> Property taxes is simply rent you pay to your locality based on the value of your property. But it acts to reduce speculation because you have to pay it whether you are using the property or just holding it for the appreciation.

Interest rates only apply to people borrowing money, which is the thing that promotes speculation. It even promotes speculation among people who are living in the houses, because then they try to buy a bigger one until so does everybody else. With the result that everyone ends up in the same house they would have before, but pays more for it.

Property taxes apply even to people paying their own money for their homes, which is an undesired side effect. It makes it more expensive to own a home, which is the thing we were trying to prevent.

> And they aren't keeping it in real estate...so at least we don't have to compete with Bob Speculator when trying to buy a house.

So then you can buy a house, which won't have a very high resale value because of the high property taxes, but then you can take the money you saved to save for retirement by investing in other assets like stocks and bonds. Which you just made unaffordable.

> But then why did I save for that downpayment in the first place? If I saved $200k over 10 years...and then houses double to $2 million while I go from making $100k to $250k/year...well, I was really stupid those first 10 years.

Let's compare our alternatives here. You spent ten years to save up a 20% downpayment, now you're ready to buy a house. Suddenly a change occurs.

If a change is that the nominal value of the house is cut in half, whether you get screwed or not depends entirely on whether you buy your house the day before or the day after the change. That isn't really ideal. This is also, effectively, deflation -- an incentive to hoard cash. That's bad.

If the change is that your nominal wages double, it doesn't matter if you bought the house yet because the nominal price of the house stays the same. It just gets easier to earn that amount of money going forward. It would be nice if we would have done this ten years ago, but we didn't.

> And not only that, but my downpayment of 20% is no longer viable...I have to pay 40% to make the loan officer comfortable with the loan.

The price of the house is the same and now you're making twice as much money, so the loan officer is more comfortable giving you the loan, not less.

> Yes, because every mega city in the world that has focused on density is affordable? Yes, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Paris are plenty dense, but they are not affordable by any measure of the word.

It's not a question of absolute density. What you need is more housing than you have people, so that you're only paying the construction cost and not competing over artificial scarcity because further increases in density are illegal. The amount of density needed for that in San Francisco is different than it is in Houston.

> Zoning isn't the only thing that needs to be done, you need to deal with the speculators, and you need a sane inflation rate so that people can afford to buy those houses eventually.

If you deal with zoning then you deal with speculators, because increasing the housing supply by a sufficient amount prevents prices from skyrocketing, which drives away speculators. Nobody expects the price of housing to double if a 20% increase in price induces enough construction to cause it to fall back to the original price in five years, and nobody speculates unless they're expecting prices to rise.