Abandoned land drives dangerous heat in Houston, Texas A&M study finds

> 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.

Somebody needs to compile a database of these and let people start actually taking advantage of the adverse possession laws.

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)

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.

yes i also know people who do that

The Mincraftification of language...

>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.

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.

Welcome to Houston, TX, a monument to urban sprawl.

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.

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.

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.

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