Jake Schmidt

Just some guy. Housing policy, bikes, mass transit, New York City, local politics, finance, software engineering, not necessarily in that order.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

Is New York full? No! Most of Manhattan is visibly underbuilt. Let's make it legal to build these missing homes! #YIMBY

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

Does a pied-a-terre tax have enough juice to drive NYC property tax reform? I bet not, but we should try anyway.

[Chris Goldammer @floor_per_area]

Great article about the Pied-A-Terre a tax and how we'd be defining something like "$5M market value".

The underlying, much bigger story: NYC property taxes and how they often just don't match true market values at all.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@sethmpk Jason Wang was bullied by the marketplace into allowing people to order his food less-spicy, or getting the noodles to go and eating them 20 minutes later, but he just can't believe they're actually doing it. His life's work is to undo these mistakes.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

Ctrl+A, delete, no nuance required, full repeal

[Open New York @OpenNYForAll]

Since 1966, historic districts have steadily expanded to cover much of Lower Manhattan.

As more areas are covered, new housing is effectively banned there, driving displacement and higher rents.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@PEWilliams_ @harryh @bfurnas I hope that's true, because Goodhart's Law is watching us like a hawk right now. A repetitive maintenance task that takes a small, discrete amount of time and is easily counted, but whose need can be reduced by other projects - dangerous territory!

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@caesararum They also passed a "zoning resolution" in 1961 that restricts homebuilding and never adjusted it for growth, so now $2.6M doesn't buy you a mansion either.

[Alex Armlovich @aarmlovi]

Your local planning department doesn't need "capacity". They need Ctrl-F+Delete and a paper shredder.

All the best neighborhoods were built before zoning--before the regulatory tools of postwar planning to microregulate the private realm & mandate car use were constitutional

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@CartoonsHateHer The fact that she remarried relatively soon after JFK's assassination was widely commented on at the time, but not the sort of thing that remained in popular consciousness into the next generation. I only learned that in my 30s.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@CartoonsHateHer It is sort of odd that her most-used nickname (Jackie O) is from her least famous marriage by a long shot.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

(I'm sure someone's going to pop in and tell me that London only had a lot of empty houses in 1989 because of the worst-designed law I've ever heard of in my life)

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

The wonders of adequate housing stock: as the drummer for My Bloody Valentine, you can be homeless while recording Loveless and yet sleep in a house every night.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@aarmlovi @kuza55 @michaeldomps That isn't not an investment just because it was analyzed using Excel in an office on Park Avenue - it's no different than someone researching and deciding to buy GOOG in the evening after work, or a farmer buying up an adjacent empty field for cultivation, etc.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@aarmlovi @kuza55 @michaeldomps More seriously: Investment professionals are also paid salaries; those are taxed as ordinary income. Their carried interest is their share of the profits - some fraction of which is the profits from the partnership making a long-term investment and holding it until it paid off.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@kuza55 @michaeldomps @aarmlovi I also don't want to let it go unsaid that those two are both good tax principles. And they interact in a way that makes sense, is easy to understand when you dive in, and produces a good result (investment, through broad and deep capital markets).

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@kuza55 @michaeldomps @aarmlovi If a legislator wrote those two provisions and then was surprised that partners in investment firms were paying the capital gains tax rate on their capital gains, I would think that was a pretty bad legislator. Or, more likely, that they're engaging in some left-wing populism.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@michaeldomps @aarmlovi Not really - a "loophole" has to be unintended or at least surprising, it can't just describe an intentional choice made in writing the tax code.

More to the point, though, it sounds like the "loophole" you're talking about is the long-term capital gains tax rate?

[Jerusalem @JerusalemDemsas]

Like, the problem of high-income households struggling to make ends meet is 100% a problem of high housing costs.

Making it about taxation or groceries or whatever else is just obviously wrong and we're going to end up in the same place pursuing the same brain-dead policies in a few years if we don't solve this.

[Jake Schmidt @TheJakeSchmidt]

@AlanMCole Sure, but I didn't assume you meant "the virus has been eradicated", but that the society-disrupting novel pandemic phase was done.

But it seems even milder than that - you meant that the actions we needed to take in response to the pandemic were ~done, which seems accurate.