[Wortmeldung zur Enquete über die Reform der Gebäudesteuer: 23. November 1903]

Richard Reisch: Intervention on Building-Tax Reform

Richard Reisch’s intervention at the official hearing of 23 November 1903, published in 1904, examines who would benefit from reducing the tax on rental income from buildings (Hauszinssteuer). Addressing an expert’s earlier testimony, Reisch moves from the capitalization of existing taxes to two potential obstacles to passing tax reductions on to tenants: delayed rent adjustment and the competitive advantages of particular urban locations. His questions expose a distributional problem within the expectation that lower taxation would produce lower rents.

Reisch first recalls the expert’s view that the existing tax could generally be regarded as amortized—absorbed into property values. He asks whether the same reasoning should apply to supplementary levies that have remained stable over many years. This establishes the relationship between recurring tax liabilities and capital values before he considers the consequences of a reduction.

The expert had predicted falling rents but acknowledged that the timing could not be specified. Reisch turns this uncertainty into a question about owners’ gains during the transition:

Da möchte ich mir zunächst die Frage erlauben, ob er nicht glaubt, daß in der Zwischenzeit, bis die Mietpreise sich den neuen Verhältnissen akkommodiert haben, der Hausherr, welcher in dieser Zeit Transaktionen durchführt, die kapitalisierte Steuerdifferenz für sich lukrieren würde.

English translation: Here I should first like to ask whether he does not believe that, in the interval before rents have adjusted to the new conditions, the landlord who carries out transactions during this time would pocket the capitalized tax difference.

The issue is not simply whether rents eventually fall. Transactions before adjustment could allow an owner to realize the capital value of the tax saving while rents still reflect the previous fiscal burden. Reisch thus distinguishes eventual benefits to tenants from gains available to owners in the meantime.

His second question challenges the expert’s treatment of location-bound businesses as exceptional. The expert had cited Vienna’s Kärntnerstraße as a location without competition, where tenants might continue paying unchanged rents. Reisch argues that comparable privileged sites exist throughout larger cities:

Ich glaube nun, daß diese letzteren Fälle eigentlich nicht Ausnahmsfälle bilden werden, sondern daß man diese Fälle wird generalisieren und ruhig behaupten können, daß in jeder größeren Stadt bestimmte, favorisierte Orte vorhanden sind, welche wegen ihrer konkurrenzlosen Lage imstande sein werden, die früheren Zinse zu behaupten.

English translation: I now believe that these latter cases will not actually constitute exceptions, but that these cases can be generalized and one can confidently assert that in every larger city there are certain favored locations which, because of their unrivalled position, will be able to maintain the previous rents.

Reisch concludes by asking whether the reduction would therefore benefit exclusively those landlords already best placed economically: owners whose properties had gained most from urban growth. The intervention’s force lies in connecting tax incidence with unequal locational advantages. It questions both the speed and the reach of rent reductions, suggesting that fiscal relief could reinforce gains already accruing to favored property owners. The excerpt supplies Reisch’s probing questions, but no expert response or final policy recommendation.