Value of the Chrysler Building and California Property Taxes

The big news in New York City is that the Chrysler Building is for sale:

New York City's iconic Chrysler Building has appeared in dozens of movies and remained an Art Deco jewel of the Manhattan skyline for decades. Now, the 89-year-old skyscraper can be yours. Located on 42nd Street just east of Grand Central Terminal, sale price estimates for the famed Chrysler Building vary, but its majority owners, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, hope to recoup the $800 million it paid for their stake of the building back in 2008.

They hope but some think the building might go for as little as $650 million and that does not cover the value of the land:

the land beneath the building is owned by New York's Cooper Union School and the lease last year came to $32.5 million.

If we assume a 5% discount rate, the present value of annual lease payments like these might be another $650 million if one wants to know the value of the land and the building. But is it reasonable to assume a 5% discount rate? Let’s return to this after noting some grumpiness from John Cochrane towards something Paul Krugman wrote:

I try very hard not to get in to the business of rebutting Paul Krugman's various outrages. The article "The Economics of Soaking the Rich" merits an exception. I will ignore the snark, the... distoritions, the ... untruths, the attack by inventing evil motive, the demonization of anything starting with the letter R, and focus on the central economic points … Diamond and Saez made a big splash precisely because their estimates were so novel and so much higher than the prevailing consensus. For example, Greg Mankiw, also a previous CEA chair, and not a fraud, writing the excellent "Optimal Taxation in Theory and Practice" in the Journal of Economic Perspectives … Krugman and company are proposing a 70% top federal rate on top of all the others, which is ... a bit deceptive relative to the 70% total marginal tax rate even in his cherry-picked sources.

OK – I cherry picked much of this rant so read the entire long winded thing for yourself. Optimal taxation is indeed a controversial topic and I applaud the notion that we should go beyond Federal taxation. Can someone tell Mankiw that before his next oped on how progressive the Federal tax system is? Cochrane followed this by some claim that we should include property taxes in the calculus of calculating the marginal tax on income:

How much is the property tax? In Calfornia, we pay 1% per year. That doesn't seem bad, except that property values are very high. You can't get a tear-down in Palo Alto for under $2 million. If you buy a house that costs 5 times your income -- say someone earning $200,000 per year buying a $1 million house -- then that is equivalent to 5 percentage points additional income tax. On top of 42% federal, 13.2% state, 9% sales, and other taxes, it's part of my view that we're past 70% top marginal rate now.

Maybe it is because so many of us in New York City choose to pay rents but adding the tax on property to the tax on income strikes me as odd. I’ll leave to others to weigh on this debate but I would be amiss if I did not note Peter Dorman’s latest post:

In the world of urban politics, there is probably no more potent populist rallying cry than the demand to halt gentrification. Activists have fought it on multiple fronts: zoning, development subsidies, permitting, rent control—every lever housing policies afford. But what if they’re mistaking cause for effect, hacking away at the visible manifestations of the problem while leaving the problem itself intact? Pivot to an important article in today’s New York Times, reporting on recent research David Autor of MIT presented at the economics meetings in Atlanta earlier this month.

Cochrane had an odd calculation of the present value of property taxes:

A 1% property tax at a 1% interest rate is equivalent to a 100% tax on houses. That $1,000,000 house is really going to cost you $2,000,000!

Wait, wait – I’m assuming a 5% discount rate and he assumes a 1% discount rate? OK, he continues:

What is the right rate? We can have a lot of fun with that one. The current 30 year TIPS (inflation indexed) rate is 1.19%. The 30 year nominal Treasury rate is 2.97%. In California, under Proposition 13, you pay 1% of the actual purchase price per year, but that quantity never increases. (This fact results in the paradox of extremely high property taxes on new purchasers, older people staying in huge old houses, and low property tax revenues.) So you might say that the nominal rate applies.

You might say? If the nominal cash flow is not indexed, then you should use the nominal risk-free rate as your starting point. So I started with a 3% rate and then added 2% more. Why the extra 2% you ask? Well I have read the seminal paper on leasing by Merton Miller and Charles Upton that note we should add a premium for bearing the risk of obsolescence. A lot of research would put that premium at 2% but I guess Cochrane wants to pretend owners of property should discount cash flows at the risk-free rate, which reminds me of that book by James Glassman and Kevin Hassett entitled DOW 36000. Never mind having fun with the appropriate discount rate – who did Cochrane rely on when teaching his students finance – Glassman & Hassett or Merton Miller?