a five-minute walk from my hotel to a pharmacy, but it took me 30 minutes with no shade, no red lights and no safe place to cross,”
This sounds like a Google problem as much as a Houston problem! But it’s amusing (and sad) to read about the Democrat mayor of Houston removing bike lanes and trying to ban electric scooters[1].
It sounds like they want to make the city even more car-centric, not less.
This land isn't "abandoned". Nobody is sitting on vacant RE in Texas and getting fucked by sky high TX property taxes for the fun of it.
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.
They're not competing with each other. They're competing with the warehouses that blanket the industrial parts of LA and areas south of Newark.
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.
I live in Houston and would rather it be 10 degrees warmer than have to deal with 32258 additional mosquito spawning pools. The heat isn’t the worst part of Houston, most long term Houstonians are used to it. You never get used to mosquitos, especially Aedes aegypti.
I think that the post I made, which I should've used a /s tag (sarcasm) on probably needed a /sh tag (shitpost).
Your thoughtful reply made me reconsider what I posted as if I had been serious. Seeing another instance of someone attempting to build a coherent picture in the reader's minds eye about the size of one thing relative to another (10000 acres is roughly 1/4 of a Lichtenstein), dredged up the recurrent memories about the all-too-commonly misused Olympic swimming pool comparison. I felt compelled to to reply and ended up building an implausibly plausible narrative about mitigating some of the issue with the overheated abandoned buildings by repurposing them as community improvements.
I am surprised that you would prefer the temperature there to be 10 degrees warmer. This reminds me of a time when I was out of state, in Mississippi, on a wellsite and I had picked up a copy of USA Today at the hotel before I left. I read the interesting parts and finally got to the weather forecasts on the back page for major cities across the US. As I scanned the forecasts they were all positive - Sunny, Breezy and Nice, etc until I got to Houston. For Houston their forecast header said "Oppressive". I checked all the other headings for all the other cities listed and none had negative connotations, only Houston. That gave me the chuckle I needed to get through that shitty day on muddy the wellsite and it continues to provide a pleasant memory all these years later.
I lived in Houston and the Houston area for 10 years and commuted for work to Houston for another 16 years. I'm pretty familiar with most of the pros and cons including the climate, the traffic, many of the communities, the abundance of delicious food options for any price range, the stormwater drainage issues due to over-development, problems created by lack of zoning, etc. and being a geoscientist, I can see advantages to repurposing these abandoned buildings for community use.
I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. They would all be built as indoor pools where families from the neighborhoods around these abandoned buildings can bring their kids on those hot spring days. In many cases it would probably not be necessary to remove the existing building, only to gut it and add pool facilities. I have my doubts about whether functioning outdoor pools are significant sites for mosquitoes to breed due to the agitation of the water surface from the pumps and the chlorination so I don't think your concerns about Aedes aegypti and the pathogens they spread are worth worrying about. For control of that problem you have to look at how Houston and other municipalities handle their stormwater retention ponds, their channelized creeks and bayous, and storm drains across neighborhoods in the city. Storm drains that are not regularly graded tend to have water pooling due to debris traps and that water becomes the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It is also a huge hill to climb to get people to manage standing water on their property by dumping accumulations after rain events.
We looked at buying homes when we lived there and frankly, Houston will always have issues with water because of the gulf coastal plain geology which left them with wide areas of very clay-rich soils which have low permeabilities and thus it is imperative for runoff to be a critical part of every infrastructure project in the region. Even knowing all this they still sold off all the Katy Prairie land where rice and sugarcane was grown and which regularly flooded for generations. That land was a winter ground for migratory birds from all over North America until they turned it into poorly-drained subdivisions with homes on concrete slabs that crack and buckle and keep foundation repair contractors busy.
I think it would be a useful project for a GIS pro to map these abandoned properties and short-list some of them for repurposing as described in communities where kids have few options for recreation. It would provide facilities for people of all ages to learn to swim, practice diving board skills, remain physically fit, and some of them could be fitted with wave pools to simulate beach conditions and make it more fun. Jobs for young teens in the neighborhood, community building, physical activity that one can do on a hot Houston day, etc. I see nothing but positives here. Maybe my whole post needs a /sh though.
A more generous interpretation of your grandiose vision would obviously include some way to make the water not into a breeding ground, like what you mentioned here. But seeing as this is hacker news, I felt like playing into the respective stereotypes of an interaction between someone living in the Bay Area and Houston completely talking past eachother.
And yes, the lack of planning does cause problems. It also has obviously has some benefits, like affordable housing. I live in a suburb (Sugarland) and while it’s not particularly exciting, it has everything I need for my family… and yes, it absolutely would be better 10 degrees cooler ;)
Re: one swimming pool per child project: when can you start?
However, as it often is, Houston is a weird outlier because its development is so recent. The majority of its current footprint was built after 1970, with many neighborhood pools and community pools. Some are limited to residents of the area and their guests, others are fully public, such as this one:
This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments.
The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
Demand for floorspace is very large, but it is not infinite.
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.
You can't build an infinite height tower with no parking if the market doesn't support it. You need to be building that in a neighborhood of half infinite height towers to make it make sense.
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.
The idea is to drive up demand for land in general, and then make your piece of land the valuable one. Please note that we don't live in a perfectly efficient market.
as my go(es) to weather "app", billion dollar live sat feed on my phone, for lots of things, other than just local weather,including general investigation into *stuff™
such as finding citys, of which huston is easy, cause it glows in the infrared like nothing else, with the major ring roads and highways clearly visible from geosyncronous orbit at I think a 1 km/pixle resolution, in hot dry high pressure weather huston is clearly an oven.
today is cloudy there, but watch for "better", ha!, weather
Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.
Texas already has exorbitantly high property taxes, more than most, that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning (which never stops increasing) will do.
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.
A land value tax is based on the value of the land only, with no input from whatever improvements are or are not built on it. So, with a proper LTV implementation (i.e., one where LTV is the only tax incurred on real state), there would be literally no tax incentive to tear down a usable (but unused) building. You would be paying the exact same amount of taxes on an empty lot as on a high end modern building on that same lot.
What you say does make sense because it's got to be better than what things have evolved into in so many misguided places.
But I forgot to add that the amount of revenue from property tax is only intended to act like collateral damage :)
When you do the math it turns out anytime you start taxing anything but commerce, it is unsustainable because it accrues and accumulates disadvantage to the taxpayer until it is overwhelming. Plus the higher that taxes rise above absolute insignificance, the more likely a major upset occurs from just a slight lapse in overall prosperity, re-balancing to the further disadvantage against those who can afford it least. And that doesn't include the pulling of political strings by those who benefit most from that type activity.
You don't sensibly tax people just for existing, even at 3/5 the amount per head. Likewise their property unless it is involved in commercial activity, nor wage income since the employer is the commercial enterprise they should have that all covered like it used to be when things were not so predatory.
But they tax "rooftops" like a lot of other places based on square footage and now in Houston there has been some recent influence to demolish unoccupied buildings more so for appearance sake to the world for the upcoming World Cup as an excuse more than anything else.
It appears the actual demolition of truly abandoned buildings can not be accelerated without blurring the lines between actual abandonment and merely unoccupied to some degree or another.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The big thing is there's enough people much wealthier than those who have the properties now, who want them either way, demolished or not.
Under threat of forced demolition those having buildings suitable for rehab would need to sell for less than they would have otherwise. Who cares about the poor sellers who have been paying taxes on the buildings the whole time, working toward a financial turnaround? The idea seems to be to incentivize new buyers to have better opportunities by preying on previous owners' misfortune.
OTOH, as soon as any property has had any nonproductive structures removed, its appraised value and tax levy drops like a rock, making it way more attractive for the same type buyers who could have already obtained all the lots having buildings they are willing to rehab.
The new buyers can then afford many more vacant lots for potential future construction, which had always been a non-bonanza prospect otherwise, and with the newly lowered taxes afford to wait and see which might be a bonanza to build on someday. A lot more so than the previous owners.
If a lot of this happens at the same time, then the market for reclaimed lots like this will have downward price pressure too until the effect runs its course.
>> that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning
This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.
The owners don't want to destroy the structures at all.
They've been holding onto the properties because appreciation was outpacing taxation, allowing a predictable path to remodeling and re-habitation.
Until that changed. Primarily from greedier investors not having enough low-hanging fruit to pick from so they're shaking the trees for all they have until they can give no more.
It's new buyers instead that want to swoop in if the landscape can be further tilted in their favor. Just a little bit is all it takes to yield a big return for a privileged few.
Other costs have risen too but the taxes are so high that's what triggers the final destruction.
Property tax has that extra-financial "property" that keeps your home positioned like dominos ready to fall. Like other skyrocketing costs don't do, even though the pressure from them is huge too.
".. and your smart watch detected that you've exceeded the methane footprint quota this month, here's your fine and please consider upgrading your greenhouse gas tier, otherwise we're disabling the bean buying flag in your CBDC UBI"
I’d bet the farm the land in question is Ag value land. Property taxes are significant in Texas relative to most states, as there is no income tax. Consequently, it’s hard to sit in property indefinitely if you’re paying taxes on its fair market value.
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.
They may not be paying taxes. When I worked with this in other states, most of time, it's commercial property that property owner LLC just walked away from because it's worthless. LLC exists on paper owning the land but has no money/assets besides the land so nothing for government to take. Bills just go into shredder and arrears continuing piling up.
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.
> 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.
Worse than vacant land will be land with abandoned structures, which would need to be demolished at someone's expense. Especially industrial sites where there may be hazardous waste, underground tanks, etc. present as well.
There might not be a duty but I would say it's good policy. Tall grass is a fire risk and often a place to dump things. Also a source of weeds that spread to neighboring properties.
Somebody needs to compile a database of these and let people start actually taking advantage of the adverse possession laws.
Varies state to state, as usual, but 'round here:
The taxing authority (city or county, generally) maintains a list of all the property in tax arrears. Once a year, there is an auction where they go around the room and each bidder can bid a rate for each property; the lowest rate wins a coupon that entitles the bearer to collect the tax plus the rate from the property owner, but requires the bearer to pay the base tax to the taxing authority.
If a few years go by without the property owner retiring the debt, the holder can send a notice with some time requirements and after that, they can sue for the title and then they own the property. Usually the owner pays at the last moment but then they owe attorney's fees.
Adverse possession is completely different and would require living in the tax-delinquent property for several years.
Whole problem is likely the value of the land is less than taxes owed. So any system where county is HAS to get the taxes owed means no one will touch the property.
The second paragraph of the article attributes the hot spots to abandoned buildings and parking lots; vacant lots with vegetation are not the problem.
If we fill those abandoned buildings with people, air-conditioning the inside of the building for them will obviously add even more heat to the outside? Parking lots that are full of cars aren't going to be that much cooler than empty ones?
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)
There are complex trade offs there: housing uses more power than a parking lot but it also provides far more significant social goods, housing can be built with very different levels of energy usage and external heat emissions, and while people need housing they don’t need cars the same way so you can offset a substantial fraction of the pollution from housing by reducing the number of cars used by residents.
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.
>the land is vacant because [of some imaginary occurrences]
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 . . ."
>air-conditioning the inside of the building for them will obviously add even more heat to the outside?
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 :)
Is that a sort of joke?
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
>Is that a sort of joke?
Yes!
But only if your name is Roger :)
>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
Which is exactly what I've been saying since I was a teenager.
According to thermodynamics anyway . . .
This is still just moving the heat around, but with metamaterials you can now passively convert the heat energy into wavelengths that do not get absorbed by the atmosphere and beam a decent chunk of it back into space.
I’d like to see how the land is classified, regardless. If it’s genuinely urban land, it should be taxed heavily enough to make it hurt if it is appraised correctly.
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.
One of the problems Boston had a couple decades ago is actually figuring out who owns those abandoned lots.
If land is actually abandoned, taxation makes no difference. Land with abandoned biuldings can often cost more to redevelop than green fields (asbestos remediation, buried oil tanks etc). An owner dies, a holding company folds, and land sits vacant. Tax it all you want, nobody is around to pay. Of course the city or other government can take the land, but they dont want it either.
> Tax it all you want, nobody is around to pay
Why wouldn't this land immediately be forfeited to the city?
Even if it does escheat to the city, the city has to pay for the various abatements.
Nothing in land is ever immediate. Is it worth the legal efforts to force throufh a forfeiture? Does the city even want the land? Perhaps the land is tied up in a disputed estate. Such things can take a decade to resolve. Perhaps some holding company is using the land as an investment vehicle and is paying the taxes, if any are due. Owners have the right to let land sit.
> Owners have the right to let land sit.
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.
here you go.
https://mycity.houstontx.gov/MYCITYDOCS/documents/map-LandUs...
No, no, no. You don’t understand. He wanted to see something that validated his completely unresearched yet strangely strongly held theory.
>Also, I’d want to know about zoning
There is no zoning, that would be kind of dumb and self-defeating in Houston.
Houston was a planned industrial community.
Too late to edit now, but it might help to remind that it's always possible for people to indicate they are not very aware of a subject by their superstitious or misleading behavior, without having anything factual to add whatsoever, or even anything at all.
Which is well recognized as even dumber.
You don't see anybody trying to point out when actual zoning was enacted, or that Houston was founded where it was when it was for any other reason than to be the industrial powerhouse of the independent nation of Texas.
Except to serve as the Capitol of the new Nation too, but those guys moved to higher ground one day, I wonder why.
No brag, just fact.
Enquiring minds wanted to know.
Remember what Davy Crockett said when he was going back to Texas that time?
To some people it applies more than others.
>> including large ranches owned by hedge funds and foreign nationals.
Hedge Funds and Foreign Nationals owning large american ranches???
It's extremely unlikely the land in question (paved lots and abandoned buildings) is agricultural.
"finds that vacant lots with vegetation can help cool surrounding areas. Abandoned buildings and paved lots do the opposite"
We keep the happiest pet cows in the old field in front of the family farmhouse after the farm downsized and sold most of the land so the city and state wouldn’t try to include it in the house plot sorts front yard acreage.
Different state but I think a similar conundrum. They’re old dairy cows living their best life.
Beekeeping is popular, too. I know some wealthy people who pay a beekeeper to keep bees on their land and receive jarred honey with personalized labels as a little bonus on top of their tax break. "<Name>'s Honey" with a head shot.
yes i also know people who do that
Did you even take a cursory look at the article?
I recently moved to the more forested biome just north of Houston and the difference in the actual temperature is remarkable. The city core area inside 610 loop is sitting at 77F right now. My back porch is right at 68F. I am not even 60 miles away.
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.
I would never expect the temperature 60 miles away to be anywhere close to mine. Is that normally the case in Texas?
You sure? Thats the case for areas the size of entire states. You can look at any weather temperature map to prove this.
60 miles is the distance between downtown Seattle and the peak of Mt. Rainier. Downtown Tokyo to the peak of Mt. Fuji. The highest and lowest points in the contiguous US are Death Valley and Mt Whitney, only 80 miles apart, yes that's 20 more than 60 but you get the point here.
Even between places at roughly the same elevation, the climate can vary hugely within 60 miles of a coast. And a majority of the population of the US lives within 60 miles of a coast.
San Antonio and Austin are around 80 miles apart and have nearly identical climates. But they are both about the same distance from the coast, which is probably the main driver of climate in TX.
The whole region is relatively flat swampy area, so probably moreso than in more mountainous places. The soil and vegetation is quite varied though.
Really? Assuming similar elevation, I'd expect the temperature of two points 60 miles apart on earth to average the same with fairly low standard deviation.
Is there something specific to your geography that leads you to assume the temperature 60 miles away wouldn't "be anywhere close to yours"?
In the San Francisco Bay Area, for example, the temperature commonly varies dramatically between some places which are a quarter mile apart. And one side of a hill can be persistently foggy while the other side is usually sunny.
That is true but it's also an infamously unusual aspect of the Bay Area.
Daly City never ceased to baffle me whenever I'd drive through from the valley to SF.
Fancy way of say The Woodlands?
The Woodlands has become part of the concrete blob which is now in the process of assimilating Conroe and Willis. You need to go further north.
The Mincraftification of language...
When I lived near downtown Houston, during the summer, I had to change into my work clothes after I got to the office. Just the 100 yd walk, at 8 am, from my house to the bus stop, left me sweaty. The city definitely holds a lot of heat.
Urban Heat Islands are far stronger than people generally realise.
I live in a forest. When it’s 28C here, it’ll be 36C in the village a few km away. It’ll drop to 16C overnight here but they have a low of 28C.
All that masonry, concrete, blacktop, the absence of shade, and you basically just have a great big passive thermal accumulator.
Welcome to real Northern Living :)
>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" :)
Solution: put green spaces with solar panels. Fairly cheap to do, contributes to cooler temperatures, and contributes to renewable power.
Alas, bunches of people would rather see a rotting city instead of solar panels.
When I was younger (in the 1970s), I lived in the DC area (East Coast, USA). The summers were always tough, but they weren't obscene. We also got some really cold winters, with lots of snow.
During the 1980s, there was a huge development surge, all up and down the East Coast. Basically, the whole coast got paved.
The summers really seemed to get crazy hot, and we stopped getting extreme winters.
Greenery not only lowers temperatures, it also creates a sense of calm, is more beautiful than concrete, and results in less crime.
Plant.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6950486/#sec5-ijerp... "Based on the 45 quantitative and qualitative papers summarized here, we can deduce that the presence of parks and other green space reduces urban crime."
Would say blacktop rather than concrete.
Reminds me of the quote:
One of the best things you can have on your property is a large deciduous tree on the south side of your house.
- In the summer, it shades your house (specifically the roof) so you spend less money cooling it
- In the winter, the tree loses its leaves so you get more sunlight (again, on your roof) which helps heat your house when it's cold but sunny
The summer shade makes sense, but a tree without leaves in the winter does not provide more sunlight than no tree at all.
We could also talk about the potential for the roots of the tree crawling under the foundation and wrecking it or the tree itself falling on the roof of the house.
But it is a very nice quote if you don't think too much about it.
In Houston, any tree over your house could lead to much worse hurricane damage, or damage when there would otherwise be none.
Any tree will eventually extend roots beneath your foundation and do damage. They will shift and crack the foundation (unless you use pillar construction), break pipes and structures and will penetrate your sewer lines. If you're lucky you will kill them before they do any severe damage.
Though it sounds absurd, rather than a tree, it might be better to put up a shade (i.e., two poles and a sail cloth between them) to block the lith/heat. It would definitely be cheaper than having a tree although your neighbors might not like it.
A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed. But then a new problem arises: the dying tree roots, which extend entirely across and below the land, and which had previously remained placidly underground and invisible, now begin to rot, swell and rise irregularly everywhere. They thrust upward at random ruining the lawn's former level appearance. You can no longer mow your lawn: the lawnmower strikes the rising roots and either breaks the blade or the lawnmower stalls. The surface is no longer level. You can let your lawn lie fallow for 20 more years until the roots rot completely or...
... you pay someone enough to remove all the roots and fill them in with soil, then re-level and re-sod the lawn. That likely triples the cost of removal.
Trees look great - from a distance.
It is a tribute to the old "pier and beam" construction techniques that their use evades these problems somewhat by allowing you to raise/lower the piers in response to tree growth/intrusion, thus maintaining a level house (so your grandkids can play marbles on the wood floor in the living room).
Root barriers may be a reasonable solution too, but they must be maintained. I am unfamiliar with their success rate.
I recently saw an 11-story high-rise whose foundation is endangered by the "nice trees" that were planted at its base to form a park for the building's inhabitants decades ago. The trees are moving everything: the building, the streets around the building, *everything!! Imagine having bought a condo in that buiding! What a disaster.
That hasn't been my experience with many trees and homes. Lots of people live with trees around - maybe most people who are in houses. I don't personally know of anyone with these problems, though I've heard of things like it.
Maybe the tree doesn't need to be right next your structure?
> A tree must be trimmed annually once it reaches a certain size; eventually it must be removed.
Definitely not my experience!
A similar tirade can be made about rain, wind, sunshine, heat and cold. Entropy happens. I think the nature of what you're saying isn't universal. Different style foundations, different kinds of ground and different kinds of trees will mean different things. Some issues can be avoided with minimal foresight. Some won't happen for decades at which point the balance of benefit vs cost comes into question. Some issues are really just expectations that many would consider unnecessary, like having a flat lawn.
Where I live in the Midwest, trees around houses is incredibly common. I wouldn't want to live in a neighborhood without them.
Didn't intend to make a tirade but:
Yes! Search for a house without a tree in a neighborhood full of trees. Enjoy!
Having a flat lawn may be unnecessary, but generally, most people want a lawn that a lawnmower can cross w/o self-destructing [or that their oft-drunken uncle can walk across after dark without tripping on a root and passing before his time.]
A lawnmower blade is usually not adequate for a 4-inch root knuckle risen from the depths - that requires a chain saw. But then you're chain-sawing in dirt, mud and root, so neither safe nor easy. This is a contest the homeowner cannot win, merely survive.
If he’s that drunk all the time, the uncle might want to wear a helmet.
How long is eventually, because in the Pacific Northwest, there are 100ft+ trees every which way and lots of houses built in between them. I have never heard of this lawn issue, nor any foundations ruined by the trees (not planted directly next to the house).
Lots of houses have decorative maples/plums/cherry/crabapples/fig in their front yard within 30ft of the foundation. I thought the rule of thumb was roots go as far as the circumference of the tree branches.
My experience is mostly in the southeast region of Texas where the land is flat and fertile. This would be considered good farmland by most people. It is in these regions, separated by mostly pine forests, that I have seen considerable housing development.
Pricier homes of the Pacific Northwest are usually well-clear of the larger trees that challenge foundations. And I'm sure they're usually built by people knowledgeable about tree intrusion. By well-clear I mean half a football field away. I don't know about more densely-populated areas.
Smaller decorative trees are not usually a problem but nonetheless are best kept away from structures. It's the "nice old 50-year old oak tree" or the "30-year old pine tree" that is within 20 feet that will ruin your lawn and house.
I have a neighbor who simultaneously removed an oak tree from his back yard and a rather large young pine from his front yard ~12 years ago. The back yard is just starting to settle down. The front still looks bad. He mows his lawn in shifts: part at a time until he tires. During the rainy season you can still easily trace the oak tree's rotting roots as they steer the rainwater through the back yard. He saws and hacks at the roots, trying to keep the general flow toward the front yard and the street (as drainage is supposed to be in these neighborhoods). I know that he would be happier with a simple flat backyard of grass for his grandchildren to play on.
Every old tree near our lovely family home eventually had to be removed. This, despite the classic pier-and-beam construction. The shifting had gone too far to adjust the piers. It was time to adjust the trees: and my father, being an engineer, had to run the operation himself.
What an eye-opener that was: who knew that when an inch-thick braided steel cable holding an oak tree in suspension as it is sawed down could break, whip backward, slash and tear a 3-inch deep by 3-foot wound across the side of an even-larger pecan tree in less than the blink of an eye? Thank God no one was standing in the open area when the cable broke!
“unless you use pillar construction”
And no good reason not to, generally. Our house is elevated on 18 concrete piers, anchored onto the bedrock - because the soil is shallow and not stable. We have trees growing inches from the house.
This is becoming obsolete with roof-mounted PV. You'd want it exposed all year.
The PV panels, with the air space above the roof, would also act as a bit of insulation.
I've been having this idea of designing a neighborhood where the proportions of natural and built-up areas are reversed. Instead of having a basically artificial setting where trees live in little holes in the sidewalk, the basic setting is natural soil and vegetation, and the buildings are situated between and under the trees.
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.
One of my neighbors has a sycamore tree that practically covers the entire house. It does look really nice, but I'm glad It's not my house, because the tree is constantly dropping debris on the roof, and if a branch fell of in a wind storm, it could do significant damage to the house.
Having a lot of buildings under trees brings up a big problem when heavy rainstorms, wind, or hail occur. Texas has all three. Old trees are particularly troublesome since heavy limbs can snap off with very gentle stimulation.
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.
Removing trees adjacent to a house is also surprisingly expensive.
This exists in many parts of the world. And is usually reserved for the ultra wealthy, especially if you want it to be near a big city. One famous example is Karuizawa.
You haven't explained what you'd do for the car-based infrastructure, which seems to be the main problem here
“Low-income communities lack trees and green space,”
I lived in 3rd Ward Houston for years, it was very well treed. As were most of the other inner loop “hoods”
The gradient should be pretty obvious here https://www.google.com/maps/@29.7512376,-95.5104388,10129m/d...
I went into a “bamboo maze” the other day and it was wild how dark and cool it was under all that dense bamboo, it grows super fast, they should plant bamboo forests on the vacant lots to promote cooler air.
> “Houston is famous as an unwalkable city,” Ren said… “Google Maps said it was a five-minute walk from my hotel to a pharmacy, but it took me 30 minutes with no shade, no red lights and no safe place to cross,”
This sounds like a Google problem as much as a Houston problem! But it’s amusing (and sad) to read about the Democrat mayor of Houston removing bike lanes and trying to ban electric scooters[1].
It sounds like they want to make the city even more car-centric, not less.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/19/us/politics/houston-mayor...
This land isn't "abandoned". Nobody is sitting on vacant RE in Texas and getting fucked by sky high TX property taxes for the fun of it.
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.
10,000 acres of abandoned buildings?
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?
They're not competing with each other. They're competing with the warehouses that blanket the industrial parts of LA and areas south of Newark.
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.
>10,000 acres of abandoned buildings?
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.
I live in Houston and would rather it be 10 degrees warmer than have to deal with 32258 additional mosquito spawning pools. The heat isn’t the worst part of Houston, most long term Houstonians are used to it. You never get used to mosquitos, especially Aedes aegypti.
I think that the post I made, which I should've used a /s tag (sarcasm) on probably needed a /sh tag (shitpost).
Your thoughtful reply made me reconsider what I posted as if I had been serious. Seeing another instance of someone attempting to build a coherent picture in the reader's minds eye about the size of one thing relative to another (10000 acres is roughly 1/4 of a Lichtenstein), dredged up the recurrent memories about the all-too-commonly misused Olympic swimming pool comparison. I felt compelled to to reply and ended up building an implausibly plausible narrative about mitigating some of the issue with the overheated abandoned buildings by repurposing them as community improvements.
I am surprised that you would prefer the temperature there to be 10 degrees warmer. This reminds me of a time when I was out of state, in Mississippi, on a wellsite and I had picked up a copy of USA Today at the hotel before I left. I read the interesting parts and finally got to the weather forecasts on the back page for major cities across the US. As I scanned the forecasts they were all positive - Sunny, Breezy and Nice, etc until I got to Houston. For Houston their forecast header said "Oppressive". I checked all the other headings for all the other cities listed and none had negative connotations, only Houston. That gave me the chuckle I needed to get through that shitty day on muddy the wellsite and it continues to provide a pleasant memory all these years later.
I lived in Houston and the Houston area for 10 years and commuted for work to Houston for another 16 years. I'm pretty familiar with most of the pros and cons including the climate, the traffic, many of the communities, the abundance of delicious food options for any price range, the stormwater drainage issues due to over-development, problems created by lack of zoning, etc. and being a geoscientist, I can see advantages to repurposing these abandoned buildings for community use.
I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. They would all be built as indoor pools where families from the neighborhoods around these abandoned buildings can bring their kids on those hot spring days. In many cases it would probably not be necessary to remove the existing building, only to gut it and add pool facilities. I have my doubts about whether functioning outdoor pools are significant sites for mosquitoes to breed due to the agitation of the water surface from the pumps and the chlorination so I don't think your concerns about Aedes aegypti and the pathogens they spread are worth worrying about. For control of that problem you have to look at how Houston and other municipalities handle their stormwater retention ponds, their channelized creeks and bayous, and storm drains across neighborhoods in the city. Storm drains that are not regularly graded tend to have water pooling due to debris traps and that water becomes the breeding grounds for mosquitoes. It is also a huge hill to climb to get people to manage standing water on their property by dumping accumulations after rain events.
We looked at buying homes when we lived there and frankly, Houston will always have issues with water because of the gulf coastal plain geology which left them with wide areas of very clay-rich soils which have low permeabilities and thus it is imperative for runoff to be a critical part of every infrastructure project in the region. Even knowing all this they still sold off all the Katy Prairie land where rice and sugarcane was grown and which regularly flooded for generations. That land was a winter ground for migratory birds from all over North America until they turned it into poorly-drained subdivisions with homes on concrete slabs that crack and buckle and keep foundation repair contractors busy.
I think it would be a useful project for a GIS pro to map these abandoned properties and short-list some of them for repurposing as described in communities where kids have few options for recreation. It would provide facilities for people of all ages to learn to swim, practice diving board skills, remain physically fit, and some of them could be fitted with wave pools to simulate beach conditions and make it more fun. Jobs for young teens in the neighborhood, community building, physical activity that one can do on a hot Houston day, etc. I see nothing but positives here. Maybe my whole post needs a /sh though.
A more generous interpretation of your grandiose vision would obviously include some way to make the water not into a breeding ground, like what you mentioned here. But seeing as this is hacker news, I felt like playing into the respective stereotypes of an interaction between someone living in the Bay Area and Houston completely talking past eachother.
And yes, the lack of planning does cause problems. It also has obviously has some benefits, like affordable housing. I live in a suburb (Sugarland) and while it’s not particularly exciting, it has everything I need for my family… and yes, it absolutely would be better 10 degrees cooler ;)
Re: one swimming pool per child project: when can you start?
I am sure Houston has a mosquito control board.
"I don't picture any of the swimming pools as outdoor pools. "
Like https://www.texasstandard.org/stories/houston-underground-th...
You might want to read up about what happened to swimming pools in the South after segregation
I am familiar with what you are referring to.
However, as it often is, Houston is a weird outlier because its development is so recent. The majority of its current footprint was built after 1970, with many neighborhood pools and community pools. Some are limited to residents of the area and their guests, others are fully public, such as this one:
https://epconservancy.org/aquatics-center/
After segregation they were at their prime. You mean desegregation . 25% percent of Houston was born in another country
In New Orleans they were filled in upon desegregation. Yes I meant after the end/after the period of segregation.
Welcome to Houston, TX, a monument to urban sprawl.
> "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
This doesn't make any sense. Allowing people to build infinite height towers with no parking instantly makes land worth far more, and the people that pay for this "movement" are all large-scale landowners. Holding land and keeping it trash is an investment; they're sure that pouring money into YIMBY groups will eventually make them a fortune, and the fact that they're leaving the land trashed will just help YIMBY arguments.
The people who fight it are the people who actually live there. You know, the "demographics."
Demand for floorspace is very large, but it is not infinite.
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.
I'd assume that floorspace close to the ground would be worth more than floorspace that takes a half hour commute by elevator to reach.
lol true :)
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.
You can't build an infinite height tower with no parking if the market doesn't support it. You need to be building that in a neighborhood of half infinite height towers to make it make sense.
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.
The idea is to drive up demand for land in general, and then make your piece of land the valuable one. Please note that we don't live in a perfectly efficient market.
Paving way to future land grabs with the climate change strawman.
Can you name a time this has ever happened?
I use this
https://weather.ndc.nasa.gov/goes/
as my go(es) to weather "app", billion dollar live sat feed on my phone, for lots of things, other than just local weather,including general investigation into *stuff™ such as finding citys, of which huston is easy, cause it glows in the infrared like nothing else, with the major ring roads and highways clearly visible from geosyncronous orbit at I think a 1 km/pixle resolution, in hot dry high pressure weather huston is clearly an oven. today is cloudy there, but watch for "better", ha!, weather
Land value tax would fix this
Texas has some of the highest property tax millages in the U.S. they’re closer to a land value tax than most other places
How? If it’s not profitable nor possible to build anything profitable right now, making it more expensive via taxing will make the situation worse.
Because a revenue neutral implementation lowers taxes on net on improved active sites that do something with land, and raises it on net for vacant abandoned sites that do nothing, shifting the incentive to do something with the land or sell it to someone who will.
Texas already has exorbitantly high property taxes, more than most, that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning (which never stops increasing) will do.
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.
A land value tax is based on the value of the land only, with no input from whatever improvements are or are not built on it. So, with a proper LTV implementation (i.e., one where LTV is the only tax incurred on real state), there would be literally no tax incentive to tear down a usable (but unused) building. You would be paying the exact same amount of taxes on an empty lot as on a high end modern building on that same lot.
What you say does make sense because it's got to be better than what things have evolved into in so many misguided places.
But I forgot to add that the amount of revenue from property tax is only intended to act like collateral damage :)
When you do the math it turns out anytime you start taxing anything but commerce, it is unsustainable because it accrues and accumulates disadvantage to the taxpayer until it is overwhelming. Plus the higher that taxes rise above absolute insignificance, the more likely a major upset occurs from just a slight lapse in overall prosperity, re-balancing to the further disadvantage against those who can afford it least. And that doesn't include the pulling of political strings by those who benefit most from that type activity.
You don't sensibly tax people just for existing, even at 3/5 the amount per head. Likewise their property unless it is involved in commercial activity, nor wage income since the employer is the commercial enterprise they should have that all covered like it used to be when things were not so predatory.
But they tax "rooftops" like a lot of other places based on square footage and now in Houston there has been some recent influence to demolish unoccupied buildings more so for appearance sake to the world for the upcoming World Cup as an excuse more than anything else.
It appears the actual demolition of truly abandoned buildings can not be accelerated without blurring the lines between actual abandonment and merely unoccupied to some degree or another.
But appearances can be deceiving.
The big thing is there's enough people much wealthier than those who have the properties now, who want them either way, demolished or not.
Under threat of forced demolition those having buildings suitable for rehab would need to sell for less than they would have otherwise. Who cares about the poor sellers who have been paying taxes on the buildings the whole time, working toward a financial turnaround? The idea seems to be to incentivize new buyers to have better opportunities by preying on previous owners' misfortune.
OTOH, as soon as any property has had any nonproductive structures removed, its appraised value and tax levy drops like a rock, making it way more attractive for the same type buyers who could have already obtained all the lots having buildings they are willing to rehab.
The new buyers can then afford many more vacant lots for potential future construction, which had always been a non-bonanza prospect otherwise, and with the newly lowered taxes afford to wait and see which might be a bonanza to build on someday. A lot more so than the previous owners.
If a lot of this happens at the same time, then the market for reclaimed lots like this will have downward price pressure too until the effect runs its course.
Too bad for the little guy either way.
>> that's why perfectly good buildings are often torn down. Nice buildings where that would not happen in other states. Because it allows the appraisal value to plummet and the owner to continue to own the property when nothing other than a drastic reduction in this yearly siphoning
This is exactly the problem that Land Value Tax proposes to fix. The tax doesn’t go down if the land owner destroys their structures and ruins the site.
See my other message.
The owners don't want to destroy the structures at all.
They've been holding onto the properties because appreciation was outpacing taxation, allowing a predictable path to remodeling and re-habitation.
Until that changed. Primarily from greedier investors not having enough low-hanging fruit to pick from so they're shaking the trees for all they have until they can give no more.
It's new buyers instead that want to swoop in if the landscape can be further tilted in their favor. Just a little bit is all it takes to yield a big return for a privileged few.
Other costs have risen too but the taxes are so high that's what triggers the final destruction.
Property tax has that extra-financial "property" that keeps your home positioned like dominos ready to fall. Like other skyrocketing costs don't do, even though the pressure from them is huge too.
This is by design.
LVT wont help you now. It's too late.
if it’s truly not profitable or possible to use the land, then the land value tax would be $0.
Something is more profitable than nothing, always
Tree cover has come way down in New Orleans after Katrina so the city is much hotter as a result
Oh lord...
"Sir, your house is too hot, which makes you subject to the 'hot house tax'", coming to a road near you in 2028.
".. and your smart watch detected that you've exceeded the methane footprint quota this month, here's your fine and please consider upgrading your greenhouse gas tier, otherwise we're disabling the bean buying flag in your CBDC UBI"