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tptacek 13 hours ago [-]
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.
jakintosh 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
philipallstar 6 hours ago [-]
> 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".
ahtihn 6 hours ago [-]
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?
teiferer 3 hours ago [-]
> 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...
ForHackernews 1 hours ago [-]
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?
philipallstar 1 hours ago [-]
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.
ForHackernews 49 minutes ago [-]
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.
derac 24 minutes ago [-]
God forbid they lose some tiny fraction of their wealth to benefit society. The horror.
sweetlimetea 46 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
philipallstar 1 hours ago [-]
> 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.
lazide 5 hours ago [-]
Do you think any of the folks who benefitted the way you’re talking are going to give a damn about the attempted guilting you’re doing? Lol
applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago [-]
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?
philipallstar 57 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
svpk 27 minutes ago [-]
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.
ForHackernews 39 minutes ago [-]
>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.
lazide 4 hours ago [-]
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.
larsiusprime 9 hours ago [-]
(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.
Den_VR 7 hours ago [-]
Seems like a story of knowing how to operate the machine of government and relationships.
wslack 3 hours ago [-]
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.
roenxi 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
margalabargala 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tonyedgecombe 6 hours ago [-]
Or if they are in the same political district or even country.
pj_mukh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ryandrake 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
vulcan01 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pj_mukh 12 hours ago [-]
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.
skrebbel 6 hours ago [-]
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?
lazide 5 hours ago [-]
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.
barry-cotter 7 hours ago [-]
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.
lazyasciiart 6 hours ago [-]
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?”
MichaelZuo 6 hours ago [-]
This doesn’t seem to follow? No “control” is needed, a quid quo pro is more than sufficient.
Gareth321 4 hours ago [-]
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.
gjm11 3 hours ago [-]
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.)
Gareth321 2 hours ago [-]
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.
pydry 1 hours ago [-]
>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.
Gareth321 40 minutes ago [-]
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.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
Local politics are very different, especially in responsiveness, to state and national politics.
nemomarx 12 hours ago [-]
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.
lazyasciiart 6 hours ago [-]
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.
8note 12 hours ago [-]
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
hardbass 7 hours ago [-]
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.
MisterMower 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Hammershaft 2 hours ago [-]
It isn't clear that upzoning reduces property values, as it increases the potential productivity of a given parcel of land.
literalAardvark 5 hours ago [-]
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.
somenameforme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
derektank 6 hours ago [-]
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
sarchertech 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tptacek 12 hours ago [-]
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.
sarchertech 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
coryrc 12 hours ago [-]
I'm betting the developers are for single-family homes not apartments. The only NIMBY I'm for is anti-SFH.
Hammershaft 2 hours ago [-]
Landlords are often against upzoning (and the increased competition!), but developers benefit from less red tape.
jibe 11 hours ago [-]
High density is more profitable for developers, they have no interest in supporting SFH zoning.
tptacek 11 hours ago [-]
I know that not to be true in my area as well.
inglor_cz 46 minutes ago [-]
In CZ it is the developers who push for more density. Land prices are terrible in our big cities.
jakintosh 10 hours ago [-]
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.
AnthonyMouse 6 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pj_mukh 11 hours ago [-]
Are there any public meetings with the developer stepping up and saying “I need to make money, please approve!”. That seems… counter productive
sarchertech 11 hours ago [-]
It’s usually them saying something more like “this will bring jobs”, “growth is inevitable” etc…
kraken_cult 11 hours ago [-]
And by jobs what they mean is that they will import labor to build housing you can't afford in your neighbourhood.
Kinrany 11 hours ago [-]
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.
sarchertech 11 hours ago [-]
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.
tptacek 10 hours ago [-]
This is well studied, and I don't believe that's true: a luxury development _reduces_ rents in the immediate surrounding area.
sarchertech 38 minutes ago [-]
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.
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.
jakintosh 10 hours ago [-]
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.
noduerme 10 hours ago [-]
>> 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.
jakintosh 9 hours ago [-]
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.
noduerme 8 hours ago [-]
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.
jacobolus 7 hours ago [-]
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.
noduerme 5 hours ago [-]
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?
Hammershaft 2 hours ago [-]
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.
> 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?
skissane 10 hours ago [-]
> 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
mullingitover 10 hours ago [-]
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.
skissane 10 hours ago [-]
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
lazyasciiart 6 hours ago [-]
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?
noduerme 6 hours ago [-]
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.
kasey_junk 4 hours ago [-]
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!
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.
adammarples 4 hours ago [-]
Yes but unfortunately you never paid for what rights your neighbour had, so nothing is being taken from you
noduerme 5 hours ago [-]
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.
akst 10 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 9 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Grimburger 3 hours ago [-]
>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
8note 12 hours ago [-]
id guess the arguments you had to convince non-existent readers also helped make a stronger case to the electeds?
redribbonx 2 hours ago [-]
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thoughtbefore 2 hours ago [-]
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Drupon 7 hours ago [-]
How dare these wretched poors fight to protect the single most important financial asset in their life: their home. Those NIMBY backwards cretins! Those swine! How dare they not embrace the sweet delights of the 5 over 1 luxury condo with an HVAC that sounds like a tornado and walls so then you learn every single neighbor's dog on your entire floor by bark. Of course I, the noble YIMBY patrician who knows what's best, will continue to live in the $1.2M home my parents purchased for me and my wife in the walkable part of town near the hustle and bustle of the city's best breweries and axe throwing salons!
Hammershaft 2 hours ago [-]
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.
lazyasciiart 6 hours ago [-]
You should meet more real people.
lemonberrysoda 1 hours ago [-]
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EdwardDiego 7 hours ago [-]
> 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.
And then we struggle with a housing crisis.
stymaar 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pdantix 3 hours ago [-]
good thing we have a political party in NZ campaigning for LVT + UBI then!
philipallstar 60 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
mindwok 43 minutes ago [-]
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.
iandanforth 10 minutes ago [-]
"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.
rao-v 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tomrod 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
impossiblefork 42 minutes ago [-]
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.
twindongs 25 minutes ago [-]
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psd1 5 hours ago [-]
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.
rao-v 5 hours ago [-]
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.
psd1 1 minutes ago [-]
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.
Gareth321 4 hours ago [-]
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.
netcan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
carefree-bob 5 hours ago [-]
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.
efaref 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
netcan 3 hours ago [-]
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.
carefree-bob 2 hours ago [-]
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.
netcan 5 hours ago [-]
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.
andrepd 17 minutes ago [-]
> The whole business with theoretical prices is why Georgism was dismissed as a form of communism
This (the calculation) is addressed by the author.
skew-aberration 14 hours ago [-]
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.
jdjdndndbd 14 hours ago [-]
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.
skew-aberration 13 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
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.
grafmax 10 hours ago [-]
Yes, the right generalization of Georgism is the taxation of economic rent in its various forms - something which George himself opposed.
lieuwex 6 hours ago [-]
> something which George himself opposed.
Do you have a source on this?
runeks 6 hours ago [-]
> economic rent
What's the definition of this term?
YokoZar 2 hours ago [-]
Basically money you make by owning some legal right rather than by doing something productive
marcosdumay 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Buttons840 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tekne 10 hours ago [-]
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?
dools 7 hours ago [-]
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.
rrrrrrrrrrrryan 11 hours ago [-]
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.
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.
BobbyTables2 13 hours ago [-]
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?
tekne 10 hours ago [-]
I mean — valuing things is not always that hard: how much are you willing to take to go without?
legulere 6 hours ago [-]
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.
ro_sharp 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, pricing negative externalities is a good idea. Unfortunately some are more or less expensive to price/enforce
mcdonje 13 hours ago [-]
Other replies supporting taxing externalities and scarce resources are correct, but it can be generalized as taxing undesirable behavior to disincentivize it.
notatoad 13 hours ago [-]
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.
treis 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mcdonje 12 hours ago [-]
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.
wahern 13 hours ago [-]
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.
wahern 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
notahacker 6 hours ago [-]
> 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...
13 hours ago [-]
intrasight 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
margalabargala 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
moritzwarhier 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Aurornis 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
tonyedgecombe 6 hours ago [-]
>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.
skew-aberration 11 hours ago [-]
> 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
pampas 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mohamedkoubaa 13 hours ago [-]
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.
comnetxr 13 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 11 hours ago [-]
Does a parking lot in Manhattan pay the same cost per acre than a 50 story apartment block does?
1d22a 6 hours ago [-]
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.
hdgvhicv 12 hours ago [-]
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.
skew-aberration 13 hours ago [-]
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.
mohamedkoubaa 13 hours ago [-]
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
aidenn0 12 hours ago [-]
Author of TFA certainly argues that land and income is better than just income.
dyauspitr 13 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
secabeen 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Sharlin 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bigstrat2003 13 hours ago [-]
No it doesn't. You haven't realized any gains, therefore it's not just to tax you on that.
skew-aberration 13 hours ago [-]
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.
cjbgkagh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
skew-aberration 13 hours ago [-]
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.
xboxnolifes 13 hours ago [-]
The alternative is unbounded compounding of wealth until all land is held by very few hands.
tarkin2 13 hours ago [-]
Paying taxes in perpetuity is what pretty much everyone does.
pampas 13 hours ago [-]
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.
gnopgnip 13 hours ago [-]
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.
PeterHolzwarth 12 hours ago [-]
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.
30 minutes ago [-]
epistasis 11 hours ago [-]
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.
rudolftheone 7 hours ago [-]
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?
nikanj 7 hours ago [-]
”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
braiamp 26 minutes ago [-]
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bariumbitmap 13 hours ago [-]
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?
larsiusprime 9 hours ago [-]
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?
epistasis 8 hours ago [-]
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.
nrr 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
adverbly 11 hours ago [-]
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.
efaref 4 hours ago [-]
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.
skybrian 12 hours ago [-]
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.
doctorpangloss 10 hours ago [-]
on the other hand, having been enacted almost nowhere, what is there to discuss besides theoreticals and edge cases?
bombcar 12 hours ago [-]
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.
m101 6 hours ago [-]
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!)
notahacker 6 hours ago [-]
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...
m101 4 hours ago [-]
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.
noosphr 6 hours ago [-]
Singapore has freeholds.
m101 4 hours ago [-]
A minority of land is freehold.
jacobajit 4 hours ago [-]
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.
tancop 2 hours ago [-]
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.
slifin 4 hours ago [-]
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
Gareth321 4 hours ago [-]
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.
fragmede 3 hours ago [-]
Is that thanks to capitalism or despite it?
Gareth321 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Tiktaalik 10 hours ago [-]
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.
burlesona 10 hours ago [-]
He literally has an entire section of the essay on this question with two linked articles that explain it in more detail.
GodelNumbering 12 hours ago [-]
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.
vannevar 11 hours ago [-]
>...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.
GodelNumbering 2 hours ago [-]
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.
Buttons840 9 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 8 hours ago [-]
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.
efaref 4 hours ago [-]
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.
Buttons840 6 hours ago [-]
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?
GodelNumbering 2 hours ago [-]
> 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.
jwolfe 9 hours ago [-]
A whole section of the article is about this. "Can Land Value Tax Be Passed on to Tenants?"
robocat 9 hours ago [-]
> rent seeking
I would worry that you just substitute a rent seeking landlord with a rent seeking government (local?).
psd1 5 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago [-]
We already have that. The government is going to get its slice of your money one way or another.
nikanj 7 hours ago [-]
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.
hardbass 6 hours ago [-]
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.
llimos 6 hours ago [-]
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.
tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago [-]
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).
bombcar 14 hours ago [-]
"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.
john01dav 13 hours ago [-]
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.
bpodgursky 11 hours ago [-]
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.
john01dav 4 hours ago [-]
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).
paulryanrogers 11 hours ago [-]
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.
bpodgursky 9 hours ago [-]
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.
maomao5 11 hours ago [-]
You can do the work, but what is it worth if the competition is a very generous campaign donation in exchange for keeping the status quo
psd1 5 hours ago [-]
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.
analog31 12 hours ago [-]
This works at the office too.
Archelaos 6 hours ago [-]
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.
Our city council always discusses it, then bails on implementation once property owners raise hell. Classic NIMBYism.
13 hours ago [-]
lifeisstillgood 6 hours ago [-]
>>> 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”
marcosdumay 13 hours ago [-]
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?
skybrian 12 hours ago [-]
Too soon to say apparently? They got some laws passed.
airstrike 13 hours ago [-]
Yes, you did. Re-read the end of section III, around the part with the final two color coded images.
marcosdumay 12 hours ago [-]
Those are the change in tax rates between properties. And the wins on that section are about votes to change the tax policy.
braiamp 4 hours ago [-]
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
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.
braiamp 36 minutes ago [-]
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
lifeisstillgood 12 hours ago [-]
>>> 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
po1nt 5 hours ago [-]
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.
lee_ward 9 hours ago [-]
Would love to see a large-scale simulation of LVT rollouts instead of just small pilot programs. The edge cases must be wild.
mwkaufma 9 hours ago [-]
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.
psd1 5 hours ago [-]
Then you should be able to rebut it. I cannot conceive of your rebuttal, so please lay it out for me.
jonplackett 4 hours ago [-]
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.
applfanboysbgon 5 hours ago [-]
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.
ccppurcell 6 hours ago [-]
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).
kubb 6 hours ago [-]
The market would stop it unless there’s an employment monopoly in which case you need more regulation.
casey2 1 hours ago [-]
Wyoming, Kansas... Utaaaah Nevada. Illinois! I'm missing a few can you name your 50 states? Alaska
Dredging
13 hours ago [-]
noduerme 11 hours ago [-]
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.
viccis 7 hours ago [-]
If you ever played Monopoly, you were intended to learn a bit about it whether you knew you did or not.
EA-3167 10 hours ago [-]
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.
epistasis 8 hours ago [-]
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.
noduerme 4 hours ago [-]
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 ;)
EA-3167 8 hours ago [-]
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”.
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.
perilunar 9 hours ago [-]
Georgism has been mentioned many, many times in the 15 years you've been on HN. How could you not know about it?
noduerme 8 hours ago [-]
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.
NeoByte 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
marsven_422 7 hours ago [-]
[dead]
thoughtbefore 3 hours ago [-]
[dead]
adverbly 11 hours ago [-]
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!
slopinthebag 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mixmastamyk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
rangestransform 7 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
Having most people rent their home would bring what advantage? Can still have high property prices and (local) lack of supply.
slopinthebag 9 hours ago [-]
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...
mixmastamyk 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cyberax 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 7 hours ago [-]
Can you please make your substantive points without snark or resorting to the flamewar style? We're hoping to avoid those things here.
Austin is the main example of consequences of densification.
scuppernong 10 hours ago [-]
Austin doesn't crack the top 100 (!) list of densest cities in America on Wikipedia. What are you talking about?
motionlessveloc 10 hours ago [-]
You are attacking a strawman of your own invention, since LVTs have nothing whatsoever to do with Austin.
mixmastamyk 9 hours 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.
adverbly 11 hours ago [-]
You are confusing property taxes with land value taxes
cyberax 10 hours ago [-]
No, I'm not. LVT is a vehicle designed to force density in housing.
psd1 3 hours ago [-]
Wrong. It's designed to _encourage_ density _appropriate for the location_
tclancy 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 7 hours ago [-]
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.
(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.)
tclancy 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
sunshowers 13 hours ago [-]
Perhaps I'm missing something, but I don't associate Rand with LVT.
delichon 13 hours ago [-]
To the question, ‘Should the government have the power to tax?,’ I’d answer, ‘No, all taxation should be voluntary.’ — Ayn Rand
Agree, there's no way to reconcile that with Georgism.
GaryBluto 13 hours ago [-]
What do you think the Internet is?
13 hours ago [-]
throwitaway222 13 hours ago [-]
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.
aidenn0 12 hours ago [-]
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.
loeg 13 hours ago [-]
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.
throwitaway222 13 hours ago [-]
Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.
kccqzy 12 hours ago [-]
The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.
loeg 11 hours ago [-]
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.
crooked-v 10 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 7 hours ago [-]
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?
crooked-v 6 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 6 hours ago [-]
If it isn't considering hypothetical land uses than it isn't necessarily always pushing for more efficient use, no?
crooked-v 6 hours ago [-]
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.
knowaveragejoe 7 hours ago [-]
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.
RandomLensman 6 hours ago [-]
My concern is that the endpoint of most efficient land use might not be a great one.
crooked-v 6 hours ago [-]
Why?
RandomLensman 6 hours ago [-]
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".
tomrod 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ivm 13 hours ago [-]
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).
WorldMaker 12 hours ago [-]
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.
techgnosis 13 hours ago [-]
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.
13 hours ago [-]
12 hours ago [-]
hyperlinerapp 11 hours ago [-]
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.”
psd1 4 hours ago [-]
> 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.
larsiusprime 10 hours ago [-]
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.
Gimpei 13 hours ago [-]
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.
singpolyma3 11 hours ago [-]
TFA literally shows how it is better for homeowners
rcpt 11 hours ago [-]
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
maomao5 11 hours ago [-]
I think that GPs point still stands if you replace homeowners with the sort of organization that own en-masse the sort of empty lots that would lose out.
wmf 12 hours ago [-]
In most cases LVT would be the same or lower than current property taxes. Only empty lots would pay more.
perilunar 7 hours ago [-]
Empty lots and surface-level parking.
Tiktaalik 10 hours ago [-]
Carbon tax was great for me. I made money. Maybe you should have used less carbon.
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.
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.
"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".
What did you do to deserve the massive raise in value of land since you bought that house besides buying early?
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...
Protect it against drastic change and maintain it over decades, investing money in upgrading it where possible.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You never know until you try.
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.
Especially since these days it is entirely unclear whether a given keyboard warrior is actually a human being at all.
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.
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?
Either way, the shift in day to day to day stances is apparent on many topics.
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.)
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 believe the civil rights movement succeeded in America because it was morally right. Not because black activists caused social harm.
trump constantly doing annoying stuff for instance, was good for him getting elected.
visibility correlates positively with likeability
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07352166.2026.2...
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.
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 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’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'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.
> 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'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?
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
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
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.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is a big deal, because rent is the biggest factor to the avg person's cost of living.
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.
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.
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?
Generally enjoyed this blog post, however this is either the most naive question, or worst strawman argument I've read in a long time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This (the calculation) is addressed by the author.
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.
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.
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.
Do you have a source on this?
What's the definition of this term?
As powerful as taxes are to create change, you don't need to use them to solve every problem out there.
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.
What if they just moved? Or should we have US-style global taxes following them around even then?
What both have in common is that economists from all different schools of thought widely agree that they're the least distortionary taxes.
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.
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?
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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, 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.
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.
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.
I suspect a lot of younger people would welcome it. Especially in areas where there is a real shortage of family homes.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Care to explain how it would work in practice?
> 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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
The reality is that in the vast majority of places the valuations just aren’t there.
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!)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This is the argument again Georgism I have the hardest time countering.
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.
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.
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.
I would worry that you just substitute a rent seeking landlord with a rent seeking government (local?).
Broadly, government is not called rent-seeking because it does things to justify its keep: law, defense, roads, bins, etc etc.
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.
> 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.
I do wish he had called an election though (I suspect he may still do that).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get a bunch of town councils on side and you're better placed to tackle the vested interests at the next level up.
> 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...
As a UK resident
“Ouch”
Really
“Ouch”
Did it actually increase the amount of housing? Reduce wealth disparity? Got enough taxes so cities can make commutes better?
> 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
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.
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
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 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).
Dredging
Serendipity, I guess.
It never ends.
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.
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 ;)
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...
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.
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!
if you were to couple Georgism with a massive reduction in state spending i would be more on board i think.
Also, I don't think it precludes a sales tax or tariffs, etc.
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.
but yes, home ownership is becoming increasingly unaffordable for a number of reasons, including increasing government spending...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
It's usually up against some insane shit like Prop 13