I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.
> you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles
after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.
there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.
Yeah I think one of the vestiges of the "liberal consensus" era of politics (pre 2016) was that "persuasion" was seen as the only valid way to advance your advocacy. But the shattering of that consensus has allowed the left of center to realize that, in fact, winning is what matters. Your biggest ideological opponents by definition cannot be persuaded- politics is now a tightly coupled to the ego and therefore someone attempting to change your beliefs is deeply threatening.
The right learned this a long time ago. Persuasion does not matter. Our system is winner take all. Winning is all that matters. Online debate is a waste of time. Find your base and activate them instead.
> watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously
"Yes you worked your whole life for that house that you carefully chose and maintained, but we want to send its value through the floor because we're more powerful".
Show me someplace a change in zoning from R1 to Rx sent values through the floor.
Around here (Metro DC), that simply hasn't happened. There's so much pent up demand for housing that at worst, the appreciation has slowed, but I'm not even convinced that's happened, as the infill/redeveloped land is actually being used and generating economic activity (vs parking lots or old flats and offices nobody wanted).
When I was fresh out of college, I got the advice to invest a part of my salary in bonds and stocks.
I luckily stumbled upon a good pick and basically a month's salary showed up on my account overnight. It's been a puzzling occurence morally speaking, that I gained so much money by essentially doing nothing.
While I certainly didn't mind the money and still don't I'm puzzled by the 'rich people' who inevitably show up in every discussion claiming 'dammit I worked for what I have with sweat and blood, while freeloaders and parasites loafed about! I deserve every penny I have'.
No you didn't (I didn't either), please shut up. I worked hard for a lot of stuff I cherish that made me very little money, and the place I own went up a lot in value, to which I had zero contribution.
Land is a little different from shares because you can meaningful affect the value of your land by spending your life improving your community if everyone else does too. You can be a good neighbour much more easily than a good shareholder.
I picked up some rubbish from the street on my way home yesterday. That act probably raised all our property values by some microscopic fraction of a cent. Then global macroeconomic conditions affected the property value by a huge amount more. It would be incorrect to attribute any gains to picking up rubbish, but it would be a very understandable human mistake, I think.
> What do you care about the value of the house you're living in?
When you are eventually too old to live there, sell it and move into an assisted housing facility, the money you get for that house very much matters for how you will live the remaining years of your life.
> What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
What did the sw eng do to deserve the 500k a year comp while the lady cleaning the toilets in the same building hardly makes 10% of that? Market? You don't say...
If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking. Apples and orangutans.
> If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
"Whatever"? With 20 years left to live, $500k difference is huge. Try to get informed about prices for such places. And how come you are the one to decide whether they are worth it or deserve it? This is a ridiculous discussion.
> To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking.
The economic value of their lot obviously increased manyfold since they purchased it. Anybody could have bought it. If society (through laws) should have a say in the price of selling a plot of land then I'd like to see your reaction to society having a say about sw eng compensation. Oh right that's totally different! Because one of them impacts you directly while the other one doesn't and is easy to armchair philosophize about.
I believe that most people see the state of housing as a problem, home owner or not.
Still no reason to deny folks whose property value skyrocketed those funds when they sell. Unless you also want to deny Nvidia or Tesla stock owners their money when they sell.
You don't have to move to such a place, but there are a lot of real estate that's not very hot, on account of not being near anything economically relevant, but are still pretty nice places.
If you don't have to work a day for the rest of your life, why should you care if a famous tech company has its offices 15 minutes away?
It wasn't a jackpot. Many, many people have houses. Trying to make people who did that into a group you're allowed to dismiss is evil. Just as it is with basically any group.
If you bought a house for 50 grand in 1984 and now it's worth $3 million because you got lucky and happened to buy in the right spot, that's a jackpot in my book. You didn't do anything to create the value of that land: that's what Georgism recognizes.
If you bought it in California, say, in 1984 it was more like $100k, and would now be worth more like $900k[0]. Your outlier valuation is a terrible basis upon which to institute yet another tax.
The outlier valuation is exactly the point! That's why it's a lottery ticket. Some people get $900k, others get $3m, not because of anything they did, not because of improvements made to the property, but just because they picked the lucky patch of dirt.
As discussed in the article, LVT can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way where most homeowners would pay lower property taxes so your handwringing about "yet another tax" is unconvincing.
"I'm a highly paid sw eng in the bay area and want to buy a house, but it's very pricy. Let me present a scapegoat so we can all agree to force them to sell below market value. But don't touch my total comp because that's totally the market value of what I contribute to society!"
A consistent view please. Either society decides through laws who gets to have how much, or not, but stop selectively applying that to things you want versus things you already have. Such brain acrobatics is just dishonest.
Sorry, what is your actual objection here? I'm not saying anyone should be forced to sell below market price - I'm saying the market price is inflated by the the cost of land: Land that no one created, land that is not a product of any human market.
The point of a Georgist land-value tax is to separate the value of the land from the value of buildings on the land. Land itself is a public good and should be taxed as such.
I don't disagree that the market price is inflated. Lots of market prices are inflated. Many people here are paid in or own (or both) stocks of tech firms whose value is inflated by at least as much or higher. Have not heard anybody claim that they are earning too much money. Easy to punch others though.
I can't begin to understand what the quoted section you start your comment with has to do with the comment of mine that you replied to. I didn't say anything about any of that stuff...
Sorry, took some liberties to paraphrase how your comment sounded to me. You seem to have little respect for what others own, but I'm assuming you expect others to respect your private property. I was trying to illustrate that somewhat selfish inconsistency.
Your investment in maintenance and improvement of the structure is, in any in-demand area, a tiny contribution to the appreciation of the value of the property.
By "protect it against drastic change", I'm assuming you're talking about political action. That part of your contribution to the value is literal rent seeking.
Not everyone has the follow-through to maintain a property over the years. Some owners allow a structure or surrounding grounds to degrade. There is something to be said for the homeowners that keep a house, property, and neighborhood well maintained and attractive to live in over the years.
This is true for pretty much any asset though. If I put effort into maintaining my car (which I use), the expectation is that it will last longer, provide me the benefit of using a well-maintained vehicle, and maybe sell for some portion of its original value when I eventually swap it out. I certainly don't expect my Toyota to appreciate in value by 1000% just because I didn't let it rust out.
This 'Georgian' tax scheme looks good in many ways. More below, but first, your question:
I don't know about other zones, but I live in a town that highly values open space and natural environment. This is a town ~35 miles away from a major city (top 10/20 in US), with no rail or mass transportation, or substantial business.
This is not the same as residential towns/zones more adjacent to the city, and I'm not making any arguments about those.
But for this town, and several near it the residents do a LOT to deserve the increase in land value. 1) Everyone in the town pays, and has paid for decades, substantially higher taxes to maintain the open rural character of the town, which includes the town buying parcels of town to keep open. 2) Everyone in the town foregoes substantial development opportunities available for subdividing land. 3) Everyone in the town pays higher taxes for high-density developments that do not happen to preserve wetland, environment, or usable open space. 4) Everyone in the town pays extra costs maintaining habitat rather than clear-cutting. 5) Because of the lack of development, the values have gone up LESS than other such towns in the region.
Yet everyone yells that this sort of town should be subject to the exact same massive high-density developments of other towns, utterly destroying the environment and town character, and yet providing nothing of value. A new lower-income-accessible house in such towns provides ZERO advantage to a supposed resident, who would now become absolutely dependent on a car and all the required expenses, being located a multi-hour commute from jobs in the city and no public transportation. Meanwhile, entire habitats of endangered species would be destroyed along with the character of the town.
It should be a different call on locales closer to the city (although I cannot speak for them). Particularly in zones near public transport such as rail lines, where people can get to/from work without the expense of an automobile, higher density should be encouraged, so their income can go towards building wealth in a property.
The Georgian idea looks quite good to me, as long as it respects the value of land conserved for natural habitat and open space. Such land should be completel different from a vacant lot with a torn-down building or parking lot — the "rentable" value of habitat or open land should be zero, since it cannot be built upon.
That said, it also looks like this 'Georgian' tax scheme would likely eliminate all parking near the city center very rapidly, or make it very expensive. This change should not be left to unintended consequences. Either provisions for parking should be made (force tall high-quantity parking garages?) or better yet, provisions for reducing/eliminating cars in the city with extensive public transport, low-/no-tax for bicycle parking? Probably different for each locale, but it needs to be planned for.
> Yet everyone yells that this sort of town should be subject to the exact same massive high-density developments of other towns, utterly destroying the environment and town character, and yet providing nothing of value.
Nothing of value to existing inhabitants perhaps, but massive value for those that don't have housing yet.
There are already inexpensive houses available at similar distances from the big city that would provide the same value to someone who doesn't yet have housing. Same commute distances, would require an automobile (and associated expenses), and the rest.
They stay inexpensive — because the people who lack housing do not want to buy them. Why? Because they are in the towns who do NOT spend all those costs and taxes to maintain a town with character, open lands, and protected natural environments.
No, you will not, without a fight, get to just destroy and take by fiat what others have spent decades and fortunes building.
The result will be just more of what is available in adjacent towns who did not spend to create a better environment, while destroying what value there is.
And then of course, if we do have people move into the less-well=-maintained areas, and try to improve them to produce more and better housing, the same "pro-housing" people complain of "gentrification".
It's not a glib response. People like you have made their "Garden cities" into a fortress, from where you drink champagne (or your favorite equivalent), while watching the plebs fight to the death outside, because they don't have a place to live. Maybe one day you'll realize you're one of the baddies and shed a tear.
I'm not talking about a garden city or walled fortress of any kind, and I said so above. I'm talking about a semi-rural town where people have valued nature and open space.
And no, destroying that to supposedly make housing for low-income people who are "fighting to the death for a place to live" will help zero of them. Because even if you gave the housing for near free, there are zero local jobs and zero local public transportation options to jobs, or even to groceries (nearest is 15min+ drive away). So, they'd need to jump up to meet the expenses of a two-car household, with car payments, insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc.. Plus spend hours commuting to work. Plus daycare, not cheap in the area. If you are that low-wage and have to support the automobiles and commuting, it literally costs more to get to work than you earn. You will have destroyed something of great value created over decades at vast personal expense, and helped no one.
The point is to put the housing where it makes sense. E.g., near jobs and public transport, and where it doesn't destroy open lands or literally endangered species habitat.
New York city could put plenty more housing right in Manhattan, but you don't see even the most radical pro-housing types suggesting they build over Central Park to do it.
> New York city could put plenty more housing right in Manhattan, but you don't see even the most radical pro-housing types suggesting they build over Central Park to do it.
Central Park acts as counterweight to the very dense urban area of Manhattan, which doesn't have that much place for building anew. Your merry walled garden doesn't have that excuse.
In fact it does have exactly the same reason for being. Stop arguing non-facts, and microscopic context. There is no walled garden, or gated community of come imagined tycoons here (I'm sure there are elsewhere, but not where I'm talking about).
The town I'm talking about is well outside the city, but also one of the closer ones that actually has habitat, and in particular habitat for endangered species. It is EXACTLY this kind of preservation (and in fact, much larger zoning) that is needed to serve as a counterweight for high-density development.
I'm all for wherever it is already dense enough to basically exclude natural habitats, increase the density. But wherever it is sparse enough to have maintained natural habitat, decrease the density, not increase it.
You evidently have not noticed we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event, the previous one being the Cretaceous (~65 million years ago) asteroid impact catastrophe, and this one being entirely human-caused.
Simply encouraging blanket urban/suburban sprawl will only exacerbate that catastrophe. Which would be particularly tragic, since the need is entirely temporary, as birthrates are declining and the problem will be the opposite in a few decades as population declines (and already is in many countries), but the endangered species will already have been killed off never to return.
Personally, I paid substantially higher cost, of hard-earned money, and continue to pay taxes on a lot where 75% of it is absolutely unbuildable - I can't even cut a tree in that zone without permission. If I were greedy, the best move would be to advocate for ending zoning and environmental regs, and let me fill in the wetlands and build multiple units and subdivide. Doing that would easily yield enough money to retire wealthy in less than two years. But fortunately, there is a town where most people value the environment. It was actually hard to find, since there are many, actually MOST towns around prioritized development, because, money.
So, yes, just like Central Park, on a larger scale, this is one of the counterweights, and we pay more and incur large opportunity costs to maintain that counterweight.
Got it. You post simplistic opinions based on overdramatized notions of things that exist only in fiction, and consistently ignore facts and never actually engage with a real situation or reasoning that might change your opinion. Plus a quick check of your other comments shows similar uninformed yet strong opinions, failure to provide substantive answers to questions, and even admonishing others to "grow up". Wow.
Sorry, my mistake to reply above. Have the life you deserve, but here is not the place for it.
They're responding to attempted guilting. "Retirees will lose all their value they worked their whole life for" is the guilting, "actually they didn't earn shit by buying land and sitting on it" is the "not giving a damn". Your reply is literally the exact inverse of reading comprehension.
Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell. But you should not expect to profit 2, 3, 500% by waiting 20 or 30 years. Speaking from my personal experience, housing in Japan is extremely affordable and Japan is much, much better off for it compared to the hellscape that is US housing prices. And for what purpose? To reward people for already having wealth by passively giving them more of it?
> Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell.
You do not get to decide this. And the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment. If people pay more for a house with a nice view, they have every right to protest if someone comes along wanting to change that. It not only reduces the value of the property monetarily, it reduces the value to them that they took out a mortgage on and worked for decades to pay off.
>the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment
People pay money for all kinds of things that aren't investments. Ever eat at a restaurant? Ever buy a car?
I agree with parent: houses should be more like cars and less like stocks. Prices should be lower, there should be less debt-financing, and we should end the expectation that home prices will go up endlessly forever.
And in some places they are. Japan works that way - houses generally lose value over time and there is even a cultural stigma against living in a "used house" - if you can afford it the convention is to buy a house and knock it down and start fresh.
I mean the fancy thing about living in a liberal democracy is that they do get to decide this in a limited sense. They get to have an opinion, advocate for it, and if they can convince people through the political process they do get to determine the outcome!
To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.
Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.
You don't get to decide it either. It's decided via politics. But you started the thread by being annoyed with people doing politics. You need to pick a lane.
In my experience, people call it ‘politics’ when it isn’t working for them or is frustrating, ‘the rules’ otherwise. Depending on the day, they might randomly be flipping back and forth.
When you buy a property you buy a property, not a view. Check the deed for the property you bought; the view won’t be listed on the legal docs. The view is an externality. If you are lucky enough to have a view across someone else’s property, lucky you. Having had a free benefit does not mean that other people’s right to their own property should be restricted to
maintain access to a positive externality for you. In other words, if someone else can build something that blocks your view, it wasn’t your view, you were just lucky enough to be able to have access to someone else’s view for a while.
If you want to maintain the view, you should pay the cost of that, whether that is buying the property that the view crosses, or compensating that other property owner for the loss of use of their property.
Using regulatory means to shortcut other peoples property rights is - in my opinion - horseshit. It also sets a dangerous precedent to regulate out the ability to change. It’s all fun and games until someone out maneuvers you at a city council meeting and now you can’t build a carport without hiring a lawyer and 6 months of hearings (real story, had to do this because our house was old enough to be considered historic. For context the carport was being put in an alley next to a dumpster and a cinder block apartment building. No historic element was involved)
Not from what I’ve seen. This seems like fantasy cope.
They’re responding to markets locking up. And changes in actual laws, being forced through by shifting demographics allowing actual shifts in voting power - and hence changes in actual laws.
Upzoning a neighborhood typically increases the value of the land, so that straw -man owner would benefit from it when/if they decide to sell their place.
I don't know how you can say it's a straw-man argument when you qualify the the statement as "typically" increases the value of the land... that indicates you KNOW at least occasionally it doesn't increase and instead decreases, and if it's a real possibility (even if the % is low - 10-15%) then it's not a straw-man argument to be concerned about it, it becomes something that should be risk weighted and explained to mitigate the concern.
Also, you didn't reply to what I wrote, which is that it's funny that you were trying to convince us that land value appreciation is a return to labor. I'm guessing you ditched that because it's obvious how silly it is.
The problem with having everyone rely on gains from home appreciation is that it doesn’t continue to work over time.
Yesterday’s home appreciation is today’s price increase for new home buyers. In most places in the US, home prices have far outpaced inflation for several decades now.
It seems silly to even be arguing about whether or not it’s deserved when we already know that it’s not remotely sustainable.
Why should someone who is almost dead care about the current and future value of their house? Why should someone who is almost dead care about what their neighborhood looks like after they're gone? There some sort of mental illness where these people think they're going to live forever.
> Why should someone who is almost dead care about what their neighborhood looks like after they're gone?
It might be unfamiliar, but people care about their neighbours and family, and passing on a good place to others to raise their families there in future.
> But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.
But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.
Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.
I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.
Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.
Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.
Yes. Thank you. And actually, when you have a non-politically charged conversation offline with some of the political operatives that cause these bridge shutdowns, they will admit that this is their goal as well. They know it's ragebait, but bait nonetheless.
Not quite - that’s if you believe the moderates control the extremists. If they don’t, it’s more like “I’m the extremist and I am currently so unhappy I will do this. What will you do to make me less unhappy?”
Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.
Doing a little looking around about why some of those worked, and so few have since, was interesting to me.
Length, economic impact, cold war politics, regional vs national opinions, how actors reacted (sometimes violently), the way information propagated at the time… an interesting confluence of events.
They largely weren’t for the locals. The biggest wins were from deliberately provoking extremists who foolishly allowed nationwide pictures of dogs and water cannons being used to attack children, which attracted attention from people elsewhere.
On principle I usually vote against anyone who harms me, my life, or my family’s life. I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective. We’re all aware of the phenomenon now. You’re just being an asshole and throwing a tantrum because people aren’t voting like you want them to.
I'm not sure I understand what work "on principle" is doing in this sentence.
What's the difference between voting against anyone who acts against your interests "on principle", and voting against anyone who acts against your interests "out of self-interest"?
(I am not suggesting that you shouldn't vote self-interestedly; arguably democracy works best when everyone does.)
Assuming I understand your question, I vote for people I would not have otherwise voted for merely to spite the people who have harmed me in some way. It's petty but it makes me feel like I have reclaimed some agency against said aggressors.
Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best
Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little.
Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.
That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful
>I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective
Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"
There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.
I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society, and not because it was morally right. The implications of this claim are frightening, and can be used to justify all manner of violence for any and all political causes. Should someone wish to restrict abortion rights, they just need to sufficiently terrorise the nation to the degree that they get their way? I strongly disagree that that is how laws and rights work in a democracy.
I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.
What is morally right is a matter of public consensus, not a self-evident fact to those outside that moral context. Law is the expression of morality at a societal level. How do you propose changing the societal expression of the public consensus without making a nuisance of yourself?
The same way all progress is made in a democracy: dialogue. Violence and domination has been frequently used throughout history, but we no longer solve our differences that way. At least, I don’t want to live in such a society.
I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.
> I don’t want to live in such a society.
You kind of already do, but kind of don’t. Coercive politics still rule, but countries with strong civil liberties protections allow less harmful forms of coercion. Under strongman rule, coercion looks like the threat of murder. Under a liberal democracy, coercion looks like blocking traffic. That’s a big improvement.
Positive incentives (bribery and upside) also play a role opposite coercion. But “dialogue” absent self interested or dominance-oriented goals is a much less significant influence—unless you loosen the definition of dialogue to include things like “I convince you that it’s in your interests to vote for X so that protestors stop blocking traffic”, at which point there’s no distinction between the concepts.
I don't think any significant social change has been bought about by people asking nicely. Votes for women, anti racism, worker's rights, land rights - all hard fought for.
What a shallow understanding of history. Men didn’t vote to give women the right to vote because women waged war on men. It was a centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650.
I don’t subscribe to your belief that politics and society requires power and domination. I suggest you look to nations and cultures which follow such beliefs to see how well that turns out.
If their take was shallow yours is revisionist to the point it's ahistorical.
Choosing to focus on the "centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650" but then ignoring that the suffragettes were bombing buildings within the decade they got the vote, do you not think you're laying your own narrative on a little too thick?
I agree. Look at the swing from opposing gay marriage to supporting it. It went from mostly opposed to mostly supporting it in ten years. Obama went from opposing to supporting it during his presidential term.
And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.
How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago? How can you make them understand what you live when there is a legal policy of separation between you? I don't think you really understand what segregation and racism being accepted facts of society ("morally right" in the views of many whites at the time) or lynching being not an unheard-of barbaric act but a form of popular vigilantism punishing any kind of "miscegenation" or "uppity" attitudes really means. The fact that the civil rights movement was largely peaceful was a marvel when you look at the actual facts of the time, because the oppression of non-whites and retribution activists faced was certainly not peaceful.
> How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago?
The vast majority of black and white people had reasonable dialogue all over the U.S. in the 60s. There were obviously places where racism prevailed to greater degrees, and I think the record reflects that dialogue was less successful there. Which is why they were forced at the federal level to desegregate. The reason that the laws were passed at the federal level was dialogue. Outreach, lobbying, fliers, marketing, campaigning. All the things which make democracy great.
Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.
> Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.
Civil disobedience is not terrorism. Conflating the two is highly problematic. Civil disobedience was a large part of the reason white people changed their views. Without courageous blacks standing up and protesting and making themselves heard and seen in public, most white people wouldn't have cared. The government and other influential groups tried to suppress the movement until they couldn't anymore, and then they caved. Acting as if they did so at the first moment because everybody recognized the moral correctness of equality is totally ahistorical and a whitewashing of history.
"Terrorised" and "terrorism" have different definitions. I'm disappointed that you would attempt to conflate the two in an attempt to refute an argument I didn't make.
If you believe that black people harming white people - whether by the use of force, preventing free movement, or any aphorism you would like to use - was a "large part of the reason white people changed their views" then I would like to see evidence of that. Force works in dictatorships but I don't think it's effective in democracies. Why would someone vote for a person who has materially harmed them or made their lives worse? Surely that would make it less likely to win a vote.
Civil rights wasn't decided by plebiscite - it was decided by elected representatives. They saw huge crowds gathering in support, tremendous amounts of dialogue about what and how and why activists and government were doing. The activists made some people temporarily angry by blocking traffic or violating their ideas about proper societal organization, but the TV and newspaper coverage reached many more and managed to convince enough of them speak up that the representatives went along with it. Of course dialogue was a huge part of this, but that dialogue wouldn't have existed on the same scale or been nearly as effective in bringing change if activists hadn't caused a big fuss in the first place.
If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation. The same principle is at play in most political movements. To get people to care, you have to make them pay attention first! You have to make them outraged, make them react, make them think, make them do something. When representatives see people in a furor they know they have to take a side, and usually the side that makes more noise wins.
The US itself was founded like this - the Boston Tea Party is one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in history. Our electoral system is a process of continual revolution, continual change and upheaval. This process is necessarily just as messy and ugly as our own society. The fact that even in the very ugly and full-of-contradictions pre-Civil Rights era USA we could have a revolution with relatively little loss of life and mostly minor disruptions to the lives of people should be celebrated rather than bemoaned. Look at what it took to be rid of monarchy and slavery and see that the way we overcame/are still overcoming segregation and racial bias shows vast improvements and gives hope for even more civil revolutions in the future.
Lest you forget, the people vote for the representatives. There were 18 different consequential national elections between 1955 and 1968, in which every single member of the House, Senate, and Presidency were up for election multiple times. To characterise this as legislative activism is outrageous and without any historical corroboration. The vast majority of voters were not harmed by black people. They voted for change because they believed it to be moral, not because they saw black people harming white people on the news. I asked you to substantiate your claim and given this response it seems clear you know that you cannot.
> If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation.
This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.
> The US itself was founded like this...
I'm not sure if you understand the implication of invoking the founding of the nation as a cultural pillar for future change. At this time slavery was moral and legal. Women couldn't vote. They were effectively property. It seems you're being selective about one aspect of the past to justify a vision for the future in which force is required for change.
Do you believe that it is moral and just for anti-migrant protestors to use force against you? Or is it just the things you personally care about where force is acceptable? I think we both know the answer to that question. This is why in a democracy we give everyone one vote, and we require them to follow the law. That means not using force to coerce others. If you were to succeed in your vision for society, you'd have to accept that others would use force against you for their aims, and you'd be a hypocrite to condemn it.
> This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.
It's very hard to take your opinions as sincere and earnest when you're in one comment selectively pruning hundreds of years of history to make your point and then pretending that bullying is a solved problem to make your point in another. Just a reminder that we're living in the realm of rising teenage suicide rates, much of that rooted in the trauma caused by bullying.
If nothing else I'd call on you to be kinder to the people you're responding to, who put in the effort when you're clearly not doing the same.
>I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society,
I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.
>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right
No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.
Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.
Using force to prevent people going to work, or seeing their family, or getting to hospital, is wrong. Especially if the goal is to coerce people. If I came to your house and physically prevented you from leaving I doubt you’d be making equivocations. Whether you want to call it violence, force, or any other fluffy euphemism, I do not subscribe to your vision for society or your retelling of MLK.
Thats your right of course, although the parallels to MLK's essay about the backlash he faced for holding up traffic are still precisely applicable here no matter how upsetting you may find that.
That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
Do you think people just naturally become more aware of immoral things? Even if you assume better education is the single reason, that's something that's very much not a given, and is in fact constantly being attacked by people who benefit from it not being guaranteed.
When you're fighting against billionaires who want to act against your best interest, do you believe you just need to appeal to people's morality and it's an easy win? Sorry to say it doesn't work like that, though it'd be wonderful if it did. People's minds are swayed easier by financial interests than they are by moral value. That's the impact of a capitalist system allowing levels of inequality putting even people's livelihood in danger.
Status quo is much easier to defend than it is to disrupt, regardless of how immoral it is in the first place. And disruption needs drastic measures to be successful when fighting an asymmetrical war of resources.
> That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
I think this is incredibly naive. Morality isn’t objective. It changes and adapts and grows. It is the product of culture and religion and circumstance. Values can deviate markedly between people in a single family, let alone within a nation and between nations.
Slavery used to be considered moral in the West. Then some time in 1833, the British people voted to end it across all colonies. Not because slaves terrorised British citizens into acquiescence, but because literature and education and culture had advanced, and the British no longer believed that people should be enslaved.
I’m sorry, I simply do not subscribe to your vision for society of might making right. That is the domain of dictators and despots, not democracies.
I don’t think you read the comments above before you replied. They argue for “disruption” and “drastic measures.” Do you think they’re talking about a dance troupe?
Success of protests and grassroots movements does not scale with harm/annoyance to society. If that were true you'd just have to be as annoying and hostile as possible to win, which would have been sussed out a long time ago.
The predictor is public moral sentiment, and maximizing exposure to an issue people would be sympathetic to.
Blocking traffic "for climate awareness" does not engender sympathy. People think themselves "aware" that climate is an issue, but aren't on board with perverse degrowth solutions.
The left is held to a much higher standard than the right in the US. By both sides.
Trump was a convicted sexual molester when last elected. Senator Franken was asked to leave office by his own party for a decades-old (tasteless) joke-photo.
This titanic difference in standards helps enables people to pretend "BSAB".
Agree with NIMBY's that a lot of constructions are a blight. Propose to demolish their own house, as you believe its a blight upon the place. They should agree to it after all and be proactive about it given how earnestly they believe in keeping the locality pretty.
People buy a house with an implicit expectation that zoning regulations and building code will be relatively stable. Even if those laws are unnecessarily restrictive or nonsensical, I don’t think the NIMBYs are crazy for being upset about changes to those laws that will lower their property values. They may even want to change them but the fact of the matter is they have a financial incentive to protect the value of their property.
Successful areas change: you get a few people, then you need a store, then you get more people and all of sudden there's nowhere to walk, so you make a park and some avenues, then people like those and move in, then you need a school and a hardware store and a power plant even if the OGs were homeschoolers with donkey power and hate your guts.
Don't like it? Hold on to the land.
Dire Straits' Telegraph Road is a good documentary on the subject.
Plenty of ideas have shifted public opinion because people argued for them in good faith. But performative extremism doesn't automatically insert ideas into the Overton window.
The best reading of the literature is that radicals can make moderates look reasonable but reduce overall support for their cause. See these recent papers for the research:
I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.
That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.
the movement against SFH zoning is not about destroying single family zoned neighborhoods, it’s about not forcing every lot to require a SFH. i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read, but SFH zoning itself is more of a taking. people who want to live in a single-family-only neighborhood should find a spot on the edge of town where development pressure is low, not weaponize land use regulations to make it illegal to build what the market wants near jobs and amenities.
and while an LVT doesn’t really care about zoning, depending on how close to a city center your SFH is, a well calibrated LVT might dramatically increase your overall tax burden even if you dropped all other taxes. SFH zoning is manufactured scarcity; LVT prices scarcity correctly, and there’s no upper bound on that value, especially since land taxes become divorced from income.
>> i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read
I should have clarified that. I meant it in the context of Georgism. The concept of Georgism was manifestly against the government actually redistributing owned land; instead, landlords would divest themselves of the land if the only utility they got from it was rent. What Georgism says you're paying for when you pay LVT on the land you own is the exclusive right to private use of that land, which comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't "own" (or essentially, lease) the right to live on it or build on it.
Georgism distinguished between ownership by individuals for productive use and ownership by either (a) individuals for rent-seeking or (b) governments as stewards.
You may be right about LVT pricing scarcity where I live winding up higher than my current tax basis, but even that would make sense since I have to earn a lot and therefore pay inordinate income tax to have the ability to live in a single family home near to a city center already. If where I lived were less important to me, under Georgism, I could simply move to the burbs. But there is a funny corrolary to that which Georgism seems to intuitively grasp and which is orthogonal to the argument between manufactured scarcity and progressive housing policies. (And maybe this is a gap in Georgism's argument):
I live in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. Along all our east-west avenues there are tons of Amazon boxes (what we call studio / one bedroom 4-6 story cheaply constructed wooden apartments with a patina of modern amenity). And tons of local businesses. Between the major arteries it's almost all single family homes. This makes it one of the last cities in America where you can live in a SFH within walking distance of everything, including downtown. Street parking is still free here, and a lot of people don't need a car at all. I live in an SFH within two blocks of apartments where the waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers live who work at the businesses on the avenues. It's truly mixed use. However, they've now rewritten the zoning law to allow tearing down houses as small as mine (1200 sqft) and replacing them with 4-plexes. The problem with the Amazon boxes is that they don't provide room for families. No one is building 3 bedroom apartments with a yard where you can raise your kids in the city. My Dad grew up in a shared row house in Baltimore. No one's building that.
Which gets to the heart of the matter, which is that a major reason that this city and this area are so desirable is precisely because those SFHs exist between all the major streets. The spending value (and social value) of the essentially middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center is widely overlooked by people campaigning to eliminate SFH zoning; but without those people, you end up with neighborhoods where everyone is under 30 and relatively transient, without much money to spend in the local economy or any deep ties to the place. The apartments decay, and most of the work reasons for living there disappear.
Eliminating SFH zoning is an opinionated, political form of slow redistribution that preferences a certain age group and a certain socioenconomic position over others. It reduces actual diversity, and produces monocultural places like Seattle and Santa Monica where only the very rich can raise a family in town, and everyone else is a young renter.
And here's the kicker where Georgism may be right: In the end, eliminating SFH zoning only redistributes property from individuals and families (like me) to corporate landlords.
i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.
i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.
if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.
also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.
I think we largely agree on the fact that SFHs should not be the only option for young families or empty nesters or aging couples. (As an aside, all of the above live in SFHs on my block, as well as young single renters in their 20s who share SFHs as roommates). I brought up Baltimore rowhouses for that reason. My Mom grew up in a duplex in LA with a backyard... my brother is raising his own kids in almost an exact copy of that duplex.
I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of new construction of that type coming from broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum. Maybe uou could elaborate. The upper end of the spectrum in Portland is... almost everyone with money moves to either the oldest exclusive homes in one of two very non-diverse neighborhoods (Laurelhurst or the West Hills), or else they move to the exurbs and build McMansions out in the farmland. Neither is really actively engaged in a community beyond a homeowner's association, and neither is walkable or a place where people of different economic and cultural backgrounds get to interact for everyone's benefit.
So maybe what I'm trying to say is that the high upper end (homes over $1M, let's say), is going to remove itself anyway, and that yes there should be more construction of 2-4-plexes which are not Amazon boxes... but there seems to be no incentive to build those things, and I don't even know how you could do so on a 1200 sqft lot.
In the interim, Portland has eased lots of rules on the use of ADUs and trailers in backyards and even yurts. I bought my home for $450k and the range in the area goes up to $800. This tells you that what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard.
But I do feel like the crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class, anti-family quality to it... and what I mean to say is that it is the working middle class families in the upper end of housing on those avenues who anchor those blocks and keep the neighborhoods livable and loved and who keep the businesses in business. I've seen what's happened to such inner city SFH neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it turns into somewhere that no one would want to live if they didn't have to, with no community or neighborhood to speak of. Row houses and shared brownstones in East Coast cities have fared slightly better as an attractive living pattern.
Ultimately too, your argument is that not everyone should live where they live, because more people want to live in that spot, so if they want space they should move to the suburbs. My argument is that not everyone can afford to live exactly where they want, either way, but that doesn't logically imply that you should increase density as much as possible in a mixed and vibrant neighborhood just because people want to live there. At a certain point it will lose the very thing that makes people want to live there in the first place. Not even to get into the fact that no one actually works downtown anymore or commutes away from the neighborhood, so this is purely a choice for most people.
You still didn't address my point that every SFH torn down for a 4-plex just redistributes individual middle class ownership to financial corporations.
Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.
> what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard
If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.
> crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class
To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.
I think this all depends on what time and place you're living in.
I'm definitely living in a very weird bubble in eastern Portland. It was a working-class, blue collar town of single-family homes. It was colonized in two separate waves, in the 90s and in the 2020s, by people who couldn't afford rents or homes in city areas of San Francisco or Seattle. But it never really took off economically as an international city, and it's still stagnant, and much more reminiscent of Seattle in the 1980s.
There's a lot to like about that pattern, and under Georgism it would make lots of sense for people to move here because the land value close to downtown isn't really that great. Or to move to Cincinnati, or Lexington, or Des Moines. If all people had to pay was fair rent on the land, new local communities and diverse downtown areas would be springing up all over America.
Not everywhere that people rush into and want to live because it was shown on the Real World needs to instantly resemble the same monocultural sort of housing that a big city like Los Angeles or Seattle has had to adopt.
Moreover, there's nothing inherently immoral about retaining the shape of a city when more people move into it; presumably, they are moving there because they like the city.
When I see working people being priced out of Seattle or LA, they're being priced out by financial groups and offshore investors, with the help of local boards that allow homes to be torn down and replaced with half-empty investment apartment blocks... destroying the very thing they're investing in.
We may be clinging on as homeowners and holding to a way of life that is incompatible with the kind of colonization other cities experienced, but: We take care of our parks. We know each other. I can't go 4, or 8 or 12 blocks that I don't see people I know. Up in the Amazon boxes, we meet the people who come for a year and go.
What equity is there for us in the plan to remove single family zoning? Not even as a parable:
10 miles west of Portland, Intel built a giant facility, and there is a commuter train stop out there which has Amazon boxes for miles around it. But no SFHs in their new construction, nor anything that would be attractive to anyone over the age of 29.
Why should I move out there and they move here, when in reality, that wouldn't even exist without the ancient core of SFHs that defines the character of the city they ostensibly want to live in?
The problem I have with your line of thinking is that it basically seems like the main reason you like your SFH neighborhood is that it's right next to one that's not SFH; if you were surrounded by multiple layers of SFH, you'd lose the ability to have the nearby businesses staffed people you're describing as not living in that type of zoning. It's not clear that the non-SFH home neighborhood with all of the businesses near you gets anywhere close to as much benefit from the proximity to your neighborhood (the closest thing to this I can find is that you mention you have well-maintained parks, but it's not clear why you think that this couldn't exist in a large cluster of non-SFH neighborhoods as well; I've lived within a few blocks of very large, well-maintained parks in separate neighborhoods where there were no SFH neighborhoods anywhere close by).
Combined with some kind of odd ways is describing things (cities being "colonized" in recent decades, people moving to LA because it was on The Real World, as if there hasn't been close to a century of tropes of people moving to Hollywood to pursue show business, implication that eliminating SFH zoning requires you to "move out" when it certainly does not require any individual homeowners to do anything different than what they're already doing), it's hard not to get the impression that you're basically trying to argue in favor of NIMBY without actually saying it.
An aside - I was talking about the wave of mostly white, young, single, affluent people colonizing and gentrifying Portland, not LA. The Amazon boxes are a form of gentrification that push out existing homeowners. Portland's historically Black neighborhood of Albina was a thriving mix of SFHs and medium density. Now those houses are torn down and it's a wall of condos and apartments that all look the same, each with a sushi restaurant or an organic market.
You're right, it is that there is denser zoning in close proximity that makes us want to live where we do, and makes it walkable. Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals. I also don't want to live in the only SFH surrounded by condos. I think your point is that the SFHs don't contribute anything to the mixture, and are somehow parasitic on the higher density zones. I think that's not true. Both sides of the mix are important. It gives the neighborhood a character that doesn't exist in most American cities, which is: People of different backgrounds sit together outside cafes and talk. On any given day we hang out with other homeowners, their kids, young professionals, and also people who work in the service industry who live in the neighborhood and go to the same places they work on their days off. We go to concerts with them, they come over when we BBQ and hang out at our house.
My argument is that this arrangement is much better for society as a whole, and for individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum, than a division between all-SFH suburbia and all high-density inner city. Especially now that most people don't commute to an office, and most of the commuting is done by wage workers who have to commute out to the suburbs to work in a strip mall. The homeowners close to downtown provide an economic base for higher-end local businesses that renters would not be able to support. The people who work in those businesses earn enough to rent in the neighborhood where they work. With all high-density, families are essentially exiled to the burbs, there is little to no socializing between economic classes, and everyone has to commute.
Sure, re-zoning doesn't affect individual homeowners immediately, but the endpoint or goal of it is to ultimately get rid of SFHs in inner areas, not to leave a healthy mixture standing. That's what I see as the problem. And I think it's a politically motivated goal based on the idea that no one should really own a SFH (or if they do, as one poster put it, they can move somewhere far away from the city).
I've lived or spent significant time in a bunch of places around the US - rural NJ, suburban NJ, NYC, Philly, Orlando exurbs, San Diego, San Francisco, South Bay, and I now live in inner SE Portland. And I agree with you that there is something really special about it.
In some ways it's similar to the tourism or gentrification problem - the very things that make a place desirable lead to the destruction of those things. Some people view the world through a purely economic lens and treat individual people as abstracted production/consumption units. And unfortunately there's no real way to put a dollar value on "all the neighbors know each other and help each other out". And even if you could - you can't just BUY your way into that, no matter how much money you have! The only way to unlock that value is to live there and engage with the community. Obviously there will be turnover but what some people don't seem to grasp is that there is a tipping point, where enough newcomers overwhelm the "old timers" and destroy the culture of a place. And think about the game theory of it from the point of view of a resident - why invest time and resources in a community if you're just going to leave in a year or two? Or if the beneficiaries are future random people who are not going to give a shit about the community?
Nice to hear from a fellow Portlander who feels the same way! And your explanation is clearer than what I tried to describe as "character". There are a lot of people here of course who do just view residents as economic units, but there's just as much resistance.
"you can't just buy your way into that" is a great insight.
> Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here at all. If you're trying to argue against some sort of development or planning change that doesn't change anything about your own property due for reasons that are purely about how it would affect you personally, that seems like NIMBY to me. The fact that you happen to not be arguing for universal SFH doesn't somehow make it not NIMBY.
Independent of that, I don't really find the rest of what you're saying compelling. You're arguing against a change to eliminate something with concrete, known problems on the basis of wanting to preserve "character". I still maintain that this is indistinguishable from any NIMBY argument.
This comment makes me wonder: is the actual issue perhaps not so much the single part of SFH but the family part?
I can imagine a sensible zoning rule requiring an appropriate fraction of housing units to have 2+ bedrooms and another fraction to have 3+. (There is no particular reason that a multi bedroom unit needs to house a family. Plenty of 20-somethings are happy to have housemates.)
Due in part to suboptimal fire codes, the US has trouble building nice multi-unit buildings with 2+-bedroom units. Other countries manage just fine.
What is the median price of one of these SFH in this neighborhood? I doubt very much that "middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center" is an accurate assessment here. This is a housing policy that allows the most valuable land for high density housing to be monopolized by a small cohort of rich people who have enough money to afford both the convenience of proximity to downtown and also the luxury of a whole house + yard to themselves, probably making up less than 1% of the metro area population.
That's really not the case. Which is why I'm saying that inner SE and NE Portland are very unique in their walkability, zoning pattern and the resulting social effects for an American city.
Prices have risen in the past 10 years, but the median SFH in Portland sits at around $550k. 54% of the housing stock in Portland is SFH.[0]
The 1% don't live in the city, they live in Lake Oswego and other suburbs where the average SFHs are twice as large (at least).
> That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.
Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
> Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?
And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?
Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable
I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.
And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.
Real property is a bundle of rights in land and its fixtures – that's the standard definition in academic legal theory
If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.
Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.
[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments
Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
> Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
I'm not saying I oppose abolishing either racially restrictive covenants or single family zoning. On the contrary, I support the abolition of the former, and am open-minded about the abolition of the latter.
What I'm opposing is particular arguments to those conclusions – what one might call libertarian(-adjacent) arguments – not the conclusions themselves.
I think, a legal right to racially homogenous neighbours is a property right, and taking it away was an expropriation of property – but an expropriation I support. And I don't think one is always owed compensation for such expropriations either. Legally speaking, not all "regulatory takings" are entitled to compensation; and I'm unconvinced the answer is different if we look at that question through a moral lens rather than a legal one.
Was it ever an explicitly legal right, or just one that hadn't been explicitly illegal? I don't know offhand if there was any prior legal ruling that this sort of thing was legal or if it was just something that in practice the government never did anything about before 1968. I feel like there's a difference between a legal status quo and a legal right, and it's not clear to me that this was ever a right (although maybe you're aware of a specific case or something I'm not)
The US Supreme Court upheld racially restrictive covenants in the 1926 case Corrigan v. Buckley; they then overturned that decision in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer.
So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.
Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that for any given form of racial discrimination, there was some point in US history where a court directly ruled that it was legal.
> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).
To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.
I think racially restrictive covenants were originally legal basically everywhere; but only in the US, Canada and South Africa did they become common.
Under English real estate law, while there are some constraints on your ability to make covenants, the rules are quite broad. A century ago, racial discrimination wasn't illegal or clearly contrary to public policy in most common law jurisdictions – indeed, many of them had explicitly racially discriminatory laws on the statute book – so racially restrictive covenants weren't obviously disallowed. The US, with its constitutional prohibition on discrimination in the 14th Amendment, was actually the only common law country in which there was a decent argument they weren't legal – but SCOTUS rejected that argument at first, then changed its mind over 20 years later. In the 1945 case Re Drummond Wren, the Ontario High Court ruled them illegal – but it cited the just signed United Nations Charter as grounds for doing so.
I agree. And really the Supreme Court ruling that racial zoning couldn’t be enforced and was an unlawful property taking is an even more direct analogy.
Uh, no, that's not the case at this point in time. There were racist HOA compacts like that up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Pretty few people alive today have bought houses where they were given an "explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people" as you said.
I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.
This is not the case today.
Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.
The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.
The more fair reading of the parent comment is that some people bought homes prior to 1968 with racial covenants attached that were subsequently made illegal. Those homes built in that regime still exist. So we have precedent within the lifetime of the _homes_ for this sort of change.
Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!
Within my lifetime, the municipality in which I live enacted policies (historic preservation and racial steering of apartments) specifically to limit the number of Black families that moved in. The preservation-based restrictionism continued into the 1980s (and, of course, remains in force today); the steering into the late 1990s. Our Fair Housing Ordinance included an escape clause allowing our board to resegregate specific blocks, and just a year or two before I was born, they used it.
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not you gaining more freedom with the land that’s the problem. It’s that all your neighbors now have the same freedom.
I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.
No, that’s not expropriation. There’s a really important difference between a restrictive covenant on the title and a zoning regulation. The former is part of what you bought. The latter is something that happened to exist, and nothing about your purchase carried any sort of promise, express or implied, that this would continue forever.
It’s no different from buying a house with a great tree in the neighbor’s yard, and then they cut it down. Was that part of the value of the house to you? Yep. Was there a promise that it would stay there forever? Nope. Is cutting it down expropriation? Nope. Should you have assumed it would be there forever? Absolutely not.
Like, that's a clever response, but it's not describing expropriation, and you know that. Expropriation literally means taking away property, so it's not a matter of degree: It's saying we are taking your property and redistributing it.
Here's where Georgism gets clever: The initial Georgism says that land should be taxed up to the value of its land-rent. Some progressive people said, well, that means the landlord wouldn't make any money anyway, so the government should just take (expropriate) the land. George said, basically, no. Let the landlord decide if it's worth it for them to keep the freehold.
Then, there are varieties of Georgism that disagree about whether the government should be allowed to tell you anything at all about what to do with your property. Some say you should be able to do anything on it. Others say not.
When I bought my house, across from an elementary school, I knew I didn't have a right to drill oil on it, or to build a factory making solid rocket boosters and dumping perchlorates in the basement.
That's all written into the code governing the land before you buy it. The Georgist question is: If I'm paying 100% tax on this land's rent value, does that mean I get to despoil it any way I want? Or do some rules apply?
That's a separate and more nuanced question; the answer is probably that the same rules would apply as do now, but that doesn't equate with expropriation.
So IIUC your argument is that what do you do as a landholder when actually land development is forbidden/restricted because the absence of certain developments actually what provide the value ?
I have no idea what georgists would say about that. My guess is that being a the holder of such land would work as luxury/status-signal because you are only incurring the cost of the land and no/low revenues from it
It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.
It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.
> A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
It wouldn't directly address those planning issues, but it aligns the financial incentives of the body politic between residential homeowners and the rest of the community. Normally residential homeowners have huge financial incentive to make housing scare and expensive, the LVT removes that financial gain from causing misery.
LVT is a good reform to do, but if the goal is to improve housing affordability through supply it's quite an indirect measure and occur at a glacial pace without proper planning reform.
Many areas where people want to live and where homes should be built, can sometimes have a large portion of home owners like Mosman, Bondi, Croydon or Woollahra in Sydney. A tax on the unimproved value of land just doesn't get home building started here if no one is a renter (I recall increases in rent were tied to LVT in Progress and Poverty). And if its based on valuations the valuations will again be distorted by planning controls.
If you upzone these areas for towers, the moment the first person takes the gazillion dollar offer from a developer suddenly homes get built, and suddenly everyone else want to exit. And besides if you have LV Tax their land value will got up because their land will have fewer development limitations, higher demand, etc, etc.
Georgism is cool, land tax is cool, but it's not a silver bullet.
If your goal is to make homes more affordable, reforms like the ones they did in Auckland (loosening planning controls) is the way to go. https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland
If your goal is to redistribute wealth Georgism is not a bad option, but again planning controls (zoning, Floor space, height limits, heritage controls, parking minimums, upper setbacks, excessive lower setbacks) can suppress the true size of the tax base.
Nobody is expropriating your land by upzoning it, they're giving you and all of your neighbours stronger property rights through the freedom to develop your land.
Denser developments are also much more fiscally productive than SFH zoning [1]. This means that cities that upzone will tend to have lower taxes, less debt, and better services in the long run.
I think UBI is pretty squarely a progressive issue. Maybe you're conservative for the area you live in (Cali?) but many conservatives would consider your view to be pretty extreme left.
Just dropping by to say that you're doing gods work advocating for more housing. Its exhausting seeing amount of cynicism around how the status quo just can't be changed for this or that reason, but seeing the small, incremental, advocacy over decades pro housing groups put in is really inspiring. An incredible amount of progress has been made here
My business partners will chuffed when the vote happens in October or November, whichever way it goes, because this has been siphoning a huge amount of my attention over the last year.
> The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.
It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.
Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.
“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.
People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.
> and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in
That ignores all the people who have other incentives to build.
Depending on the area you probably have about 10% of the people who have jobs that directly benefit from new construction (construction workers, plumbers, electricians etc…) or who are married to people who do. Then you have all the people who work or own businesses in sectors that indirectly benefit from new construction or directly benefit from increased density.
In my town of 8k people, I’ve seen 30 people from those groups show up
in support of a new sub division vs half a dozen against.
cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger, so it really depends on the market. i don’t really know any developers who actively oppose upzoning in my region, but the SFH builders I think have an easier and more lucrative job than the ones doing urban infill.
> cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger
Construction cost per unit goes up a little, but land cost per unit goes down a lot, because you buy the same plot of land and put N times more units on it.
A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.
Assuming a perfectly efficient market sure. But in reality an expensive house next door raise the price of the cheap house next door because home prices are heavily influenced by the amount banks will loan, and appraisals are heavily influenced by nearby property values.
Plus other reasons like people want to live in good school districts and higher income areas tend to have better schools.
Many studies find a small net drop in rent (1-5%). But other studies show no aggregate drop in rent. And importantly show an increase in rent for lower quality apartments.
Also for single family homes, nearby property values generally rise.
Are you sure this isn't just 'turnout inertia' working in your favor? People who are relatively content with the zoning rules are probably not actively engaged on the issue. But swap them in a way that they become unhappy with (as you presumably were) and you see sharply increased turnout in the opposite direction.
Put another way, one of the historical critiques of democracy was that it ends up catering to interest groups whose interest may not align with the rest of society. At first that seems paradoxical, because a more knee-jerk critique would expect democracy to just turn into a tyranny of the majority. But the reality is that people generally don't act on things until they are sufficiently incentivized to do so. And that incentivization is often reactive in nature.
Yes, representative democracy as a system is biased more towards preventing bad outcomes (i.e. allowing the people to remove leaders that harm their interests) rather than pursuing the pareto frontier
It strikes me that there is something slightly ironic to this point that he's making. It actually is useful for him to persuade the "overly online keyboard warriors" who frequent his writing that they should be focusing on local influence. It seems to me that the real lesson is that if you have a big audience, it is most useful to persuade that audience, but if you don't, it's most useful to work to influence specific people in the right positions.
as someone who reads a lot but doesn't comment much you've got the topshelf content here consistently, its so obvious when someone has a clue or doesn't if you're in the same areas, very easy to fool others with confident assertions (cough airline issues on HN) but for someone in the industry it's not at all
funnily enough this comment about zoning which isn't your or my field but get the feeling it's on point, is such a massive problem in the western world which has built up over decades, lets just copy someone elses homework in my opinion, Asia gets this stuff right: https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning
Doesn't matter if you increase the housing supply but replace the demand with one of a higher real estate tier. "Oh no all these $300k houses were knocked down to make $800k condos. But on the bright side consider how much higher the supply will be!"
> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.
This was made dramatically obvious in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake.
Land that previously housed people or businesses in the central city became unsealed carparks run by an overseas company that dominates parking businesses here, for years, and many still are, 15 years on.
Likewise, the owners of buildings rendered unusable by earthquake damage had no compelling reason to demolish and rebuild, as their local taxes dropped significantly, as they're based on land value and improvement (i.e., building) value, and the building was now worth nothing.
So long as the increase in the value of the land outweighed the now minimal local taxes they paid, they'd still come out ahead when they finally sold.
Hence the local government resorted to naming and shaming the so-called "Dirty Thirty", because they had no other levers to pull.
But this still doesn't address the previously utilized land that is now just a muddy carpark operating for the benefit of a company in Singapore - they have no economic incentive to invest in a parking building when they can just run their business on several hectares of unsealed and frequently muddy and pot-holed sections in the central city while paying minimal local tax.
And in and around Auckland, New Zealand's most populous city and the most expensive to buy or rent a home in, they struggle with the land bankers, and ghost houses - properties owned solely for (largely untaxed) capital gains.
Is there any evidence to support this 'land banking' and 'ghost house' theory? I've heard it mentioned but the rate of unused housing in Auckland is low from what i can see.
> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.
The reasoning makes no sense applied to land value tax though: people improve properties for their own profit, and the land value (on which the tax is raises) increases slower than the value of their own property so they aren't being deterred by the land value tax. People who don't invest on the other hand don't see increase in their profit while their taxes increase because the land value is being pumped up by those who invest.
I’ve always been Georgism curious, but didn’t know how to handle some of the more obvious challenges so I really want to thank the author for the work here!
I’m curious about how to think about the dynamics of a LVT:
- I can imagine urbanism creating a flocking behavior that ruins neighborhoods in 5-10 year cycles. Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”, only to collapse when a nearby area is cheaper for a cool coffee shop to start. (The problem specifically is that you’ve both driven out people and caused an inefficient overbuild in each area)
- Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?
- Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.
I’m a fan of the idea - these are just some of the tricky challenges I don’t have a good answer to yet.
Something I think most people miss is that LVT doesn’t increase directly because of the improvements. If you build a coffee house, the building and equipment are excluded from the tax. It just applies to the underlying land value.
But a popular coffee house can make the surrounding area more desirable. If that increases what people will pay for locations there, land values rise. At the same tax rate, that means higher LVT for nearby sites, and, potentially the coffee house’s own site. Gentrification by other means.
In a lot of ways, it depends on what the comparative LVT base is. If its just blocks or streets nearby -- a single happening place can push the value up. Spread out to the census tract, the city, the county, and now you can toss more and more of hot coffee shops in the same place with minor impact to the tax base.
I would think that lag, combined with the general public legibility of LVT, combined with the inertia of property transactions, would damp oscillations.
Gentrification and decay are already cycles, and maybe those cycles would accelerate somewhat; but a prediction that they would drop to below decade level would be a bold assertion.
The challenge is that LVT as advocated here pushes for annual updates of the tax based on available information. That easily can move rates up (and down) by “drive people out” amounts in 5-10 years in urban areas.
I agree that's a concern. I don't know the answer.
Of course any government can jack up taxes, and some may use LVT as an excuse. That's already a problem. But the _ideal_ LVT replaces property tax. So I'm skeptical that LVT will be a large exacerbating factor.
The real problem is that gentrification drives up demand, and that's baked into the premise - and necessarily precedes any LVT uprating. I expect LVT's contribution to the problem to be marginal. More data needed.
Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.
Well, that group is rewarded by this system.
I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.
I don’t see how the people building ugly things would benefit really. If the goal is a factory or something that necessarily has to be ugly building it on low value land makes more sense then lowering the value of high value land. If the goal is just to be a dick, well people already do that by leaving these lots vacant.
Well, if ugliness weren't enough, imagine if they instead did everything to make things unpleasant for people living nearby.
Since that would reduce demand in the area, there's a real risk that we'd infer that the neighbourhood is more inherently undesirable and drop the rates there, even though we shouldn't.
I think you're really basically just saying "but no one would do this". People would absolutely do this. People even do this today in inter-group conflict about who is to live in specific neighbourhoods.
Yea on second thought I see it. One of the gentrifying neighborhoods in my city has a large group of longtime residents who are doing everything they can to slow down gentrification by making the area a worse place to live. They’d probably be working even harder if there was an lvt.
What's the end goal of this "build ugly things and depress land values" strategy? If it's to drive out current residents and buy cheap, to what goal? If, once you have bought cheap, you stop building ugly things and start doing high value things.....then land values go back up and you have defeated your own purpose.
Yeah sure the taxes would go back to normal later, but the people left with deflated property values and a worse neighborhood and potentially leave because of decreasing property values aren't going to feel very good about it.
Also the asshole still saves on the purchase. The taxes go back up, but the sale price of the land was artificially low still. Which benefits the asshole and hurts the original owners.
The only way it doesn't benefit the asshole is if the property is worth zero dollars to sell.
Yes and no. You can even do this as a group, to other groups for the group's benefit.
Imagine a group that chucks rocks at everyone else who lives in the place where they want to live, then try to buy the people living there out. It's the same strategy.
They don't need to build anything at all. Just leave the lot unoccupied and uncared for, and it'll turn into blight. The city will reward them for this by reducing their property taxes.
> drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents
Land value taxes only go up if the land value (and thus the demand) is overall going up. The taxes lower desirability, but are also proportional to desirability. So, it's more like a frictional force: inherently counter-cyclical, able to slow down a property value increase but not to reverse it.
So the theory says "nobody goes to the ballpark, it's too crowded" shouldn't happen. And even imagining weird time-delays, mismodeling, etc that could cause it, everything in your scenario is directionally the same with normal property taxes. If it happened, we'd see it today.
I'm no expert on Georgism but I think there are reasonable answers to your questions.
1. "Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”"
This is an impossible premise. The relationship between the cost of the LVT and the popularity are directly and inseparably linked. LVT only goes up (and stays higher) when the neighbourhood is popular. It drops (and stays lower) if the neighbourhood falls out of popularity. In real life it would reach an equilibrium, but it might encounter some volatility along the way.
This is overshadowed by many more factors than a small increase in taxes, and I would propose that an LVT is a minor factor in the popularity of neighbourhoods.
2. Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?
The tricky part about LVT is that it requires an assessment of value prior to realisation. Popular methods include using a combination of average of realised land prices in the area, against a velocity coefficient (the general gain/loss over a period of time), modified by negatively and positively correlated correlates like proximity to public transport and parks. There are countless ways proposed to do just this so I won't retread worn ground.
In the case of the desert data centre, it is likely that the land will not increase much in value. This is by design, because we want data centres (and similar industry) to move into the middle of nowhere so that scarce land is instead used for more productive enterprise like housing for workers so they can get to work easily.
3. Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.
This is the brilliant part of Georgism, and the reason I "converted." A well designed LVT imputes the social costs (implied by their economic costs) of the use of land. It then gives the businesses the fully informed choice of how to deploy their capital. It could be that the efficiency you allude to is real, and is worth remaining on high value land. So be it. The business is the best actor to make that decision. On the other hand, if the deadweight loss is lower than the LVT, then the land should be better utilised by another company which would have better utility for its location.
Georgism aligns social costs with business interests in a way no other tax currently does. Meaning that businesses act in their best interests, and in doing so, act in the best interests of society.
Well right now it happens on 20-30yr cycles which is enough for the people who implement the bad policy that stops the music to get paid and screw off to Idaho or Florida filthy rich leaving the next guy holding the bag.
Maybe if the tempo were increased the cycle would be so flagrantly visible that possible for the general populace to say "no screw you you and the ideas you peddle are bad"
LVT is just another form of attempted centralized control of the market and it will be just as susceptible to government corruption, cronyism, lobbying, etc.
There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.
Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!
But you can multpliy location by building up (there is some energy and time inefficiency in having to go up and down but in theory you can also build multiple layers of transportation), so how that works?
I see how it works but all you're doing is making more efficient use of the given parcel of land. The value of the land already prices in its development potential. A parcel that could legally, physically, and feasibly accommodate a high rise will be worth more.
> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic
It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.
George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.
For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.
When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.
Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.
Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.
I think this is actually the problem with Georgism. The world has plenty of dirt. Locations are in short supply. Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations, which is an important economic activity. For example, most of London's suburbia was created by the building of the metropolitan railways around 100-150 years ago. Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations, and the railway companies made back the money they spent to build the railways by selling these new Locations for home building (now known as Metroland).
Although we don't have LVT in the UK, it interesting that we have another restriction on the creation of Locations: Planning laws in the UK are extremely hard and expensive to navigate and get permission to build pretty much anything, so the creation of new Locations is pretty much impossible. And that doesn't seem to be a good thing.
> Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations
The premise of Georgism is that there is no creation of locations (at least unless you're in the business of creating planets).
> Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations
No, those were always locations, before and after the construction of railways made them more valuable. Accordingly, Georgists ain't interested in taxing the gains of the railways themselves; we're only interested in taxing the gains of the landowners profiting off of their land suddenly being more valuable from no contribution of their own. Under LVT the railway companies still would've made their money back in droves — probably moreso if they're only paying taxes on the land under the railroads instead of the actual railroads themselves!
Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.
Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.
I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.
If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.
> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,
When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.
It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.
All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of. This is a very different characteristic than scarcity, because many scarce things can be increased, and should be if they are needed.
Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.
> Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of.
I think people get tripped up on this specifically because a growing demand for something with fixed/inelastic supply will naturally tend to cause that thing to become scarce given enough time, and it's that scarcity as applied to land that's making Georgism look more and more like a good idea.
Monopoly busting doesn't need to be solved by the tax system, right? Isn't that a separate issue?
Although, maintaining a monopoly by owning land becomes more difficult with a LVT. It theoretically becomes easier for a new vet to find a place and setup shop in the city, and then the Monopoly is busted.
Doesn’t the veterinarian own their own skills, after having spent decades in school to learn them (and perhaps being saddled with student loans to do so?)
What if they just moved? Or should we have US-style global taxes following them around even then?
Randall Wray frames this as “tax bads not goods”. In other words: don’t tax payroll, we want companies to hire. Don’t tax labour: we want people to work. Don’t tax company profits: we want profitable companies. DO tax pollution. DO tax interest income: we don’t want people to get money for doing nothing. DO tax resource usage. If your houses are too big tax house volume. If your land is being banked tax vacancy and so on.
Interest income is not taxed under Georgism btw, except for income on land speculation.
If you buy company x, restructure the business, start turning a profit, then sell the company -> that income (capital gains under current system) is untaxed in Georgism
If you buy an empty lot, wait 10 years to sell it to someone at a higher price, then all that profit is taxed (before it is realized too).
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.
The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.
How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?
These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.
Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?
Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?
Here in Germany there was a bidding frenzy for 3G frequencies. The end result was simply that 3G was more expensive than in other countries and reception was worse.
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.
“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.
But that is what the land tax folks are doing. They want dense cities and transit. They tax the "undesirable behavior" i.e. parking lots and lower density usage.
Not misleading. Rent-seeking is an undesirable behavior, and it's the primary behavior a land value tax targets. Hoarding limited resources is an undesirable behavior. Making products that have negative environmental impacts is an undesirable behavior.
There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.
Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.
An analogy just occurred to me. Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.
I get why an LVT makes sense from an economic perspective, but in practice it feels nearly as unfair as the above. Residents especially, but small and medium sized businesses would very quickly lobby to eviscerate an LVT. Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen.
There's zero chance such a scheme could survive intact politically. In Pittsburg it's an LVT in name only, with a long list of exceptions and curious appraisals. And once it's applied ad hoc, which it must, there's all manner of distortions and incentives for corruption.
There are many ways for land use and tax policy to improve, but you have to come at from the perspective of improving the existing system, not revolutionizing it with an LVT. And you could probably get closer to an LVT by smart incremental reform than you could by trying to nominally pursue an LVT.
>Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen.
Some of us think that would be a good thing. My elderly neighbour has been living on her own in a five bedroom house for twenty five years meanwhile there are people nearby struggling to raise a family in one or two bedroom houses. She doesn't need that house, she is just there out of inertia. Letting the tax system nudge people in the right direction is a good thing.
Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, I no longer deserve to live there. How am I to compete with the vast productivity of a massive corporation?
Where do I deserve to live then? Only where my productivity matches the economic bar of those around me?
I'm getting old and tired. Am I only allowed in a retirement home?
On the contrary, Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, they have to compensate the local community for their use of that valuable land. Local homeowners have to do the exact same thing, but a single home would pay vastly less tax compared to the much more expansive Disneyland. So even the homeowners would marginally benefit in that scenario. Land is always valued according to the potential highest and best use, so the fact that a Disneyland may or may not have been built in any specific location matters less than one might expect.
To an economist, the highest and best use of the land around disneyland is not my home. It's not housing. It's hotels, motels, restaurants. So my land would now be taxed at that rate, until I'm forced out
For devil's advocate's sake, how is this not state sponsored gentrification?
The problem economists would point out is that this is a fully general argument against any development. Which is exactly what leads to the negative side of gentrification - people eventually being forced out of their communities, because there's way too little developed real estate and the rent is too damn high. Georgism lowers rents by pushing towards the highest and best use of land, which is the anti-gentrification move.
In your specific example, you shouldn't assume that the supposed change in the "highest and best use" will be enough to price you out if you're a typical homeowner (not a vulnerable renter in a sharply gentrifying area): the numbers don't really pencil out that way. High land values exist in some places, but they're quite rare and quite concentrated.
The solution to this is to use that LVT revenue to fund UBI, such that the income from all that Disneyland-related land value offsets your own LVT burden.
In a mathematically-perfect setup (100% LVT going entirely to UBI, with zero overhead and zero other government expenditures), the break-even point where your LVT exactly equals your UBI would mean that you own your exact equal share of that tax jurisdiction's total land value; if you own more, then you pay for it, and if you own less, then you get paid for it. Obviously in the real world some of that LVT revenue has to go toward paying people to collect taxes / distribute income checks (not to mention the many other functions of a typical government), but the point is that LVT+UBI produces a self-balancing system that maximizes fairness even for people using their land “non-productively”.
Not sure if you realize this, but most businesses and nearly half of residents pay exactly such a tax. It's called 'rent' and is based on a 'market rate' which is exactly the amount that could be earned. They get kicked out all the time! That's actually what created the political demand for LVT!
You even pay rent when you buy a house. The value of the land is the market expectation of the value of future rents.
You can have a less than 100% LVT to get some of the advantages without upsetting the apple cart. Common in many jurisdictions.
> Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.
Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)
As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...
> I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh
Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.
I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.
Right exactly. And by raising land tax and lowering (ha) or keeping constant property tax they discourage vacant lots without punishing homeowners even more, which is what happens everywhere else.
You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.
We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.
It should! The public (through taxes) shouldn't be forced to subsidize the cost of a parking lot. If the parking lot was valuable to the market, the opportunity cost of the land not being used for some other purpose would be priced in (either through consumers paying more for parking, or businesses subsidizing the cost for consumers as it's profitable for them to do so). Parking lots paying lower property taxes subsidizes economic inefficiency.
Personally I’d rather Land tax revenue be distributed evenly as a citizens dividend, and separate from the taxes leveed to make the society which allows people to have income and wealth.
Those who use their fair share are no change, those using more see taxes go up, those using less see a rebate.
The more valuable Land a business uses the more they have to pay, encouraging more efficient utilisation. Their competitor using less Land has lower taxes and can thus out compete them.
Land of course isn’t just dirt, it’s any limited natural resource.
This presupposes a balancing, when in reality it only ever goes up, and when it goes down it leads to lapses in services where the bill comes due later, with interest
It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.
But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.
All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.
Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.
Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.
Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.
You'll see so many beautiful places.
But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.
It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.
> If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.
It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.
Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.
Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.
If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.
The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.
> there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT
Yeah that's the exact distinction I was drawing. The article says Georgism but talks about land tax in general, which is popular with many non-Georgist economists.
However, I have to take issue with your example
1) Land is effectively nationalized under 100% LVT. Worker likely own (the profits of) more land than before
2) The value of the land where the tradesman works is already used against him, to extract the majority of hte profits of his labor. He already pays the land value tax - to his landlord. From his perspective, the burden changes little while the wealthier lose an avenue to make money without working.
3) A luxurious house / lifestyle still requires paying land tax on the things you consume (the land of course and notably energy sources, minerals, timber, building materials, etc). The kind of spartan lifestyle required to truly avoid this tax works now too - incorporate as a company and don't pay yourself a salary.
4) I think very few people care about a $500k salary tech workers, or footballers, or what have you. It's the billionaire oligarchs influencing politics who attract the most attention.
5) Current day oligarchs derive a lot of their wealth from land and other monopoly rents, not from simply 'working more' or 'contributing more value'. This is resented by many. When people get rich by contributing (relatively more) value, they are usually widely praised
> 1) Land is effectively nationalized under 100% LVT.
You're close to understanding why people wouldn't like it.
100% LVT schemes are basically a mechanism for letting the government force people to do things that the government wants. You want to live in your forever home that you and your husband worked for 50 years to afford? Sorry, government has other plans for that land and now it's too expensive for you to keep it.
The utopian use case that proponents talk about is replacing parking lots with high rise apartment buildings, which everyone loves because it feels like a win for the people and a loss for developers. The more realistic use cases would be much less popular, like the 90-year old couple getting forced out of their forever home because it's close to a substation, which suddenly turned that land into highly valuable property for data centers, which will happily pay those taxes and bulldoze the homes.
Every time I read a 100% LVT piece it's focused on the parking lots to houses type story. They either ignore the more obvious problems of people being forced out of their homes everywhere for businesses to take over, or they do a hand-wavey thing to say it's all for the greater good and we shouldn't care.
Every 100% LVT argument turns into an argument against private property ownership and in favor of a central planning type land reallocation, but with the final use case going to the highest bidder.
90 year-olds may well have bought land at a bargain and would therefore suffer somewhat under an LVT. It's a transition problem though - since in the 100% LVT world the couple didn't have to work 50 years (and pay vast interest to a banker) to get that house.
19 year-olds on the other hand already compete with businesses for land (especially corporate landlords - who pay more than datacenter owners) and are losing rapidly.
You do lose the option of speculation - buy early before a town or region is built up. In the current system, speculation is not an option, it is compulsory.
Also you can't force everyone out of their houses - people could simply reserve land for residential purposes (as is already the case). It is still a democratic system, after all.
Finally, western governments already use eminent domain to repurpose land. It's already a part of our system.
This line of reasoning never made sense to me. If the value of the land is going up enough to make an impact on the month to month financials then it makes sense to dip into the equity of the property. Presumably the overall equity still goes up? Beneficiaries still inherit more in fiat terms? What’s the issue here?
Also datacenters are absolutely not going to be built on ultra desirable land, why would the developer ruin the land value that way?
Land is worthless under 100% LVT. Your land value going up just means you owe the government more in rent every year, since the government owns all the land rents. The only real solution to this problem is prop 13 I think which georgists hate. Nationwide prop 13(only on homes) + LVT is still probably better than the current system though imo, although it creates a huge incentive to never move
The majority of Americans own the home they live in. That’s the real issue here. The landlord the tradesman is enriching is himself.
If you incorporate and don’t pay yourself a salary you still owe corporate taxes.
People absolutely care about the tax rate techies making 500k are paying. They’ll care even more when the billionaires start blasting the airwaves with ads about how unfair it all is.
Athletes have the highest tax rate in the country, why do you think people don’t care about their tax rate?
As far as I know the only tech billionaire with significant land holdings is gates. Zuckerberg and Ellison have big holdings too but not compared to the land per wealth that normal Americans have.
> The majority of Americans own the home they live in
That's the biggest obstacle but also the biggest motivation for increasing land tax. The number is barely 50% currently and falling fast. Of those 40% are owned outright, the rest have mortgages.
This isn't even accounting for commercial real estate and farmland. People complain about grocery price gauging where I live but supermarkets are no more profitable than before covid - they don't realize the main expense change has been land rent.
Once you take out a mortgage you're committed to speculating on that land's future value. If that expectation doesn't pan out, you get a GFC. A gradual land tax would remove some fuel from that fire.
> If you incorporate and don’t pay yourself a salary you still owe corporate taxes
Well yes but actually no - e.g 'buy borrow die'. Regardless, my point is avoiding a land tax isn't as simple as living somewhere with cheap land (it requires consuming less), and people (companies) do also avoid income taxes (it doesn't require consuming less).
> Athletes have the highest tax rate in the country, why do you think people don’t care about their tax rate?
I've never heard anyone talk about this. If I search 'taylor swift tax rate' vs 'elon musk tax rate' I think it's clear.
> As far as I know the only tech billionaire with significant land holdings is gates
Why limit to tech billionaires (who do own lots of land)? The class that specifically didn't make their money from land monopolies, and who pay little effective tax under current system anyway? Trump, Kushner, Witkoff come to mind.
If you're concerned about taxing tech specifically - well George is one of very few people in the 1800s who genuinely considered the full AI + robotics case.
I suspect you're right, in the same way that a lot younger people really like any ideas like blanket student loan forgiveness because they have student loans and are receptive to any idea that involves someone else paying for them.
Like most ideas in this category, they become less popular as people grow older and build up some of their own assets. I would expect popularity of this idea to fall of sharply around the age that people start buying a home and see their property tax bill go up.
Practically, this makes it a complete dead end. Much to my lament in every election, younger people don't vote as much as they post online and respond to polls. Older people don't post online and respond to polls as much as they actually go out and vote.
This is why the Georgism thing always seems popular on niche internet boards, but would never get anywhere in a real political system.
Alternatives like aggressive up zoning and development would benefit this cohort and be welcomed as well. It's very natural to welcome things that benefit you
About half might. But then another half will have dealt with actually moving a confused, possibly suffering from dementia, elderly person, managing all of the affairs (and forgetting to do some, changing health care insurance), creating an unnecessary multiyear fuck you in your life while trying to manage a job and a family, and the policy will get torched.
Allowing the elderly to stay where they are isn't just about protecting vulnerable boomers, it's about not being a problem for responsible people in the next generation. You could also be one of those no-contact assholes and never have to deal with your parents when they get screwed by displacement, land value tax away.
The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window.
I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.
> You have to pay the government rent in perpetuity.
You are paying the government rent in perpetuity for the services they provide, including enforcement of your property rights. If you wish to live on land without paying government rent, you will need to go to a place without effective government. Today, that would be Syria, parts of Sudan, or Mali as examples. I doubt you want to live in those places as a 1st world resident, but if you do, there's little stopping you.
It’s exactly the correct idea. If the value of your land rises as a positive externality, it only makes sense that you contribute some of that back to the society that effected the rise in the first place.
Vast majority are realizing their gains as rent. A land tax would just be taxing those gains before they can be recycled into the real-estate market. Perfectly just in that case.
If you're talking about an individual not using the land commercially - well theoretically the tax burden lowers the sale price. You don't pay both. At 100% land tax, the sale price would be zero. You pay only as you use the land. That also seems just to me.
Well I have news for you… governments are coming for unrealized gains, they will not care if the money is on hand, they’ll fire sell your property if you don’t get a loan to pay the taxes. It’s a mathematical inevitability. And by that I mean governments are going broke and will try to find ever more creative ways to raise money, and unrealized gains, tax normalization, is one of the bigger leavers.
Where I live, the government owns about 40% of the value of my labour. I have to rent my own body in perpetuity. Meanwhile my second biggest expense is a mortgage I pay for land that nobody created.
How much of the land value of your country do you currently own? A land value tax is likely to increase the amount of land you own (the profits of). I don't think US tracks land values as accurately as countries with some kind of land tax.
A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.
When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.
It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.
It's actually a really key part of the functioning of the LVT. It is fuel to grow the economy, just like the LVT is the stick that punishes those who hold back the economy by hoarding land.
At least, that's my opinion. Carrot based economic policies have a tendency of working in multiples of the money involved, and penalties a bit less than that.
It's much easier to do things like pursue higher education or start a business when you don't have to worry that you'll be homeless if things don't pan out.
Because having more money than what's needed for basic subsistence is nice? Because it's something that interests you? Maybe you'd be one to lounge around doing nothing if you had UBI, but UBI studies so far have demonstrated that you'd be the exception rather than the norm.
More money in the hands of the entire population have a multiplicative effect in the economy, as it spurs more spending, and that spending is organic choices by tons of people, rather than it just sitting in the investment accounts of a few wealthy people.
The fuel of capitalism is a large population of consumers. To be extent that we have inequality and we have lots of people that are unable to make economic choices due to poverty, we limit the growth of the economy.
One of the lessons of macroeconomics is that subsidizing demand doesn’t really grow the economy, it’s mostly just results in inflation. Obviously not a hard law but if UBI causes people to work less then the economy will shrink, no matter how much stuff people want to buy.
Inflation is caused by the Fed's 2% inflation target. If tomorrow Congress passed a UBI, backed by nothing extra, the Fed would respond by raising rates, and inflation would be the same exact long-run value of their target.
But a UBI funded through an LVT is much better than that. An LVT is a non-distortionary tax. This means that increasing the tax does not change behavior. But it is not only non-distortionary, it also reduces the ability to speculate as land tax rises. This causes the LVT to be a net-good tax, in much the same way that not taxing carbon is a subsidy to those who burn carbon. The lack of an LVT is a subsidy to the owner of the land. Ending rent-seeking will thus cause the economy to grow. This would result in deflation, and so the UBI is necessary to bring us back to our inflationary target.
The article shows a good example where this will have a massive impact to the economy, even if it is not true in most of the world. That place is South Korea, where roughly 50% of the population lives in the Seoul Capital Area, which continues to grow every year. This has caused significant economic damage, as young people are unable to afford to have both families and a place to live in Seoul, but they must live there in order to have a job. They can simply not afford to live outside of Seoul, where housing is less, but wages are much less.
If they were to enact an LVT with a UBI(or as Georgists call it, Citizen's Dividend) then the population of Seoul that would prefer to move out into cities and towns throughout SK would finally be able to afford to do so. They would only need to be able to find a job that allowed them to live a lifestyle that they preferred.
That's what great about a policy that does not advocate for any particular out-come, but about reaching equilibrium economic states. For places that have to low density, it incentivizes density. For places that have to high density, it incentives spreading.
My understanding is that UBI experiments show that is not the case. UBI is a safety net, and does not lead to a significant drop in labor. With the pending waves of AI and automation impacting labor we'd be well-served to continue to explore how to make it work.
”The taxes will go up and getting a job is going to be optional” is a really hard sell, because anyone who has done group projects at school knows that freeloading is a massive issue
I learned a little bit about georgism as the idea started crossing my feed.. 5-ish years ago.
What I've noticed, especially in online spaces is that advocates have quite disperate notions of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.
Relatively contentious and complex arguments about 2nd and 3rd order effects seem to dominate. EG rent will decrease because of incentives and political economies.
I think this comes from defensive arguments.
Here, he defends against the argument thelat taxes will be passed on to tenents. I agree that the answer is no, but how that is established is important. It's core to understanding the whole framework.
The premise of georgism is that land is scarce. Hi demand, and low supply yields a price. That price does not change because the landlord owes taxes. Supply and demand remain the same, and yields the same price/rent.
LVT is the maximum, non distorting tax rate. The rate at which land itself is worth zero. If tax exceeds LVT building becomes unprofitable and land has negative value.
When tax equals lvt... Tax revenue is maximized and land value is zero.... in the theoretical chalkboard economy.
This is the whole core reasoning underlying Georgism. It is about capturing the value of land, in taxes. All of it, ideally.
Price, scarcity, abundance, affordability... These are peripheral. Also the same rules, more or less apply.
Skipping onto YIMBY, supply constraints and whatnot tends to obfuscate the key parts.
Georgism wants to crash the property market. Zero out the location component of real estate value.
If I actually instituted, an enormous class of wealth goes poof.
Georgism does not assume that land is scarce, Georgism only assumes that land is in constant supply. E.g. that taxing land does not cause the land to disappear, unlike produced goods, where if you tax a shirt, for example, you get less shirts produced. That's the whole point. Because fewer shirts are produced, the price of each shirt goes up, and this is the mechanism by which taxes can be "passed on" to the buyers of shirts.
On the other hand, structures on the land are produced, they are not in fixed supply. Therefore Georgism does not advocate taxing the structure -- only the land itself.
Because land is in fixed supply, it is impossible to pass on costs to renters of land. In a market economy where prices are set by supply and demand, the only mechanism for sellers to pass on costs is a reduction in supply (since they cannot influence demand), because for all goods (not just land), the sellers always charge the maximum the market can bear. Once this price is established, they cannot "choose" to raise prices, because this suggests they were charging less than the market would bear before. Therefore threats to raise prices even more are always hollow. Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.
In that environment, the only way for land rent prices to go up higher is a reduction in supply, as demand curves bend downward. But with land, supply is fixed so reductions in supply are impossible. This is the insight of Ricardo.
Now the argument is that land, encumbered with a tax, is worth less to the land buyer than unencumbered land, so that what happens as property taxes rise is that the land falls in value due to the tax burden. It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value, if even just a few pennies -- at which it will be sold, and so the result is the capture of the value of the land by the state, while people get to keep the value of what they produce (the structure on the land), which is not taxed. It's important to recognize that not taxing produced goods is an important part of Georgism also. This incentivizes people to invest in produced goods rather than non-produced goods, and to save by acquiring capital rather than land, as there is no social benefit for people to bid against each other for ownership of something in fixed supply like land, because no matter how many bidders there are, the same amount of land will be supplied every year, regardless of what price it is.
> Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.
This is simply not true in the same way that consumers are not always rational and always pay the exact correct price.
Landlords regularly charge less than full market rate, for example when they have a good tenant, as the costs of a new tenancy and the risk of a void are higher than the incremental marginal rent (once taxed at the landlord's marginal rate) is worth to that landlord. Unlike what most people seem to assume, being a landlord is not a zero-labour job. Things that require additional labour on the part of the landlord have to be worth it.
The thing that changes this calculation is an increase in costs. You are right that landlords are not charities, so they will generally avoid a loss. The primary costs for most landlords are mortgage interest and taxes. Increase the taxes and some of these landlords will now be underwater and will increase prices towards highest market rate as a result.
Yes, landlords have and rental markets are not securatized commodity markets. There's always some noise.
The point is that the price is determined by supply and demand, primarily. Speculative market responses at the margins if the transition is analyzing the noise. Besides the point.
The much bigger issue at transition, is that landlords are going to be underwater across the board. The whole point here is a permanent transition from high land prices to near-zero land prices.
Landlords avoid raising prices to good tenants not for emotional reasons, but because a vacant apartment earns no rent, and getting a tenant that lives in the unit only for 6 months and then you need to spend two months without rent looking for a new tenant is a worse situation in terms of revenue than a stable tenant that pays every month. It is purely an economic decision that takes search costs into account and falls into the rubric "charging the most the market can bear".
You are just adding complications but not really changing the argument. We can also talk about hotels versus longer term rentals versus residential rent. Why does a hotel charge more per night than a residential rental? Because hotels have much higher vacancy rates, in order to have a unit available. A good hotel strives to be 3/4 full at any time. That would bankrupt most landlords of residential housing, where vacancy rates are 5-7%, not 20-30%.
As the rent goes up above the average rent for your area, so does the cost and time of finding someone willing to pay that rent, and in this way, there is an optimal rent that maximizes your revenue that may not be the highest rent paid but is the highest revenue received over time. That is why good, stable tenants often pay less.
Yes, said more directly, tenants are not commodities. Some tenants will destroy their unit. Others will require more maintenance requests, move out sooner or will pay rents later. Those differing qualities yield different prices. They have differing qualities, just as items at the grocery store do. You will pay more for a higher quality item, if you desire that quality.
Thus there is no single rental price, merely an initial unknown quality rental price, that as a tenant gets to know the quality of the landlord, and the landlord gets to know the tenant, will resolve to a price that is different for every combination. There will be a distribution according to all of these factors.
Henry George talks about "fixed supply" and a lot of his language speaks to the conomic ideas of the time. Remember that the liberal philosophy of property rights was all about adding your own labour to establish value and property rights.
But... We've moved on from those things.
We both said the same thing, just using different words. But... Using simple, modern economic explanations makes it a lot easier to follow.
I think people get totally lost unless they understand (in modern, marginalist microeconomic terms) why (a) rent does not change (b) the value of land becomes near-zero (c) what "land value" attempts to describe.
Meanwhile, the part of this that inevitably dominates the politics and decision making is this: (x) land loses all it's value and real estate investing no longer yields capital gains (y) Homeownership is no longer a safe haven. Owner-occupiers becomes exposed to future housing costs, just like renters.
These are two major changes, and Georgism and needs to own them (imo) to maintain coherence. There's no room for confusion here.
>It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value
No. The land can have negative value, if the tax is too high. This is the kind of confusion I'm talking about... and where georgism gets genuinely confusing.
The "land value" in Geogist land-value-tax.. is not market price. It is whatever the land price would be.. in a market without property taxes. It is a theoretical price. The tax rate is applied to the theoretical price. That is LVT.
The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism. Soviet economics was developing similar concepts in the 60s-90s. Eg linear programming.
In all honesty, I don't think this is all that important. Irl georgist policies would have to make do with an innacurate estimate of LVT, erring on the side of low taxe rates relative to "real/theoretical" LVT. They could even abandon the concept entirely, and go with a more tangible proxy.
But... long before you get to that point, you have to contend with the losers of this paradigm shift. (1) Anyone holding valuable real estate loses. Both homeowners and investors. That is a lot of private wealth disappearing (2)Then, the economic safety of home ownership disappears. You can no longer buy to lock in a price and guarantee yourself housing forever.
It's important to remember that in most periods, Georgists like georgism because it is a better tax system. It's not really a solution to housing availability or affordability... not directly.
There are interesting discussions to be had about indirect consequences.. but you can only have those once you have the direct consequences straight.
There are real, genuine tradeoffs. Policy advocacy tends to obfuscate these... and that balloons out into a general confusion.
> When landlords threaten to raise rents in response to a future land value tax, why don’t they just raise the rents right now? Why do they have to wait until the tax is enacted?
I think the answer to this is because a tax increase is something they know every other landlord they’re competing with will be subject to as well. Raising it right now makes yours an oddly expensive apartment. Once the law passes though, even before implementation date, every landlord knows every other landlord will want to preserve the same cash flow they had before, by raising the rent by roughly the amount of the tax.
Unless of course you have mass vacancy rates already, and those rent raises would be more than the market can bear. But decent rentals in desirable cities have been in shortage for decades which is why rent steadily rises already. Even if your current tenants refuse to renew at a raised rent, someone else will come along, trading slightly down if necessary in terms of quality/amenities.
Responding to LVT in this way would require an unprecedented degree of collusion among landlords. That's unlikely to be sustainable, given that a lot of rental inventory is under smaller-scale landlords who will have a much harder time holding units vacant and therefore will be more eager to cave and drop rents back down to their actual market values.
Even if such a cartel could be sustainable (say, because the vast majority of rental units are under a couple of massive property management firms instead of thousands of smallhold landlords), it'd only “work” until people get sick of it and move to other cities, thus producing more vacancies, thus (under LVT) causing those landlords to hemorrhage more money.
Put differently: every landlord already knows every other landlord wants to maximize cash flow, so if landlords were actually capable of coordinating to the degree necessary to raise rents in response to LVT without bankrupting themselves, then why are they not doing that already? Why have they not yet all gotten together and decided “we're all going to charge infinity dollars per month per square foot”?
We also have examples with this. In London shortly after covid the interest rate on mortgages increased, and as a result landlords increased rent, saying it was due to the mortgage paid. This happened throughout the city.
It might be though that this happened because the supply is limited, and thus we're in the case where the increase is passed to the tenant
LVT and things like market value based taxes are all far more complicated than is what already works, and what Singapore does (and a couple other countries like China): all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.
So the revenue comes through in resales once leases end.
Super simple: no valuation (only market sales); no annual expenses to consider (all upfront); development issues are simply a matter for leases to expire; speculation is capped given the capped lease length (although it can still get to stupid valuations).
Implementation is also extremely simple if you’re already onboard with taxation as expropriation: the state just legislates that all property is now a 99 year lease and they own it at that point (alternatively they compensate you 2-5% of market value, and retain existing annual taxes, or cut existing annual taxes to compensate, or they just do it without compensation!)
Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...
Well yes, in reality you want a system where you don’t wait until the lease expires because that would leave many short lease properties without investment. It is trivial to value (competitive real estate market, rational negotiation, market interest rates) a lease extension from 30 to 99 years (enabling development) and the state shouldn’t really care about it unless it wanted to take ownership early as part of a wider land development plan.
The state is technically repossessing it when you own a lease, but it’s not something you had rights to anyway, or had paid for. The terms of what you own are up to the lease end date, under the terms of the lease.
I agree this seems like the most realistic way to implement an lvt. A pure lvt would need to have tons of loopholes to convince people to build industry in low value places. If a builder thinks their taxes will skyrocket in the future they will go overseas. The yearly evaluation is ripe for corruption(my city has tons of corruption in property taxes evaluations).
Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.
Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.
Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.
>...the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed...
I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.
Right, it's not in the article but this is a problem I have spent disproportionate amount of time thinking so that leaked in. A lot of things that benefit the regulatory capturing class are presented as if they are good for the 'common man' and how we all won't even have homes to rent if it wasn't for generosity of landlords, such bs.
> Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions.
In a market economy, if it's a known fact that the area is in an upward economic trajectory, then the future increase in usefullness of that land will already be priced into the land today. You can't just make profit (in expectation) by going and buying land in an area that the market already knows is going to become more productive. Competition amongst investors will drive expected profit to 0.
The only way that you can actually make a profit as a speculator, is by bringing new information to the market. The rest of society thinks this area has no potential, but you have good insight that is costly to figure out, which tells you that the area is going to be more productive. You take a risk and purchase the property. You are compensated for the risk and effort you undertook, and if you're wrong, you are punished by losing money.
Government already has the prerogative to set taxes, so you should worry about that exactly to the extent that you currently worry about it. LVT is orthogonal.
Broadly, government is not called rent-seeking because it does things to justify its keep: law, defense, roads, bins, etc etc.
At least I have some influence over my local government and how it spends my tax money. Same can't be said about my landlord and how it spends my rent money.
What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?
This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.
Landlords tend to raise rent to the maximum value they can.
If they could raise rents, why haven't they already?
And if their costs go up and they can't make ends meet, they will sell the property, possibly at a loss, and the lower value will lower taxes.
But this won't happen, because the landlord's taxes won't rise. They'll almost certainly fall, as shown in the abundant data. And if for some reason the landlord's property tax does rise, it's because it's a ridiculously underused parcel in an area of really really high value, like a duplex next to 10+ story buildings. Which means it may be best to let 100-300 people use that parcel rather than ~10.
The LVT shifts tax burden away from homes and businesses and towards empty lots and parking lots.
They haven't raised rents because they are in competition with other landlords. If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.
To put it another way, why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.? If if were true that it wouldn't be passed on to tenants then you've found the magic money tree.
Excellent point, and nobody has ever brought it up to me despite me talking this way many times! I think the "competition" angle is really good at pointing out why a land value tax is very different from a property tax here.
A property tax affects all square footage of apartments quite equally, which is very well correlated to rental prices, so a property tax is roughly equally a rise in all landlord's costs. So in the very few housing markets where rental prices have fallen to near the cost level, and there's very near zero profit in renting, property taxes could easily cause a rise in rents.
However when switching to a land value tax from the current property tax system, the incidence is quite different than a broad property tax increase. Some landlord's taxes fall quite a bit, some landlord's tax bills might increase.
> If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.
And then all landlords will see a surge in vacancies, and not all landlords are able to tolerate paying LVT on empty units for very long before they're forced to drop their rents back to the actual market value.
> why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.?
Same reason why landlords can't raise rents to $1M/sq.ft or $1B/sq.ft: because nobody in their right mind would pay that much.
Thanks. I like this response. I might phrase it a little more verbosely: what forces currently limit rent prices, and will any of those forces be lessened if land value is taxed?
> What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?
The first effect Georgism would have is, more effective utilization of real estate. If you go to any big city, there is simultaneously a shortage of properties while a significant number of vacant properties. This would disincentivize vacant properties, so more supply (or at least more tax collected on vacant properties that the city can use for better purposes).
Also, the reason for making progressive tax larger on larger landlords means renting out a few homes is significantly more economically attractive while beyond a certain number, it is no longer viable, which pins prices down.
The headlines would be more along the lines of ”Grandma Jones is losing her family farm, because she refuses to turn it into condos and now the land is taxed as if there was development on it”
Georgism ignores how many voters are vehemently anti-development. Just visit any hearing where housing is discussed, people really hate the idea of getting more homes built.
Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.
I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.
The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.
Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.
Well, I wouldn't even expect to be able to have access to any platform to be taken seriously enough even if I had such a bill. For example, most professional licensing is at the state level, so it requires a state legislature vote. I've already spoken to both of the state representatives' offices for my area, and they give me a hard wall of they won't even talk to me about it in any detail unless I come back with a huge number of people demanding the same. And, I can't get that because of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs — very few people will both care enough to show up, and be on the side that is not the special interest with concentrated benefits (i.e., current license holders).
I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but probably 80% of the value of lobbying comes from just showing up and talking to the representative. You won't know what works, unless you do the same.
I speculate that that form of corruption is concentrated at the large scale. Town councillors where i live don't have campaign budgets. They barely have campaigns.
Get a bunch of town councils on side and you're better placed to tackle the vested interests at the next level up.
It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.
The article points out that land value is intensely concentrated downtown, while outlying single-family areas typically have low land values. While this naturally results from agglomeration effects, isn't it also a partially an artifact of the low-density zoning itself?
Ie. if we implemented an LVT but also loosened zoning restrictions, the net development (and net taxes) on the single-family areas may well see the highest growth. The interaction between these two reforms performed simultaneously seems unclear.
Outstanding article. I didn't have much of an informed opinion but they certainly make a compelling case for their position. Shame to see so many comments here that clearly did not even read it. If you're going to comment on a thread like this with a complaint about LVT the author addresses, you really ought to engage with the author's rebuttal and offer a counter-rebuttal rather than just restating the level 1 argument that the author already mentioned verbatim.
> in January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT
More exact: On 4 November 2020, a law was enacted in the state of Baden-Württemberg which shall apply for the first time to real estate tax for the calendar year 2025 and constitutes a form of LVT.
> Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.
I wish I could describe how optimistic this sentence made me. Ever since I read Leverage Points[0] I developed this paradoxical impotence in enacting change because I felt like the best way to do anything was by finding (or becoming) the leaders who can change the paradigm. But this? This is a breakthrough. We can just do the work.
I think property taxes should be part land value and part land use, with no explicit tax on buildings. That lets the local government unbalance tax rates to be even more in favor of dense apartment and industrial space over parking lots, or whatever their priorities are.
The goal is putting vacant lots in so much tax debt that they go underwater. After that the city can seize them, pay off the other creditors and put the land to better use as housing projects, a community center or low rent small business space. Leaving everything to markets is a big mistake.
No, the goal is to facilitate optimal use of land. The fact that parking lots are inefficient is a coincidence and you will likely find that your "community center" is equally useless. By "unbalancing" this and that and whatever you personally prefer for ideological reasons, you are undermining the whole system.
>>> boring scut work of implementation. Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.
See every enterprise project. The code for s written, the app is promoted as working in this department and the the project gets funded and approved. Under some other manager
I think it's perverse that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a global competition with every other human to survive
It's hard enough to survive but in our world you have to do survive while everyone else is incentivised to take money from you
Life shouldn't just be about efficiencies it should be about things that make us human, sharing and community used to be a big part of that
Like we're geared up for taking but not giving - like petting my dog in the global competition I'm incentivised to give him up he costs me time and money I could be grinding the next facebook
There should be a point of abundance where we reflect on what the point of all this competition is
Because I predict in the end it will be one guy with all money and everyone else in desperation
It's funny/sad that some people have so much capital they could live in absolute abundance, they could light up the lives of an entire country but they're the most robotic and desperate of all of us
As things are at the moment they're our future until we can imagine a world where everyday is not a slow decline into the end stages of a monopoly game
Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.
Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.
I do. My parents do. My wife does. Most of my friends do. Her parents do. Most of my colleagues do.
To be clear, I am not claiming that everyone is universally better off today than 20 years ago. Obviously that would be silly. I’m making the case that modern society affords many benefits in aggregate.
> Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history
As economist, this entire sentence repulses me. No, it wasn't thanks to frantic capitalism. None of the "mechanism" that are adjudicated to frantic capitalism alone mean everything to bring most people out of poverty. What actually has brought more people out of poverty was consistent growth paired with a fairer distribution of the gains in productivity... which is not an economic system feature
Well, not only I have a title, you can't respond with anything of substance because my comment gave you no chance to respond with anything other than your opinion. That's how you shut down keyboard warriors such as yourself.
This is a tautology. Technological advancement doesn’t just appear. It’s the product of an interconnected social and economic system which encourages risk-taking. I can speak to my industry: pharmaceuticals. New drugs are developed because brave people are willing to risk billions of dollars. Most drugs fail. If they were smart they’d retire to a beach somewhere, but thankfully they want even more money, and they invest unbelievable piles of money into moon shots in the hope that one day they cure cancer and make a fortune.
Contrary to what Reddit might tell you, the majority of new drugs are developed by private industry, not universities. These include life changing drugs like propranolol, fluoxetine, sildenafil, atorvastatin, semaglutide, and many more.
Elon Musk didn’t build globally distributed internet for a laugh. He hasn’t reduced the cost of space logistics by 90% for fun. He did it because he wanted more money. He was incentivised to risk his entire fortune on more than one occasion.
Thanks to. Humanity has attempted 37 separate experiments with communism in the last century alone, and they resulted in 100M+ deaths. To be clear, no one is claiming that capitalism is perfect. Merely that it is the best of all the options on the table. The problem with communism is that it doesn't account for the human element. Most notably greed, corruption, and nepotism. The reason capitalism succeeds where communism fails is that it embraces the ugly underside of humanity and harnesses it for good. Elon Musk would never have revolutionised internet payments, EVs, space-based internet distribution, and reduced space transport costs by 90% if there were no reward for him. Humanity benefits thanks to his greed.
Yes but we can't run a simulation of what life would have been like if, say, we'd had monarchies or socialism instead, and technology kept advancing. We can only state what has transpired. If there was no Elon Musk, would someone else have had the vision to build out the super charger network and the gigafactory to have forced electric vehicles into being viable? If the Wright brothers hadn't been the first to fly, would someone else have managed to do the same thing? The first transatlantic telegraph cable failed.
This is why we should rely on precedent. It’s not like we haven’t tried other forms of governance and economies. We have. Many. The best so far has been capitalism. Since I live in Denmark I would argue the best social outcomes are from strong capitalist economies with strong social safety nets.
I would currently classify China as a one-party socialist state under Communist Party rule with a state-directed mixed-market economy. Under Mao Zedong, China was a relatively faithful adherent Marx's writing and vision for communism, and I would classify it as communist one-party state with a highly collectivised, state-directed command economy.
The tricky thing about governing and economic systems is that they're never ideologically pure. No previous system can ever be called "purely" communist, nor can any current system be called "purely" capitalist. We therefore often analyse outcomes from nations using the dominant system is the lens.
Then why would you claim that capitalism is the largest driver of poverty reduction when China was the largest contributor to poverty reduction in the last 100 years? Add to that USSR and it is clear that you should be thanking socialism and not capitalism.
>>> The state capacity limits that he asserts prevent Britain from successfully implementing LVT would be a specific local dysfunction, and would presumably impede any reform the country pursued to address its housing crisis.
> I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
It's best to avoid people who will challenge your ideas and instead create a large group of loud people who believe your promises. What could go wrong?
- I've spent the last five years dutifully responding to each and every criticism I've found online. My entire original article series was about responding to the three most significant critiques of the movement. On my blog you can find many other such replies to critiques that have come in since then.
- This is important to do for epistemic reasons. However, it has nothing to do with actually changing things. You simply do not change the world by responding to your most hard-bitten critics. That's an entirely orthogonal problem.
I’ve followed the authors work for years and one important aspect to land reform is there is some people with a such a strong status quo bias that they can’t be reasoned with. If someone truly believes land use should never change they will just oscillate between arguments that are not coherent or well intentioned.
So the author is right that at a certain point you should disengage with these types and focus on racking up real world wins.
I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.
Buried in the middle, a whole section on "won't landlords just pass costs into tenants" passed over with the weakest deflections. This is willful naivety.
Evidence is presented suggesting landlords don't lower rent when costs go down, and a hand-wavy claim is made by-symmetry that they won't raise rents when costs go up. It's nonsense, there's nothing to rebut.
I think i see the error in your thinking. You believe that rent is low-margin and cannot be sustained at a given level if costs rise.
That's never been true anywhere I've lived. Landlords generally charge the maximum the market will bear. In high-demand areas, letting is highly profitable. A London flat, say, will generally net five figures above the mortgage.
LVT is, definitionally, only high in those places.
No I don't. I believe landlords grab any excuse to price gouge. You're tilting at a strawman.
Edit 1: We agree rent is a problem, we disagree that your LVT "one weird trick" is effective, and I'm hostile to the trojan-horse-end-of-income-tax which gets this stuff on HN in the first place.
Edit 2: you'll win more hearts without the patronizing/smug rhetoric.
Apologies for the condescension. The position you've outlined makes no logical sense to me, so i discounted it. Let me ask in a spirit of enquiry: Why are they waiting for LVT?
They hike the rent ten percent and say it's because of LVT - if LVT didn't exist, they'd say it was because of the war on Iran, or interest rates, or mercury in retrograde.
Most LVT advocates would be in favor of letting these kinds of policies be more market driven.
But say there is an urban area that is 60% parking, by default LVT would probably make that uneconomical and the land owners would be incentivized to redevelop or sell.
A concrete example is I used to work at a warehouse in Boston as a teen that had hundreds of parking spaces… in one of the most housing constrained cities in the whole country in relatively prime real estate. I hope that lot gets turned into condos or something it would be a huge win for the city.
On whether LVTs are passed on to tenants: "For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"
One wonders whether they are rebutting their critics' actual arguments - I simply cannot imagine that a serious critic would make the quoted claim.
Besides zero taxes (which I am an advocate as anarchist), the most efficient tax of all is money printing done the right way. Bear with me for a moment...
The government needs money. It prints a fixed budget for the year say 10% of money supply. Boom, 10% instant inflation spread evenly across all money holders, those who have more, those who have less. In one second, one enter key, all the money government needs right in their pockets, no need for infrastructure, monitoring, personnel, overhead, nothing. Clean money ready to use.
Land Value Tax as Henry George proposed, while philosophically sound, it still requires collection, measurement, vigilance, etc while Money Printing Tax MPT does not. We have a trillion dollars in circulating money, we print 100 billions. Next year we print 110, and so on (whatever the math is) and they both cover the same principle, money for the government to work extracted the most equitably from all at once
If the government ever needs more money say for real wars, threats, national disasters, it prints more (special circumstances approved by congress 75/25), everybody contributes proportionally to their wealth, and nobody would ever complain
You say in less than ten years the money supply would double and the currency debase? So what? In real life, the government printing money only benefit those who get the money first, while with this method everybody is affected equally so there is no advantage at all
Thing is, the insatiable appetite of the state for money no matter where it comes from is impossible to tame and no matter how many ethical thoughts we put on it, thieves in power won't ever care as that's their nature
I find hilarious that you call yourself anarchist and your first order of business is inventing the state's dream tax... invisible, unaudited, with one one Enter key, just for the institution you yourself just called an untameable thief. You didn't kill the tax man, you gave him a black card
What's hilarious about that? Thinking is not prohibited for anarchists, or atheists (I am also) so if you ask me about god I may tell you a thousand possible explanations to your own delusion without me accepting none of them
I am also a programmer, so I try to find solutions to everything, or at least interpretations of my own thoughts toward an optimization of a real or imagined problem
One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase masquerading as innovative tax policy. It would be great if cities were to reduce the spend by a 30% while they are at it.
At the very least, it would be great if politicians implemented it as tax neutral and as originally designed: the ONLY tax, and including renters. Some jurisdictions are doing it that way.
It’s unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve. Market value changes for every asset, not just land, and unearned wealth creation is common. Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?
I will probably believe it more when the proponents act on their recommendations, say, if Lars sells his house and sends the 50% appreciation he says in his blog he didn’t earn, as a gift to the Federal Government so that Trump can hire a few more ICE agents.
My concern is also aligned with Orwell in Notes on Nationalism: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
> One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase
Done honestly, land tax replaces property tax. The problem of tax increases is orthogonal. Your paragraph doesn't address LVT, it addresses cities being broke.
> It's unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve
Unfairness of existing tax; rent-seeking; insufficient housing supply; unpriced externalities; take your pick.
> unearned wealth creation is common
...and, typically, taxed. I have a Capital Gains liability for mine, which comes due when i sell.
> Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?
No; they were presumably taxed on it already; and it's currently dropping, also due to market forces. But that's beside the point. Their income, inflated or not, was earned. LVT is about pricing in an externality that currently goes unpriced, that is deemed to be owned because someone a long time ago planted a flag. We do not need to abolish the concept of land ownership, but we should question assumptions about it.
> I will probably believe it more when...
That's just insane.
> My concern is also aligned with Orwell
No, you merely quoted Orwell out of context. FFS. By all means borrow a pithy line, but don't claim an authority who doesn't agree with you.
Orwell was a passionately radical and progressive. He fought in the Spanish civil war. He wrote "Down And Out In Paris And London". I don't know if he ever wrote about LVT, but my bet is that he would have been strongly in favour of it.
The standard reform we actually pitch is a revenue neutral swap for existing property taxes. The tax we are reducing is the building tax, shifted onto land instead.
I find amazing that the problems found while implementing this were things that I, imitating solutions from elsewhere, considered and addressed. I didn't even have the luxury of experience to consider those issues to be showstopper. I think we need to see the parallels between fundamentally the same problems rather than finding bespoke solutions:
> You handle that the same way income taxes do: the first X amount is exempt, like a standard deduction, applied to the land under someone's primary residence. Pair it with a rolling multi-year average for assessment so value spikes phase in gradually instead of hitting all at once. Keeps the incentive against passive land-holding everywhere else intact, without the blanket caps that also protect speculators. Instead of using one tool to fix it all, you use multiple tools that work together to make efficient systems
> Yeah, no. The only land that should be exempt is the one under your primary residence. If you're doing something productive with it, like extracting value, renting it out, whatever, it's not just your residence anymore, and it should be taxed like any other land. The whole point is that productive/extractive use is supposed to generate enough return to cover the tax. If it doesn't, that's the market telling you it's not being used efficiently enough to justify holding it
At risk of repeating myself at some point, lets explain why those "issues" are already addressed... with examples in the real world. In florida if you are caught using comercial space for your "main residence", you are hit with a 10 years claw back, 50% of penalties and 15% of interests on those 10 years that you left unpaid. Also on the same state, you are counted by actual household not just "household on paper" and courts rejected that "loophole". You could further disuade people from trying to pull that crap by putting into law that if they don't pay on time the acure interest too while the case is solved.
About 3, the exemption isn't total. It's a flat land-value floor, the same for every household, set from median income rather than land value, so it moves with what a typical earner can afford rather than with the market. Below that floor, land goes untaxed. Above it, you pay like anyone else. If your land's worth outpaces that floor, that's the market saying it's better used commercially than as housing you can no longer actually afford
Here's a dumb question. If there was just one tax, the lvt, what would stop businesses sort of rediscovering income tax.
I mean putting a line on your pay slip called "lvt contribution" and then state the pre-lvtc salary in job descriptions and stuff like that.
Similarly with vat and related taxes. The incentive in both cases being to signal: here's what we would pay/charge if it weren't for the government. Which is presumably the current incentive to state before tax salary/cost (this assumption could well be totally wrong).
Remember that the idea od LVT was to replace all the taxes. Not an excuse for a government to tax you more with ever more complicated schemes to benefit lobbying billionaires.
If you’re going to disable reader view on your website can you at least make sure the contrast isn’t completely terrible. Blue links on blue? Not great.
It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.
I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.
Allow to me cite another beloved HN blog by way of explanation for why this mostly appeals to people without a strong understanding of the systems they want to “fix”.
I directionally agree! I grew out of Big Systemic Fixes in my 20s. The great thing about LVT is that it can be implemented piecemeal at the small scale. I think we should do that; have some tolerance while we thrash out the bugs; then let matters progress as they will.
While i don't agree with Big Systemic Fixes, i certainly agree with - or rather, acknowledge the existence of - Big Systemic Problems. We should tackle those when we can, with appropriate caution. LVT's viability, IMO, is predicated on gradual rollout and low cost of reversal.
I would not call a "hack" a "systemic fix" in fact quite the opposite.
And those who work on understanding the systems (economists) universally agree that the hack is a great hack, across all sorts of schools of thought, something that's pretty much unheard of in economics.
I hope you are as interested in detail as you purport with your link, and go and look at the real world examples of doing this hack in practice!
Honestly, a week ago after I got deeply into Georgism and totally apart from this, I was like:
This is the hack that fixes inequality in the 21st century, provides for a UBI, fixes the housing shortage, lowers inflation, ___and___ is astonishingly libertarian in a way that would still achieve a lot of those progressive goals, but could be embraced by self-employed / founder / developer / capitalist / middle-class and upwardly mobile non-bitching people like myself... even those of us who do own land.
Next thought was that I should start a political campaign based on it. It probably would function as a sort of systemic broad-spectrum antibiotic for our current monopolist "late capitalism", at least on a street level.
Then a week later it's topping HN, so why bother ;)
shrug I must've missed it. I guess the fact that I was enchanted when I read it last week, and I've been here 15 years, illustrates something about common zeitgeist that I had stopped ascribing to HN awhile ago.
This guy has been grinding his axe and wasting folks' time here for years. Even when shown how middle-density towns are the most efficient for utilities, taxes, infrastructure, etc. Even when confronted with the falling rents of Tokyo and yes Austin in times when they've briefly overbuilt. Don't bother arguing with economics deniers.
Austin is the only possible outlier so far. My model predicts that housing prices (sustainably) fall in dense cities only when the population declines, so Austin's population should be declining. There is no data _yet_ to prove or disprove it, the ACS data series will be released in about 1 year. The IRS data will also be available around that time.
However, some proxy data tends to support _my_ viewpoint. The student enrollment in Austin schools has dropped unexpectedly this year.
2. Even if it didn't work, Georgism is fundamentally a more just and fair system.
3. The world really needs it right now. Housing, wealth inequality, climate change, the inability for most populations to understand how to properly balance aspects of capitalism and socialism.
Friends let their friends know about Georgism! Do the right thing!
I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".
So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.
Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.
One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.
Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.
I don't even think "unused" is helpful framing. I'd say, property taxes should be assessed on land, not productive imps. If you want to keep your expensive urban downtown land a parking lot, fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by lower taxes than your neighbor with a high-rise.
The point of Georgism is to get rid of the 'unused' part. You're just taxed on land, full stop, based on the most valuable things that could probably be done with it right now.
Land in a city center? Hefty taxes, identical for a parking lot and a skyscraper, because the parking lot could be a skyscraper instead.
Land in a low population rural area? Low taxes, because the likely uses are homes or businesses that could be built in any other rural area.
So the idea is to make cities denser? Is maximum density use what we really want? What about industry, data centers, etc., that could be built in rural areas - wouldn't that push land value up there a lot?
The effect on taxes depends on the specific rules. But, with the easiest answer of basing it on market rate of land sales, industry in rural areas only increases taxes if that industry's paying significantly above existing market rate for some reason.
And if they are doing that, the taxes should go up, since there's some previously unrecognized value to the land that's driving industry to need to build there specifically and not somewhere else they can buy at preexisting market rate.
Of course, the same also applies in the other direction: if an active mine shuts down and sells for pennies, taxes for the surrounding land should go down based on that.
There's only so hypothetical you can go before losing the point of the whole system. We could, after all, make the whole planet like Coruscant if we really wanted, but taxing for that hypothetical would do nothing useful.
The idea is to encourage more efficient use of land. In urban areas of the US that usually means more density since they aren't actually all that dense(the oft cited example being surface parking lots in downtown areas, this isn't a very efficient use). There's a lot of other baggage to make that work well, imk - better infrastructure and transit come to mind.
Most cities in the US aren't even near 'a little bit efficient', let alone 'most efficient'. You're worrying about what happens if the waddling baby at the ten-yard line on the football field runs out past the end zone and keeps going onto the highway.
It's just one local revenue stream, comparable to property tax. Nothing about it requires or precludes any other policy goal like making cities "nice" places to live.
Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.
What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).
LVT is about assessing improvements, conservation can be understood as an improvement and valued as such. For the same reasons that urban parks should have a different tax assessment than low value surface parking lots.
Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You've been here a long time, and it's dismaying to see a longstanding user degrade the site like this.
its unclear to me how you could pay for the massive tax burden of a modern state with a single tax. while i agree in theory that taxation of land is the most "fair" type of tax, it does not seem possible that eg. the federal US government could obtain $7,000,000,000,000 from a %5 tax rate on land, without making it completely unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home.
if you were to couple Georgism with a massive reduction in state spending i would be more on board i think.
The US ideological push for homeownership is what eventually led to the housing shortage that we’re in now. If we tie up a big chunk of the majority’s net worth in their house, of course they’re going to vote for their own net worth going up. Of course they’re going to vote for renters to become their serfs. Of course they’re going to vote for subsidizing housing demand instead of subsidizing housing supply.
We needed a government to crush the majority’s house values yesterday. As a consolation prize, we got ‘08. It sucked investment out of housing, and we got a booming economy.
The average citizen should not own a home and be allowed to vote at the same time. Canada experienced the consequences of a psychotic ideological homeownership push, China dodged it by intentionally deflating property values, the US will pay the price if people keep voting for property values to go up.
i think it generally does preclude other taxes, although i'm sure there are people who consider themselves georgists who would also want to see other forms of taxation.
but yes, home ownership is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a number of reasons, including increasing government spending...
"For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"
Generally enjoyed this blog post, however this is either the most naive question, or worst strawman argument I've read in a long time.
Except... it isn't. You see, there's a limit how much a person is willing to pay in rent and since the tax puts pressure on non-productive uses of land, either the market gets flooded with land or with rapid development, which brings down the prices of rent. The only problem the author has is that it mistook the mechanisms which it will work, prices will come down because supply will go up, not because they pay less.
The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.
I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
We're about to have a board vote eliminating single-family zoning (I expect us to win) and this rings extremely true about local politics. If you count "votes" in Facebook comments --- Facebook is where all our local politics happen --- you'd think this is the most contentious issue in the world. But in our last mayoral election, you'd draw the same conclusion about the race being tight, and in fact the progressive rinsed the moderate by a huge margin.
The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
I spend a lot of time in online arguments with opponents, on the theory that I'm not really writing to the person I'm arguing with but rather to everyone quietly reading comments. But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.
You never know until you try.
Seems like a story of knowing how to operate the machine of government and relationships.
Well, yeah, that's humanity for you.
And when it is tried, somewhere, the results then add to the momentum. Local dynamics will always be a little chaotic and that's ok.
> you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles
after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.
there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.
Yeah I think one of the vestiges of the "liberal consensus" era of politics (pre 2016) was that "persuasion" was seen as the only valid way to advance your advocacy. But the shattering of that consensus has allowed the left of center to realize that, in fact, winning is what matters. Your biggest ideological opponents by definition cannot be persuaded- politics is now a tightly coupled to the ego and therefore someone attempting to change your beliefs is deeply threatening.
The right learned this a long time ago. Persuasion does not matter. Our system is winner take all. Winning is all that matters. Online debate is a waste of time. Find your base and activate them instead.
> watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously
"Yes you worked your whole life for that house that you carefully chose and maintained, but we want to send its value through the floor because we're more powerful".
Show me someplace a change in zoning from R1 to Rx sent values through the floor.
Around here (Metro DC), that simply hasn't happened. There's so much pent up demand for housing that at worst, the appreciation has slowed, but I'm not even convinced that's happened, as the infill/redeveloped land is actually being used and generating economic activity (vs parking lots or old flats and offices nobody wanted).
What do you care about the value of the house you're living in?
What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
When I was fresh out of college, I got the advice to invest a part of my salary in bonds and stocks.
I luckily stumbled upon a good pick and basically a month's salary showed up on my account overnight. It's been a puzzling occurence morally speaking, that I gained so much money by essentially doing nothing.
While I certainly didn't mind the money and still don't I'm puzzled by the 'rich people' who inevitably show up in every discussion claiming 'dammit I worked for what I have with sweat and blood, while freeloaders and parasites loafed about! I deserve every penny I have'.
No you didn't (I didn't either), please shut up. I worked hard for a lot of stuff I cherish that made me very little money, and the place I own went up a lot in value, to which I had zero contribution.
Land is a little different from shares because you can meaningful affect the value of your land by spending your life improving your community if everyone else does too. You can be a good neighbour much more easily than a good shareholder.
I picked up some rubbish from the street on my way home yesterday. That act probably raised all our property values by some microscopic fraction of a cent. Then global macroeconomic conditions affected the property value by a huge amount more. It would be incorrect to attribute any gains to picking up rubbish, but it would be a very understandable human mistake, I think.
> What do you care about the value of the house you're living in?
When you are eventually too old to live there, sell it and move into an assisted housing facility, the money you get for that house very much matters for how you will live the remaining years of your life.
> What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
What did the sw eng do to deserve the 500k a year comp while the lady cleaning the toilets in the same building hardly makes 10% of that? Market? You don't say...
If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking. Apples and orangutans.
> If the house is paid off, you have that equity. Maybe it's $500k instead of $1million, whatever, it's still worth money.
"Whatever"? With 20 years left to live, $500k difference is huge. Try to get informed about prices for such places. And how come you are the one to decide whether they are worth it or deserve it? This is a ridiculous discussion.
> To your second question... the difference is a wage is based on adding economic activity while the land value increase is almost exclusively rent-seeking.
The economic value of their lot obviously increased manyfold since they purchased it. Anybody could have bought it. If society (through laws) should have a say in the price of selling a plot of land then I'd like to see your reaction to society having a say about sw eng compensation. Oh right that's totally different! Because one of them impacts you directly while the other one doesn't and is easy to armchair philosophize about.
> Anybody could have bought it.
People that were not alive could not have bought it.
I own a home. I still see the state of housing as a problem. Because I’m not a greedy selfish asshole.
I believe that most people see the state of housing as a problem, home owner or not.
Still no reason to deny folks whose property value skyrocketed those funds when they sell. Unless you also want to deny Nvidia or Tesla stock owners their money when they sell.
Stocks aren't a necessity to live. Housing is (and while ownership of housing is not, the land costs impact rental rates as well).
And as mentioned in the sibling, few people think of stock gains as an inherent right. Stocks go up and down and we all accept that.
Housing is a market and the value of items in a market can go up or down.
For some reason going down isn’t allowed in housing.
If Nvidia or Tesla tanked tomorrow to $10/share are those who own shares being “denied” money when they sell? Obviously not.
That could be 5-10 years of retirement funds for the average American… “whatever” is extremely out of touch.
You don't have to move to such a place, but there are a lot of real estate that's not very hot, on account of not being near anything economically relevant, but are still pretty nice places.
If you don't have to work a day for the rest of your life, why should you care if a famous tech company has its offices 15 minutes away?
Sounds like a problem with how you fund your elder care. What about the old folks who weren't lucky enough to win the housing jackpot?
It wasn't a jackpot. Many, many people have houses. Trying to make people who did that into a group you're allowed to dismiss is evil. Just as it is with basically any group.
If you bought a house for 50 grand in 1984 and now it's worth $3 million because you got lucky and happened to buy in the right spot, that's a jackpot in my book. You didn't do anything to create the value of that land: that's what Georgism recognizes.
If you bought it in California, say, in 1984 it was more like $100k, and would now be worth more like $900k[0]. Your outlier valuation is a terrible basis upon which to institute yet another tax.
[0] https://www.noradarealestate.com/blog/california-housing-mar...
The outlier valuation is exactly the point! That's why it's a lottery ticket. Some people get $900k, others get $3m, not because of anything they did, not because of improvements made to the property, but just because they picked the lucky patch of dirt.
As discussed in the article, LVT can be implemented in a revenue-neutral way where most homeowners would pay lower property taxes so your handwringing about "yet another tax" is unconvincing.
Nobody is saying it's evil. But the value of your land is also not sacrosanct to the rest of society, nor should it be.
"I'm a highly paid sw eng in the bay area and want to buy a house, but it's very pricy. Let me present a scapegoat so we can all agree to force them to sell below market value. But don't touch my total comp because that's totally the market value of what I contribute to society!"
A consistent view please. Either society decides through laws who gets to have how much, or not, but stop selectively applying that to things you want versus things you already have. Such brain acrobatics is just dishonest.
Sorry, what is your actual objection here? I'm not saying anyone should be forced to sell below market price - I'm saying the market price is inflated by the the cost of land: Land that no one created, land that is not a product of any human market.
The point of a Georgist land-value tax is to separate the value of the land from the value of buildings on the land. Land itself is a public good and should be taxed as such.
I don't disagree that the market price is inflated. Lots of market prices are inflated. Many people here are paid in or own (or both) stocks of tech firms whose value is inflated by at least as much or higher. Have not heard anybody claim that they are earning too much money. Easy to punch others though.
It is, in fact, a common kind of economic policy approach, to disincentive rent seeking. This does not apply to labor income, generally.
I can't begin to understand what the quoted section you start your comment with has to do with the comment of mine that you replied to. I didn't say anything about any of that stuff...
Sorry, took some liberties to paraphrase how your comment sounded to me. You seem to have little respect for what others own, but I'm assuming you expect others to respect your private property. I was trying to illustrate that somewhat selfish inconsistency.
I still have no clue whatsoever how my comment could have sounded like that paraphrase to you.
I'm very confused what private property you think my comment suggests I do not respect.
The land somebody owns is private property, is it not?
Yes. But nobody is talking about taking anybody's land. What's your point?
It was a jackpot because houses were cheap back when they bought and now due partially to nimbys it's not cheap anymore.
God forbid they lose some tiny fraction of their wealth to benefit society. The horror.
Fight for tech workers paying higher tax rates and investors making above X million a year paying an extra surcharge and we can talk again.
I do. Also a LVT would have that same effect since those people live on valuable land.
> What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
Protect it against drastic change and maintain it over decades, investing money in upgrading it where possible.
Your investment in maintenance and improvement of the structure is, in any in-demand area, a tiny contribution to the appreciation of the value of the property.
By "protect it against drastic change", I'm assuming you're talking about political action. That part of your contribution to the value is literal rent seeking.
Not everyone has the follow-through to maintain a property over the years. Some owners allow a structure or surrounding grounds to degrade. There is something to be said for the homeowners that keep a house, property, and neighborhood well maintained and attractive to live in over the years.
This is true for pretty much any asset though. If I put effort into maintaining my car (which I use), the expectation is that it will last longer, provide me the benefit of using a well-maintained vehicle, and maybe sell for some portion of its original value when I eventually swap it out. I certainly don't expect my Toyota to appreciate in value by 1000% just because I didn't let it rust out.
This 'Georgian' tax scheme looks good in many ways. More below, but first, your question:
I don't know about other zones, but I live in a town that highly values open space and natural environment. This is a town ~35 miles away from a major city (top 10/20 in US), with no rail or mass transportation, or substantial business.
This is not the same as residential towns/zones more adjacent to the city, and I'm not making any arguments about those.
But for this town, and several near it the residents do a LOT to deserve the increase in land value. 1) Everyone in the town pays, and has paid for decades, substantially higher taxes to maintain the open rural character of the town, which includes the town buying parcels of town to keep open. 2) Everyone in the town foregoes substantial development opportunities available for subdividing land. 3) Everyone in the town pays higher taxes for high-density developments that do not happen to preserve wetland, environment, or usable open space. 4) Everyone in the town pays extra costs maintaining habitat rather than clear-cutting. 5) Because of the lack of development, the values have gone up LESS than other such towns in the region.
Yet everyone yells that this sort of town should be subject to the exact same massive high-density developments of other towns, utterly destroying the environment and town character, and yet providing nothing of value. A new lower-income-accessible house in such towns provides ZERO advantage to a supposed resident, who would now become absolutely dependent on a car and all the required expenses, being located a multi-hour commute from jobs in the city and no public transportation. Meanwhile, entire habitats of endangered species would be destroyed along with the character of the town.
It should be a different call on locales closer to the city (although I cannot speak for them). Particularly in zones near public transport such as rail lines, where people can get to/from work without the expense of an automobile, higher density should be encouraged, so their income can go towards building wealth in a property.
The Georgian idea looks quite good to me, as long as it respects the value of land conserved for natural habitat and open space. Such land should be completel different from a vacant lot with a torn-down building or parking lot — the "rentable" value of habitat or open land should be zero, since it cannot be built upon.
That said, it also looks like this 'Georgian' tax scheme would likely eliminate all parking near the city center very rapidly, or make it very expensive. This change should not be left to unintended consequences. Either provisions for parking should be made (force tall high-quantity parking garages?) or better yet, provisions for reducing/eliminating cars in the city with extensive public transport, low-/no-tax for bicycle parking? Probably different for each locale, but it needs to be planned for.
> Yet everyone yells that this sort of town should be subject to the exact same massive high-density developments of other towns, utterly destroying the environment and town character, and yet providing nothing of value.
Nothing of value to existing inhabitants perhaps, but massive value for those that don't have housing yet.
What a glib response.
And no, it provides no new value.
There are already inexpensive houses available at similar distances from the big city that would provide the same value to someone who doesn't yet have housing. Same commute distances, would require an automobile (and associated expenses), and the rest.
They stay inexpensive — because the people who lack housing do not want to buy them. Why? Because they are in the towns who do NOT spend all those costs and taxes to maintain a town with character, open lands, and protected natural environments.
No, you will not, without a fight, get to just destroy and take by fiat what others have spent decades and fortunes building.
The result will be just more of what is available in adjacent towns who did not spend to create a better environment, while destroying what value there is.
And then of course, if we do have people move into the less-well=-maintained areas, and try to improve them to produce more and better housing, the same "pro-housing" people complain of "gentrification".
It's not a glib response. People like you have made their "Garden cities" into a fortress, from where you drink champagne (or your favorite equivalent), while watching the plebs fight to the death outside, because they don't have a place to live. Maybe one day you'll realize you're one of the baddies and shed a tear.
Ah, returning to counterfactual over-dramatizing
I'm not talking about a garden city or walled fortress of any kind, and I said so above. I'm talking about a semi-rural town where people have valued nature and open space.
And no, destroying that to supposedly make housing for low-income people who are "fighting to the death for a place to live" will help zero of them. Because even if you gave the housing for near free, there are zero local jobs and zero local public transportation options to jobs, or even to groceries (nearest is 15min+ drive away). So, they'd need to jump up to meet the expenses of a two-car household, with car payments, insurance, maintenance, fuel, etc.. Plus spend hours commuting to work. Plus daycare, not cheap in the area. If you are that low-wage and have to support the automobiles and commuting, it literally costs more to get to work than you earn. You will have destroyed something of great value created over decades at vast personal expense, and helped no one.
The point is to put the housing where it makes sense. E.g., near jobs and public transport, and where it doesn't destroy open lands or literally endangered species habitat.
New York city could put plenty more housing right in Manhattan, but you don't see even the most radical pro-housing types suggesting they build over Central Park to do it.
> New York city could put plenty more housing right in Manhattan, but you don't see even the most radical pro-housing types suggesting they build over Central Park to do it.
Central Park acts as counterweight to the very dense urban area of Manhattan, which doesn't have that much place for building anew. Your merry walled garden doesn't have that excuse.
In fact it does have exactly the same reason for being. Stop arguing non-facts, and microscopic context. There is no walled garden, or gated community of come imagined tycoons here (I'm sure there are elsewhere, but not where I'm talking about).
The town I'm talking about is well outside the city, but also one of the closer ones that actually has habitat, and in particular habitat for endangered species. It is EXACTLY this kind of preservation (and in fact, much larger zoning) that is needed to serve as a counterweight for high-density development.
I'm all for wherever it is already dense enough to basically exclude natural habitats, increase the density. But wherever it is sparse enough to have maintained natural habitat, decrease the density, not increase it.
You evidently have not noticed we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event, the previous one being the Cretaceous (~65 million years ago) asteroid impact catastrophe, and this one being entirely human-caused.
Simply encouraging blanket urban/suburban sprawl will only exacerbate that catastrophe. Which would be particularly tragic, since the need is entirely temporary, as birthrates are declining and the problem will be the opposite in a few decades as population declines (and already is in many countries), but the endangered species will already have been killed off never to return.
Personally, I paid substantially higher cost, of hard-earned money, and continue to pay taxes on a lot where 75% of it is absolutely unbuildable - I can't even cut a tree in that zone without permission. If I were greedy, the best move would be to advocate for ending zoning and environmental regs, and let me fill in the wetlands and build multiple units and subdivide. Doing that would easily yield enough money to retire wealthy in less than two years. But fortunately, there is a town where most people value the environment. It was actually hard to find, since there are many, actually MOST towns around prioritized development, because, money.
So, yes, just like Central Park, on a larger scale, this is one of the counterweights, and we pay more and incur large opportunity costs to maintain that counterweight.
Bla bla bla.
Got it. You post simplistic opinions based on overdramatized notions of things that exist only in fiction, and consistently ignore facts and never actually engage with a real situation or reasoning that might change your opinion. Plus a quick check of your other comments shows similar uninformed yet strong opinions, failure to provide substantive answers to questions, and even admonishing others to "grow up". Wow.
Sorry, my mistake to reply above. Have the life you deserve, but here is not the place for it.
Go back to your lair, lizard man.
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They're responding to attempted guilting. "Retirees will lose all their value they worked their whole life for" is the guilting, "actually they didn't earn shit by buying land and sitting on it" is the "not giving a damn". Your reply is literally the exact inverse of reading comprehension.
Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell. But you should not expect to profit 2, 3, 500% by waiting 20 or 30 years. Speaking from my personal experience, housing in Japan is extremely affordable and Japan is much, much better off for it compared to the hellscape that is US housing prices. And for what purpose? To reward people for already having wealth by passively giving them more of it?
> Housing should not be an investment. You should maybe be able to expect to get what you put in back out of it if you decide to sell.
You do not get to decide this. And the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment. If people pay more for a house with a nice view, they have every right to protest if someone comes along wanting to change that. It not only reduces the value of the property monetarily, it reduces the value to them that they took out a mortgage on and worked for decades to pay off.
>the people involved all had to pay money, so presumably it was someone's investment
People pay money for all kinds of things that aren't investments. Ever eat at a restaurant? Ever buy a car?
I agree with parent: houses should be more like cars and less like stocks. Prices should be lower, there should be less debt-financing, and we should end the expectation that home prices will go up endlessly forever.
And in some places they are. Japan works that way - houses generally lose value over time and there is even a cultural stigma against living in a "used house" - if you can afford it the convention is to buy a house and knock it down and start fresh.
I mean the fancy thing about living in a liberal democracy is that they do get to decide this in a limited sense. They get to have an opinion, advocate for it, and if they can convince people through the political process they do get to determine the outcome!
To actually advocate for their position: the US housing market isn't the consequence of natural market forces; it is the consequence of government intervention in the market to force a specific outcome. Housing prices have been rising as a percentage of average income for a long time. That cannot continue forever, so it won't, there will be a breaking point eventually (arguably we're just about at that point which is why it's become a political hot topic). We can choose policies to gracefully reduce prices over time or we can just let prices climb and the housing situation become ever more acute as it becomes increasingly difficult to people to own homes.
Housing prices going down will undoubtedly disadvantage people who made homes their primary investment vehicle. Though those people also just an investment path was dependent on the government creating artificial scarcity combined with interference in the loan market to keep the ship afloat. It will undoubtedly hurt. But it also hurts right now for individuals who did not choose the current set of regulations and suffer under the fruit such regulations have born (sky high prices, a lack of starter homes, etc.) The current housing situation is one without easy answers. It is a crises of our own making, but now that we're in it we will have to rip off the band-aid or just let the wound fester till it's something even worse.
If you think Boomers are going to allow housing prices to go down while they are trying to retire - and it’s their primary asset - you’re delusional.
Everything up to and including murder is likely on the table, hah.
You don't get to decide it either. It's decided via politics. But you started the thread by being annoyed with people doing politics. You need to pick a lane.
In my experience, people call it ‘politics’ when it isn’t working for them or is frustrating, ‘the rules’ otherwise. Depending on the day, they might randomly be flipping back and forth.
"I am advocating for Thing and that's Good and Not Politics, but you are advocating for Other-Thing and that's Bad because it is Politics."
When you buy a property you buy a property, not a view. Check the deed for the property you bought; the view won’t be listed on the legal docs. The view is an externality. If you are lucky enough to have a view across someone else’s property, lucky you. Having had a free benefit does not mean that other people’s right to their own property should be restricted to maintain access to a positive externality for you. In other words, if someone else can build something that blocks your view, it wasn’t your view, you were just lucky enough to be able to have access to someone else’s view for a while.
If you want to maintain the view, you should pay the cost of that, whether that is buying the property that the view crosses, or compensating that other property owner for the loss of use of their property.
Using regulatory means to shortcut other peoples property rights is - in my opinion - horseshit. It also sets a dangerous precedent to regulate out the ability to change. It’s all fun and games until someone out maneuvers you at a city council meeting and now you can’t build a carport without hiring a lawyer and 6 months of hearings (real story, had to do this because our house was old enough to be considered historic. For context the carport was being put in an alley next to a dumpster and a cinder block apartment building. No historic element was involved)
Not from what I’ve seen. This seems like fantasy cope.
They’re responding to markets locking up. And changes in actual laws, being forced through by shifting demographics allowing actual shifts in voting power - and hence changes in actual laws.
Not guilting.
Upzoning a neighborhood typically increases the value of the land, so that straw -man owner would benefit from it when/if they decide to sell their place.
I don't know how you can say it's a straw-man argument when you qualify the the statement as "typically" increases the value of the land... that indicates you KNOW at least occasionally it doesn't increase and instead decreases, and if it's a real possibility (even if the % is low - 10-15%) then it's not a straw-man argument to be concerned about it, it becomes something that should be risk weighted and explained to mitigate the concern.
It's really funny to try to frame land value appreciation as a return on labor.
Sounds like 19th century landowners
Yeah we're literally just rehashing all the same debates.
It's a return on the result of trying to cram too many people into one place, and/or zoning issues that prevent increase of housing supply.
Why would you tax people for those things? They didn't do them.
Why wouldn't you?
Also, you didn't reply to what I wrote, which is that it's funny that you were trying to convince us that land value appreciation is a return to labor. I'm guessing you ditched that because it's obvious how silly it is.
The problem with having everyone rely on gains from home appreciation is that it doesn’t continue to work over time.
Yesterday’s home appreciation is today’s price increase for new home buyers. In most places in the US, home prices have far outpaced inflation for several decades now.
It seems silly to even be arguing about whether or not it’s deserved when we already know that it’s not remotely sustainable.
Why should someone who is almost dead care about the current and future value of their house? Why should someone who is almost dead care about what their neighborhood looks like after they're gone? There some sort of mental illness where these people think they're going to live forever.
> Why should someone who is almost dead care about what their neighborhood looks like after they're gone?
It might be unfamiliar, but people care about their neighbours and family, and passing on a good place to others to raise their families there in future.
Zero evidence that upzoning decreases property values btw
> But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.
General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.
But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.
> But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time.
Especially since these days it is entirely unclear whether a given keyboard warrior is actually a human being at all.
Or if they are in the same political district or even country.
Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.
I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.
> think bridges being forcibly closed for causes
Has irritating the Average Joe ever resulted in political support from Joe? I can't help but think that these guys sitting in front of traffic, forcing normal people to be late for work, are just doing damage to their own causes, in hopes of just getting some "visibility" to those causes. Yea, it's visible now--visible as something annoying and ultimately counterproductive.
Parent is not claiming that protesters generally gain support for their own cause. Parent claims that protests shift the Overton Window such that more reasonable stances can fall within and gain support.
Yes. Thank you. And actually, when you have a non-politically charged conversation offline with some of the political operatives that cause these bridge shutdowns, they will admit that this is their goal as well. They know it's ragebait, but bait nonetheless.
It’s a terrible idea and I believe a substantial portion of the world’s polarization issues stem from this “overton window” nonsense.
How are you ever going to find common ground if everybody who cares deeply about an issue constantly makes the moet extreme version of their argument?
Bold of you to assume extreme version arguments are by people who legitimately care, and not in many cases griefers, rage baiters, etc.
Either way, the shift in day to day to day stances is apparent on many topics.
Those are the same argument. The idea that “I’m the moderate and if you don’t vote for my position, you’ll get the extremist” is a form of blackmail.
Not quite - that’s if you believe the moderates control the extremists. If they don’t, it’s more like “I’m the extremist and I am currently so unhappy I will do this. What will you do to make me less unhappy?”
This doesn’t seem to follow? No “control” is needed, a quid quo pro is more than sufficient.
Control/coordination
Famously sit ins and marches across public streets and bridges did some work for the civil rights movement, but they were certainly not popular with the locals either.
Doing a little looking around about why some of those worked, and so few have since, was interesting to me.
Length, economic impact, cold war politics, regional vs national opinions, how actors reacted (sometimes violently), the way information propagated at the time… an interesting confluence of events.
> they were certainly not popular with the locals either.
No, but the cause was popular enough with broader electorate.
They largely weren’t for the locals. The biggest wins were from deliberately provoking extremists who foolishly allowed nationwide pictures of dogs and water cannons being used to attack children, which attracted attention from people elsewhere.
On principle I usually vote against anyone who harms me, my life, or my family’s life. I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective. We’re all aware of the phenomenon now. You’re just being an asshole and throwing a tantrum because people aren’t voting like you want them to.
I'm not sure I understand what work "on principle" is doing in this sentence.
What's the difference between voting against anyone who acts against your interests "on principle", and voting against anyone who acts against your interests "out of self-interest"?
(I am not suggesting that you shouldn't vote self-interestedly; arguably democracy works best when everyone does.)
Assuming I understand your question, I vote for people I would not have otherwise voted for merely to spite the people who have harmed me in some way. It's petty but it makes me feel like I have reclaimed some agency against said aggressors.
The phrase “cutting your nose off to spite your face” springs to mind.
or the phrase lesser of two evils...
Candidate A - will do X, Y, Z all in ways I think are the best Candidate B - will do A, B, C which I prefer less than X, Y, Z but in the grand scheme likely impact my day to day life little. Candidate A - also supports (or is supported by) people / movements that actively make my life harder and piss me off.
That's not cutting off my nose that's deciding I can live with a less optimal solution to some problems to avoid something that pisses me off massively from growing more powerful
>I’ve never accepted the claims that people who hold up traffic to “raise awareness” for global warming were effective
Martin Luther King wrote an essay about people with this exact attitude called "the racism of the polite liberal"
There were obviously just as many people back then who thought his type of activism - e.g. blocking a freeway would never achieve any of his goals. They thought it was just annoying, even though it was successful.
I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society, and not because it was morally right. The implications of this claim are frightening, and can be used to justify all manner of violence for any and all political causes. Should someone wish to restrict abortion rights, they just need to sufficiently terrorise the nation to the degree that they get their way? I strongly disagree that that is how laws and rights work in a democracy.
I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.
What is morally right is a matter of public consensus, not a self-evident fact to those outside that moral context. Law is the expression of morality at a societal level. How do you propose changing the societal expression of the public consensus without making a nuisance of yourself?
The same way all progress is made in a democracy: dialogue. Violence and domination has been frequently used throughout history, but we no longer solve our differences that way. At least, I don’t want to live in such a society.
I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.
> I don’t want to live in such a society.
You kind of already do, but kind of don’t. Coercive politics still rule, but countries with strong civil liberties protections allow less harmful forms of coercion. Under strongman rule, coercion looks like the threat of murder. Under a liberal democracy, coercion looks like blocking traffic. That’s a big improvement.
Positive incentives (bribery and upside) also play a role opposite coercion. But “dialogue” absent self interested or dominance-oriented goals is a much less significant influence—unless you loosen the definition of dialogue to include things like “I convince you that it’s in your interests to vote for X so that protestors stop blocking traffic”, at which point there’s no distinction between the concepts.
> I don’t think dialogue has ever been the principal motivator for social change.
You cannot divorce dialogue from change in sentiments among the public. It spreads for a reason.
For instance, we've entered a period of populist hysteria with both left/right variants.
I don't think any significant social change has been bought about by people asking nicely. Votes for women, anti racism, worker's rights, land rights - all hard fought for.
What a shallow understanding of history. Men didn’t vote to give women the right to vote because women waged war on men. It was a centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650.
I don’t subscribe to your belief that politics and society requires power and domination. I suggest you look to nations and cultures which follow such beliefs to see how well that turns out.
If their take was shallow yours is revisionist to the point it's ahistorical.
Choosing to focus on the "centuries-long process of cultural and educational and social progress beginning in the Enlightenment in 1650" but then ignoring that the suffragettes were bombing buildings within the decade they got the vote, do you not think you're laying your own narrative on a little too thick?
I agree. Look at the swing from opposing gay marriage to supporting it. It went from mostly opposed to mostly supporting it in ten years. Obama went from opposing to supporting it during his presidential term.
And it wasn't violence or obnoxious protests that changed people's minds. In large part, they just saw it, talked about it, experienced it, and became ok with it. Mostly because the culture had advanced to a point where the discussion could be had.
How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago? How can you make them understand what you live when there is a legal policy of separation between you? I don't think you really understand what segregation and racism being accepted facts of society ("morally right" in the views of many whites at the time) or lynching being not an unheard-of barbaric act but a form of popular vigilantism punishing any kind of "miscegenation" or "uppity" attitudes really means. The fact that the civil rights movement was largely peaceful was a marvel when you look at the actual facts of the time, because the oppression of non-whites and retribution activists faced was certainly not peaceful.
> How do you convince white people to have a dialogue with you when you're black in the highly segregated and extremely racist society we had 60 years ago?
The vast majority of black and white people had reasonable dialogue all over the U.S. in the 60s. There were obviously places where racism prevailed to greater degrees, and I think the record reflects that dialogue was less successful there. Which is why they were forced at the federal level to desegregate. The reason that the laws were passed at the federal level was dialogue. Outreach, lobbying, fliers, marketing, campaigning. All the things which make democracy great.
Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.
> Remember that the reason the Civil and Voting Rights Act(s) (and their amendments) passed in the 60s was because white people - the major and predominant voting bloc - believed they were morally right. Black people didn't terrorise white people isn't submission. That would have backfired spectacularly.
Civil disobedience is not terrorism. Conflating the two is highly problematic. Civil disobedience was a large part of the reason white people changed their views. Without courageous blacks standing up and protesting and making themselves heard and seen in public, most white people wouldn't have cared. The government and other influential groups tried to suppress the movement until they couldn't anymore, and then they caved. Acting as if they did so at the first moment because everybody recognized the moral correctness of equality is totally ahistorical and a whitewashing of history.
"Terrorised" and "terrorism" have different definitions. I'm disappointed that you would attempt to conflate the two in an attempt to refute an argument I didn't make.
If you believe that black people harming white people - whether by the use of force, preventing free movement, or any aphorism you would like to use - was a "large part of the reason white people changed their views" then I would like to see evidence of that. Force works in dictatorships but I don't think it's effective in democracies. Why would someone vote for a person who has materially harmed them or made their lives worse? Surely that would make it less likely to win a vote.
Civil rights wasn't decided by plebiscite - it was decided by elected representatives. They saw huge crowds gathering in support, tremendous amounts of dialogue about what and how and why activists and government were doing. The activists made some people temporarily angry by blocking traffic or violating their ideas about proper societal organization, but the TV and newspaper coverage reached many more and managed to convince enough of them speak up that the representatives went along with it. Of course dialogue was a huge part of this, but that dialogue wouldn't have existed on the same scale or been nearly as effective in bringing change if activists hadn't caused a big fuss in the first place.
If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation. The same principle is at play in most political movements. To get people to care, you have to make them pay attention first! You have to make them outraged, make them react, make them think, make them do something. When representatives see people in a furor they know they have to take a side, and usually the side that makes more noise wins.
The US itself was founded like this - the Boston Tea Party is one of the most famous acts of civil disobedience in history. Our electoral system is a process of continual revolution, continual change and upheaval. This process is necessarily just as messy and ugly as our own society. The fact that even in the very ugly and full-of-contradictions pre-Civil Rights era USA we could have a revolution with relatively little loss of life and mostly minor disruptions to the lives of people should be celebrated rather than bemoaned. Look at what it took to be rid of monarchy and slavery and see that the way we overcame/are still overcoming segregation and racial bias shows vast improvements and gives hope for even more civil revolutions in the future.
Lest you forget, the people vote for the representatives. There were 18 different consequential national elections between 1955 and 1968, in which every single member of the House, Senate, and Presidency were up for election multiple times. To characterise this as legislative activism is outrageous and without any historical corroboration. The vast majority of voters were not harmed by black people. They voted for change because they believed it to be moral, not because they saw black people harming white people on the news. I asked you to substantiate your claim and given this response it seems clear you know that you cannot.
> If a child is bullied at school and suffers in silence, chances are they will continue being bullied. If they fight back or make a scene, a teacher is far more likely to take notice and possibly be convinced to correct the situation.
This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.
> The US itself was founded like this...
I'm not sure if you understand the implication of invoking the founding of the nation as a cultural pillar for future change. At this time slavery was moral and legal. Women couldn't vote. They were effectively property. It seems you're being selective about one aspect of the past to justify a vision for the future in which force is required for change.
Do you believe that it is moral and just for anti-migrant protestors to use force against you? Or is it just the things you personally care about where force is acceptable? I think we both know the answer to that question. This is why in a democracy we give everyone one vote, and we require them to follow the law. That means not using force to coerce others. If you were to succeed in your vision for society, you'd have to accept that others would use force against you for their aims, and you'd be a hypocrite to condemn it.
> This is not how it works in most parts of the Western world anymore. The child who is being bullied reports the bully and the authorities (usually a teacher or other faculty) address the issue with various forms of remediation. I feel sorry for you if this was your experience at school. It sounds awful.
It's very hard to take your opinions as sincere and earnest when you're in one comment selectively pruning hundreds of years of history to make your point and then pretending that bullying is a solved problem to make your point in another. Just a reminder that we're living in the realm of rising teenage suicide rates, much of that rooted in the trauma caused by bullying.
If nothing else I'd call on you to be kinder to the people you're responding to, who put in the effort when you're clearly not doing the same.
>I find it fascinating when people make the argument that the reason the civil rights movement succeeded was the harm done to society,
I find it fascinating that what Martin Luther King described as the "polite liberal racist" who moaned about blocking a freeway is still alive and well.
>I believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right
No, it worked because of Martin Luther King's nonviolent protest tactics - the ones which you described as terrorism.
I don’t subscribe to your violent retelling of MLK. He spoke at length on countless occasions of using words, not violence to affect social change.
There is no violent retelling.
Your choice to depict blocking a freeway as "violence" doesnt make it so, it simply puts you in the camp of liberals he criticised for indirectly supporting the racist status quo.
Using force to prevent people going to work, or seeing their family, or getting to hospital, is wrong. Especially if the goal is to coerce people. If I came to your house and physically prevented you from leaving I doubt you’d be making equivocations. Whether you want to call it violence, force, or any other fluffy euphemism, I do not subscribe to your vision for society or your retelling of MLK.
"Roadworks and heavy traffic are violence"
This comment doesn’t respond to anything and adds nothing helpful. I flagged it
Thats your right of course, although the parallels to MLK's essay about the backlash he faced for holding up traffic are still precisely applicable here no matter how upsetting you may find that.
That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
Do you think people just naturally become more aware of immoral things? Even if you assume better education is the single reason, that's something that's very much not a given, and is in fact constantly being attacked by people who benefit from it not being guaranteed.
When you're fighting against billionaires who want to act against your best interest, do you believe you just need to appeal to people's morality and it's an easy win? Sorry to say it doesn't work like that, though it'd be wonderful if it did. People's minds are swayed easier by financial interests than they are by moral value. That's the impact of a capitalist system allowing levels of inequality putting even people's livelihood in danger.
Status quo is much easier to defend than it is to disrupt, regardless of how immoral it is in the first place. And disruption needs drastic measures to be successful when fighting an asymmetrical war of resources.
> That's incredibly naïve. If being morally right was all it took, slavery would not have been a thing in the first place.
I think this is incredibly naive. Morality isn’t objective. It changes and adapts and grows. It is the product of culture and religion and circumstance. Values can deviate markedly between people in a single family, let alone within a nation and between nations.
Slavery used to be considered moral in the West. Then some time in 1833, the British people voted to end it across all colonies. Not because slaves terrorised British citizens into acquiescence, but because literature and education and culture had advanced, and the British no longer believed that people should be enslaved.
I’m sorry, I simply do not subscribe to your vision for society of might making right. That is the domain of dictators and despots, not democracies.
That sounds like a strawman. What you're arguing against is not how I read the parent
I don’t think you read the comments above before you replied. They argue for “disruption” and “drastic measures.” Do you think they’re talking about a dance troupe?
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Success of protests and grassroots movements does not scale with harm/annoyance to society. If that were true you'd just have to be as annoying and hostile as possible to win, which would have been sussed out a long time ago.
The predictor is public moral sentiment, and maximizing exposure to an issue people would be sympathetic to.
Blocking traffic "for climate awareness" does not engender sympathy. People think themselves "aware" that climate is an issue, but aren't on board with perverse degrowth solutions.
Local politics are very different, especially in responsiveness, to state and national politics.
as a general case yes, people like things more the more times they hear about them.
trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.
visibility correlates positively with likeability
> trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.
And I remember when just yelling on stage got you disqualified from running for president (Dean scream)
Now, you can chant fascist rhetoric on campaign, and the MAGAts eat it up.
How times and decorum change.
The left is held to a much higher standard than the right in the US. By both sides.
Trump was a convicted sexual molester when last elected. Senator Franken was asked to leave office by his own party for a decades-old (tasteless) joke-photo.
This titanic difference in standards helps enables people to pretend "BSAB".
If there's one thing that is universally hated left, right, and center, it's traffic.
Agree with NIMBY's that a lot of constructions are a blight. Propose to demolish their own house, as you believe its a blight upon the place. They should agree to it after all and be proactive about it given how earnestly they believe in keeping the locality pretty.
People buy a house with an implicit expectation that zoning regulations and building code will be relatively stable. Even if those laws are unnecessarily restrictive or nonsensical, I don’t think the NIMBYs are crazy for being upset about changes to those laws that will lower their property values. They may even want to change them but the fact of the matter is they have a financial incentive to protect the value of their property.
Implicit but unreasonable.
Successful areas change: you get a few people, then you need a store, then you get more people and all of sudden there's nowhere to walk, so you make a park and some avenues, then people like those and move in, then you need a school and a hardware store and a power plant even if the OGs were homeschoolers with donkey power and hate your guts.
Don't like it? Hold on to the land.
Dire Straits' Telegraph Road is a good documentary on the subject.
It isn't clear that upzoning reduces property values, as it increases the potential productivity of a given parcel of land.
People have all sorts of unreasonable expectations and we are not obliged to honor them.
Upzoning increases property values, because the increased flexibility for development makes the land more valuable.
Plenty of ideas have shifted public opinion because people argued for them in good faith. But performative extremism doesn't automatically insert ideas into the Overton window.
The best reading of the literature is that radicals can make moderates look reasonable but reduce overall support for their cause. See these recent papers for the research:
- "Radical flanks of social movements can increase support for moderate factions": Simpson, Willer & Feinberg 2022, https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/1/3/pgac110/66336...
- "Extreme Protest Tactics Reduce Popular Support for Social Movements": Feinberg, Willer & Kovacheff 2017, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2911177 (this is the working paper, since the published piece is paywalled)
I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.
That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.
the movement against SFH zoning is not about destroying single family zoned neighborhoods, it’s about not forcing every lot to require a SFH. i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read, but SFH zoning itself is more of a taking. people who want to live in a single-family-only neighborhood should find a spot on the edge of town where development pressure is low, not weaponize land use regulations to make it illegal to build what the market wants near jobs and amenities.
and while an LVT doesn’t really care about zoning, depending on how close to a city center your SFH is, a well calibrated LVT might dramatically increase your overall tax burden even if you dropped all other taxes. SFH zoning is manufactured scarcity; LVT prices scarcity correctly, and there’s no upper bound on that value, especially since land taxes become divorced from income.
>> i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read
I should have clarified that. I meant it in the context of Georgism. The concept of Georgism was manifestly against the government actually redistributing owned land; instead, landlords would divest themselves of the land if the only utility they got from it was rent. What Georgism says you're paying for when you pay LVT on the land you own is the exclusive right to private use of that land, which comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't "own" (or essentially, lease) the right to live on it or build on it.
Georgism distinguished between ownership by individuals for productive use and ownership by either (a) individuals for rent-seeking or (b) governments as stewards.
You may be right about LVT pricing scarcity where I live winding up higher than my current tax basis, but even that would make sense since I have to earn a lot and therefore pay inordinate income tax to have the ability to live in a single family home near to a city center already. If where I lived were less important to me, under Georgism, I could simply move to the burbs. But there is a funny corrolary to that which Georgism seems to intuitively grasp and which is orthogonal to the argument between manufactured scarcity and progressive housing policies. (And maybe this is a gap in Georgism's argument):
I live in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. Along all our east-west avenues there are tons of Amazon boxes (what we call studio / one bedroom 4-6 story cheaply constructed wooden apartments with a patina of modern amenity). And tons of local businesses. Between the major arteries it's almost all single family homes. This makes it one of the last cities in America where you can live in a SFH within walking distance of everything, including downtown. Street parking is still free here, and a lot of people don't need a car at all. I live in an SFH within two blocks of apartments where the waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers live who work at the businesses on the avenues. It's truly mixed use. However, they've now rewritten the zoning law to allow tearing down houses as small as mine (1200 sqft) and replacing them with 4-plexes. The problem with the Amazon boxes is that they don't provide room for families. No one is building 3 bedroom apartments with a yard where you can raise your kids in the city. My Dad grew up in a shared row house in Baltimore. No one's building that.
Which gets to the heart of the matter, which is that a major reason that this city and this area are so desirable is precisely because those SFHs exist between all the major streets. The spending value (and social value) of the essentially middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center is widely overlooked by people campaigning to eliminate SFH zoning; but without those people, you end up with neighborhoods where everyone is under 30 and relatively transient, without much money to spend in the local economy or any deep ties to the place. The apartments decay, and most of the work reasons for living there disappear.
Eliminating SFH zoning is an opinionated, political form of slow redistribution that preferences a certain age group and a certain socioenconomic position over others. It reduces actual diversity, and produces monocultural places like Seattle and Santa Monica where only the very rich can raise a family in town, and everyone else is a young renter.
And here's the kicker where Georgism may be right: In the end, eliminating SFH zoning only redistributes property from individuals and families (like me) to corporate landlords.
i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.
i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.
if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.
also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.
I think we largely agree on the fact that SFHs should not be the only option for young families or empty nesters or aging couples. (As an aside, all of the above live in SFHs on my block, as well as young single renters in their 20s who share SFHs as roommates). I brought up Baltimore rowhouses for that reason. My Mom grew up in a duplex in LA with a backyard... my brother is raising his own kids in almost an exact copy of that duplex.
I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of new construction of that type coming from broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum. Maybe uou could elaborate. The upper end of the spectrum in Portland is... almost everyone with money moves to either the oldest exclusive homes in one of two very non-diverse neighborhoods (Laurelhurst or the West Hills), or else they move to the exurbs and build McMansions out in the farmland. Neither is really actively engaged in a community beyond a homeowner's association, and neither is walkable or a place where people of different economic and cultural backgrounds get to interact for everyone's benefit.
So maybe what I'm trying to say is that the high upper end (homes over $1M, let's say), is going to remove itself anyway, and that yes there should be more construction of 2-4-plexes which are not Amazon boxes... but there seems to be no incentive to build those things, and I don't even know how you could do so on a 1200 sqft lot.
In the interim, Portland has eased lots of rules on the use of ADUs and trailers in backyards and even yurts. I bought my home for $450k and the range in the area goes up to $800. This tells you that what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard.
But I do feel like the crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class, anti-family quality to it... and what I mean to say is that it is the working middle class families in the upper end of housing on those avenues who anchor those blocks and keep the neighborhoods livable and loved and who keep the businesses in business. I've seen what's happened to such inner city SFH neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it turns into somewhere that no one would want to live if they didn't have to, with no community or neighborhood to speak of. Row houses and shared brownstones in East Coast cities have fared slightly better as an attractive living pattern.
Ultimately too, your argument is that not everyone should live where they live, because more people want to live in that spot, so if they want space they should move to the suburbs. My argument is that not everyone can afford to live exactly where they want, either way, but that doesn't logically imply that you should increase density as much as possible in a mixed and vibrant neighborhood just because people want to live there. At a certain point it will lose the very thing that makes people want to live there in the first place. Not even to get into the fact that no one actually works downtown anymore or commutes away from the neighborhood, so this is purely a choice for most people.
You still didn't address my point that every SFH torn down for a 4-plex just redistributes individual middle class ownership to financial corporations.
Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.
> what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard
If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.
> crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class
To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.
I think this all depends on what time and place you're living in.
I'm definitely living in a very weird bubble in eastern Portland. It was a working-class, blue collar town of single-family homes. It was colonized in two separate waves, in the 90s and in the 2020s, by people who couldn't afford rents or homes in city areas of San Francisco or Seattle. But it never really took off economically as an international city, and it's still stagnant, and much more reminiscent of Seattle in the 1980s.
There's a lot to like about that pattern, and under Georgism it would make lots of sense for people to move here because the land value close to downtown isn't really that great. Or to move to Cincinnati, or Lexington, or Des Moines. If all people had to pay was fair rent on the land, new local communities and diverse downtown areas would be springing up all over America.
Not everywhere that people rush into and want to live because it was shown on the Real World needs to instantly resemble the same monocultural sort of housing that a big city like Los Angeles or Seattle has had to adopt.
Moreover, there's nothing inherently immoral about retaining the shape of a city when more people move into it; presumably, they are moving there because they like the city.
When I see working people being priced out of Seattle or LA, they're being priced out by financial groups and offshore investors, with the help of local boards that allow homes to be torn down and replaced with half-empty investment apartment blocks... destroying the very thing they're investing in.
We may be clinging on as homeowners and holding to a way of life that is incompatible with the kind of colonization other cities experienced, but: We take care of our parks. We know each other. I can't go 4, or 8 or 12 blocks that I don't see people I know. Up in the Amazon boxes, we meet the people who come for a year and go.
What equity is there for us in the plan to remove single family zoning? Not even as a parable:
10 miles west of Portland, Intel built a giant facility, and there is a commuter train stop out there which has Amazon boxes for miles around it. But no SFHs in their new construction, nor anything that would be attractive to anyone over the age of 29.
Why should I move out there and they move here, when in reality, that wouldn't even exist without the ancient core of SFHs that defines the character of the city they ostensibly want to live in?
The problem I have with your line of thinking is that it basically seems like the main reason you like your SFH neighborhood is that it's right next to one that's not SFH; if you were surrounded by multiple layers of SFH, you'd lose the ability to have the nearby businesses staffed people you're describing as not living in that type of zoning. It's not clear that the non-SFH home neighborhood with all of the businesses near you gets anywhere close to as much benefit from the proximity to your neighborhood (the closest thing to this I can find is that you mention you have well-maintained parks, but it's not clear why you think that this couldn't exist in a large cluster of non-SFH neighborhoods as well; I've lived within a few blocks of very large, well-maintained parks in separate neighborhoods where there were no SFH neighborhoods anywhere close by).
Combined with some kind of odd ways is describing things (cities being "colonized" in recent decades, people moving to LA because it was on The Real World, as if there hasn't been close to a century of tropes of people moving to Hollywood to pursue show business, implication that eliminating SFH zoning requires you to "move out" when it certainly does not require any individual homeowners to do anything different than what they're already doing), it's hard not to get the impression that you're basically trying to argue in favor of NIMBY without actually saying it.
An aside - I was talking about the wave of mostly white, young, single, affluent people colonizing and gentrifying Portland, not LA. The Amazon boxes are a form of gentrification that push out existing homeowners. Portland's historically Black neighborhood of Albina was a thriving mix of SFHs and medium density. Now those houses are torn down and it's a wall of condos and apartments that all look the same, each with a sushi restaurant or an organic market.
You're right, it is that there is denser zoning in close proximity that makes us want to live where we do, and makes it walkable. Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals. I also don't want to live in the only SFH surrounded by condos. I think your point is that the SFHs don't contribute anything to the mixture, and are somehow parasitic on the higher density zones. I think that's not true. Both sides of the mix are important. It gives the neighborhood a character that doesn't exist in most American cities, which is: People of different backgrounds sit together outside cafes and talk. On any given day we hang out with other homeowners, their kids, young professionals, and also people who work in the service industry who live in the neighborhood and go to the same places they work on their days off. We go to concerts with them, they come over when we BBQ and hang out at our house.
My argument is that this arrangement is much better for society as a whole, and for individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum, than a division between all-SFH suburbia and all high-density inner city. Especially now that most people don't commute to an office, and most of the commuting is done by wage workers who have to commute out to the suburbs to work in a strip mall. The homeowners close to downtown provide an economic base for higher-end local businesses that renters would not be able to support. The people who work in those businesses earn enough to rent in the neighborhood where they work. With all high-density, families are essentially exiled to the burbs, there is little to no socializing between economic classes, and everyone has to commute.
Sure, re-zoning doesn't affect individual homeowners immediately, but the endpoint or goal of it is to ultimately get rid of SFHs in inner areas, not to leave a healthy mixture standing. That's what I see as the problem. And I think it's a politically motivated goal based on the idea that no one should really own a SFH (or if they do, as one poster put it, they can move somewhere far away from the city).
I've lived or spent significant time in a bunch of places around the US - rural NJ, suburban NJ, NYC, Philly, Orlando exurbs, San Diego, San Francisco, South Bay, and I now live in inner SE Portland. And I agree with you that there is something really special about it.
In some ways it's similar to the tourism or gentrification problem - the very things that make a place desirable lead to the destruction of those things. Some people view the world through a purely economic lens and treat individual people as abstracted production/consumption units. And unfortunately there's no real way to put a dollar value on "all the neighbors know each other and help each other out". And even if you could - you can't just BUY your way into that, no matter how much money you have! The only way to unlock that value is to live there and engage with the community. Obviously there will be turnover but what some people don't seem to grasp is that there is a tipping point, where enough newcomers overwhelm the "old timers" and destroy the culture of a place. And think about the game theory of it from the point of view of a resident - why invest time and resources in a community if you're just going to leave in a year or two? Or if the beneficiaries are future random people who are not going to give a shit about the community?
Nice to hear from a fellow Portlander who feels the same way! And your explanation is clearer than what I tried to describe as "character". There are a lot of people here of course who do just view residents as economic units, but there's just as much resistance.
"you can't just buy your way into that" is a great insight.
> Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here at all. If you're trying to argue against some sort of development or planning change that doesn't change anything about your own property due for reasons that are purely about how it would affect you personally, that seems like NIMBY to me. The fact that you happen to not be arguing for universal SFH doesn't somehow make it not NIMBY.
Independent of that, I don't really find the rest of what you're saying compelling. You're arguing against a change to eliminate something with concrete, known problems on the basis of wanting to preserve "character". I still maintain that this is indistinguishable from any NIMBY argument.
This comment makes me wonder: is the actual issue perhaps not so much the single part of SFH but the family part?
I can imagine a sensible zoning rule requiring an appropriate fraction of housing units to have 2+ bedrooms and another fraction to have 3+. (There is no particular reason that a multi bedroom unit needs to house a family. Plenty of 20-somethings are happy to have housemates.)
Due in part to suboptimal fire codes, the US has trouble building nice multi-unit buildings with 2+-bedroom units. Other countries manage just fine.
What is the median price of one of these SFH in this neighborhood? I doubt very much that "middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center" is an accurate assessment here. This is a housing policy that allows the most valuable land for high density housing to be monopolized by a small cohort of rich people who have enough money to afford both the convenience of proximity to downtown and also the luxury of a whole house + yard to themselves, probably making up less than 1% of the metro area population.
That's really not the case. Which is why I'm saying that inner SE and NE Portland are very unique in their walkability, zoning pattern and the resulting social effects for an American city.
Prices have risen in the past 10 years, but the median SFH in Portland sits at around $550k. 54% of the housing stock in Portland is SFH.[0]
The 1% don't live in the city, they live in Lake Oswego and other suburbs where the average SFHs are twice as large (at least).
[0] https://www.portland.gov/phb/documents/2024-state-housing-po...
> That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.
Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
> Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?
Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?
And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?
Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable
I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.
And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.
Real property is a bundle of rights in land and its fixtures – that's the standard definition in academic legal theory
If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.
Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.
[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments
Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
> Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?
I'm not saying I oppose abolishing either racially restrictive covenants or single family zoning. On the contrary, I support the abolition of the former, and am open-minded about the abolition of the latter.
What I'm opposing is particular arguments to those conclusions – what one might call libertarian(-adjacent) arguments – not the conclusions themselves.
I think, a legal right to racially homogenous neighbours is a property right, and taking it away was an expropriation of property – but an expropriation I support. And I don't think one is always owed compensation for such expropriations either. Legally speaking, not all "regulatory takings" are entitled to compensation; and I'm unconvinced the answer is different if we look at that question through a moral lens rather than a legal one.
Was it ever an explicitly legal right, or just one that hadn't been explicitly illegal? I don't know offhand if there was any prior legal ruling that this sort of thing was legal or if it was just something that in practice the government never did anything about before 1968. I feel like there's a difference between a legal status quo and a legal right, and it's not clear to me that this was ever a right (although maybe you're aware of a specific case or something I'm not)
The US Supreme Court upheld racially restrictive covenants in the 1926 case Corrigan v. Buckley; they then overturned that decision in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer.
So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.
Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
I guess I shouldn't be surprised that for any given form of racial discrimination, there was some point in US history where a court directly ruled that it was legal.
> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.
Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).
To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.
I think racially restrictive covenants were originally legal basically everywhere; but only in the US, Canada and South Africa did they become common.
Under English real estate law, while there are some constraints on your ability to make covenants, the rules are quite broad. A century ago, racial discrimination wasn't illegal or clearly contrary to public policy in most common law jurisdictions – indeed, many of them had explicitly racially discriminatory laws on the statute book – so racially restrictive covenants weren't obviously disallowed. The US, with its constitutional prohibition on discrimination in the 14th Amendment, was actually the only common law country in which there was a decent argument they weren't legal – but SCOTUS rejected that argument at first, then changed its mind over 20 years later. In the 1945 case Re Drummond Wren, the Ontario High Court ruled them illegal – but it cited the just signed United Nations Charter as grounds for doing so.
I agree. And really the Supreme Court ruling that racial zoning couldn’t be enforced and was an unlawful property taking is an even more direct analogy.
Uh, no, that's not the case at this point in time. There were racist HOA compacts like that up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Pretty few people alive today have bought houses where they were given an "explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people" as you said.
I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.
This is not the case today.
Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.
The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.
The more fair reading of the parent comment is that some people bought homes prior to 1968 with racial covenants attached that were subsequently made illegal. Those homes built in that regime still exist. So we have precedent within the lifetime of the _homes_ for this sort of change.
Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/32c7a747127e46dda11...
Within my lifetime, the municipality in which I live enacted policies (historic preservation and racial steering of apartments) specifically to limit the number of Black families that moved in. The preservation-based restrictionism continued into the 1980s (and, of course, remains in force today); the steering into the late 1990s. Our Fair Housing Ordinance included an escape clause allowing our board to resegregate specific blocks, and just a year or two before I was born, they used it.
This is not ancient history.
Aside from everything else you missed, plenty of people today live in the houses their parents or previous generations bought before 1968.
I think you’re missing the point. It’s not you gaining more freedom with the land that’s the problem. It’s that all your neighbors now have the same freedom.
I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.
Yes but unfortunately you never paid for what rights your neighbour had, so nothing is being taken from you
No, that’s not expropriation. There’s a really important difference between a restrictive covenant on the title and a zoning regulation. The former is part of what you bought. The latter is something that happened to exist, and nothing about your purchase carried any sort of promise, express or implied, that this would continue forever.
It’s no different from buying a house with a great tree in the neighbor’s yard, and then they cut it down. Was that part of the value of the house to you? Yep. Was there a promise that it would stay there forever? Nope. Is cutting it down expropriation? Nope. Should you have assumed it would be there forever? Absolutely not.
Like, that's a clever response, but it's not describing expropriation, and you know that. Expropriation literally means taking away property, so it's not a matter of degree: It's saying we are taking your property and redistributing it.
Here's where Georgism gets clever: The initial Georgism says that land should be taxed up to the value of its land-rent. Some progressive people said, well, that means the landlord wouldn't make any money anyway, so the government should just take (expropriate) the land. George said, basically, no. Let the landlord decide if it's worth it for them to keep the freehold.
Then, there are varieties of Georgism that disagree about whether the government should be allowed to tell you anything at all about what to do with your property. Some say you should be able to do anything on it. Others say not.
When I bought my house, across from an elementary school, I knew I didn't have a right to drill oil on it, or to build a factory making solid rocket boosters and dumping perchlorates in the basement.
That's all written into the code governing the land before you buy it. The Georgist question is: If I'm paying 100% tax on this land's rent value, does that mean I get to despoil it any way I want? Or do some rules apply?
That's a separate and more nuanced question; the answer is probably that the same rules would apply as do now, but that doesn't equate with expropriation.
So IIUC your argument is that what do you do as a landholder when actually land development is forbidden/restricted because the absence of certain developments actually what provide the value ?
I have no idea what georgists would say about that. My guess is that being a the holder of such land would work as luxury/status-signal because you are only incurring the cost of the land and no/low revenues from it
It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.
It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.
> A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.
It wouldn't directly address those planning issues, but it aligns the financial incentives of the body politic between residential homeowners and the rest of the community. Normally residential homeowners have huge financial incentive to make housing scare and expensive, the LVT removes that financial gain from causing misery.
LVT is a good reform to do, but if the goal is to improve housing affordability through supply it's quite an indirect measure and occur at a glacial pace without proper planning reform.
Many areas where people want to live and where homes should be built, can sometimes have a large portion of home owners like Mosman, Bondi, Croydon or Woollahra in Sydney. A tax on the unimproved value of land just doesn't get home building started here if no one is a renter (I recall increases in rent were tied to LVT in Progress and Poverty). And if its based on valuations the valuations will again be distorted by planning controls.
If you upzone these areas for towers, the moment the first person takes the gazillion dollar offer from a developer suddenly homes get built, and suddenly everyone else want to exit. And besides if you have LV Tax their land value will got up because their land will have fewer development limitations, higher demand, etc, etc.
Georgism is cool, land tax is cool, but it's not a silver bullet.
If your goal is to make homes more affordable, reforms like the ones they did in Auckland (loosening planning controls) is the way to go. https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland
Similar thing is taking place in Austin Texas right now as well. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/0...
If your goal is to redistribute wealth Georgism is not a bad option, but again planning controls (zoning, Floor space, height limits, heritage controls, parking minimums, upper setbacks, excessive lower setbacks) can suppress the true size of the tax base.
Nobody is expropriating your land by upzoning it, they're giving you and all of your neighbours stronger property rights through the freedom to develop your land.
Denser developments are also much more fiscally productive than SFH zoning [1]. This means that cities that upzone will tend to have lower taxes, less debt, and better services in the long run.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmQomKCfYZY
I think UBI is pretty squarely a progressive issue. Maybe you're conservative for the area you live in (Cali?) but many conservatives would consider your view to be pretty extreme left.
Just dropping by to say that you're doing gods work advocating for more housing. Its exhausting seeing amount of cynicism around how the status quo just can't be changed for this or that reason, but seeing the small, incremental, advocacy over decades pro housing groups put in is really inspiring. An incredible amount of progress has been made here
My business partners will chuffed when the vote happens in October or November, whichever way it goes, because this has been siphoning a huge amount of my attention over the last year.
> The same thing is very true of public meetings; the turnout for comment at those things is almost never representative of the area's median sentiment. "No" turns out for everything; "yes" rarely does.
That’s the exact opposite of the experience I’ve had in my town.
It seems that money is the primary driver of turnout at town council meetings. I live at the top of a mountain with 1 real road and 2 smaller frequently closed roads down to the city below. Developers really want to build up here, but there’s no way to widen the road, and no realistic way to build more. There’s not enough flat land to build enough jobs, shopping, dining etc… up here, so increasing density just means more cars making the trip 30 minutes into the city.
Every single time there’s an issue about development, you get dozens of real estate agents, developers, and people who work in construction showing up because their bank account depends on it. Every local election, you have candidates bankrolled by out of town developers.
“No” is much less well organized and will only occasionally turn out in larger numbers than “Yes” despite dominating in elections.
People say the same things here, where I know them not to be true, but I don’t know anything about your municipality. I know what the social science says about this, and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in, but does occur to people who want to stop it. Your mileage obviously varies.
> and the common sense intuition that never occurs to people to turn out in favor of apartments they’re not going to live in
That ignores all the people who have other incentives to build.
Depending on the area you probably have about 10% of the people who have jobs that directly benefit from new construction (construction workers, plumbers, electricians etc…) or who are married to people who do. Then you have all the people who work or own businesses in sectors that indirectly benefit from new construction or directly benefit from increased density.
In my town of 8k people, I’ve seen 30 people from those groups show up in support of a new sub division vs half a dozen against.
I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.
Landlords are often against upzoning (and the increased competition!), but developers benefit from less red tape.
High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.
I know that not to be true in my area as well.
In CZ it is the developers who push for more density. Land prices are terrible in our big cities.
cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger, so it really depends on the market. i don’t really know any developers who actively oppose upzoning in my region, but the SFH builders I think have an easier and more lucrative job than the ones doing urban infill.
> cost per unit actually goes up as buildings get larger
Construction cost per unit goes up a little, but land cost per unit goes down a lot, because you buy the same plot of land and put N times more units on it.
Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive
It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…
And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.
A new house makes every other lower quality house cheaper by providing an alternative. What matters is the total supply of the houses as good or better as the one you want.
Assuming a perfectly efficient market sure. But in reality an expensive house next door raise the price of the cheap house next door because home prices are heavily influenced by the amount banks will loan, and appraisals are heavily influenced by nearby property values.
Plus other reasons like people want to live in good school districts and higher income areas tend to have better schools.
This is well studied, and I don't believe that's true: a luxury development _reduces_ rents in the immediate surrounding area.
Then studies aren’t conclusive.
Many studies find a small net drop in rent (1-5%). But other studies show no aggregate drop in rent. And importantly show an increase in rent for lower quality apartments.
Also for single family homes, nearby property values generally rise.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2026.2...
Both can be true. The luxury development can increase value for neighbors while making surrounding areas cheaper
Are you sure this isn't just 'turnout inertia' working in your favor? People who are relatively content with the zoning rules are probably not actively engaged on the issue. But swap them in a way that they become unhappy with (as you presumably were) and you see sharply increased turnout in the opposite direction.
Put another way, one of the historical critiques of democracy was that it ends up catering to interest groups whose interest may not align with the rest of society. At first that seems paradoxical, because a more knee-jerk critique would expect democracy to just turn into a tyranny of the majority. But the reality is that people generally don't act on things until they are sufficiently incentivized to do so. And that incentivization is often reactive in nature.
Yes, representative democracy as a system is biased more towards preventing bad outcomes (i.e. allowing the people to remove leaders that harm their interests) rather than pursuing the pareto frontier
It strikes me that there is something slightly ironic to this point that he's making. It actually is useful for him to persuade the "overly online keyboard warriors" who frequent his writing that they should be focusing on local influence. It seems to me that the real lesson is that if you have a big audience, it is most useful to persuade that audience, but if you don't, it's most useful to work to influence specific people in the right positions.
>but rather to everyone quietly reading comments
as someone who reads a lot but doesn't comment much you've got the topshelf content here consistently, its so obvious when someone has a clue or doesn't if you're in the same areas, very easy to fool others with confident assertions (cough airline issues on HN) but for someone in the industry it's not at all
funnily enough this comment about zoning which isn't your or my field but get the feeling it's on point, is such a massive problem in the western world which has built up over decades, lets just copy someone elses homework in my opinion, Asia gets this stuff right: https://devonzuegel.com/north-american-vs-japanese-zoning
id guess the arguments you had to convince non-existent readers also helped make a stronger case to the electeds?
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Less housing supply means higher rents... so single family zoning disproportionately harms poor people.
This is a big deal, because rent is the biggest factor to the avg person's cost of living.
Doesn't matter if you increase the housing supply but replace the demand with one of a higher real estate tier. "Oh no all these $300k houses were knocked down to make $800k condos. But on the bright side consider how much higher the supply will be!"
You should meet more real people.
Yeah, most real people are repulsed by YIMBY scum.
> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.
This was made dramatically obvious in Christchurch, New Zealand, after the 2011 earthquake.
Land that previously housed people or businesses in the central city became unsealed carparks run by an overseas company that dominates parking businesses here, for years, and many still are, 15 years on.
Likewise, the owners of buildings rendered unusable by earthquake damage had no compelling reason to demolish and rebuild, as their local taxes dropped significantly, as they're based on land value and improvement (i.e., building) value, and the building was now worth nothing.
So long as the increase in the value of the land outweighed the now minimal local taxes they paid, they'd still come out ahead when they finally sold.
Hence the local government resorted to naming and shaming the so-called "Dirty Thirty", because they had no other levers to pull.
https://ccc.govt.nz/the-council/future-projects/barrier-site...
But this still doesn't address the previously utilized land that is now just a muddy carpark operating for the benefit of a company in Singapore - they have no economic incentive to invest in a parking building when they can just run their business on several hectares of unsealed and frequently muddy and pot-holed sections in the central city while paying minimal local tax.
And in and around Auckland, New Zealand's most populous city and the most expensive to buy or rent a home in, they struggle with the land bankers, and ghost houses - properties owned solely for (largely untaxed) capital gains.
And then we struggle with a housing crisis.
good thing we have a political party in NZ campaigning for LVT + UBI then!
More will fix it
Is there any evidence to support this 'land banking' and 'ghost house' theory? I've heard it mentioned but the rate of unused housing in Auckland is low from what i can see.
> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.
The reasoning makes no sense applied to land value tax though: people improve properties for their own profit, and the land value (on which the tax is raises) increases slower than the value of their own property so they aren't being deterred by the land value tax. People who don't invest on the other hand don't see increase in their profit while their taxes increase because the land value is being pumped up by those who invest.
I’ve always been Georgism curious, but didn’t know how to handle some of the more obvious challenges so I really want to thank the author for the work here!
I’m curious about how to think about the dynamics of a LVT:
- I can imagine urbanism creating a flocking behavior that ruins neighborhoods in 5-10 year cycles. Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”, only to collapse when a nearby area is cheaper for a cool coffee shop to start. (The problem specifically is that you’ve both driven out people and caused an inefficient overbuild in each area)
- Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?
- Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.
I’m a fan of the idea - these are just some of the tricky challenges I don’t have a good answer to yet.
Something I think most people miss is that LVT doesn’t increase directly because of the improvements. If you build a coffee house, the building and equipment are excluded from the tax. It just applies to the underlying land value.
But a popular coffee house can make the surrounding area more desirable. If that increases what people will pay for locations there, land values rise. At the same tax rate, that means higher LVT for nearby sites, and, potentially the coffee house’s own site. Gentrification by other means.
In a lot of ways, it depends on what the comparative LVT base is. If its just blocks or streets nearby -- a single happening place can push the value up. Spread out to the census tract, the city, the county, and now you can toss more and more of hot coffee shops in the same place with minor impact to the tax base.
I would think that lag, combined with the general public legibility of LVT, combined with the inertia of property transactions, would damp oscillations.
Gentrification and decay are already cycles, and maybe those cycles would accelerate somewhat; but a prediction that they would drop to below decade level would be a bold assertion.
The challenge is that LVT as advocated here pushes for annual updates of the tax based on available information. That easily can move rates up (and down) by “drive people out” amounts in 5-10 years in urban areas.
I agree that's a concern. I don't know the answer.
Of course any government can jack up taxes, and some may use LVT as an excuse. That's already a problem. But the _ideal_ LVT replaces property tax. So I'm skeptical that LVT will be a large exacerbating factor.
The real problem is that gentrification drives up demand, and that's baked into the premise - and necessarily precedes any LVT uprating. I expect LVT's contribution to the problem to be marginal. More data needed.
I actually see a reverse problem.
Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.
Well, that group is rewarded by this system.
I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.
I don’t see how the people building ugly things would benefit really. If the goal is a factory or something that necessarily has to be ugly building it on low value land makes more sense then lowering the value of high value land. If the goal is just to be a dick, well people already do that by leaving these lots vacant.
Well, if ugliness weren't enough, imagine if they instead did everything to make things unpleasant for people living nearby.
Since that would reduce demand in the area, there's a real risk that we'd infer that the neighbourhood is more inherently undesirable and drop the rates there, even though we shouldn't.
I think you're really basically just saying "but no one would do this". People would absolutely do this. People even do this today in inter-group conflict about who is to live in specific neighbourhoods.
Yea on second thought I see it. One of the gentrifying neighborhoods in my city has a large group of longtime residents who are doing everything they can to slow down gentrification by making the area a worse place to live. They’d probably be working even harder if there was an lvt.
What's the end goal of this "build ugly things and depress land values" strategy? If it's to drive out current residents and buy cheap, to what goal? If, once you have bought cheap, you stop building ugly things and start doing high value things.....then land values go back up and you have defeated your own purpose.
Yeah sure the taxes would go back to normal later, but the people left with deflated property values and a worse neighborhood and potentially leave because of decreasing property values aren't going to feel very good about it.
Also the asshole still saves on the purchase. The taxes go back up, but the sale price of the land was artificially low still. Which benefits the asshole and hurts the original owners.
The only way it doesn't benefit the asshole is if the property is worth zero dollars to sell.
I'm not an LVT expert but I think you are still conflating it with property values and market rates.
The LVT assessment doesn't have to consider whether it is a "desirable place to live" or what the neighbors are like. Only the potential for the land.
A key factor in LVT is the local control of the process. That is the part that can be more easily swung by coalitions with money/power.
Yes and no. You can even do this as a group, to other groups for the group's benefit.
Imagine a group that chucks rocks at everyone else who lives in the place where they want to live, then try to buy the people living there out. It's the same strategy.
They don't need to build anything at all. Just leave the lot unoccupied and uncared for, and it'll turn into blight. The city will reward them for this by reducing their property taxes.
> drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents
Land value taxes only go up if the land value (and thus the demand) is overall going up. The taxes lower desirability, but are also proportional to desirability. So, it's more like a frictional force: inherently counter-cyclical, able to slow down a property value increase but not to reverse it.
So the theory says "nobody goes to the ballpark, it's too crowded" shouldn't happen. And even imagining weird time-delays, mismodeling, etc that could cause it, everything in your scenario is directionally the same with normal property taxes. If it happened, we'd see it today.
I'm no expert on Georgism but I think there are reasonable answers to your questions.
1. "Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”"
This is an impossible premise. The relationship between the cost of the LVT and the popularity are directly and inseparably linked. LVT only goes up (and stays higher) when the neighbourhood is popular. It drops (and stays lower) if the neighbourhood falls out of popularity. In real life it would reach an equilibrium, but it might encounter some volatility along the way.
This is overshadowed by many more factors than a small increase in taxes, and I would propose that an LVT is a minor factor in the popularity of neighbourhoods.
2. Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?
The tricky part about LVT is that it requires an assessment of value prior to realisation. Popular methods include using a combination of average of realised land prices in the area, against a velocity coefficient (the general gain/loss over a period of time), modified by negatively and positively correlated correlates like proximity to public transport and parks. There are countless ways proposed to do just this so I won't retread worn ground.
In the case of the desert data centre, it is likely that the land will not increase much in value. This is by design, because we want data centres (and similar industry) to move into the middle of nowhere so that scarce land is instead used for more productive enterprise like housing for workers so they can get to work easily.
3. Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.
This is the brilliant part of Georgism, and the reason I "converted." A well designed LVT imputes the social costs (implied by their economic costs) of the use of land. It then gives the businesses the fully informed choice of how to deploy their capital. It could be that the efficiency you allude to is real, and is worth remaining on high value land. So be it. The business is the best actor to make that decision. On the other hand, if the deadweight loss is lower than the LVT, then the land should be better utilised by another company which would have better utility for its location.
Georgism aligns social costs with business interests in a way no other tax currently does. Meaning that businesses act in their best interests, and in doing so, act in the best interests of society.
good question, the answer is: just as bad as it is with market value and current property taxes.
georgism doesn't solve gentrification. neither does anything else solve N people desiring limited things.
it solves many other issues around it though. the focus of the linked author is fixing the freeriders with lots of capital.
Well right now it happens on 20-30yr cycles which is enough for the people who implement the bad policy that stops the music to get paid and screw off to Idaho or Florida filthy rich leaving the next guy holding the bag.
Maybe if the tempo were increased the cycle would be so flagrantly visible that possible for the general populace to say "no screw you you and the ideas you peddle are bad"
LVT is just another form of attempted centralized control of the market and it will be just as susceptible to government corruption, cronyism, lobbying, etc.
There's a lot here to absorb, but one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic:
> Land, however, is not built. Land is inelastic in supply, and landowners don’t “provide” land the way laborers provide labor and investors provide capital; they un-provide land by excluding others from using it. Building supply can change in response to a tax change, but land supply cannot.
But many cities actually can increase their land supply via land reclamation. This can be done by filling in waterways or otherwise altering the landscape to make it suitable to build on. Chicago, for example, built the land under the Adler Planetarium by filling in rubble along the shore of Lake Michigan. Boston is an even more impressive example; Back Bay used to be a bay of the Atlantic Ocean, not an entire neighborhood of a city with very high cost of living.
Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise, or disasters like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions. Other times a lack of regulation might permit pollution to make land unlivable or infeasible to build on. Land owners can't create natural disasters, but they can advocate for policies that strongly influence effective land supply, such as whether building codes allow building on certain kinds or soil or require resistance to earthquakes.
Does this change the calculus from a Georgist economic perspective? If not, why?
Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.
Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!
https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/georgism-through-land-leasi...
But you can multpliy location by building up (there is some energy and time inefficiency in having to go up and down but in theory you can also build multiple layers of transportation), so how that works?
I see how it works but all you're doing is making more efficient use of the given parcel of land. The value of the land already prices in its development potential. A parcel that could legally, physically, and feasibly accommodate a high rise will be worth more.
> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic
It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.
George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.
For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.
You are confusing "location" and "dirt"
When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.
Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.
Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.
I think this is actually the problem with Georgism. The world has plenty of dirt. Locations are in short supply. Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations, which is an important economic activity. For example, most of London's suburbia was created by the building of the metropolitan railways around 100-150 years ago. Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations, and the railway companies made back the money they spent to build the railways by selling these new Locations for home building (now known as Metroland).
Although we don't have LVT in the UK, it interesting that we have another restriction on the creation of Locations: Planning laws in the UK are extremely hard and expensive to navigate and get permission to build pretty much anything, so the creation of new Locations is pretty much impossible. And that doesn't seem to be a good thing.
> Georgism taxes away the gain from the creation of Locations
The premise of Georgism is that there is no creation of locations (at least unless you're in the business of creating planets).
> Places that were too far from London to be useful suddenly became Locations
No, those were always locations, before and after the construction of railways made them more valuable. Accordingly, Georgists ain't interested in taxing the gains of the railways themselves; we're only interested in taxing the gains of the landowners profiting off of their land suddenly being more valuable from no contribution of their own. Under LVT the railway companies still would've made their money back in droves — probably moreso if they're only paying taxes on the land under the railroads instead of the actual railroads themselves!
Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.
Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.
I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.
If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.
> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,
When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.
It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.
All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.
on the other hand, having been enacted almost nowhere, what is there to discuss besides theoreticals and edge cases?
The key is that land is accidental in a way - people don’t want “land” per se they want to DO something with the land - and if the valuations are high enough you get multiple uses.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh.
Also Georgism is 100% LVT -> A land tax alone has been the recommendation of many economists before and after George - From Smith, Riccardo, Mill to Friedman. Across classical, neoclassical, Keynesian, Austrian schools. If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.
Yes, it's been suggested that all scarce inputs to the economy should be taxed. And yes the idea of Georgism is to let market set the prices and tax based off of that.
It does become complicated when the scarce inputs are things like highly specialized labor. Georgism wouldn't tax that monopoly, though our current systems (progressive income taxes) do. Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of. This is a very different characteristic than scarcity, because many scarce things can be increased, and should be if they are needed.
Taxing specialized labor goes against that spirit, because specialized labor can be created. And in fact taxing the labor would result in less of it being there, the exact opposite of the optimal result.
> Georgism is not about scarcity, it's about economic land: inputs to production which are fixed in quantity, and that you can't make more of.
I think people get tripped up on this specifically because a growing demand for something with fixed/inelastic supply will naturally tend to cause that thing to become scarce given enough time, and it's that scarcity as applied to land that's making Georgism look more and more like a good idea.
Yes, the right generalization of Georgism is the taxation of economic rent in its various forms - something which George himself opposed.
> something which George himself opposed.
Do you have a source on this?
> economic rent
What's the definition of this term?
Basically money you make by owning some legal right rather than by doing something productive
> Many people would want a system which penalizes businesses for buying up e.g. all the veterinarians in a city and charging monopoly prices.
As powerful as taxes are to create change, you don't need to use them to solve every problem out there.
Monopoly busting doesn't need to be solved by the tax system, right? Isn't that a separate issue?
Although, maintaining a monopoly by owning land becomes more difficult with a LVT. It theoretically becomes easier for a new vet to find a place and setup shop in the city, and then the Monopoly is busted.
Doesn’t the veterinarian own their own skills, after having spent decades in school to learn them (and perhaps being saddled with student loans to do so?)
What if they just moved? Or should we have US-style global taxes following them around even then?
Randall Wray frames this as “tax bads not goods”. In other words: don’t tax payroll, we want companies to hire. Don’t tax labour: we want people to work. Don’t tax company profits: we want profitable companies. DO tax pollution. DO tax interest income: we don’t want people to get money for doing nothing. DO tax resource usage. If your houses are too big tax house volume. If your land is being banked tax vacancy and so on.
Interest income is not taxed under Georgism btw, except for income on land speculation.
If you buy company x, restructure the business, start turning a profit, then sell the company -> that income (capital gains under current system) is untaxed in Georgism
If you buy an empty lot, wait 10 years to sell it to someone at a higher price, then all that profit is taxed (before it is realized too).
You're kind of describing two different ideas: pigouvian taxes, and taxing The Commons.
What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.
This is Norway's approach with Hydropower and Petroleum: https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...
The good news is that as different things become valuable their value changes, I guess? So if radio frequency stops being useful, the LVT put on it also drops pretty hard.
The bad news is now you have to assess the value of a lot more things in order to do this (the value of clean waterways in a certain state, the value of IP taken away from the common culture) that may not have a direct market value.
How does one even put a direct financial value on clean water, clean air, lack of noise pollution, etc.?
These things have different values to different people. While most everyone wants them in some form, there is a huge spectrum between “it won’t kill me this month” and “living in pristine Mt. Fuji”.
Should private companies be allowed to pollute sparse remote areas with no population?
Does it have a financial value if nobody goes there?
I mean — valuing things is not always that hard: how much are you willing to take to go without?
Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce
Here in Germany there was a bidding frenzy for 3G frequencies. The end result was simply that 3G was more expensive than in other countries and reception was worse.
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
The generalization I would use is that governments should tax any scarce resource based on the amount of revenue it should produce if used effectively, rather than the revenue a given consumer can actually produces. Whether that is land, radio spectrum, or clean air.
“Undesirable behavior” is overly broad to the point of being actively misleading, and gets you into sin taxes. smut or drugs are not the scarce resources anybody is talking about here.
But that is what the land tax folks are doing. They want dense cities and transit. They tax the "undesirable behavior" i.e. parking lots and lower density usage.
Not misleading. Rent-seeking is an undesirable behavior, and it's the primary behavior a land value tax targets. Hoarding limited resources is an undesirable behavior. Making products that have negative environmental impacts is an undesirable behavior.
There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.
Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.
An analogy just occurred to me. Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.
I get why an LVT makes sense from an economic perspective, but in practice it feels nearly as unfair as the above. Residents especially, but small and medium sized businesses would very quickly lobby to eviscerate an LVT. Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen. There's zero chance such a scheme could survive intact politically. In Pittsburg it's an LVT in name only, with a long list of exceptions and curious appraisals. And once it's applied ad hoc, which it must, there's all manner of distortions and incentives for corruption.
There are many ways for land use and tax policy to improve, but you have to come at from the perspective of improving the existing system, not revolutionizing it with an LVT. And you could probably get closer to an LVT by smart incremental reform than you could by trying to nominally pursue an LVT.
>Imagine long-time residents getting kicked out not because a developer wants to make buck, but because the tax system requires that to happen.
Some of us think that would be a good thing. My elderly neighbour has been living on her own in a five bedroom house for twenty five years meanwhile there are people nearby struggling to raise a family in one or two bedroom houses. She doesn't need that house, she is just there out of inertia. Letting the tax system nudge people in the right direction is a good thing.
> she doesn't need that house
Ick.
Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, I no longer deserve to live there. How am I to compete with the vast productivity of a massive corporation?
Where do I deserve to live then? Only where my productivity matches the economic bar of those around me?
I'm getting old and tired. Am I only allowed in a retirement home?
On the contrary, Georgists would say that if some corporation built Disneyland next door, they have to compensate the local community for their use of that valuable land. Local homeowners have to do the exact same thing, but a single home would pay vastly less tax compared to the much more expansive Disneyland. So even the homeowners would marginally benefit in that scenario. Land is always valued according to the potential highest and best use, so the fact that a Disneyland may or may not have been built in any specific location matters less than one might expect.
To an economist, the highest and best use of the land around disneyland is not my home. It's not housing. It's hotels, motels, restaurants. So my land would now be taxed at that rate, until I'm forced out
For devil's advocate's sake, how is this not state sponsored gentrification?
The problem economists would point out is that this is a fully general argument against any development. Which is exactly what leads to the negative side of gentrification - people eventually being forced out of their communities, because there's way too little developed real estate and the rent is too damn high. Georgism lowers rents by pushing towards the highest and best use of land, which is the anti-gentrification move.
In your specific example, you shouldn't assume that the supposed change in the "highest and best use" will be enough to price you out if you're a typical homeowner (not a vulnerable renter in a sharply gentrifying area): the numbers don't really pencil out that way. High land values exist in some places, but they're quite rare and quite concentrated.
The solution to this is to use that LVT revenue to fund UBI, such that the income from all that Disneyland-related land value offsets your own LVT burden.
In a mathematically-perfect setup (100% LVT going entirely to UBI, with zero overhead and zero other government expenditures), the break-even point where your LVT exactly equals your UBI would mean that you own your exact equal share of that tax jurisdiction's total land value; if you own more, then you pay for it, and if you own less, then you get paid for it. Obviously in the real world some of that LVT revenue has to go toward paying people to collect taxes / distribute income checks (not to mention the many other functions of a typical government), but the point is that LVT+UBI produces a self-balancing system that maximizes fairness even for people using their land “non-productively”.
Not sure if you realize this, but most businesses and nearly half of residents pay exactly such a tax. It's called 'rent' and is based on a 'market rate' which is exactly the amount that could be earned. They get kicked out all the time! That's actually what created the political demand for LVT!
You even pay rent when you buy a house. The value of the land is the market expectation of the value of future rents.
You can have a less than 100% LVT to get some of the advantages without upsetting the apple cart. Common in many jurisdictions.
> Imagine an income tax not on what you currently earn, but on what you could earn given your schooling, credentials, experience, etc, and the available jobs within your region. Imagine how utterly unfair people would feel about that, and how quickly such a scheme would fall to widespread political pressure.
Yep, great analogy. LVT is the optimum tax from the point of view of maximising production incentives, but actually practical ways of extracting significant revenues from people tend to skew towards "this person/organization has liquid funds available and wants to do something enough to pay the tax on top". (For related reasons LVT-style approaches to taxation work rather well when the finite resource being taxed is something like broadcast spectrums which the average person doesn't own)
As for Single Taxing, convincing the public theres some ethical principle that PE funds buying tech stocks deserve to keep all of the rewards for risking their money on a particular venture and homeowners who lived through the area's dodgy-reputation years don't is a complete non-starter even though anyone with an economics degree can tell you why such an argument might be made...
Full LVT “never works” because landowners have a vested interest in sabotaging it and the vast majority of politicians are landowners.
> I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh
Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.
I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.
> All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.
Right, because there's already a home on the property.
Anyone who owns a parking lot or vacant lot, will care very much about the split.
Then it's just an argument about raising taxes, which any municipality could choose to do, rather than a question of land value tax.
Georgeism is just silly from economics standpoint
I think you misunderstand. Having separate land and property taxes allows the city a lever to discourage vacant lots.
Vacant land has just one tax - which they can raise.
Right exactly. And by raising land tax and lowering (ha) or keeping constant property tax they discourage vacant lots without punishing homeowners even more, which is what happens everywhere else.
You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.
We already have property tax + income tax, and property tax is land value + value of improvements. From TFA, the immediate proposal is just allowing the property tax to assess the land value and value of improvements at two different rates, with the rate on improvements decreasing to remove incentives against improvements.
Does a parking lot in Manhattan pay the same cost per acre than a 50 story apartment block does?
It should! The public (through taxes) shouldn't be forced to subsidize the cost of a parking lot. If the parking lot was valuable to the market, the opportunity cost of the land not being used for some other purpose would be priced in (either through consumers paying more for parking, or businesses subsidizing the cost for consumers as it's profitable for them to do so). Parking lots paying lower property taxes subsidizes economic inefficiency.
Personally I’d rather Land tax revenue be distributed evenly as a citizens dividend, and separate from the taxes leveed to make the society which allows people to have income and wealth.
Those who use their fair share are no change, those using more see taxes go up, those using less see a rebate.
The more valuable Land a business uses the more they have to pay, encouraging more efficient utilisation. Their competitor using less Land has lower taxes and can thus out compete them.
Land of course isn’t just dirt, it’s any limited natural resource.
I think land + income is better. It's what I have where I live, and I'd like to see the balance shifted more towards land.
This presupposes a balancing, when in reality it only ever goes up, and when it goes down it leads to lapses in services where the bill comes due later, with interest
Author of TFA certainly argues that land and income is better than just income.
It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.
But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.
All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.
Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.
Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.
Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.
You'll see so many beautiful places.
But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.
It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.
> If there's one thing economists can agree on, it's that land tax is better than income tax.
This is overstating the case by a lot. There is a lot of discussion about land value taxes being efficient for various means, but there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT is a good idea.
It just wouldn’t be popular. It would instantly get filled with holes and exceptions and distorted until it tries to approximate something else.
Some of the high level economic features that 100% LVT advocates want, like forcing people out of their properties when they become too valuable for other uses, are actually extremely unpopular with people who actually live in homes. You would get a wave of cases where grandma got pushed out of her forever home because the LVT got too expensive and a developer bulldozed it to build a strip mall instead. Under the economic model this is a good thing because the land is being used for its best value, but people actually hate this stuff.
Land value taxes are also really bad at progressive taxation. The hardcore LVT people think this is a good thing because they talk about taxes as “disincentivizing extra work” but we all know that taxes have never stopped people from earning money. Going full LVT puts us in ridiculous situations where someone who earns $500K for a tech company but works remote from a luxurious house somewhere where land is not valued much will pay almost nothing in taxes, but a family with modest income who works a trades job (which generally requires being close to a population center) will have to live in some form of housing subject to very high taxation, therefore paying a lot in taxes.
If you still don’t see it, imagine the outrage when people realized that some billionaires are barely paying more in taxes than a family of four in a modest house in a city where land is valuable.
The more you read about Georgism you more you realize how it’s not as popular with economists as it’s portrayed. There is valuing in taxing land, but we already do that! The debates about eliminating other taxes and replacing them all with LVT is something else, and it’s not universally popular at all.
> there are far fewer economists who would suggest that 100% LVT
Yeah that's the exact distinction I was drawing. The article says Georgism but talks about land tax in general, which is popular with many non-Georgist economists.
However, I have to take issue with your example
1) Land is effectively nationalized under 100% LVT. Worker likely own (the profits of) more land than before
2) The value of the land where the tradesman works is already used against him, to extract the majority of hte profits of his labor. He already pays the land value tax - to his landlord. From his perspective, the burden changes little while the wealthier lose an avenue to make money without working.
3) A luxurious house / lifestyle still requires paying land tax on the things you consume (the land of course and notably energy sources, minerals, timber, building materials, etc). The kind of spartan lifestyle required to truly avoid this tax works now too - incorporate as a company and don't pay yourself a salary.
4) I think very few people care about a $500k salary tech workers, or footballers, or what have you. It's the billionaire oligarchs influencing politics who attract the most attention.
5) Current day oligarchs derive a lot of their wealth from land and other monopoly rents, not from simply 'working more' or 'contributing more value'. This is resented by many. When people get rich by contributing (relatively more) value, they are usually widely praised
> 1) Land is effectively nationalized under 100% LVT.
You're close to understanding why people wouldn't like it.
100% LVT schemes are basically a mechanism for letting the government force people to do things that the government wants. You want to live in your forever home that you and your husband worked for 50 years to afford? Sorry, government has other plans for that land and now it's too expensive for you to keep it.
The utopian use case that proponents talk about is replacing parking lots with high rise apartment buildings, which everyone loves because it feels like a win for the people and a loss for developers. The more realistic use cases would be much less popular, like the 90-year old couple getting forced out of their forever home because it's close to a substation, which suddenly turned that land into highly valuable property for data centers, which will happily pay those taxes and bulldoze the homes.
Every time I read a 100% LVT piece it's focused on the parking lots to houses type story. They either ignore the more obvious problems of people being forced out of their homes everywhere for businesses to take over, or they do a hand-wavey thing to say it's all for the greater good and we shouldn't care.
Every 100% LVT argument turns into an argument against private property ownership and in favor of a central planning type land reallocation, but with the final use case going to the highest bidder.
People do not actually want this.
90 year-olds may well have bought land at a bargain and would therefore suffer somewhat under an LVT. It's a transition problem though - since in the 100% LVT world the couple didn't have to work 50 years (and pay vast interest to a banker) to get that house.
19 year-olds on the other hand already compete with businesses for land (especially corporate landlords - who pay more than datacenter owners) and are losing rapidly.
You do lose the option of speculation - buy early before a town or region is built up. In the current system, speculation is not an option, it is compulsory.
Also you can't force everyone out of their houses - people could simply reserve land for residential purposes (as is already the case). It is still a democratic system, after all.
Finally, western governments already use eminent domain to repurpose land. It's already a part of our system.
This line of reasoning never made sense to me. If the value of the land is going up enough to make an impact on the month to month financials then it makes sense to dip into the equity of the property. Presumably the overall equity still goes up? Beneficiaries still inherit more in fiat terms? What’s the issue here?
Also datacenters are absolutely not going to be built on ultra desirable land, why would the developer ruin the land value that way?
Land is worthless under 100% LVT. Your land value going up just means you owe the government more in rent every year, since the government owns all the land rents. The only real solution to this problem is prop 13 I think which georgists hate. Nationwide prop 13(only on homes) + LVT is still probably better than the current system though imo, although it creates a huge incentive to never move
The majority of Americans own the home they live in. That’s the real issue here. The landlord the tradesman is enriching is himself.
If you incorporate and don’t pay yourself a salary you still owe corporate taxes.
People absolutely care about the tax rate techies making 500k are paying. They’ll care even more when the billionaires start blasting the airwaves with ads about how unfair it all is.
Athletes have the highest tax rate in the country, why do you think people don’t care about their tax rate?
As far as I know the only tech billionaire with significant land holdings is gates. Zuckerberg and Ellison have big holdings too but not compared to the land per wealth that normal Americans have.
> The majority of Americans own the home they live in
That's the biggest obstacle but also the biggest motivation for increasing land tax. The number is barely 50% currently and falling fast. Of those 40% are owned outright, the rest have mortgages.
This isn't even accounting for commercial real estate and farmland. People complain about grocery price gauging where I live but supermarkets are no more profitable than before covid - they don't realize the main expense change has been land rent.
Once you take out a mortgage you're committed to speculating on that land's future value. If that expectation doesn't pan out, you get a GFC. A gradual land tax would remove some fuel from that fire.
> If you incorporate and don’t pay yourself a salary you still owe corporate taxes
Well yes but actually no - e.g 'buy borrow die'. Regardless, my point is avoiding a land tax isn't as simple as living somewhere with cheap land (it requires consuming less), and people (companies) do also avoid income taxes (it doesn't require consuming less).
> Athletes have the highest tax rate in the country, why do you think people don’t care about their tax rate?
I've never heard anyone talk about this. If I search 'taylor swift tax rate' vs 'elon musk tax rate' I think it's clear.
> As far as I know the only tech billionaire with significant land holdings is gates
Why limit to tech billionaires (who do own lots of land)? The class that specifically didn't make their money from land monopolies, and who pay little effective tax under current system anyway? Trump, Kushner, Witkoff come to mind.
If you're concerned about taxing tech specifically - well George is one of very few people in the 1800s who genuinely considered the full AI + robotics case.
>but people actually hate this stuff.
I suspect a lot of younger people would welcome it. Especially in areas where there is a real shortage of family homes.
I suspect you're right, in the same way that a lot younger people really like any ideas like blanket student loan forgiveness because they have student loans and are receptive to any idea that involves someone else paying for them.
Like most ideas in this category, they become less popular as people grow older and build up some of their own assets. I would expect popularity of this idea to fall of sharply around the age that people start buying a home and see their property tax bill go up.
Practically, this makes it a complete dead end. Much to my lament in every election, younger people don't vote as much as they post online and respond to polls. Older people don't post online and respond to polls as much as they actually go out and vote.
This is why the Georgism thing always seems popular on niche internet boards, but would never get anywhere in a real political system.
Alternatives like aggressive up zoning and development would benefit this cohort and be welcomed as well. It's very natural to welcome things that benefit you
About half might. But then another half will have dealt with actually moving a confused, possibly suffering from dementia, elderly person, managing all of the affairs (and forgetting to do some, changing health care insurance), creating an unnecessary multiyear fuck you in your life while trying to manage a job and a family, and the policy will get torched.
Allowing the elderly to stay where they are isn't just about protecting vulnerable boomers, it's about not being a problem for responsible people in the next generation. You could also be one of those no-contact assholes and never have to deal with your parents when they get screwed by displacement, land value tax away.
The fact that economically right wing economists like Milton Friedman supported LVT is a great argument against landlord type labelling LVT as far-left and attempting to push the idea outside the Overton window. I think the only valid argument against is it is that a significant LVT would punish those who've worked for their wealth as they've already paid significant income tax. But there are plenty of ways to introduce it gradually. Other arguments boil down to vested interests when I dig into it.
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> You have to pay the government rent in perpetuity.
You are paying the government rent in perpetuity for the services they provide, including enforcement of your property rights. If you wish to live on land without paying government rent, you will need to go to a place without effective government. Today, that would be Syria, parts of Sudan, or Mali as examples. I doubt you want to live in those places as a 1st world resident, but if you do, there's little stopping you.
It’s exactly the correct idea. If the value of your land rises as a positive externality, it only makes sense that you contribute some of that back to the society that effected the rise in the first place.
No it doesn't. You haven't realized any gains, therefore it's not just to tax you on that.
Vast majority are realizing their gains as rent. A land tax would just be taxing those gains before they can be recycled into the real-estate market. Perfectly just in that case.
If you're talking about an individual not using the land commercially - well theoretically the tax burden lowers the sale price. You don't pay both. At 100% land tax, the sale price would be zero. You pay only as you use the land. That also seems just to me.
Well I have news for you… governments are coming for unrealized gains, they will not care if the money is on hand, they’ll fire sell your property if you don’t get a loan to pay the taxes. It’s a mathematical inevitability. And by that I mean governments are going broke and will try to find ever more creative ways to raise money, and unrealized gains, tax normalization, is one of the bigger leavers.
Where I live, the government owns about 40% of the value of my labour. I have to rent my own body in perpetuity. Meanwhile my second biggest expense is a mortgage I pay for land that nobody created.
How much of the land value of your country do you currently own? A land value tax is likely to increase the amount of land you own (the profits of). I don't think US tracks land values as accurately as countries with some kind of land tax.
The alternative is unbounded compounding of wealth until all land is held by very few hands.
Paying taxes in perpetuity is what pretty much everyone does.
Not necessarily. It can be arranged so for owners with no income the tax accrues to the land and no cashflow is necessary until sale.
California and at least ten other states have programs for the elderly to defer paying property tax on their homestead and the heirs pay it.
A compelling review of the authors work, but I think there would be benefit from dropping the early references to UBI: LVT is an interesting approach and line of reasoning. UBI is a political hotbed with deeply acrimonious feelings on all sides.
When you align one idea with an external one, you are adopting all that external baggage - it's a cheap way to get a few additional people to agree, but at the cost of a bunch of other people seeing what they perceive as warning signs of a class of ideas they are suspicious of.
It's important to have confidence in your idea, on its own merits.
It's actually a really key part of the functioning of the LVT. It is fuel to grow the economy, just like the LVT is the stick that punishes those who hold back the economy by hoarding land.
At least, that's my opinion. Carrot based economic policies have a tendency of working in multiples of the money involved, and penalties a bit less than that.
UBI as a fuel to grow economy? That's first time I hear such a preposterous sentence.
Care to explain how it would work in practice?
It's much easier to do things like pursue higher education or start a business when you don't have to worry that you'll be homeless if things don't pan out.
but why would I even bother if I don't have to worry about becoming homeless lol
Because having more money than what's needed for basic subsistence is nice? Because it's something that interests you? Maybe you'd be one to lounge around doing nothing if you had UBI, but UBI studies so far have demonstrated that you'd be the exception rather than the norm.
One man's carrot...
More money in the hands of the entire population have a multiplicative effect in the economy, as it spurs more spending, and that spending is organic choices by tons of people, rather than it just sitting in the investment accounts of a few wealthy people.
The fuel of capitalism is a large population of consumers. To be extent that we have inequality and we have lots of people that are unable to make economic choices due to poverty, we limit the growth of the economy.
One of the lessons of macroeconomics is that subsidizing demand doesn’t really grow the economy, it’s mostly just results in inflation. Obviously not a hard law but if UBI causes people to work less then the economy will shrink, no matter how much stuff people want to buy.
Inflation is caused by the Fed's 2% inflation target. If tomorrow Congress passed a UBI, backed by nothing extra, the Fed would respond by raising rates, and inflation would be the same exact long-run value of their target.
But a UBI funded through an LVT is much better than that. An LVT is a non-distortionary tax. This means that increasing the tax does not change behavior. But it is not only non-distortionary, it also reduces the ability to speculate as land tax rises. This causes the LVT to be a net-good tax, in much the same way that not taxing carbon is a subsidy to those who burn carbon. The lack of an LVT is a subsidy to the owner of the land. Ending rent-seeking will thus cause the economy to grow. This would result in deflation, and so the UBI is necessary to bring us back to our inflationary target.
The article shows a good example where this will have a massive impact to the economy, even if it is not true in most of the world. That place is South Korea, where roughly 50% of the population lives in the Seoul Capital Area, which continues to grow every year. This has caused significant economic damage, as young people are unable to afford to have both families and a place to live in Seoul, but they must live there in order to have a job. They can simply not afford to live outside of Seoul, where housing is less, but wages are much less.
If they were to enact an LVT with a UBI(or as Georgists call it, Citizen's Dividend) then the population of Seoul that would prefer to move out into cities and towns throughout SK would finally be able to afford to do so. They would only need to be able to find a job that allowed them to live a lifestyle that they preferred.
That's what great about a policy that does not advocate for any particular out-come, but about reaching equilibrium economic states. For places that have to low density, it incentivizes density. For places that have to high density, it incentives spreading.
> if UBI causes people to work less
My understanding is that UBI experiments show that is not the case. UBI is a safety net, and does not lead to a significant drop in labor. With the pending waves of AI and automation impacting labor we'd be well-served to continue to explore how to make it work.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32719/w327...
”The taxes will go up and getting a job is going to be optional” is a really hard sell, because anyone who has done group projects at school knows that freeloading is a massive issue
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I learned a little bit about georgism as the idea started crossing my feed.. 5-ish years ago.
What I've noticed, especially in online spaces is that advocates have quite disperate notions of what it's supposed to do and how it's supposed to work.
Relatively contentious and complex arguments about 2nd and 3rd order effects seem to dominate. EG rent will decrease because of incentives and political economies.
I think this comes from defensive arguments.
Here, he defends against the argument thelat taxes will be passed on to tenents. I agree that the answer is no, but how that is established is important. It's core to understanding the whole framework.
The premise of georgism is that land is scarce. Hi demand, and low supply yields a price. That price does not change because the landlord owes taxes. Supply and demand remain the same, and yields the same price/rent.
LVT is the maximum, non distorting tax rate. The rate at which land itself is worth zero. If tax exceeds LVT building becomes unprofitable and land has negative value.
When tax equals lvt... Tax revenue is maximized and land value is zero.... in the theoretical chalkboard economy.
This is the whole core reasoning underlying Georgism. It is about capturing the value of land, in taxes. All of it, ideally.
Price, scarcity, abundance, affordability... These are peripheral. Also the same rules, more or less apply.
Skipping onto YIMBY, supply constraints and whatnot tends to obfuscate the key parts.
Georgism wants to crash the property market. Zero out the location component of real estate value.
If I actually instituted, an enormous class of wealth goes poof.
That's the key fact to consider.
Georgism does not assume that land is scarce, Georgism only assumes that land is in constant supply. E.g. that taxing land does not cause the land to disappear, unlike produced goods, where if you tax a shirt, for example, you get less shirts produced. That's the whole point. Because fewer shirts are produced, the price of each shirt goes up, and this is the mechanism by which taxes can be "passed on" to the buyers of shirts.
On the other hand, structures on the land are produced, they are not in fixed supply. Therefore Georgism does not advocate taxing the structure -- only the land itself.
Because land is in fixed supply, it is impossible to pass on costs to renters of land. In a market economy where prices are set by supply and demand, the only mechanism for sellers to pass on costs is a reduction in supply (since they cannot influence demand), because for all goods (not just land), the sellers always charge the maximum the market can bear. Once this price is established, they cannot "choose" to raise prices, because this suggests they were charging less than the market would bear before. Therefore threats to raise prices even more are always hollow. Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.
In that environment, the only way for land rent prices to go up higher is a reduction in supply, as demand curves bend downward. But with land, supply is fixed so reductions in supply are impossible. This is the insight of Ricardo.
Now the argument is that land, encumbered with a tax, is worth less to the land buyer than unencumbered land, so that what happens as property taxes rise is that the land falls in value due to the tax burden. It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value, if even just a few pennies -- at which it will be sold, and so the result is the capture of the value of the land by the state, while people get to keep the value of what they produce (the structure on the land), which is not taxed. It's important to recognize that not taxing produced goods is an important part of Georgism also. This incentivizes people to invest in produced goods rather than non-produced goods, and to save by acquiring capital rather than land, as there is no social benefit for people to bid against each other for ownership of something in fixed supply like land, because no matter how many bidders there are, the same amount of land will be supplied every year, regardless of what price it is.
> Landlords are not charities, they always charge the maximum that renters can pay, irrespective of the landlords' own costs.
This is simply not true in the same way that consumers are not always rational and always pay the exact correct price.
Landlords regularly charge less than full market rate, for example when they have a good tenant, as the costs of a new tenancy and the risk of a void are higher than the incremental marginal rent (once taxed at the landlord's marginal rate) is worth to that landlord. Unlike what most people seem to assume, being a landlord is not a zero-labour job. Things that require additional labour on the part of the landlord have to be worth it.
The thing that changes this calculation is an increase in costs. You are right that landlords are not charities, so they will generally avoid a loss. The primary costs for most landlords are mortgage interest and taxes. Increase the taxes and some of these landlords will now be underwater and will increase prices towards highest market rate as a result.
Yes, landlords have and rental markets are not securatized commodity markets. There's always some noise.
The point is that the price is determined by supply and demand, primarily. Speculative market responses at the margins if the transition is analyzing the noise. Besides the point.
The much bigger issue at transition, is that landlords are going to be underwater across the board. The whole point here is a permanent transition from high land prices to near-zero land prices.
Landlords avoid raising prices to good tenants not for emotional reasons, but because a vacant apartment earns no rent, and getting a tenant that lives in the unit only for 6 months and then you need to spend two months without rent looking for a new tenant is a worse situation in terms of revenue than a stable tenant that pays every month. It is purely an economic decision that takes search costs into account and falls into the rubric "charging the most the market can bear".
You are just adding complications but not really changing the argument. We can also talk about hotels versus longer term rentals versus residential rent. Why does a hotel charge more per night than a residential rental? Because hotels have much higher vacancy rates, in order to have a unit available. A good hotel strives to be 3/4 full at any time. That would bankrupt most landlords of residential housing, where vacancy rates are 5-7%, not 20-30%.
As the rent goes up above the average rent for your area, so does the cost and time of finding someone willing to pay that rent, and in this way, there is an optimal rent that maximizes your revenue that may not be the highest rent paid but is the highest revenue received over time. That is why good, stable tenants often pay less.
Yes, said more directly, tenants are not commodities. Some tenants will destroy their unit. Others will require more maintenance requests, move out sooner or will pay rents later. Those differing qualities yield different prices. They have differing qualities, just as items at the grocery store do. You will pay more for a higher quality item, if you desire that quality.
Thus there is no single rental price, merely an initial unknown quality rental price, that as a tenant gets to know the quality of the landlord, and the landlord gets to know the tenant, will resolve to a price that is different for every combination. There will be a distribution according to all of these factors.
These are market rents. LVT will not change them.
Yes.
Henry George talks about "fixed supply" and a lot of his language speaks to the conomic ideas of the time. Remember that the liberal philosophy of property rights was all about adding your own labour to establish value and property rights.
But... We've moved on from those things.
We both said the same thing, just using different words. But... Using simple, modern economic explanations makes it a lot easier to follow.
I think people get totally lost unless they understand (in modern, marginalist microeconomic terms) why (a) rent does not change (b) the value of land becomes near-zero (c) what "land value" attempts to describe.
Meanwhile, the part of this that inevitably dominates the politics and decision making is this: (x) land loses all it's value and real estate investing no longer yields capital gains (y) Homeownership is no longer a safe haven. Owner-occupiers becomes exposed to future housing costs, just like renters.
These are two major changes, and Georgism and needs to own them (imo) to maintain coherence. There's no room for confusion here.
>It never falls to zero, of course, even at a one million percent tax rate the land has some positive value
No. The land can have negative value, if the tax is too high. This is the kind of confusion I'm talking about... and where georgism gets genuinely confusing.
The "land value" in Geogist land-value-tax.. is not market price. It is whatever the land price would be.. in a market without property taxes. It is a theoretical price. The tax rate is applied to the theoretical price. That is LVT.
The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism. Soviet economics was developing similar concepts in the 60s-90s. Eg linear programming.
In all honesty, I don't think this is all that important. Irl georgist policies would have to make do with an innacurate estimate of LVT, erring on the side of low taxe rates relative to "real/theoretical" LVT. They could even abandon the concept entirely, and go with a more tangible proxy.
But... long before you get to that point, you have to contend with the losers of this paradigm shift. (1) Anyone holding valuable real estate loses. Both homeowners and investors. That is a lot of private wealth disappearing (2)Then, the economic safety of home ownership disappears. You can no longer buy to lock in a price and guarantee yourself housing forever.
It's important to remember that in most periods, Georgists like georgism because it is a better tax system. It's not really a solution to housing availability or affordability... not directly.
There are interesting discussions to be had about indirect consequences.. but you can only have those once you have the direct consequences straight.
There are real, genuine tradeoffs. Policy advocacy tends to obfuscate these... and that balloons out into a general confusion.
> The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism
This (the calculation) is addressed by the author.
> When landlords threaten to raise rents in response to a future land value tax, why don’t they just raise the rents right now? Why do they have to wait until the tax is enacted?
I think the answer to this is because a tax increase is something they know every other landlord they’re competing with will be subject to as well. Raising it right now makes yours an oddly expensive apartment. Once the law passes though, even before implementation date, every landlord knows every other landlord will want to preserve the same cash flow they had before, by raising the rent by roughly the amount of the tax.
Unless of course you have mass vacancy rates already, and those rent raises would be more than the market can bear. But decent rentals in desirable cities have been in shortage for decades which is why rent steadily rises already. Even if your current tenants refuse to renew at a raised rent, someone else will come along, trading slightly down if necessary in terms of quality/amenities.
Responding to LVT in this way would require an unprecedented degree of collusion among landlords. That's unlikely to be sustainable, given that a lot of rental inventory is under smaller-scale landlords who will have a much harder time holding units vacant and therefore will be more eager to cave and drop rents back down to their actual market values.
Even if such a cartel could be sustainable (say, because the vast majority of rental units are under a couple of massive property management firms instead of thousands of smallhold landlords), it'd only “work” until people get sick of it and move to other cities, thus producing more vacancies, thus (under LVT) causing those landlords to hemorrhage more money.
Put differently: every landlord already knows every other landlord wants to maximize cash flow, so if landlords were actually capable of coordinating to the degree necessary to raise rents in response to LVT without bankrupting themselves, then why are they not doing that already? Why have they not yet all gotten together and decided “we're all going to charge infinity dollars per month per square foot”?
We also have examples with this. In London shortly after covid the interest rate on mortgages increased, and as a result landlords increased rent, saying it was due to the mortgage paid. This happened throughout the city. It might be though that this happened because the supply is limited, and thus we're in the case where the increase is passed to the tenant
LVT and things like market value based taxes are all far more complicated than is what already works, and what Singapore does (and a couple other countries like China): all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.
So the revenue comes through in resales once leases end.
Super simple: no valuation (only market sales); no annual expenses to consider (all upfront); development issues are simply a matter for leases to expire; speculation is capped given the capped lease length (although it can still get to stupid valuations).
Implementation is also extremely simple if you’re already onboard with taxation as expropriation: the state just legislates that all property is now a 99 year lease and they own it at that point (alternatively they compensate you 2-5% of market value, and retain existing annual taxes, or cut existing annual taxes to compensate, or they just do it without compensation!)
Unless the state is renewing the lease every time you do non-trivial development work or actually undertaking the development work itself as in Singapore, short leases are a rather significant deterrent from making optimal use of the land. If you think developers hold back from developing land because it might be worth more developed differently in ten years' time, wait to see what incentive "the state will repossess it and everything you've built on it in ten years' time" has...
Well yes, in reality you want a system where you don’t wait until the lease expires because that would leave many short lease properties without investment. It is trivial to value (competitive real estate market, rational negotiation, market interest rates) a lease extension from 30 to 99 years (enabling development) and the state shouldn’t really care about it unless it wanted to take ownership early as part of a wider land development plan.
The state is technically repossessing it when you own a lease, but it’s not something you had rights to anyway, or had paid for. The terms of what you own are up to the lease end date, under the terms of the lease.
> all land owned by the state, sold to private individuals with [99] year leases.
All land¹ is already owned by the state and leased to the “owners”; the only differences are in how much the state charges those “owners” for rent.
In light of this, the difference between a 100% LVT rate v. the state issuing land leases is just semantics.
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¹ within any state's territory, of course.
I agree this seems like the most realistic way to implement an lvt. A pure lvt would need to have tons of loopholes to convince people to build industry in low value places. If a builder thinks their taxes will skyrocket in the future they will go overseas. The yearly evaluation is ripe for corruption(my city has tons of corruption in property taxes evaluations).
Singapore has freeholds.
A minority of land is freehold.
Georgism, or the tax on the unimproved value of the land, is the fairest tax I (and many others) can imagine. It directly counters one of the ugliest part of any economy/society - rent seeking.
Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions. All this while someone who could have used that land/property for a more productive used is deprived of it. Georgism directly counters that by taxing any 'base land value' that you own.
Georgism and the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed around the world, economic rent-seeking steals from future generations.
>...the 'taxing progressively higher any property a person directly/indirectly owns after first N properties' are seriously very much needed...
I don't see it in the article, but the progressive nature of the tax is important. It makes it harder for large landowners to pass along the tax, since they must compete with smaller landlords. The net effect should also stabilize land appreciation, which will no longer rise with rapidly increasing wealth disparity as it has in the past couple of decades. And we won't need clunky, patchwork solutions like the ban on home ownership by private equity.
Right, it's not in the article but this is a problem I have spent disproportionate amount of time thinking so that leaked in. A lot of things that benefit the regulatory capturing class are presented as if they are good for the 'common man' and how we all won't even have homes to rent if it wasn't for generosity of landlords, such bs.
> Suppose you see an area in upward economic trajectory, you buy a bunch of land/properties, then do fuck-all for the next 30 years while the hard work of everyone around that land causes your land's value to increase. You contribute nothing, while benefitting from others' contributions.
In a market economy, if it's a known fact that the area is in an upward economic trajectory, then the future increase in usefullness of that land will already be priced into the land today. You can't just make profit (in expectation) by going and buying land in an area that the market already knows is going to become more productive. Competition amongst investors will drive expected profit to 0.
The only way that you can actually make a profit as a speculator, is by bringing new information to the market. The rest of society thinks this area has no potential, but you have good insight that is costly to figure out, which tells you that the area is going to be more productive. You take a risk and purchase the property. You are compensated for the risk and effort you undertook, and if you're wrong, you are punished by losing money.
> rent seeking
I would worry that you just substitute a rent seeking landlord with a rent seeking government (local?).
Government already has the prerogative to set taxes, so you should worry about that exactly to the extent that you currently worry about it. LVT is orthogonal.
Broadly, government is not called rent-seeking because it does things to justify its keep: law, defense, roads, bins, etc etc.
At least I have some influence over my local government and how it spends my tax money. Same can't be said about my landlord and how it spends my rent money.
We already have that. The government is going to get its slice of your money one way or another.
What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?
This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.
Landlords tend to raise rent to the maximum value they can.
If they could raise rents, why haven't they already?
And if their costs go up and they can't make ends meet, they will sell the property, possibly at a loss, and the lower value will lower taxes.
But this won't happen, because the landlord's taxes won't rise. They'll almost certainly fall, as shown in the abundant data. And if for some reason the landlord's property tax does rise, it's because it's a ridiculously underused parcel in an area of really really high value, like a duplex next to 10+ story buildings. Which means it may be best to let 100-300 people use that parcel rather than ~10.
The LVT shifts tax burden away from homes and businesses and towards empty lots and parking lots.
They haven't raised rents because they are in competition with other landlords. If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.
To put it another way, why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.? If if were true that it wouldn't be passed on to tenants then you've found the magic money tree.
Excellent point, and nobody has ever brought it up to me despite me talking this way many times! I think the "competition" angle is really good at pointing out why a land value tax is very different from a property tax here.
A property tax affects all square footage of apartments quite equally, which is very well correlated to rental prices, so a property tax is roughly equally a rise in all landlord's costs. So in the very few housing markets where rental prices have fallen to near the cost level, and there's very near zero profit in renting, property taxes could easily cause a rise in rents.
However when switching to a land value tax from the current property tax system, the incidence is quite different than a broad property tax increase. Some landlord's taxes fall quite a bit, some landlord's tax bills might increase.
> If all landlords' costs go up (e.g. taxes) then all landlords will raise rents to maintain the same previously optimal profit margin they were extracting.
And then all landlords will see a surge in vacancies, and not all landlords are able to tolerate paying LVT on empty units for very long before they're forced to drop their rents back to the actual market value.
> why not raise taxes to $1M/sq.ft.? $1B/sq.ft.?
Same reason why landlords can't raise rents to $1M/sq.ft or $1B/sq.ft: because nobody in their right mind would pay that much.
Thanks. I like this response. I might phrase it a little more verbosely: what forces currently limit rent prices, and will any of those forces be lessened if land value is taxed?
A whole section of the article is about this. "Can Land Value Tax Be Passed on to Tenants?"
> What prevents the landlord rent seekers from just charging more rent? Wont they all uniformly raise rent, because they are all uniformly having their taxes increased?
The first effect Georgism would have is, more effective utilization of real estate. If you go to any big city, there is simultaneously a shortage of properties while a significant number of vacant properties. This would disincentivize vacant properties, so more supply (or at least more tax collected on vacant properties that the city can use for better purposes).
Also, the reason for making progressive tax larger on larger landlords means renting out a few homes is significantly more economically attractive while beyond a certain number, it is no longer viable, which pins prices down.
The headlines would be more along the lines of ”Grandma Jones is losing her family farm, because she refuses to turn it into condos and now the land is taxed as if there was development on it”
Georgism ignores how many voters are vehemently anti-development. Just visit any hearing where housing is discussed, people really hate the idea of getting more homes built.
We should agree and add in fact the place they live in is already too dense, we need to demolish some housing, starting with theirs.
"Doing policymaker's work for them" is something like 80% of lobbying.
If you have something you want done in your town, and you come with the work done AND not asking for funding, you're likely to get it.
If you come with the work done and a PLAN for getting the funding, you also have a good chance of success.
Unfortunately, most of the political changes that I want to see go against some special interest. Examples include liberalizing professional licensing, reducing medical paternalism, and streamlining the litigation system. I can think of a zillion ways to do this, but every one of them cuts out some toll booth with concentrated benefits and diffuse costs, and our political system is not capable of dealing with such things in a reasonable way.
I am very open to be told strategies to fight this more effectively without becoming a full time career activist for years on end for one issue at a time.
The OP is saying, if you show up with a bill to fix one of these problems, in a scoped way — like, actual working text they can put to a vote, not a general ideal of what to do — and can explain exactly what you're trying to solve, you have a decent chance of them putting it on the floor.
Just in general saying "please fix professional licensing" isn't actionable, you aren't doing the work for them. You're asking them to turn a vague idea into law, when it wasn't their problem to start with.
Well, I wouldn't even expect to be able to have access to any platform to be taken seriously enough even if I had such a bill. For example, most professional licensing is at the state level, so it requires a state legislature vote. I've already spoken to both of the state representatives' offices for my area, and they give me a hard wall of they won't even talk to me about it in any detail unless I come back with a huge number of people demanding the same. And, I can't get that because of concentrated benefits and diffuse costs — very few people will both care enough to show up, and be on the side that is not the special interest with concentrated benefits (i.e., current license holders).
I think the challenge is that when such things get to the floor, you find out that special interests kick in with ad campaigns or backroom deals.
Have you tried?
I'm not saying this doesn't happen, but probably 80% of the value of lobbying comes from just showing up and talking to the representative. You won't know what works, unless you do the same.
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I speculate that that form of corruption is concentrated at the large scale. Town councillors where i live don't have campaign budgets. They barely have campaigns.
Get a bunch of town councils on side and you're better placed to tackle the vested interests at the next level up.
This works at the office too.
It's deeply weird how little interest there seems to be the inquiry of why Georgism failed in the past despite being an enormously popular political movement. It was tried. And abandoned. Investigating that history would yield a lot more compelling information than musing about the hypotheticals of what would happen if it was implemented now.
He literally has an entire section of the essay on this question with two linked articles that explain it in more detail.
The article points out that land value is intensely concentrated downtown, while outlying single-family areas typically have low land values. While this naturally results from agglomeration effects, isn't it also a partially an artifact of the low-density zoning itself?
Ie. if we implemented an LVT but also loosened zoning restrictions, the net development (and net taxes) on the single-family areas may well see the highest growth. The interaction between these two reforms performed simultaneously seems unclear.
Outstanding article. I didn't have much of an informed opinion but they certainly make a compelling case for their position. Shame to see so many comments here that clearly did not even read it. If you're going to comment on a thread like this with a complaint about LVT the author addresses, you really ought to engage with the author's rebuttal and offer a counter-rebuttal rather than just restating the level 1 argument that the author already mentioned verbatim.
Nit:
> The UK just elected a new prime minister, Andy Burnham
He wasn't elected by anybody. The country didn't get a say and he was unopposed in his party.
The country never has a say. We didn't vote for Liz Truss for example.
I do wish he had called an election though (I suspect he may still do that).
There is a small ambiguity in the article:
> in January 2025, the German state of Baden-Württemberg implemented a new LVT
More exact: On 4 November 2020, a law was enacted in the state of Baden-Württemberg which shall apply for the first time to real estate tax for the calendar year 2025 and constitutes a form of LVT.
The text of the law can be found here (in German): https://www.landesrecht-bw.de/bsbw/document/jlr-NNLBW00007EB...
Some brief information on the Web-site of the State of Baden-Württemberg (in German): https://fm.baden-wuerttemberg.de/de/service/presse-und-oeffe...
Our city council always discusses it, then bails on implementation once property owners raise hell. Classic NIMBYism.
> Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.
I wish I could describe how optimistic this sentence made me. Ever since I read Leverage Points[0] I developed this paradoxical impotence in enacting change because I felt like the best way to do anything was by finding (or becoming) the leaders who can change the paradigm. But this? This is a breakthrough. We can just do the work.
0: https://donellameadows.org/wp-content/userfiles/Leverage_Poi...
Eh... After finishing the article, did I miss the section where the author discuss if Georgism actually works?
Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?
Too soon to say apparently? They got some laws passed.
Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.
Those are the change in tax rates between properties. And the wins on that section are about votes to change the tax policy.
I think property taxes should be part land value and part land use, with no explicit tax on buildings. That lets the local government unbalance tax rates to be even more in favor of dense apartment and industrial space over parking lots, or whatever their priorities are.
The goal is putting vacant lots in so much tax debt that they go underwater. After that the city can seize them, pay off the other creditors and put the land to better use as housing projects, a community center or low rent small business space. Leaving everything to markets is a big mistake.
No, the goal is to facilitate optimal use of land. The fact that parking lots are inefficient is a coincidence and you will likely find that your "community center" is equally useless. By "unbalancing" this and that and whatever you personally prefer for ideological reasons, you are undermining the whole system.
>>> boring scut work of implementation. Now I realize that the boring scut work is actually what precedes, and even leads to, changing the consensus.
See every enterprise project. The code for s written, the app is promoted as working in this department and the the project gets funded and approved. Under some other manager
I think it's perverse that I'm going to spend the rest of my life in a global competition with every other human to survive
It's hard enough to survive but in our world you have to do survive while everyone else is incentivised to take money from you
Life shouldn't just be about efficiencies it should be about things that make us human, sharing and community used to be a big part of that
Like we're geared up for taking but not giving - like petting my dog in the global competition I'm incentivised to give him up he costs me time and money I could be grinding the next facebook
There should be a point of abundance where we reflect on what the point of all this competition is
Because I predict in the end it will be one guy with all money and everyone else in desperation
It's funny/sad that some people have so much capital they could live in absolute abundance, they could light up the lives of an entire country but they're the most robotic and desperate of all of us
As things are at the moment they're our future until we can imagine a world where everyday is not a slow decline into the end stages of a monopoly game
Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history. *Billions* of people can afford food and shelter and clothing now, who would otherwise have died. We have eradicated diseases which have plagued humanity and caused incalculable harm. People are surviving all manner of afflictions like cancer and heart disease. We have harnessed flight, and billions of people can now afford to travel to the other side of the world to begin a new life, or just experience another culture. The internet has enabled the poorest people in the most remote regions of the world to learn advanced knowledge, start businesses, and improve their lives and the lives of their communities.
Anyone who lives in a first world nations lives an infinitely better life than even kings did just a century or two ago. I think it is easy to see the negatives that living in our world entails, but in truth, there are so many positives, and I think it behoves us to remember that.
How many people do you personally know that live a better life today than 20 years ago?
I do. My parents do. My wife does. Most of my friends do. Her parents do. Most of my colleagues do.
To be clear, I am not claiming that everyone is universally better off today than 20 years ago. Obviously that would be silly. I’m making the case that modern society affords many benefits in aggregate.
> Take heart in the knowledge that more people have been pulled out of abject poverty in the last century, thanks to capitalism, than any other time in human history
As economist, this entire sentence repulses me. No, it wasn't thanks to frantic capitalism. None of the "mechanism" that are adjudicated to frantic capitalism alone mean everything to bring most people out of poverty. What actually has brought more people out of poverty was consistent growth paired with a fairer distribution of the gains in productivity... which is not an economic system feature
I neither believe you’re an economist nor feel there is much substance in this comment to reply to.
Well, not only I have a title, you can't respond with anything of substance because my comment gave you no chance to respond with anything other than your opinion. That's how you shut down keyboard warriors such as yourself.
> Thanks to capitalism.
Thanks to technology. Productivity increases are due to technology.
This is a tautology. Technological advancement doesn’t just appear. It’s the product of an interconnected social and economic system which encourages risk-taking. I can speak to my industry: pharmaceuticals. New drugs are developed because brave people are willing to risk billions of dollars. Most drugs fail. If they were smart they’d retire to a beach somewhere, but thankfully they want even more money, and they invest unbelievable piles of money into moon shots in the hope that one day they cure cancer and make a fortune.
Contrary to what Reddit might tell you, the majority of new drugs are developed by private industry, not universities. These include life changing drugs like propranolol, fluoxetine, sildenafil, atorvastatin, semaglutide, and many more.
Elon Musk didn’t build globally distributed internet for a laugh. He hasn’t reduced the cost of space logistics by 90% for fun. He did it because he wanted more money. He was incentivised to risk his entire fortune on more than one occasion.
Famously, technology didn't exist before Capitalism. No technology was created under Communism, for example
You’re making the mistake of thinking that “technology” is a binary state.
Is that thanks to capitalism or despite it?
Thanks to. Humanity has attempted 37 separate experiments with communism in the last century alone, and they resulted in 100M+ deaths. To be clear, no one is claiming that capitalism is perfect. Merely that it is the best of all the options on the table. The problem with communism is that it doesn't account for the human element. Most notably greed, corruption, and nepotism. The reason capitalism succeeds where communism fails is that it embraces the ugly underside of humanity and harnesses it for good. Elon Musk would never have revolutionised internet payments, EVs, space-based internet distribution, and reduced space transport costs by 90% if there were no reward for him. Humanity benefits thanks to his greed.
Yes but we can't run a simulation of what life would have been like if, say, we'd had monarchies or socialism instead, and technology kept advancing. We can only state what has transpired. If there was no Elon Musk, would someone else have had the vision to build out the super charger network and the gigafactory to have forced electric vehicles into being viable? If the Wright brothers hadn't been the first to fly, would someone else have managed to do the same thing? The first transatlantic telegraph cable failed.
This is why we should rely on precedent. It’s not like we haven’t tried other forms of governance and economies. We have. Many. The best so far has been capitalism. Since I live in Denmark I would argue the best social outcomes are from strong capitalist economies with strong social safety nets.
How do we classify China on this spectrum?
I would currently classify China as a one-party socialist state under Communist Party rule with a state-directed mixed-market economy. Under Mao Zedong, China was a relatively faithful adherent Marx's writing and vision for communism, and I would classify it as communist one-party state with a highly collectivised, state-directed command economy.
The tricky thing about governing and economic systems is that they're never ideologically pure. No previous system can ever be called "purely" communist, nor can any current system be called "purely" capitalist. We therefore often analyse outcomes from nations using the dominant system is the lens.
Then why would you claim that capitalism is the largest driver of poverty reduction when China was the largest contributor to poverty reduction in the last 100 years? Add to that USSR and it is clear that you should be thanking socialism and not capitalism.
>>> The state capacity limits that he asserts prevent Britain from successfully implementing LVT would be a specific local dysfunction, and would presumably impede any reform the country pursued to address its housing crisis.
As a UK resident
“Ouch”
Really
“Ouch”
> I’ve since learned that overly online keyboard warriors are the least important people to convince. The most important people are on your local city council or state legislature. Furthermore, instead of wasting time with hard cases or elected officials who are dead-set against your ideas, you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles. This often means giving up on your own city or state, at least for the time being, and pursuing a “succeed anywhere” strategy instead.
It's best to avoid people who will challenge your ideas and instead create a large group of loud people who believe your promises. What could go wrong?
Author here. My actual point is:
- I've spent the last five years dutifully responding to each and every criticism I've found online. My entire original article series was about responding to the three most significant critiques of the movement. On my blog you can find many other such replies to critiques that have come in since then.
- This is important to do for epistemic reasons. However, it has nothing to do with actually changing things. You simply do not change the world by responding to your most hard-bitten critics. That's an entirely orthogonal problem.
Agreed it doesn't change anything. You can change things if you're willing to destroy enough or promise enough and ask for forgiveness later.
You don't get it done from discussion; you learn if you should do it. But if everyone who disagrees is a "keyboard warrior" then maybe you won't.
I’ve followed the authors work for years and one important aspect to land reform is there is some people with a such a strong status quo bias that they can’t be reasoned with. If someone truly believes land use should never change they will just oscillate between arguments that are not coherent or well intentioned.
So the author is right that at a certain point you should disengage with these types and focus on racking up real world wins.
Nobody changes their mind by reading a debate on the internet. They change their mind by experiencing things that are different to what they believe.
I wouldn't say that's entirely true. I've changed my mind reading debates on the internet, and less frequently I've changed my mind months or years after having had a debate on the internet.
No, it's more like realizing that advocacy is the least effective form of politics but the easiest to engage in.
disingenuous comments such like these are, in fact, pointless to engage with
If you're not demonstrating why it's disingenuous then it's just name-calling.
Buried in the middle, a whole section on "won't landlords just pass costs into tenants" passed over with the weakest deflections. This is willful naivety.
Then you should be able to rebut it. I cannot conceive of your rebuttal, so please lay it out for me.
Evidence is presented suggesting landlords don't lower rent when costs go down, and a hand-wavy claim is made by-symmetry that they won't raise rents when costs go up. It's nonsense, there's nothing to rebut.
I think i see the error in your thinking. You believe that rent is low-margin and cannot be sustained at a given level if costs rise.
That's never been true anywhere I've lived. Landlords generally charge the maximum the market will bear. In high-demand areas, letting is highly profitable. A London flat, say, will generally net five figures above the mortgage.
LVT is, definitionally, only high in those places.
Does this help you understand?
No I don't. I believe landlords grab any excuse to price gouge. You're tilting at a strawman.
Edit 1: We agree rent is a problem, we disagree that your LVT "one weird trick" is effective, and I'm hostile to the trojan-horse-end-of-income-tax which gets this stuff on HN in the first place.
Edit 2: you'll win more hearts without the patronizing/smug rhetoric.
Apologies for the condescension. The position you've outlined makes no logical sense to me, so i discounted it. Let me ask in a spirit of enquiry: Why are they waiting for LVT?
They hike the rent ten percent and say it's because of LVT - if LVT didn't exist, they'd say it was because of the war on Iran, or interest rates, or mercury in retrograde.
Theres also like an entire previous article linked which discusses the published literature which you are free to read if you like
Freely choose to pass.
How does LVT square away zoning laws that require commerical real estate to maintain vast parking lots that sit 50% unused?
Most LVT advocates would be in favor of letting these kinds of policies be more market driven.
But say there is an urban area that is 60% parking, by default LVT would probably make that uneconomical and the land owners would be incentivized to redevelop or sell.
A concrete example is I used to work at a warehouse in Boston as a teen that had hundreds of parking spaces… in one of the most housing constrained cities in the whole country in relatively prime real estate. I hope that lot gets turned into condos or something it would be a huge win for the city.
Would love to see a large-scale simulation of LVT rollouts instead of just small pilot programs. The edge cases must be wild.
On whether LVTs are passed on to tenants: "For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"
One wonders whether they are rebutting their critics' actual arguments - I simply cannot imagine that a serious critic would make the quoted claim.
Besides zero taxes (which I am an advocate as anarchist), the most efficient tax of all is money printing done the right way. Bear with me for a moment...
The government needs money. It prints a fixed budget for the year say 10% of money supply. Boom, 10% instant inflation spread evenly across all money holders, those who have more, those who have less. In one second, one enter key, all the money government needs right in their pockets, no need for infrastructure, monitoring, personnel, overhead, nothing. Clean money ready to use.
Land Value Tax as Henry George proposed, while philosophically sound, it still requires collection, measurement, vigilance, etc while Money Printing Tax MPT does not. We have a trillion dollars in circulating money, we print 100 billions. Next year we print 110, and so on (whatever the math is) and they both cover the same principle, money for the government to work extracted the most equitably from all at once
If the government ever needs more money say for real wars, threats, national disasters, it prints more (special circumstances approved by congress 75/25), everybody contributes proportionally to their wealth, and nobody would ever complain
You say in less than ten years the money supply would double and the currency debase? So what? In real life, the government printing money only benefit those who get the money first, while with this method everybody is affected equally so there is no advantage at all
Thing is, the insatiable appetite of the state for money no matter where it comes from is impossible to tame and no matter how many ethical thoughts we put on it, thieves in power won't ever care as that's their nature
I find hilarious that you call yourself anarchist and your first order of business is inventing the state's dream tax... invisible, unaudited, with one one Enter key, just for the institution you yourself just called an untameable thief. You didn't kill the tax man, you gave him a black card
What's hilarious about that? Thinking is not prohibited for anarchists, or atheists (I am also) so if you ask me about god I may tell you a thousand possible explanations to your own delusion without me accepting none of them
I am also a programmer, so I try to find solutions to everything, or at least interpretations of my own thoughts toward an optimization of a real or imagined problem
Laugh at this if you want
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Inflation does not hit everyone equally. Poorer people are disproportionately affected.
One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase masquerading as innovative tax policy. It would be great if cities were to reduce the spend by a 30% while they are at it.
At the very least, it would be great if politicians implemented it as tax neutral and as originally designed: the ONLY tax, and including renters. Some jurisdictions are doing it that way.
It’s unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve. Market value changes for every asset, not just land, and unearned wealth creation is common. Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?
I will probably believe it more when the proponents act on their recommendations, say, if Lars sells his house and sends the 50% appreciation he says in his blog he didn’t earn, as a gift to the Federal Government so that Trump can hire a few more ICE agents.
My concern is also aligned with Orwell in Notes on Nationalism: “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
> One of the problems with many of these tax proposals is that it’s not accompanied by a reduction in taxes. So it’s basically just a tax increase
Done honestly, land tax replaces property tax. The problem of tax increases is orthogonal. Your paragraph doesn't address LVT, it addresses cities being broke.
> It's unclear to me what problem it seeks to solve
Unfairness of existing tax; rent-seeking; insufficient housing supply; unpriced externalities; take your pick.
> unearned wealth creation is common
...and, typically, taxed. I have a Capital Gains liability for mine, which comes due when i sell.
> Should all software engineers return the 50% of their salary that market forces caused to increase and give it to typists?
No; they were presumably taxed on it already; and it's currently dropping, also due to market forces. But that's beside the point. Their income, inflated or not, was earned. LVT is about pricing in an externality that currently goes unpriced, that is deemed to be owned because someone a long time ago planted a flag. We do not need to abolish the concept of land ownership, but we should question assumptions about it.
> I will probably believe it more when...
That's just insane.
> My concern is also aligned with Orwell
No, you merely quoted Orwell out of context. FFS. By all means borrow a pithy line, but don't claim an authority who doesn't agree with you.
Orwell was a passionately radical and progressive. He fought in the Spanish civil war. He wrote "Down And Out In Paris And London". I don't know if he ever wrote about LVT, but my bet is that he would have been strongly in favour of it.
The standard reform we actually pitch is a revenue neutral swap for existing property taxes. The tax we are reducing is the building tax, shifted onto land instead.
I was really hoping this was about George Costanza
Zero class consciousness, if you leave the landlords intact they will eventually find a way to defeat your taxes. They must be dispossessed.
I find amazing that the problems found while implementing this were things that I, imitating solutions from elsewhere, considered and addressed. I didn't even have the luxury of experience to consider those issues to be showstopper. I think we need to see the parallels between fundamentally the same problems rather than finding bespoke solutions:
> You handle that the same way income taxes do: the first X amount is exempt, like a standard deduction, applied to the land under someone's primary residence. Pair it with a rolling multi-year average for assessment so value spikes phase in gradually instead of hitting all at once. Keeps the incentive against passive land-holding everywhere else intact, without the blanket caps that also protect speculators. Instead of using one tool to fix it all, you use multiple tools that work together to make efficient systems
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842540
And also:
> Yeah, no. The only land that should be exempt is the one under your primary residence. If you're doing something productive with it, like extracting value, renting it out, whatever, it's not just your residence anymore, and it should be taxed like any other land. The whole point is that productive/extractive use is supposed to generate enough return to cover the tax. If it doesn't, that's the market telling you it's not being used efficiently enough to justify holding it
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842584
Any primary residence carve out creates a whole lot of bad incentives.
1) Families and marriages formally splitting so that each member can keep one residence
2) People selecting their highest value commercial property at cost as their primary residence regardless of practicality to exempt the tax.
3) Many of the best positive effects of the tax on gradually reorganizing urban geography are seriously lessened.
At risk of repeating myself at some point, lets explain why those "issues" are already addressed... with examples in the real world. In florida if you are caught using comercial space for your "main residence", you are hit with a 10 years claw back, 50% of penalties and 15% of interests on those 10 years that you left unpaid. Also on the same state, you are counted by actual household not just "household on paper" and courts rejected that "loophole". You could further disuade people from trying to pull that crap by putting into law that if they don't pay on time the acure interest too while the case is solved.
About 3, the exemption isn't total. It's a flat land-value floor, the same for every household, set from median income rather than land value, so it moves with what a typical earner can afford rather than with the market. Below that floor, land goes untaxed. Above it, you pay like anyone else. If your land's worth outpaces that floor, that's the market saying it's better used commercially than as housing you can no longer actually afford
Here's a dumb question. If there was just one tax, the lvt, what would stop businesses sort of rediscovering income tax.
I mean putting a line on your pay slip called "lvt contribution" and then state the pre-lvtc salary in job descriptions and stuff like that.
Similarly with vat and related taxes. The incentive in both cases being to signal: here's what we would pay/charge if it weren't for the government. Which is presumably the current incentive to state before tax salary/cost (this assumption could well be totally wrong).
The market would stop it unless there’s an employment monopoly in which case you need more regulation.
Remember that the idea od LVT was to replace all the taxes. Not an excuse for a government to tax you more with ever more complicated schemes to benefit lobbying billionaires.
Wyoming, Kansas... Utaaaah Nevada. Illinois! I'm missing a few can you name your 50 states? Alaska
Dredging
If you’re going to disable reader view on your website can you at least make sure the contrast isn’t completely terrible. Blue links on blue? Not great.
It's freakishly weird to see this at the top of HN. I had never heard or read anything about Georgism until last week, when I stumbled onto it after randomly seeing a photo of a 100-year-old billboard on the Wikipedia page for the term "speculation". I spent a few days researching it on and off. In fact, I just navigated to HN from the last page I was reading about it. It seems like a clever way to address a number of very pressing modern issues.
Serendipity, I guess.
If you ever played Monopoly, you were intended to learn a bit about it whether you knew you did or not.
This place has always had a soft spot for Scott Alexander, and in turn he loves to talk about Big Systemic Fixes.
It never ends.
This piece was not written by Scott Alexander.
I think it's better to say that HN readers have a soft spot for clever solutions that seem like hacks. And the LVT is really a huge societal hack to unlock a lot of prosperity and eliminate a lot of poverty.
So… a big systemic fix in other words.
Allow to me cite another beloved HN blog by way of explanation for why this mostly appeals to people without a strong understanding of the systems they want to “fix”.
https://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising...
I directionally agree! I grew out of Big Systemic Fixes in my 20s. The great thing about LVT is that it can be implemented piecemeal at the small scale. I think we should do that; have some tolerance while we thrash out the bugs; then let matters progress as they will.
While i don't agree with Big Systemic Fixes, i certainly agree with - or rather, acknowledge the existence of - Big Systemic Problems. We should tackle those when we can, with appropriate caution. LVT's viability, IMO, is predicated on gradual rollout and low cost of reversal.
I would not call a "hack" a "systemic fix" in fact quite the opposite.
And those who work on understanding the systems (economists) universally agree that the hack is a great hack, across all sorts of schools of thought, something that's pretty much unheard of in economics.
I hope you are as interested in detail as you purport with your link, and go and look at the real world examples of doing this hack in practice!
Honestly, a week ago after I got deeply into Georgism and totally apart from this, I was like:
This is the hack that fixes inequality in the 21st century, provides for a UBI, fixes the housing shortage, lowers inflation, ___and___ is astonishingly libertarian in a way that would still achieve a lot of those progressive goals, but could be embraced by self-employed / founder / developer / capitalist / middle-class and upwardly mobile non-bitching people like myself... even those of us who do own land.
Next thought was that I should start a political campaign based on it. It probably would function as a sort of systemic broad-spectrum antibiotic for our current monopolist "late capitalism", at least on a street level.
Then a week later it's topping HN, so why bother ;)
Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?
shrug I must've missed it. I guess the fact that I was enchanted when I read it last week, and I've been here 15 years, illustrates something about common zeitgeist that I had stopped ascribing to HN awhile ago.
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Can you please make your substantive points without snark or resorting to the flamewar style? We're hoping to avoid those things here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry: serious question. What do you mean?
Austin does not have a land value tax.
Austin is the main example of consequences of densification.
Austin doesn't crack the top 100 (!) list of densest cities in America on Wikipedia. What are you talking about?
It's not the absolute density, but the density _increases_ that ruin cities.
You are attacking a strawman of your own invention, since LVTs have nothing whatsoever to do with Austin.
This guy has been grinding his axe and wasting folks' time here for years. Even when shown how middle-density towns are the most efficient for utilities, taxes, infrastructure, etc. Even when confronted with the falling rents of Tokyo and yes Austin in times when they've briefly overbuilt. Don't bother arguing with economics deniers.
> Even when confronted with the falling rents of Tokyo
I'm sorry. Did you say "Tokyo"? THIS Tokyo: https://www.globalpropertyguide.com/asia/japan/home-price-tr... - in a country with _declining_ population?
Or maybe this one - https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanFinance/comments/1ovp3et/price... ?
You folks never cease to amaze.
> Don't bother arguing with economics deniers.
So far, I have not seen a single clear example of a city that decreased its housing prices by building more denser housing.
And yes, I maintain that Austin is not a counter-example. Its population has been at _best_ stagnant, and I believe that it's now declining.
As I said.
Sigh. And I'm usually the only one providing the data against objections that I'm an idiot who doesn't understand the Economics 101.
Here's the data for Tokyo rents: https://www.patiencerealty.com/post/tokyo-rents-hit-record-h... - can you point out which period you're talking about? Or admit that you were wrong about mentioning Tokyo?
Austin is the only possible outlier so far. My model predicts that housing prices (sustainably) fall in dense cities only when the population declines, so Austin's population should be declining. There is no data _yet_ to prove or disprove it, the ACS data series will be released in about 1 year. The IRS data will also be available around that time.
However, some proxy data tends to support _my_ viewpoint. The student enrollment in Austin schools has dropped unexpectedly this year.
I'm sorry. Can you point out WHERE exactly I claimed that Austin has LVT?
I'm pointing out that Austin is a great illustrative example of what will happen when you allow density to proliferate.
You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes
No, I'm not. LVT is a vehicle designed to force density in housing.
Wrong. It's designed to _encourage_ density _appropriate for the location_
No. It's designed to FORCE density in a death spiral that never ends.
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I found the article otherwise interesting, but this particular section struck me as unbelievably dumb:
> An explanation sufficient to convince me otherwise would need good answers to these four questions:
> 1. Why don’t landlords cut rents when their operating costs fall?
I genuinely can't imagine what happened in the mind of the person writing this question.
1. It does work
2. Even if it didn't work, Georgism is fundamentally a more just and fair system.
3. The world really needs it right now. Housing, wealth inequality, climate change, the inability for most populations to understand how to properly balance aspects of capitalism and socialism.
Friends let their friends know about Georgism! Do the right thing!
I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".
So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.
Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.
One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.
Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.
LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.
Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.
The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.
I don't even think "unused" is helpful framing. I'd say, property taxes should be assessed on land, not productive imps. If you want to keep your expensive urban downtown land a parking lot, fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by lower taxes than your neighbor with a high-rise.
The point of Georgism is to get rid of the 'unused' part. You're just taxed on land, full stop, based on the most valuable things that could probably be done with it right now.
Land in a city center? Hefty taxes, identical for a parking lot and a skyscraper, because the parking lot could be a skyscraper instead.
Land in a low population rural area? Low taxes, because the likely uses are homes or businesses that could be built in any other rural area.
So the idea is to make cities denser? Is maximum density use what we really want? What about industry, data centers, etc., that could be built in rural areas - wouldn't that push land value up there a lot?
The effect on taxes depends on the specific rules. But, with the easiest answer of basing it on market rate of land sales, industry in rural areas only increases taxes if that industry's paying significantly above existing market rate for some reason.
And if they are doing that, the taxes should go up, since there's some previously unrecognized value to the land that's driving industry to need to build there specifically and not somewhere else they can buy at preexisting market rate.
Of course, the same also applies in the other direction: if an active mine shuts down and sells for pennies, taxes for the surrounding land should go down based on that.
If it isn't considering hypothetical land uses than it isn't necessarily always pushing for more efficient use, no?
There's only so hypothetical you can go before losing the point of the whole system. We could, after all, make the whole planet like Coruscant if we really wanted, but taxing for that hypothetical would do nothing useful.
The idea is to encourage more efficient use of land. In urban areas of the US that usually means more density since they aren't actually all that dense(the oft cited example being surface parking lots in downtown areas, this isn't a very efficient use). There's a lot of other baggage to make that work well, imk - better infrastructure and transit come to mind.
My concern is that the endpoint of most efficient land use might not be a great one.
Why?
Could be shoe-box sized flats or nothing even for any human living at all, for example. The most efficient land use need not be "nice".
Most cities in the US aren't even near 'a little bit efficient', let alone 'most efficient'. You're worrying about what happens if the waddling baby at the ten-yard line on the football field runs out past the end zone and keeps going onto the highway.
It's just one local revenue stream, comparable to property tax. Nothing about it requires or precludes any other policy goal like making cities "nice" places to live.
If the revenue stream weren't that big, would it change the use of land much?
Maybe we can just make small, directionally correct policy changes? With slightly better-aligned incentives? Even if they are modest.
if your acres were in the middle of the city, with one lonely house surrounded by trees to stop the noise from outside, yes
Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.
What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).
LVT is about assessing improvements, conservation can be understood as an improvement and valued as such. For the same reasons that urban parks should have a different tax assessment than low value surface parking lots.
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Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.
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Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
You've been here a long time, and it's dismaying to see a longstanding user degrade the site like this.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
(I suppose I'd better add that this has nothing to do Georgism. You're welcome to make substantive points thoughtfully, but this was not that.)
Yeah fair. Sorry about that.
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Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't associate Rand with LVT.
What do you think the Internet is?
its unclear to me how you could pay for the massive tax burden of a modern state with a single tax. while i agree in theory that taxation of land is the most "fair" type of tax, it does not seem possible that eg. the federal US government could obtain $7,000,000,000,000 from a %5 tax rate on land, without making it completely unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home.
if you were to couple Georgism with a massive reduction in state spending i would be more on board i think.
It's already unaffordable for the average citizen to own a modest home in much of the country. Only if you worked and then moved to a cheaper place.
Also, I don't think it precludes a sales tax or tariffs, etc.
The US ideological push for homeownership is what eventually led to the housing shortage that we’re in now. If we tie up a big chunk of the majority’s net worth in their house, of course they’re going to vote for their own net worth going up. Of course they’re going to vote for renters to become their serfs. Of course they’re going to vote for subsidizing housing demand instead of subsidizing housing supply.
We needed a government to crush the majority’s house values yesterday. As a consolation prize, we got ‘08. It sucked investment out of housing, and we got a booming economy.
The average citizen should not own a home and be allowed to vote at the same time. Canada experienced the consequences of a psychotic ideological homeownership push, China dodged it by intentionally deflating property values, the US will pay the price if people keep voting for property values to go up.
Having most people rent their home would bring what advantage? Can still have high property prices and (local) lack of supply.
i think it generally does preclude other taxes, although i'm sure there are people who consider themselves georgists who would also want to see other forms of taxation.
but yes, home ownership is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a number of reasons, including increasing government spending...
Those taxes have different uses, jurisdictions, and payers, as does a property tax. So it may not be a good idea to have one exclusive type.
> he’s also opposed to taxes on both labor and capital.
I see. Well, this doesn't include the two I mentioned above so perhaps.
"For instance, if landlords reflexively pass on costs (including holding costs like land value taxes) as higher rents, doesn’t that also imply they should cut rents when their costs decrease?"
Generally enjoyed this blog post, however this is either the most naive question, or worst strawman argument I've read in a long time.
Except... it isn't. You see, there's a limit how much a person is willing to pay in rent and since the tax puts pressure on non-productive uses of land, either the market gets flooded with land or with rapid development, which brings down the prices of rent. The only problem the author has is that it mistook the mechanisms which it will work, prices will come down because supply will go up, not because they pay less.
The LVT seems to me to be a lot like a carbon tax: a wonderful technocratic idea that is politically untenable. LTV would be great for humanity, but very bad for present homeowners. Since homeowners are wealthy and thus more politically engaged on average, I just don’t see how this could ever get passed. Instead of starting with an impossible task, why not start instead with a merely incredibly unlikely task: repeal proposition 13.
In most cases LVT would be the same or lower than current property taxes. Only empty lots would pay more.
Empty lots and surface-level parking.
TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners
The problem is that the issue is rarely LVT vs market-rate property taxes.
It's usually up against some insane shit like Prop 13
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Carbon tax was great for me. I made money. Maybe you should have used less carbon.