The Catholic Church Downsizing Thread

Finglas.

Not sure I would describe that as a design fault. if you dont maintain any building properly there will be issues. As the article says that church was regularly more than full, even if that was a long time ago now.

They are not driving down the price of the land. they are refusing to artificially inflate it by granting planning permission for change of use to the RCC.

The thing is, once you have a zoning system at all then obviously zoning decisions are going to affect land values — affect them bigly, as Donald Trump would say. And that, of course, creates the perfect incentives for land speculation, the exertion of political influence and the leaving of brown envelopes under the bootscraper at the back door.

Which is not to say that you shouldn't have zoning - orderly planning and development requires it. But you should recognise the tendency to corruption that zoning produces, and think about how you're going to deal with it.

So. You have an expanding town, in need of more housing, and some nice greenfield sites at the edge of the town already served by roads and convenient to existing water and sewage services. From a planning point of view, they're a good place to build the housing that the town requires. Obviously, they should be zoned for housing.

My point is that, if all these factors are present, there is no reason to delay rezoning. In particular, delaying rezoning so that you can compulsorily acquire the land at a reduced value is just as corrupt as making a zoning decision in exchange for cash. In both cases, you're exercising your zoning powers for the purpose of generating financial advantage. That is not the purpose for which zoning powers are given. This is precisely the kind of corruption that we need to guard against, not that we want to encourage.

I take your point that church lands are held ultimately for the community, but if you compulsorily acquire the lands then the amount you pay for them will be held ultimately for the community, on exactly the same terms. I don't think it's a proper use of zoning powers, or a proper object of public policy, to divert resources from churches or other community non-profits into government coffers, on the rather thin basis that you are simply substituting one community agency for another. And it would be beyond bizarre to argue that that we should be able to do this to non-profits, but not to private individuals or commercial bodies.

You might perhaps argue for a law that, e.g., allows local government to acquire land at a price based on its current use value, ignoring its development potential, if it is going to use that land for public or affordable housing. That would avoid the problem of having to corruptly abuse zoning powers in order to achieve the same outcome, and it would be honest and explicit about what is going on. Of course, in a secular state, that law would have to apply to church land and non-church land alike.

The current price is the current price because the land is zoned in a way that prevents housing being built on it; the current price is the price driven down by that restriction.

If in fact you want housing built on it, but you maintain a zoning that prevents housing from being built on it, what is the reason for that?

I'm looking at a hypothetical in which the local authority considers that land should be used for housing, and wants to acquire it and use it for housing, but despite its view that the land should be used for housing won't zone it for housing so that it can acquire it more cheaply. That is absolutely using zoning powers to depress the market value of the land, and good luck arguing to the contrary in the inevitable High Court proceedings.

Note that the word "church" doesn't enter into this argument at all. It's irrelevant to the legal issues and economic reality of what's going on here that the current owner of the land is a church. So try and frame your response without using the word "church".

It's perhaps you that needs to be a bit more grounded in reality. The land already has a zoning; therefore, there are zoning powers being used. That zoning does limit the value of the land; if it didn't, the owners would not be interested in having the zoning changed.

The key issue is, why is the land not zoned for housing, if in fact the view of the local authority is that the land should be used for housing and they intend to develop it for housing? Why does the zoning not reflect their assessment of the socially optimal use of the land, and their intentions for how they themselves will use the land? In the High Court proceedings, the owners will contend that the council are maintaining the current zoning so that they themselves can acquire the land more cheaply. Legally speaking, that would unquestionably be an improper purpose. So, if the local authority are to succeed in the proceedings, they are going to have to point to some proper reason for maintaining a zoning which, on the face of it, is not the appropriate zoning.

Couple of issues here:

If you've got underused or derelict land, one of the reasons that it is underused or derelict may in fact be that it's wrongly zoned; the land can't be put to its optimal use because the zoning doesn't allow it. And, in fact, if the official response is to CPO the land (at a value based on the fact that it can't be optimally used) and then remove the restriction on use, that looks distinctly unfair; it's tantamount to admitting that the previous zoning was inappropriate.

If the local authority thinks that land should be developed for housing, and if the landowner is willing to develop it for housing, and if the only or main thing that stops this is the zoning, then the zoning should be changed. This looks like a no-brainer to me.

I get that we want to develop affordable housing (or, even better, public housing) and this objective isn't served by landowners developing their land as high-end executive townhouses. There are various measures you can adopt to do this - e.g. planning codes that require developments to have a mix of housing types. Giving the state power to (a) prevent the development of the land for housing; (b) aquire the land at a value depressed by that resiction and then (c) develop the land for housing itself is certainly one of these, but you'd have to question the fairness of it. And if your concern is preventing land speculation and corruption this is certainly not a measure you would adopt. It will matter hugely to landowners which of them has their land purchased at a restricted value for affordable/public housing and which of them is permitted to develop their land for private housing, and the brown envelopes exchanged in an attempt to influence these decisions will be prodigious in their fatness. No?

There are two connected decisions that our society needs to take. The first is to develop an adequate supply of affordable/public housing. The second is how the economic costs of this are to be born. A mechanism which, in effect, allocates a largish chunk of the cost to people who happen to own the particular plots of land that we decide to develop looks arbitrary, unfair and likely to engender corruption. A better system might be a general land tax, paid by all owners of undeveloped land and based on the value of the land, including development potential, the proceeds of which are then used to buy land for public/affordable housing. This allocates the cost not to the particular landowners whose land we choose to buy, but to all landowners equally regardless of whether their land is bought or not.

No doubt other, and better, proposals could be put forward. But I do think the idea of using inappropriate zoning as a tool for acquiring land cheaply and then rezoning it is highly objectionable.

You can put it the other way around. If land is suitable for housing and the public interest lies in having it developed for housing and the intention is in fact to develop it for housing, there is a strong argument that the owner of the land should not be penalised by having its value artificially depressed with an inappropriate zoning.

I take your point about lands bought on a speculative basis, but using zoning lands to acquire land cheaply does not capture value from speculators; it captures value from the owners of land that the local authority wished to acquire. There's only a coincidental overlap between those two groups. Plus, the speculators still luck out if their land is developed for private housing, which is the large bulk of housebuilding, so you haven't really removed the incentives for speculation.

If your concern is speculation, then maybe a swinging tax on the profits of speculation in land (the proceeds of which could be used to fund public housing) might be a more equitable and effective way of addressing it. Or maybe even a tax on gains resulting from the rezoning of land, regardless of whether the landowner acquired the land for speculative reasons or not.

(Problem with a tax on gains resulting from a favourable zoning; should you be able to claim a deduction if your land is devalued by a restrictive zoning? Think e.g. of urban land which is devalued because an intended road scheme is going to require demolition of one side of the street. If the state can capture the value resulting from its decision than enhance land prices, should it bear the loss from its decisions that depress land prices?)

Sure. Currently if planning/zoning etc decisions devalue land, the landowner just has to suck up the loss. But if we levied tax on gains resulting from planning/zoning decisions then it would be hard to deny the case for also permitting deductions for losses resulting from planning/zoning decisions. If you do the one but not the other is seems obviously unjust. Plus, it still leaves in place incentives for the speculation and corruption that smacl is (rightly) concerned about.

We're getting quite radical now, but I think you can make a good case for a land tenure system which treats land as, first and foremost, a shared or common asset ("The land of Ireland for the people of Ireland!") over which a person (or a church) can be given particular rights or control when, and to the extent, that it's beneficial to the community to do so. But if you're taking that attitude, the corollary is that planning/zoning decisions which devalue land are detracting from the wealth of the community - i.e. the loss should be socialised, just as any gain would be socialised.

This shouldn't be the massively expensive policy that we might at first think because you have to expect that, on the whole, planning/zoning decisions should create more value than they destroy — why else make them? So (say) earmarking your property for demolition to make way for a metro station devalues your land, but it enhances the value of much adjacent land that will be served by the metro station. If both the gains and the losses are socialised, (a) the community gains more than it loses, and (b) as between the landowners, the treatment is fair and incentives for speculation/corruption are minimised.