I agree, the whole ruse that these 501s meaningfully does charitable work for our communities is laughable and their tax exemption should be revoked, at least with regard to land taxes.
And parking is a productive use - they have services once a week, and parking means people can come to the service. That's the definition of productive use. Something does not need to be used 24/7 to be productive.
>Claiming that you have ownership over land on this planet is odd, you didn't create the land and governments change overtime.
The government didn't create the land either.
The result is that return on effort are reduced. That mean labor, entrepreneurs, and capital bear the burden of supporting government budgets as opposed to landowners who benefit from the economic activity making their land valuable.
Taxes as a rule discourages whatever get taxed. The exception to this is land, because land isn't created. It already exists in nature.
Don't tax what people make, tax what people took.
>The government didn't create the land either.
The government did create the peace and order that allows you to sleep at night on your land without having to worry about another tribe taking your land from you. Without an ability to defend it, "your" land is a tenuous label.
The government, and the rest of society, also pays a hefty price routing utilities, police, ambulances, and people around your property's borders. The more property you have, the more it costs the rest of society, not just in money, but in time.
Earned income taxes are the most evil of all taxes. Why would you have to pay for the act of providing value to society?
This was self-evident in the feudal era, when landlords (Lords) had to at least raise their own militaries to assert this monopoly right. But the modern State and the landlords reached a compromise: the State will provide security to protect the lords' monopoly on nature so long as the landlords don't raise armed forces.
Totally absurd arrangement.
The current arrangement demonstrably does not work for society in place, and as AI (whether in this wave of innovation or the next) increases productivity further, it will work less and less by virtue of further increasing land rents, thereby pricing out larger and larger swaths of society from a place to live, work, or otherwise exist.
The issue is that, most of the time, "incredibly dense cities" are not the places where this is hitting the hardest. It's the smaller towns where the impact of hospital rollups hits hardest on the property tax rolls.
Problem is, of course, that if we don't get one of the hospitals in, say, Houston, to put a facility in, say, Nacogdoches, on its books; then that facility may go away entirely. In which case you'd have issues in the market with inequity of access for the very populations who may need that access most. (Elderly and poor.) But if you do allow it, well, you have issues with property tax rises.
So local leaders are put in a position of having to weigh the value of having a hospital or clinic be available locally, against any potential decrease in property tax revenues. Now you hope they get that cost-benefit analysis correct, but there's no guarantee.
But churches? Yeah. Not so much.
One thing I might agree with is land tax for non-profits that charge fees for services, as opposed to those who work off of donations. I think that would fix the issue without destroying non-profits.