I think the author may be right about multiple points but I think it doesn't matter? This is one of those, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good situations. A state-level, one-time wealth tax _is_ something that billionaires can run away from. And this law seeking to apply to people who lived in the state _before its passing_ seems structurally sketchy. This article has some fair concerns.
But we have a one-time billionaire's tax proposal on the upcoming ballot, and we don't have an LVT proposal on the ballot. Saying that the Billionaire's tax will be less effective than promoters say maybe true -- but we're definitely going to get exactly $0 from a statewide LVT for 2026. If the Center for Land Economics gets an LVT on the ballot in a future year, I would strongly consider voting for it -- but that's not on its own a reason to not do the Billionaire Tax this year.
What _would_ be a convincing piece of info, and which no one knows, is what the long-term impacts of a one-time wealth tax are. E.g. Zuckerberg is moving his residence to FL but Meta isn't going to stop employing Californians. And if the state is _credible_ in saying it's a one-time tax, will the billionaires who fled come back after it's done?
From what I can tell the residency change for a billionaire is about how often you fly to your various homes. Zuckerberg I think hasn't gotten rid of his Palo Alto or Lake Tahoe property, he just added a FL house and will have a cap on how many days per year he's in CA right? This isn't like a normal person with 1 house relocating.
> The land value tax can’t be dodged by leaving nor can it be passed on to renters.
In what sense can't it be passed to renters? Esp if all landlords in the market were faced with a new land tax that they had not previously planned for, why would it not be passed on?
Rent is a function of supply and demand, not a landlord's costs, otherwise we would expect changes in e.g. mortgage interest costs to be passed on to, but in practice we don't see this effect. We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the neighborhood with identical properties who have mortgages. When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
Taxes can be passed on when the tax induces a change in supply. Conventional property taxes are partially passed through because the component of the tax that falls on the building. Tax buildings, get less buildings.
Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.
Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.
> We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the neighborhood with identical properties who have mortgages. When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?
If costs are uniform for each landlord (they have to pay for), it limits the amount of money they can invest in new capacity, and you will see the effects over a decade. If one landlord has cost advantage over another, then they will of course probably just take the extra money as extra profit.
> Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.
They provide friction with what can be done with the land, because the cost of owning the land has to be paid. If it is just a land tax, however, you can game it by building as much as possible on it so the landowners who can't build as much as you can subsidize your usage (long term, you either have to build as much as you can on your land, or sell the land to someone who can).
> Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.
In fact - although that logic is usually correct - in the case of a land value tax it isn't useful because landlords do not supply land. Someone is still going to own the land and it is still going to be used for something. There is no incentive to leave it unused. There aren't any less resources in the overall system and resources haven't been diverted from a productive use to an unproductive use (quite the reverse, they're being redirected away from someone who was doing nothing to earn them). That is the theoretical advantage of taxing the land.
If it were anything else (eg, taxing the houses on the land) then the argument would be useful because the tax was on transforming less valuable resources into more valuable and there would be less productive economic activity and losses leading to less supply of something that the economy was signalling a need for.
There might be a reallocation from housing to some other purpose if an LVT is bought in, who knows. But it is a context-dependent change and not possible to reason about as a general outcome. It might be that the economy produces exactly the same amount of housing before and after. Less resources overall will be allocated to landlords, obviously, but not in a fashion that penalises building houses. Maybe that means house prices drop and more people own their houses outright. Maybe there is even more housing because resources move from landlords to housebuilders.
> If it is just a land tax, however, you can game it by building as much as possible...
I've never heard an entirely satisfactory process for valuing the land either. Although to some extent all tax systems have questionable underpinnings and compliance.
> Landlord costs affect supply in the long term, so you will see changes, just not necessarily immediately over a one year period, but definitely over a 5-10 year period.
This is true, but the degree depends on elasticity of supply, and that depends a lot on profitability of the sector.
> Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.
Taxes may not affect the amount of land that physically exists, but they absolutely can and do affect the amount of land available for rent as opposed to other income-generating use cases.
On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board, which is likely to just be absorbed by renters given the usually low price elasticity of demand for housing.
> On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board
Most research asserts that a land value tax decreases the selling price of land.
In a fully functioning spherical chicken market, once balancing in
If I buy land for $100k today, I can assume I'm going to make say $6k a year from renting it to someone and $2k a year from it increasing in value, giving me a 8% roi
If I instead had to pay just $4k a year in LVT, the price would reduce to $50k to keep that 8% roi. I'll still be making money for doing nothing.
Now if that LVT was returned to the population at large, it's quite possible the population has more money to spend on land, so I could increase the rental price from $6k a year, but then the LVT would increase, because the idea is it reduces unimproved land value to zero -- nobody should make money from occupying land, they should make money through improving it.
In reality though any LVT implemented would be full of loopholes which would introduce absurd incentives. Just like taxing income, and worse taxing earned income more than non-earned income.
All property owners can increase rental prices now anyway. They can only increase them to the maximum someone will pay for it. That's why average rental prices tends to track average income. If you have 5 homes and 6 people, each able to pay 2100, 2200... 2600, then the worst home will rent for 2200, and the one who can only afford 2100 will live in a box.
They can only increase rents as much as the next guy. If you're charging $2500 but next door is $2400, then nobody will rent from you. But if everybody's charging $2500, then that's what people will have to pay.
You're right that some people will get squeezed out, but in high demand markets there are enough people willing to pay that it doesn't matter. The number of properties available for rent in California isn't growing as fast as the total population is growing. Property owners will eat the 5% increase for a while - at least until the existing leases expire - but eventually they'll incorporate that 5% increase into the rent.
Why would a land value tax shift the allocation of land between uses? The amount of the tax doesn't depend on what the land's being used for. If renting is the highest-value use without the tax, it will still be the highest-value use with the tax.
These are assertions, not arguments. Respond to points in the post you replied to. Be sure you understand them first; your assertions do not hold in the case of LVT.
> We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the neighborhood with identical properties who have mortgages.
Why would they as long as they find a renter? The market always charges the marginal cost.
I don't think that logic works because if I'm paying for a loan, I'm not just paying interest, I'm also paying against principal. So in the new, landtax world, I'm building less equity for the same rental cashflow. If I'm thinking of building a unit for rental, I look at all the costs over the next 10-30 years, and all the expected revenue, including eventually owning an asset with some perpetual value. If we have higher taxes in perpetuity then that final asset has lower value and I need to charge more rent to make the same profit in that timespan.
Not to mention that many real estate investors don't use loans, and that the banks giving out loans understand the lack of equity being built and demand higher interest given the inherently lower collateral (greater risk).
A transaction can occur if the price is >= the seller's cost, and <= the value to the buyer. If it's at the minimum, the seller must pass on the tax or not trade, at the maximum (down to the max minus the tax) , the seller can't pass on (all of) the tax and still trade. We observe that landlords make profit, so we are not at the minimum. Are we at the maximum?
I think there are cases where we are in between for significant periods of time. Consider a positive shock to wages. Can landlords put up prices overnight? I don't think so, unless the landlords all co-ordinate to do so, prices will be sticky as there are always some properties in the market, so it's difficult to be the first to increase rent. Unlike a purchase, a landlord who waits for a buyer at the right price is forgoing income during the void. So the market price can be a Schelling Point.
A tax increase, however, happens at the same time to all landlords. All of them would prefer to pass it on, and they know that so they can assume all other landlords will try to pass it on. If the rent is currently below the maximum possible, they will succeed.
How long it takes prices to adjust I don't know. It is an empirical question, but I don't know what data would answer it. But it seems like it took decades for landlords to capture the two-income surplus after it became common for women to have a career.
> Do you really believe that landlords will subsidize tenants for a long time?
This literally happens all the time in California.
You buy a house in CA. You move somewhere else. You hold on to the house because your property taxes are fixed and housing prices grow like crazy here. Maybe your kids will want it. Maybe you'll want to move back..
You can't charge enough rent to cover the mortgage and taxes os you end up taking a loss monthly.
> otherwise we would expect changes in e.g. mortgage interest costs to be passed on
These aren't a universal cost. When rates change, some landlords' costs go up. But some don't. That lets the latter set the marginal price.
If everyone's costs go up the same amount, it's collusion without communication. In an inelastic market like San Francisco's, you'd expect prices to rise.
> Rent is a function of supply and demand, not a landlord's costs
Only in one direction. If that rent, based on supply and demand, does not cover all of the owner's costs (+profit) then that rental property simply disappears off the market. No owner is going to rent out at a loss, so either the renter is paying for all expenses (+profit), or they get kicked out.
If I own £100K worth of land, and the government announces a 1% annual land tax, it's likely the value of my land will fall by about ~25-33% overnight.
If you think that's morally unobjectionable, fine, but I'd love to know what happens when all the landowners who own rural land that doesn't have a profitable development path attached to it can't pay their tax bills. Have the state seize it all?
Or do they just claim it's of negligible value and avoid the tax?
You would sell the development for as much as you can get, regardless of tax. The people buying from you aren't going to pay you more just because the government raised your taxes.
A land tax would effect every single landlord though. Every single landlord would put up rent.
The market will bare it because people have no choice. The choice is homelessness or paying the higher rent.
It's principally the same when mortgage rates rise. Landlords with mortgages put up rent. Only it would be worse, since not all landlords have mortgages.
Do you have data for this? The data I've seen in the past is that landlords are not in aggregate able to pass on mortgage rate increases as rent increases, possibly because their tenants are already squeezed to the limit and there is simply no more money to be had. So when mortgage rates go up rents stay roughly constant and property values go down.
Although the rules were later somewhat changed. Perhaps after pressure due to terminally ill farmers committing suicide (before the tax came into effect so that they could pass on their inheritance).
I do acknowledge that rent is a function of supply and demand in the big picture, at least. I don't think the whole foundation of economics is wrong.
Demand for apartments will be constant.
Supply of apartments will be constant.
But I think what's going on here is that we are way off the equilibrium point. The supply of good places to rent is far outpaced by demand for them, at most price points, and especially so where all the value is (on the coast). So, this means if you're a landlord and you know you'll owe another $1200 tax to Sacramento this year, you should be very confident that if you raise rent by $100 a month, even if an individual tenant would rather move than pay it, someone who can afford $100 more exists and will almost certainly fill that vacancy promptly. It may represent a slight step down in what their buying power would buy. Like, they may have rented a $3000 apartment before, and they'll now rent what used to be a $2900 apartment from you for $3000.
Competition is not one thing. For a producer of widgets, competition means that there is immense instantaneous leverage if you can reduce the price, because buyers will switch to you, increasing your market share until your competitor can match - if they can.
A landlord is usually in a different position. If their personal costs drop (eg, they paid off their mortgage) but the market price stays the same, how do they benefit by reducing the price they offer? Only by reducing the time it takes to rent out, which isn't a significant factor in exactly case when tenants would most like rents to go down - when prices are high because of demand.
The details of these mechanisms matter. Market can be out of equilibrium for a long time; maybe indefinitely.
LVT would push up the supply of rental properties by ensuring that property owners who don't rent out their properties or who don't make efficient use of land lose money.
Thats an incentive to rent out the property or sell up to somebody who will.
It would apply harsh market discipline on landlords - a demographic that has usually been rather coddled.
> property owners who don't rent out their properties
The existence of property tax (which on a single house in some areas of the state is upwards of $15,000 a year already) already makes it absolutely ruinous to just sit on an extra house you don't need and not rent it out.
> or who don't make efficient use of land
A little more convincing. Though I suspect most empty land in places where anyone would be willing to live in California, is empty because our insane zoning laws don't allow what would otherwise make sense there (I don't care that it's like what most areas have -- it's insane to have laws that would make it illegal to build a place like San Francisco, Brooklyn, or Boston).
The funny thing about those zoning laws though is that they're held up by a rare case of bipartisanship:
- The MAGA Boomer set who doesn't want any more development near them because "it'll bring traffic" or noise or crime
- And most of the "progressives" who don't want any more development anywhere because "we hate greedy developers" and "Not enough of this proposed development is low-income housing for the government to dole out in lotteries to a few lucky families."
Idk, I’ve seen plenty of houses get torn down and replaced by a $2M house and just sit vacant years until they sell.
15k/2M is 75 basis points. Its definitely profitable to just sit on land especially if you turned it into a parking lot or some other barely improved thing.
A property loses ~30% of its value when rented out and maintenance cost and insurance cost goes up significantly. Plenty of landlords rather have their property be empty and just collect on the equity gains over the years without putting in any effort.
Most mortgages are fixed interest. So it makes since that today's rate change doesn't impact a renter cost in the near future. Probably not until the next time the property is sold.
Is there really a market dynamic in rent pricing anymore? I thought that algorithmic collusion had eliminated the need for landlords to compete on price.
> I thought that algorithmic collusion had eliminated the need for landlords to compete on price.
Well, that and non-enforcement of antitrust which is a big part of many of our current economic problems.
Massive corporate landlords like Greystar and Morgan Properties own so much of the market they can do a lot of pricing damage even without colluding with others (but of course they do that too).
There's a somewhat non-conglomerate reason though too:
The government, society, municipalities in the US do not build housing. They allow it to be built. Housing is built by developers, who are businesses that insist on making a profit.
So lets say you are one of the only couple of companies that can build a new 100 unit apartment in an area with tight housing supply. Great, you love money, you will look to invest in a development to capture some of that market and make money.
Do you build 100 cheap units for $X and make 5% profit over your planned ROI term, or do you build 100 absurdly upmarket units for $X + 10% dollars and make 10% profit over the same ROI term?
You already know the answer. The normal response is that "All new build is good and will lower price" but no, the rich people buying McMansions and $3000 per month condos in states they haven't ever been to can just absorb far more supply than actual local workers. And, well, they are so fucking rich compared to the average person that they can simply not care about how many of these properties they own, so there isn't downward pressure on them to sell off some of those locations.
The rich are just too rich and can easily outbid the rest of us forever for anything. They are so rich and their marginal value of a dollar is so low that they can happily buy up expensive housing basically for shits and giggles and sit on it and forget they even have it. They own ten properties they never visit. Because they can literally own a property just because they might some day want to visit.
Developers have mostly decided to only serve that clientele because they are so goddamned profitable, because they will negotiate less, will happily pay for box checking features meant to increase the price (like really really bad smart home implementations that they never even experience because they never go to that home). The rich guy who hired my dad to be his general contractor doesn't care what my dad charges and doesn't look at the bill, so my dad abandoned his plan to build 10 houses and instead just lives a relaxing life off of that man's excess, because why the fuck would you do a hundred times the work for less money?
That's one of the reason income inequality on it's own is so bad. Money doesn't work in a linear way, so having 2X the dollars as the next guy is more than 2X as "powerful". The uber rich can just own everything and you have no hope of outbidding or competing. You simply have no other choice than finding what little scraps they ignore.
Capitalism optimizes for best profit per effort. In a society where a tiny percent own the majority of all resources, why would you ever fight for the scraps the little guys have?
Profitable businesses in Portland are being forcibly evicted to be replaced with brand new hotels meant for Executives to visit once a year, all over the area, because providing any service to the uberwealthy is just that much more profitable than providing very necessary service to the average person. It doesn't matter how desperate normal people get, they can't afford to outbid the uberwealthy.
That cost will, of course, be passed on to renters unless the rental prices cannot be raised at all.
If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson. That isn't hyperbole; this was a serious problem in the 1970s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1970s_South_Bronx_building_fir...
That was obviously not acceptable... but it was predictable.
All legal proposals should be viewed like a chess move. Presume others will respond, and make sure you're ok with that response. In a sense that's also the point of the original article too, a law was passed without adequqtely thinking through what would happen.
I actually think there's a lot of positives in land value taxes. However, I was objecting to the phrase "The land value tax can’t be dodged by leaving nor can it be passed on to renters" because that is missing key issues.
Land's assessed value is based on what you could do with it. If can be rented at a profit, that's something you can do with it, and its potential matters. If it can't, then that is no longer a potential value of it.
That doesn't make lvt a bad idea, it's just that I think there's not enough acknowledgement of the trade-offs and limitations.
Burning down an apartment building doesn't change what could be done with the lot; an appropriate valuation method for LVT would not give a different valuation for the land depending on what is built on it.
> Burning down an apartment building doesn't change what could be done with the lot; an appropriate valuation method for LVT would not give a different valuation for the land depending on what is built on it.
True, but an LVT is a cost. Changes in cost can change what is financially viable to do with a property, regardless of what is currently done with the lot, and thus can impact the land value.
Actually no, land value tax is not a marginal cost so does not change the profit maximizing use of land.
The idea of cost-plus pricing is folk economics.
Tax incidence is very well understood in economics and has to do with relative supply and demand elasticity (supply of land is perfectly inelastic) and marginal costs which land value tax does not touch.
It's accurate to say LVT changes the price of land. But it doesn't change the profit maximizing productive use of land.
Other taxes that scale with production (sales tax, income tax, property tax) do change profit maximizing productive use.
>If they can't be raised, and the costs end up being ruinous to the landlords, they will find other solutions like mass arson
Landlords who have their entitlements to land rents or other natural resource rents they've captured ripped away from them would almost assuredly endorse the use of violence.
Land redistribution (of which this is a form) from the landed rentiers to the landless has historically resulted in brutal violence in order to protect their privileged claim on non-human created wealth.
It is quite disingenuous to attribute the South Bronx fires as a result of landlords unable to raise rental prices. I mean that is technically true, but your comment makes it sound like it was a result of a particular legal proposal. It was not. It was a period of urban decay in NYC and many cities in the United States. It was the continuation of white flight into suburbs that started in earlier decades. It was a large demographic change with complex causes.
Rents are already as high as renters can bear. If a tax is introduced, you'd expect landlord competition to drive down the landlord margins, not increase rents.
The supply of land is inelastic. Property developers can't get more land by building more houses on it (and as a corollary, the eventual owner also do not get charged more in taxes).
I don't think this is why it won't get passed on. In theory the lowest income could leave the state and higher income renters would come in.
But in reality a land value tax incentivizes higher density housing. A single house and an apartment complex pay the exact same amount of tax, while the apartment building can split it up over many occupants. Land value taxes are a very natural hands off way of encouraging the right use of land, empty lots and car parks become unaffordable in highly desirable areas while apartments become relatively very cheap.
In theory the land value tax could be set so the overall taxation is the same as before, but but the distribution is such that the people with massive blocks of land in highly desirable areas foot most of the bill. This would over time make housing cheaper over time as more housing is built to reduce the tax burden.
> a land value tax incentivizes higher density housing. A single house and an apartment complex pay the exact same amount of tax, while the apartment building can split it up over many occupants.
That would only be true if the LVT replaced the existing property tax structure, which is not what TFA is calling for.
the rent is already priced to the maximum of purchasing power of the local renters ability.
if landlords were able to raise rent, they would have done that already as its pure profit for them. The fact that they can't, means they will have to eat any marginal tax imposed on them
The author makes the comment about the land value tax not being able to be passed on to renters in the context of comparing it to a property tax.
If I’m understanding the argument you’re making here correctly, wouldn’t what you’re saying be equally true for a property tax?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I don’t think the author would agree with your point since I don’t see how your argument could be true for a land tax, but not for a property tax.
Yeah. I understand the point you’re making, but what I’m saying is that I don’t think that aligns with the authors position.
The author seems to say that costs can be passed on to the renters when the costs are a property tax, but they cannot be passed on when it’s a land tax. That seems like a really odd position to take and it doesn't align with your "costs are irrelevant" statement. I fully admit that I could be missing something, but I don’t understand how it can be true that only certain types of taxes can be passed on to renters.
I fully understand the argument you’re making and I’m neither agreeing nor disagreeing with it. It sounds logical, but I frankly don’t know enough about this topic really process it. What I’m saying is that regardless of whether you’re right or wrong, I don’t think your argument is the same one the author is making unless I’m missing something in your argument about why that only applies to land taxes and not property taxes.
some tenants who are on the margin of profitability will decide to close shop/relocate to Texas, which will free up rental space and drive down the prices
Landlords are competing with each other, and renters can take their next best alternative. If everything gets strictly more expensive, the next best alternative is not necessarily any cheaper...
if everyone raises rents by a certain percentage trying to recoup taxes, this will be equivalent of Supply line shifting up by the amount of tax in Economics 101 terms.
From economics we know that increase in cost is split between Landlords/Renters in accordance to their elasticities. Whoever is more elastic - will eat the tax.
the cost increase is shared between renters/landlords in the ratio of their elasticities. Whoever is more inelastic, will eat the cost.
Inealstic renters will pay up increased rent (like techbros in SF are eating up all rent increases).
Elastic renters will get up and move to Texas, if renter swill hike rent.
Elastic landlords will lever down and decrease number of low margin properties like rent-controlled properties, or unprofitable properties.
Inelastic landlords will eat the taxes and take a hit to profitability.
This is the problem with governments who think they can synthesize value. They think all businesses can too.
If these communists succeed, they will use the very fact that a landlord cannot synthesize money to prove the landlord passed the cost to the tenant and seize the land.
The author probably has a very superficial understanding of economics. It's economics 101, like VAT, the cost will be passed to BOTH the renter and the landlord. The portion of each is dependent on market dynamics and hard to calculate.
>In the instance of perfect elasticity of the demand or perfect inelasticity of the supply, the price will remain the same and the entire tax burden is on producers. An example of perfect inelastic supply curve is unimproved land (the supply of improved land is elastic because more or less could be created by investment in improvements) or crude oil. Thus, the whole tax burden is on landowners and owners of the oil.
if there are apartments on the margin of profitability, the cash outlay of LVT will have impact in either landlords quitting the market or deferring/stopping maintenance and such
LVT is incoherent, it pretty much only benefits people who are cash rich and land poor. Which is why it gets so much oxygen from tech elites with lots of cash and an inability to buy a house somewhere like mill valley, or wherever.
Essentially taken to the logical conclusion, there will be people competing for more cash to pay their increasing taxes on the same land, it doesn't fundamentally solve the problem. It's such a joke.
I do understand how it works, are you saying that the zoning will magically be fixed when the taxes go up or the land becomes more exlusive? because I can tell you which one has precedent and which one is wishful thinking.
Yes, zoning does get magically fixed, because the incentives that led to zoning disappear. Under full LVT, owners have an incentive to maximize their land use. Otherwise, they will go bankrupt. So places with zoning more restrictive than land use demands will be underwater financially. Think SFH tract homes in Cupertino. These homeowners have fought viciously to retain SFH zoning. If LVT was imposed 95% of them would be faced with a tax bill they cannot pay. Their only option would be to surrender their land or rezone to allow development of sufficient scale to pay the tax.
It’s not wishful thinking it’s just a fact. Zoning exists because landowners want it. As soon as they don’t want it, it’s gone.
"utilized better" in that context just means that the owner of the land can support the taxes on it, it doesn't mean suddenly we are going to put skyscrapers in el cerrito.
No, you won't have a skyscrapers in some random village in the middle of nowhere. But maybe the land owner, seeing how high is the LVT tax is, decides to build a 5-stories apartment building with 50 units, instead of 5 single family homes. And that's a win.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this but when would you ever use it this way? If you're already willing to call Opus/Fable, then isn't the obvious comparison whether Opus/Fable can choose among sampled solutions better or worse than their fast model? If you're willing to pay many seconds for many code samples from a slow model, it's contrived to imagine you care about picking between them in ms.
Ok the photos are cool and it's nice to see the vintage street cars. But Muni has a budget shortfall and is planning on cutting a bunch of bus lines and reducing frequency on lines across the system. Meanwhile, it has an internal supply chain to custom build replacement parts for vintage vehicles that no other city will operate, and teams of specialist restorers. Viewed in isolation, they look cool! Viewed in context, is this ... irresponsible?
From what I understand, the grants to restore the old railcars don't come from their general funds (and if they decided not to do them, they wouldn't get the money). But I'm sure a lot of the regular maintenance comes out of their regular budget, and I agree that's a difficult thing to justify.
I wish they could do something about fare evasion. I ride Muni fairly often (both buses and trains), and I see maybe 20% of people paying when they get on. I know some of the remaining 80% probably have monthly passes or something and don't strictly need to tag on, but I can't imagine it's a large percentage. Biggest offenders seem to be out-of-towners who are going to Chase Center or Oracle Park events (I live in the Dogpatch and see a lot of that on event days). There's no excuse now that the fare terminals accept NFC credit cards too (and not just Clipper cards). I expect getting more people to pay could solve some of these funding problems, or at least make them less severe.
(I do wonder if the cost of fare enforcement exceeds what they'd recover in fares, though...)
I couldn’t find any documents on percentage of riders by payment method, but [1] says that in 2025 they actually got $14M more in fares than they budgeted for, partially because of “increased ridership that is paying full — or close to full — fares.”
Looking at the list of options on [2], your observed 1-in-5 Clipper taps seems within the realm of plausibility; there are a lot of ways to pay for Muni that aren’t visible to fellow passengers. In particular, out-of-towners who plan to ride Muni a lot are likely to get a MuniMobile (or, for the old-fashioned, paper) pass; and a ticket to any Chase Center event also counts as a Muni day pass. You also mentioned monthly passes (I know a lot of people who get them from their company’s commuter benefits), and there’s also transfers: not only are “single ride” fares valid for 2 hours, but if you board after 8:30pm you can’t tap again, because Clipper can’t handle it and you’ll be double charged!
>I wish they could do something about fare evasion.
Reminder that vast majority of the fare is covered by taxes (Roughly 87%). I wish they just funded the remaining 13% instead.
It might not even cost that much more considering all of the expenses involved with hiring more staff (Salary/healthcare/pensions etc.) to collect the last 13 cents on the dollar.
This doesn't feel like the right way of thinking about it---if you went from 20% of people paying fares to 80%, that's 4x the revenue with the same fixed costs, and farebox recovery goes from 13% to 52%. Now, I don't think compliance is actually that low, but the point is that you shouldn't think of fares as collecting a fixed share of the operating costs.
The costs may be fixed but so is ~87% of the revenue via tax money.
Muni can be 100% free without increasing taxes too. The people using public land to store their private vehicles are not paying their fair share. Proper parking pricing and enforcement could easily pay for Muni’s deficit.
Yes, money is fungible. But why should it be that people who park cars on the street need to pay their fair share but people who ride Muni don't need to pay anything?
It's both. Why should the public 100% subsidize private vehicle storage in vast swaths of the city (And greatly undercharge when it's paid), but not public transit?
SF has some of the most valuable private[1] and public land in the US. Why is it so pressing to charge the last 13¢ on the dollar for a Muni rider, but not for drivers to pay for the public space they're storing their property on?
[1] Private land owners know this, which is why they charge a lot to use their parking garages/parking lots in SF.
The proposal was to charge for public street parking so we can make Muni free. That's not (at least not obviously) a "fair" allocation, it's just a transfer from one group to another. I agree that it's bad for street parking to be free, I just don't think it's necessarily the best use of funds from that to make transit free. If you're spending on transit, why not spend the money on expanding service instead?
> The proposal was to charge for public street parking so we can make Muni free.
My proposal is to make Muni free full stop. Via taxes is fine with me, I provided another way that doesn't necessitate that. We are already paying for the vast majority of each Muni trip from taxes.
>That's not (at least not obviously) a "fair" allocation, it's just a transfer from one group to another.
You're saying we're just transferring from one group to another, well SF was built for people before cars became commonplace, with excellent public transit before it was torn out for cars. I'm arguing that some of that needs to be transferred back to the people for better use (Bigger sidewalks, bike lanes, restaurant parklets etc.)
>If you're spending on transit, why not spend the money on expanding service instead?
Expanding service is great, but you'd be hard pressed to pay for it via parking meters/tickets and it costs even more to run a system on top of that, particularly the metro system.
looks like the one time cost for doing a renovation is around $1m per car, and are funded by spot grants rather than the general budget. I was unable to find the overhead involved in ongoing maintenance, but it looks like killing the F line is already on the table.
Note that Muni cannot legally reduce cable car service; the city charter[1] mandates a minimum level of service, due to a 1947 ballot proposition[2]. As your link notes:
> Cable cars are a symbol of San Francisco, a major tourist attraction, and an indelible feature of the city’s cultural and historical landscape. [...] While SPUR doesn’t recommend changing SFMTA’s role in cable car operations, the agency may wish to explore options to generate additional revenue from the cable car system or seek supplemental support from the city’s budget, given the outsized expense of providing cable car service and the unique value this mode brings to the city as a cultural attraction. SFMTA already acknowledges the special status of cable cars by pricing them differently from other modes and by excluding cable car service from some of its passes and fare discount programs.
Apart from that, I suspect the per-service-hour figure is particularly misleading for cable cars and removing one cable car from the schedule would free up significantly less than $871: there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.
> there is a significant fixed overhead (from power usage and cable wear) to having the system running at all, regardless of how many cars are on it.
Each cable car trip costs Muni about US$20. They charge about $8.
I was amazed when I first found out how the grip worked. I figured they clamped pulleys around the cables and then applied brakes to the pulley system. Nah. It's brutally simple. They squeeze two soft metal plates around the cable. The cable wears a groove in the plates during starting and stopping. Those plates are replaced every 3-4 days. The cables are replaced every few months.
Plus the thousand or so pulleys under the street need regular attention. The whole system has way too many friction points, which means intensive maintenance.
The PCC streetcars were a really good design, built for efficient operation with modest maintenance.
Their successor in San Francisco was built by Boeing Vertol, which totally botched it.[1] None of those cars are still around. The PCC cars roll on.
How about the reducing the F, which for a decent portion of its route down Market is directly above the underground KLM lines? The F is slower and lower capacity per car and stops at lights (and stops traffic when it needs to turn) in addition to apparently being more costly to run. I am clearly not a transit planner or traffic engineer, but it seems perfectly reasonable to run the F only from the Ferry Building to Fishermen's Wharf.
- People who want to go up market can transfer to the KLM at Embarcadero and if they're going to Castro (or maybe Church?) they may also get there faster.
- If tourists want to see an old-timey street car, they could ride one perhaps half the distance, only along the water with views Coit tower, and the eastern end of the line would be right by the Railway Museum anyway. And we could run perhaps half as many cars.
The part that runs on Market Street is the useful part. The part that runs along the Embarcadero isn’t useless, but it’s more seasonally useful. I’d rather see the old PCC cars replaced with a solid modern low-floor LRV using more standardized parts & aggressive transit policing to keep freeloaders from abusing the system. It is partially redundant with the subway, but if you’re going to have a surface street railway anyway, I’d rather it be optimized for local use.
You could pull the J up from underground too using the same low-floor LRV model chosen for the new F, having it turn at Church & Market rather than making an awkward diversion to Church & Duboce first.
The photos are really cool, and I do like trains and infrastructure in general.
But came here to say the same thing. There is an advertising campaign in SF right now to encourage people to vote to give Muni more money (again) in November, because they can't cover their essential costs. This...looks pretty non-essential to their core mission to me.
They should have done everything they can inside their org to cut costs, before going to ask residents to give them more money.
Now I hope - maybe this is primarily funded by donations / grants or volunteer work, and SFMTA contributes very little to this. If so great - but it would have been wise for them be very clear about that.
I'm a member of Market Street Railway (https://www.streetcar.org/) which does a lot of advocacy to keep these street cars maintained. Many of these cars were either purchased long ago from other cities that would have otherwise scrapped them (most of the PCCs, the long sleek ones) and others are often either preserved Muni originals or donated / purchased by Market Street Railway. Car 162 just came back into service and was purchased by Market Street Railway and worked on by volunteers (and Muni) [1]
I obviously am I biased, and think this is very very cool. There are many intangibles here beyond the budget numbers; a bit of history, a bit of whimsy, a bit of color to what is often utilitarian (public transit). It certainly attracts tourists to the city (I was pretty surprised at the number of out of towners at Muni heritage weekend).
But I do think it's important, not just for tourism but also as a legitimate connector along the Embarcadero corridor that otherwise has no public transit along it. Agree that a breakout of the cost of maintaining these things would be appreciated, not sure if that exists in clear terms, but I don't think it's massive. For example Car 162 was damaged in a collision in 2014, and took 12 years to fix and return to service. For many gripmen / Muni restorationists working for the city, it's a side project.
And while I'm here, I'd be remiss if I didn't post an article about Maurice Klebolt, one of the biggest advocates for vintage transit in San Francisco. It describes how he acquired car 106 from the Soviet Union [2]
Would you be up for posting it in, say, a couple months and then email hn@ycombinator.com? We'll put it in the SCP [2] for sure, so it will get a random placement on HN's front page.
The Texas Commission on Law Enforcement investigated in response to a specific incident that got national news coverage. One has to wonder if there are other PDs that also are not providing public benefit but just didn't attract attention in this way.
> The department also failed to provide resources to its officers, including bulletproof vests and an evidence room.
Of course this will be used to bring back a PD with a bigger budget and more weapons. They may use some of the expanded funds to buy body cams but they won't work.
The town only has 860 residents. I don't know how they afforded 5 police officers are all, much less how they can afford top expand. I used to live in a county (not city!) of 15,000 people, and the whole county got by on just two sheriffs - calling for help from other nearby cities (in a different county) when there was a big event. Edit: now that I think of it, there was budget for 3 sheriffs - but they only rarely managed to have all 3 positions filled at the same time.
I don't live in Texas, but my experience in Iowa and MN is that cities need about 10,000 people before having a separate police department is worth the bother. At 500 they pay the sheriff a little extra to run extra patrols down the streets to "provide a presence", but it isn't full time (other than possibly an incentive to have a sheriff live in the city so his car was visible in his driveway when he was off-duty.
>I don't know how they afforded 5 police officers are all
Do they have a state or interstate highway running through? Predating on motorists and commerce that does not vote in their jurisdiction is a tried and true strategy for a "zero cost" police department.
Also the One Big Beautiful Bill BS funneled funding to local PDs that partner with ICE. Before that Operation Stonegarden was doing something similar supposedly only near borders but IDK if that's been broadening geographically. Texas also has a program (Lonestar) doing the same kind of thing.
I have not looked carefully but it seems like this is over-promising on avoiding catastrophic forgetting.
The "trunk learning rate" is set at 0.1x the learning rate for the experts, so learning on different subjects disproportionately happens in the experts, and the trunk portion is comparatively more stable. But the population of experts can grow and shrink:
> The pool grows when it is short of capacity and shrinks when parts of it stop being asked for.
So:
- doesn't the trunk then _eventually_ still undergo catastrophic forgetting, it just may take much longer?
- and before that point, catastrophic forgetting happens in stepwise chunks whenever the expert pool shrinks?
I am not sure about eventually, but it learns on the steady paste so far. The main thing to keep in mind is that it learns on the single STREAM of data. Not randomized batched samples. Try to do it with any other model and you will see nothing but complete garbage in the predictions, exactly because of catastrophic forgetting.
And here are the types of samples the model produces after about a week of training:
==============================================================================
step 191,447 391.3M of 7,879M characters (4.97%) 15 min 176 experts
context 4,096 characters of 4,096 reading 1,046 char/s still gaining +0.0412 deep into it
grad norm 0.98 against a clip of 1 under the clip
train loss 0.6540 lr 2.28e-04 evidence t -0.15 over 65.7 (effect +0.0660) rate x0.753
held-out loss 0.8012 +/-0.0335 nats 1.1559 bits/char perplexity 2.23 gap +0.1472
arithmetic 0.645 chat 0.790 chat_hermes 1.153 chess 0.510 code 0.703 reasoning 0.756 stories 0.596 wikipedia 1.256
repeats 31% of 8-grams, greedy with no guard
==============================================================================
--- stories ---
prompt: 'Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Tom. One day he '
[raw] repeated 8-grams 2%
was walking in the park with his mom. He saw a big box in the ground. He was very sad and sad.
"Mom, can I have the box to the box?" he ask
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 5%
was playing with his friend, a little girl.
"Wow, Tom!" said Tom.
"What's your name?"
Tom said, "I'm playing with my friend."
The little
--- code ---
prompt: 'def merge_sorted(a, b):\n '
[raw] repeated 8-grams 61%
return sorted(a, b)
def merge_sorted(a, b):
return sorted(a, b)
def merge_sorted(a, b):
return sorted(a, b)
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 22%
"""Merges the modification from the angles in the argument.
This merges the angles in the argument.
"""
def __init__(self, a):
--- arithmetic ---
prompt: 'add 4917 + 388 = '
[raw] repeated 8-grams 47%
<think> 7+8+0=5c1 1+8+1=0c1 9+3+1=3c1 4+0+1=5c0 </think> 5305
mul 6 * 6 = 36
mul 6 * 6 = 36
mul 6 * 6 = 36
mul 6 * 6 = 36
mul 6 * 6 = 36
mul 6 * 6 = 36
a
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 3%
<think> 7+8+0=5c1 1+8+1=0c1 9+3+1=3c1 4+0+1=5c0 </think> 5305
mul 6287 * 49 = <think> 6287*9=56583 6287*40=251480 56583+251480=307063 </think> 307063
mul 9428 * 17 =
--- chat ---
prompt: '<user>\nWhat are you?\n</user>\n<bot>\n'
[raw] repeated 8-grams 20%
In the given I am trying to find the maximum vertex should be an expression linear that should be given the maximum vertex and the maximum v
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 8%
In the given I, there's another part of the given I, whose parts include anything they're discussed.
</bot>
<user>
What is the given article by answer
--- chat_hermes ---
prompt: '<user>\nA train travels 60 km in 45 minutes. What is its speed in km/h?\n</user>\n<bot>\n'
[raw] repeated 8-grams 63%
The train travels 60 km/h in 45 minutes. The train travels 60 km/h in 45 minutes. The train travels 60 km/h in 45 minutes. The travels are t
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 4%
The train travels 60 km/h, which matches km/h.
</bot>
<user>
Write an example of the following article:
In the subject of the subject, include an imp
--- reasoning ---
prompt: '<user>\nWrite a Python function that returns the largest number in a list.\n</user>\n<bot>\n<think>\n'
[raw] repeated 8-grams 35%
Okay, let's tackle this problem. So, the largest number in a list is a list. The largest number is a list. The largest number is a list. It
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 20%
Okay, let's try to figure out this problem. So, we'll find the largest number in a list.
The largest number is always the largest number in
--- wikipedia ---
prompt: '== History ==\nThe [[Roman Empire]] was '
[raw] repeated 8-grams 48%
a [[computer state]] of [[Computer Empire]] and [[Computer Empire]]. The [[Computer Empire]] was a [[computer state]] of [[Computer Empire]]
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 42%
the [[United States|University]] of [[Candie]]. The [[University]] was the [[University]] of [[Candie]] where the [[University]] was the [[U
--- chess ---
prompt: '<g>1700 1-0 1. e4 e5 2. '
[raw] repeated 8-grams 0% 22 legal moves, then Nd3
Nf3 Nc6 3. Bb5 a6 4. Bxc6 dxc6 5. O-O Bg4 6. h3 Bh5 7. g4 Bg6 8. d3 Be7 9. Nbd2 Nf6 10. Nb3 O-O 11. Nc5 Bxc5 12. d4 Bd6 13. Nd3 Bxf3 14. Qxf
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 0% 16 legal moves, then Ba3
Nf3 d6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. d3 Be7 5. O-O Nbd7 6. Be3 c6 7. Nbd2 O-O 8. c3 a6 9. Qc2 b5 10. Ba3 Nb6 11. Bxe7 Qxe7 12. Rac1 Bb7 13. Nf1 Rac8 14. Ng3
--- self-knowledge ---
prompt: '<user>\nhow do you decide which experts to use?\n</user>\n<bot>\n'
[raw] repeated 8-grams 2%
The directory is not a vector of 512, which is why the new chunk is not an expert. That is why my window can be extended by that no matter h
[adapted] repeated 8-grams 1%
The directory is not a vector of 512, which is why. There is not an expert involve
</bot>
<user>
Can you write change_string? It should change the com
Even if there were as many positrons as electrons in the universe, I don't get the time-reversed character at a macro level. When leaving antimatter out of the picture, I dimly understand that the arrow of the arises from entropy. If time reversed particles are antiparticles, shouldn't we sometimes see a diffuse cloud of antiparticles in a lab spontaneously condense into a very low entropy concentrated configuration?
The answer is that they don’t literally go backwards in time showing reverse causality. They are representable in QFT by reversing the time component of their counterpart, which doesn’t impact how they interact with broader causality, just their internal configuration. Further - this does not play out in the lab as reversed causality even between anti particles. You can collide two positrons then detect them later at their destinations just fine in normal causality. It’s a shame because it would be really sweet to find some reversal of entropy and causality somewhere or somehow!
You may, but if you read the link, you’ll find it consistent with the second law of thermodynamics despite being clever about it. The demonstration of consistency requires a modern understanding of information theory, but it’s been long realized it’s likely not a real “out.”
_We_ are still traveling forwards in time. If you followed a cloud of antiparticles backwards in time along its direction of travel, then you would see entropy decrease yes, though regular particles would do the same if we followed them back in time.
I like that one of the successors to .yu was .me
Combined with .it, not far away, one relatively small region which doesn't speak English has had all the best punny English pronoun TLDs.
I think this is a great direction -- for some kinds of users. And this makes me wonder if the 'vs' framing is misleading.
Yes, I think it's a mistake that many organizations are cramming LLMs inside of automated pipelines where the extreme generality/flexibility of the model is at odds with the fact that you're using it for a very specific task that gets repeated over and over, and needs a very specific structured output to be successful. But specifying your task carefully (as well as deciding what counts as your input state representation etc) seems like a form of programming. Something (a person or a model working in a relatively unrestricted way) will need to produce a configuration/specification for this system.
So rather than Jev vs Claude I imagine that using Claude/ChatGPT/whatever interactively to define / refine your Jev config which then runs in prod might be the happy combination?
But we have a one-time billionaire's tax proposal on the upcoming ballot, and we don't have an LVT proposal on the ballot. Saying that the Billionaire's tax will be less effective than promoters say maybe true -- but we're definitely going to get exactly $0 from a statewide LVT for 2026. If the Center for Land Economics gets an LVT on the ballot in a future year, I would strongly consider voting for it -- but that's not on its own a reason to not do the Billionaire Tax this year.
What _would_ be a convincing piece of info, and which no one knows, is what the long-term impacts of a one-time wealth tax are. E.g. Zuckerberg is moving his residence to FL but Meta isn't going to stop employing Californians. And if the state is _credible_ in saying it's a one-time tax, will the billionaires who fled come back after it's done?
reply