Another one that has been bugging me for a while is the notion that, with LVT, land prices would be permanently low and so 'property developers' would have no incentive to build anything because they can't participate in any land value uplift (mainly that triggered when planning is granted)*
This must surely be nonsense. Imagine that house prices and rents are stable. Sure, they will drift upwards with real wage increases and economic growth generally, but overall flat-ish. Construction costs will also increase in line with wages generally, so actual land values would be even more stable. This would put a dampener on NIMBYism and land speculation. No village is going to be swamped overnight so no grandiose plans to oppose. Instead of a hundred landowners putting in planning permission applications and one or two lucky winners getting it, it would be just one or two builders putting in planning applications, which get nodded through.
So land prices would be stable. They might be low and stable or high and stable, but there wouldn't be much planning uplift; actual builders would pay the existing owner for the likely planning gain when they buy.
If the population is stable or growing, and the economy is growing, there will always be demand for more buildings (moving into something bigger and nicer, or renovations or home improvements, old buildings to be knocked down and replaced etc), so builders will have enough to do. Most of the people in construction just get paid for the work they do, architects, brick manufacturers, chippies and sparkies. As long as there is work and they are being paid, they are happy, even though they don't get a penny of any land value uplift.
There would still be plenty of profit to earned by the 'property developer', the one who plans and oversees everything, takes the risks, raises the finance. That has to be rewarded or nobody would do it. Even if this incentive were eroded, so what? There would be less competition for new sites, land prices would be lower and it would be like olden times where architects, brick manufacturers, chippies and sparkies club together and organize their own developments and just earn an honest crust for work done.
* The Homeys are so stupid, having said that there would be no more developers if we had LVT, they then advance the KLN "Farmers won't be able to afford the LVT and will be forced to sell all their land to developers." Which developers, you twats? You just claimed that there wouldn't be any developers left.
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