kspaans

I believe Stripe and/or has the same issue. One of the roasters I like to buy from in Toronto has beans from Cuba, but can't sell them online.

How does this work? The $2m valuation would be based on income from current tenants, would it not? Most rent control laws, and especially not the one in Oregon, don't retroactively change rents charged to current tenants.

That is unless the $2m valuation is based on a speculative estimate of how much rents will go up in the near future?

Yup, this is how "rent stabilization" works in Ontario, Canada. When a tenant has a lease, rent increases are capped to a rate set by the government. When a tenant leaves, there is "rent decontrol" and the landlord can charge whatever the market will bear for the next tenant. Similarly newly built units for rent get market rates. No one dictates what a landlord can charge, only how much they can increase rents for existing tenants.

Of course this does lead to shenanigans to get old tenants out, but it's not rent control in the sense that all rents are everywhere anytime are set by the government.

Older buildings should sell for less, to compensate for this risk. If the mortgage payments eat up too much of the rental income then the owner overpaid, and should sell at a price that's more appropriate for the risk associated with the building.

That may be because you're competing against other owners who bought their houses for peanuts (relatively speaking) and thanks to Prop 13 also pay peanuts in property tax. They can depress market rents (below purchase prices) because for them rents are mostly profit. Even people who bought 5 or 10 years ago at previous prices can rent for less than you but keep the same margins.

The stormwater surcharge also help to nudge people whose property may contribute to excess runoff: large driveways, paved yards, larger houses, etc. This is currently a big problem in Toronto where flooding often occurs downtown (closer to the lake) during and after storms, largely due to houses further out and in the suburbs that have paved their front and back yards to make driveways.

Absolutely false. Land costs, permitting costs, zoning, permitting, etc all add up to the final cost of built housing. Developers build what's profitable, that's true, but they aren't twirling their moustaches and charging 3x premiums.

That's how Canada does inheritance tax: "deemed disposition". There is no inheritance tax per se, but when you die you're assets are assumed to be sold at current market value and trigger the appropriate taxes.

As you've alluded to, location is a factor. Specifically: the cost of land. Regardless of the price of building each square foot of housing, rising land values inflates the total cost of buying land to put that housing on. This is partially due to population growth. But it's almost entirely a self-inflicted problem. That problem is zoning.

If a slice of land can only be used to build a home for one family, and that slice of land is near things people want, it drives up the price of housing. If you were able to build a multiplex or condo tower on that land, the land would probably cost even more, but spread over more dense housing the price of land per square foot of housing would be much lower than for the single family home.

A second problem that's harder to address than waving a city planner's wand is infrastructure. Density requires transit (roads or otherwise), electricity, schools, sewers, water, etc. If municipalities don't plan for that it makes growing hard.

Yeah I hope we can eventually find a way to price these kinds of things more accurately. Like a sibling comment says: price in the externalities of low-density living and let those who want to pay them pay them, or else increase the density of the area.

In your case it's sounds like you're paying it to some extent: longer and/or more expensive commute.