> If you buy property in the second city, then as values rise, yes your taxes will go up but so will the value of your property. Worst case, you have to take out a home equity loan to pay the taxes, but you'll probably still come out ahead.

Wouldn't this rise in your property's value only matter when you sell?

Home equity loans aren't a thing in France as far as I know, so maybe I'm completely off here, but wouldn't you need to pay back that loan anyway? So if you're intending to sell the property (which I assume is the case, since OP's main complaint was being forced to move), how do you come out ahead?

You don't need a house after you die. So, you borrow money against the increase in value of the house. The OP is saying that when the estate (wealth of dead person) is concluded the balance will be such that loans against the property (aka 'equity release') will ask be paid easily by the sale of the property. Ergo, no loss to the hypothetical improver of the locality.

I'd say also, anyone who is capable of producing all those improvements should be able to make a good living, and their wage should improve with the monetary value of land in the area. Meaning the land tax shouldn't, on average, be harmful.

> You don't need a house after you die.

Perhaps these are just my European sensibilities talking, but a house is not a hamburger, that you consume and then discard when you're done with it. It is your home, and your children's, and possibly their children's too. It's part of the link to your community, your memories, your history. Not a market good like any other, measured only in dollars.

You despair why communities are dying, why people don't know their neighbors, why they are becoming increasingly isolated - well here's your answer.

here they call that "pulling up the ladder"; you are missing the sentiment -- one side sees it as "leaving my family a secure home" and the other sees it as "tax dodging generational wealth transfer"

The term "pulling up the ladder" has always been interesting to me, since even though there's a continuous tradeoff between the priorities of incumbents and newcomers (in any domain), it tends to be cast in very concrete and black-and-white terms in any debate where it's used (at least as far as I've seen).

For instance, single-family homeowners voting to keep their areas single-family zoned are cast as "pulling up the ladder". This is fair: incumbents are trying to keep newcomers from changing the things they prioritize.

One could make a similar case for public lands, though: why is it fair that residents of a city should allocate huge tracts of land for public parks, when that land could otherwise be used to build dense housing and make the city more affordable for newcomers? It feels strange, but this seems like the same tradeoff: incumbents enjoy the presence of parks, so they prioritize them over the potential needs of newcomers (more affordable housing).

Or at a more global level, we could make a similar (very controversial) case for climate change regulation: the current rich-world countries built up their economies largely on the back of environmentally damaging practices. Now that we're developed, though, there is a large push for global regulation of climate policy, punishing polluting countries. This is because the incumbent rich countries prioritize a solution to global warming over the desires of some (though certainly not all) developing economies looking to grow rich through the same environmentally-damaging practices we used.

The phrase "pulling up the ladder" feels like it's always used to illustrate the greed or selfishness of those who want to deny others the privileges they had. It's very clear, though, that there are some cases where we're totally fine with "pulling up the ladder" when it's the things that we ourselves prioritize (in this example, public parks over affordable housing, or climate-change prevention over economic development).

> the current rich-world countries built up their economies largely on the back of environmentally damaging practices. Now that we're developed, though, there is a large push for global regulation of climate policy, punishing polluting countries

While tangential to your point, it should be emphasized that when the current rich-world countries built up their economies, low-emission energy such as solar, wind, and nuclear were not available (or much more expensive). And it is those same rich countries that developed those technologies, that the rest of the world now has access to. In this light, requesting that countries minimize fossil fuel use is not so unfair.

To sell constant growth and population addition, rhetoric is developed where merely staying in place is vilified.

Do they forgive those previously incurred taxes when land values drop and I can no longer float the lien?