RATING SYSTEMS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 26618, 14 November 1947, Page 6

RATING SYSTEMS

Sir,—Claims that rating systems do secure from sellers of suburban farmland (when cut up into residential building lots of one-eighth acre) the communitycreated value is a cynical economic joke. The purchaser of such a hill section for the average price of £l5O finds that after paying for it the land-seller pockets the community-created value on which he had paid to get the section. Yet on that valuation he is rated again to pay the community value the land seller got away with. There is no law to compel the land seller to disgorge to the community what the community created. There is a law to make the victim of the land seller pay rates for something he has already paid. So viciously does that law work out that if he lets spare rooms to a returned soldier and his bride and helps them to live in privacy by an expenditure on amenities, he is rated extra, for he-, finds the rent he charges to pay for these improvements is regarded as rent on which extra rates must be paid. This prevents any vacant rooms being let Only the unimproved land value would enable one to put such improvements in without being rated. Hence people living under our rating systems based on either the capital value or the rental value dread the consequences to themselves if they rented spare rooms to a returned soldier and his bride.—l am, e t c J. MacManus.