How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's

https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/how-georgists-valued-land-in-the

by surprisetalk • 1 year ago

121 171 1 year ago

progressandpoverty.substack.com

Not only does it contradict the received wisdom from the YIMBY movement that community input is bad actually

Weird snipe. YIMBYs are certainly skeptical of some kinds of community input, but that doesn't mean they're opposed to all community input or control of everything.

rcpt7• 1 year ago

The linked article by Jerusalem Demas is worth reading.

And, yeah, community input is bad.

snovv_crash• 1 year ago

It's an incentives issue, not a community input issue.

If the only value you are able to hold onto is the development you do yourself, then you aren't going to block your neighbours from building up their property.

throw0101d• 1 year ago

And, yeah, community input is bad.

Was the community input to Robert Moses' NYC plans bad?

* https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-...

How about to the Spadina Expressway in Toronto?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Road#Spadina_Expressway

* https://www.tvo.org/article/the-streets-belong-to-the-people...

* https://transittoronto.ca/spare/0019.shtml

TulliusCicero5• 1 year ago

community input is bad

Community input is bad when it leads to bad results. Kind of a tautology, but my point is just that you can have good community input, it does happen, even if, yes, the general 'local' culture in the US tends to lend itself to NIMBYism.

roenxi2• 1 year ago

It might be more proper to deduce that community vetos are a bad idea although the practicalities of that are complex. I can imagine a situation, for example, where a community bans running a business from a residence and accidentally wiped out a major tech company from being founded. In fact, I suspect that probably did happen in the 90s although for obvious reasons it is impossible to prove.

We've seen a huge amount of economic success from allowing talented motivated people to do what they think is a good idea without developing a consensus on the proper course of action. That probably scales down into to the small too. Progress depends on letting outliers happen.

chii4• 1 year ago

where a community bans running a business from a residence and accidentally wiped out a major tech company from being founded.

the benefits of the business goes to the private person running the business from their residence.

But the externalities falls to the community (or at least, shared by the community).

Therefore, a community wanting to ban a business from a residence is very valid imho.

However, if the business could either prove there are no externalities, or compensate for it in some way, then there should be room for negotiation, rather than a straight outright ban.

giantg219• 1 year ago

Community vetos is essentially all of zoning - a set of rules deterimed indirectly through voting to prescribe what cannot be done.

The home business example is kind of a red herring. All the zoning I've ever seen does allow for home businesses with a few restrictions or requirements to prevent things like overwhelmed parking.

typewithrhythm2• 1 year ago

There seems to be a growing gap between the people who define "community" as the group of people who live in and wish to direct the changes in the area they are in. And the people who define community as the group who receives the benefits of government intervention.

YIMBYs is a silly term, since its usually a developers talking about forcing changes in someone else's neighbourhood. Considering the input they like, it's only from the second definition of community, notably people not currently in an area, or standing to endure the downsides.

natmaka• 1 year ago

"community" as the group of people who live in and wish to direct the changes in the area they are in

IMHO it is the genuine and most adequate 'community', because the less abusive way to decide is subsidiarity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity ). Constraining people who live near the potential site makes them at best suspicious, they will better memorize this constraint than any benefit from other projects.

morsecodist6• 1 year ago

The idea behind the YIMBY movement is not that community input is bad it's that the community input process structurally encourages input only from people who don't like the project. The point of YIMBY activism is to show up in your own community (your back yard if you will) to say that you do want housing.

morsecodist6• 1 year ago

It's such a weird comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the article. The YIMBY movement is concerned with people saying no to housing, it doesn't say anything about community input on assessment or anything else. It seems like the author has some sort of ax to grind.

larsiusprime2• 1 year ago

What ax? I’m the author and a YIMBY. Read the linked article, that’s the exact title of it, and I largely agree with it! I wrote that line because it contradicted the expectations of a movement I myself belong to, which I found surprising.

larsiusprime2• 1 year ago

I’m the author and a YIMBY for the record and it’s not meant as a snipe. The link is an article by that exact same title by Jerusalem Demsas

fake-name• 1 year ago

For context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

twelvechairs• 1 year ago

Land valuation is not hard. Its been done for decades in a stable way in places as diverse as Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary and Kenya.

flomo• 1 year ago

Back in the 1990s, I lived in the midwest. The state built a freeway through a bunch of cornfields, and long before the road was even done, there were suburban subdivisions sprouting up. My professor points this out, and says this highway had been in the regional plans for 20+ years, and 'capitalists' had bought or optioned all this farm land decades ago. That form of land speculation makes sense to me, but I've never been able to reconcile it with Georgism.

SwtCyber3• 1 year ago

Georgists would argue that the rising land value came from public investment (the highway), not private effort, so the unearned gains from speculating on that land should be taxed. The idea isn't to stop people from buying land, just to capture the value society created.

euroderf• 1 year ago

Likewise for subway extensions.

bombcar8• 1 year ago

In those cases what I’ve seen is as long as the land stays farm land, it is taxed at a low farmland rate, and the moment that the land is subdivided and sold houses on it it gets taxed at the much higher single-family home rate.

However, the price to buy the land starts to head towards what it will be worth it developed as soon as the freeway becomes real.

protocolture6• 1 year ago

Georgism always struck me as a method to shift homelessness onto the elderly and enrich removalists.

The absolute ideal method of retirement is home ownership. Its cheap and desirable for the home owner, and it requires the least services provided by the state until things seriously deteriorate. I once met a woman who was being forced out of her home. She bought it when it was behind a naval shipyard covered in rusted warships. The city bought the land off the military, turned it into a lovely park and opened views from her front windows directly to the water. This caused her land valued rates to increase (she said her property had reached 200 times what she paid for it. 30,000 to 6 million. But she also owed quite a decade of rates to the council and wasn't sure what she would have left over) to well beyond what she could afford, and ultimately with only pension for income it became untenable.

I really don't mind development, coming to the old lady and offering her a big payday for her to leave that she takes willingly, replacing her inner city house with higher density. But Land value as a mechanism to forcibly move on the elderly and hand their inner city character homes over to richer people who don't increase housing density is completely ass backwards.

You get stuck in a cycle of paying taxes -> improving services -> improved services increase land value -> increased land value increases taxes. Its absurd. It honestly becomes an optimal strategy to elect local officials who ruin the neighborhood and decrease value.

keybored4• 1 year ago

Home ownership rates in socialist and former countries are higher than in the West.

jhbadger• 1 year ago

Only if you count "home ownership" as just owning your apartment (many Eastern-bloc countries sold cheaply their state-owned apartments to their residents after 1989). At least in the US, "home ownership" largely implies owning a single-family house with a yard. That's the (perhaps unsustainable) "American Dream".

kubb3• 1 year ago

The absolute ideal method of retirement is home ownership.

I'm sorry, but I have to intervene, because this is a stunningly strong claim.

Its cheap ... for the home owner

Homes are unaffordable for most people today, to the point where renting can be more cost effective than buying. Housing consumes a lot of income which acts like a hidden tax - a drain on the economy.

it requires the least services provided by the state until things seriously deteriorate

1) Things deteriorate when people can't afford housing. Labor and services become more expensive. 2) Not requiring the state to be involved is an ideological advantage, not a practical one.

But she also owed quite a decade of rates to the council and wasn't sure what she would have left over

This is an anecdote and as such has limited value, but it's made even less useful by you not knowing the exact sums and percentages. It doesn't justify your sweeping claim in the slightest.

You also seem to be talking about property tax, not LVT.

Land value as a mechanism to forcibly move on the elderly and hand their inner city character homes over to richer people who don't increase housing density is completely ass backwards.

There's not much wrong with moving for retirement. We don't like to do it, and residential property owners should to some extent (for a number of years) be exempt from land value tax, but the alternative (hoarding valuable land) is much worse.

You get stuck in a cycle of paying taxes -> improving services -> improved services increase land value -> increased land value increases taxes.

Services don't improve just with tax, but with the influx of capital and development to the area, available jobs, etc. You're using an incomplete model to reason about it.

Some of the other benefits of LVT worth mentioning are that it 1) incentivises owners to use the land productively (density!), 2) discourages land speculation, 3) reduces urban sprawl.

adverbly3• 1 year ago

There's not much wrong with moving for retirement. We don't like to do it, and residential property owners should to some extent (for a number of years) be exempt from land value tax, but the alternative (hoarding valuable land) is much worse.

Totally agree. People need to live where jobs are! That's the main determinant of where you live!

When you're retired, you don't need to commute any more so forcing others to have to live further away and commute past you is a large burden being placed on productivity. We want to tax unproductive behavior so this is an entirely reasonable thing to me. All things being equal, retired people should be incentivized to move when they retire!

sokoloff4• 1 year ago

Homes are unaffordable for most people today, to the point where renting can be more cost effective than buying.

Around 65% of housing is owner-occupied in the US. That doesn’t entirely preclude it from being “unaffordable for most people” but it is evidence against that claim.

protocolture6• 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but I have to intervene, because this is a stunningly strong claim.

You might be different, but I have never met a retiree who wanted to rent. Its leisure time. Have a shed, build shit, store your caravan, host the grandkids.

Housing consumes a lot of income which acts like a hidden tax - a drain on the economy.

Yeah that sucks, lets not increase the burden of home ownership with a larger, overt tax.

Things deteriorate when people can't afford housing.

Yes, like the elderly being unable to afford housing with land value based taxes.

You also seem to be talking about property tax, not LVT.

Property taxes determined by land value. It doesnt gain special properties as an acronym, and it doesnt decrease when it becomes the primary source of state or federal income.

but the alternative (hoarding valuable land) is much worse.

Hoarding land is largely caused by valuable land grants from the government to property developers. It doesnt require some great big alternative taxation system.

Services don't improve just with tax, but with the influx of capital and development to the area, available jobs, etc. You're using an incomplete model to reason about it.

Yes, land value increases via lots of terrible reasons to increase taxation thats very true.

incentivises owners to use the land productively (density!)

Zoning laws are the big issue here, you are already incentivised to do this.

discourages land speculation

Government land release and zoning reform discourage speculation.

somnic• 1 year ago

Someone getting forced out of their home in exchange for a few million dollars isn't exactly the most tragic story out there, and increasing tax revenue to pay for better amenities is hardly a bad thing by my reckoning. The aforementioned rich people are a bit less richer, because now they're paying those rates.

Most plans to implement LVT at scale that I've seen include provisions to increase the rate slowly over years and decades, and allow deferred payments for the elderly upon sale or from their estate because yeah, a lot of people made plans to retire based on the present tax regime. Younger people saving for retirement can plan on putting retirement savings into productive assets rather than land speculation. I'm also not entirely clear on why a pension that pays for everything except housing is fine, but providing housing for the elderly is a problematic level of state intervention.

snarf212• 1 year ago

I wonder if a scheme where you could "lock in your rates" would work. Instead of just waiting for reassessment or whatever and having no way to know how it will increase in the future or hoping it stays the same for a long time, maybe you could agree to a X% yearly increase and pick how many years. So you lock in 2% increase for the next 20 years. This could be especially nice for the elderly and allow a compromise for tax revenue. Each property owner gets to decide whether to hedge or not. (This would just be for non commercial properties only.) This is just a hair brain idea off the cuff, just thinking out loud.

sokoloff4• 1 year ago

For me, the difference is choice. An elderly person voluntarily accepting a multi-million dollar buyout is a wildly positive story (as would any other voluntary conclusion).

It’s the involuntary “beat it, Grandma!” that people find objectionable.

protocolture6• 1 year ago

Someone getting forced out of their home in exchange for a few million dollars isn't exactly the most tragic story out there

Separating someone from the place they had all their kids because they cant afford the tax is pretty bad. Especially when the property hasn't gotten any better. People shouldnt be at the mercy of subjective, third party evaluations of their wealth. This is why progressive taxation waits until gains are realised.

Most plans to implement LVT at scale that I've seen include provisions to increase the rate slowly over years and decades

Never seen this, I always see Georgists lamenting home owners whose land has increased in value as evil and deserving.

providing housing for the elderly is a problematic level of state intervention.

Providing housing for the elderly is fine. But if they are already self sufficient, forcing them into alternate housing is disgusting.

ETH_start2• 1 year ago

Your assessment is deeply flawed. A land value tax does not make home ownership expensive. It makes land consumption expensive. If you live in a condo unit in a 40-story tower, you pay almost zero land value tax because you use very little land.

But if someone wants a sprawling estate, they should expect to pay more — especially in areas where that land could otherwise support hundreds of homes, jobs, or services. That’s the point. Land in high-demand areas is a scarce public resource. Using it efficiently — through dense development — lets more people benefit from the opportunity, infrastructure, and services that come with central locations.

Land value tax encourages exactly that. It doesn’t punish ownership — it rewards efficient use.

RandomLensman3• 1 year ago

It disincentivizes ownership of anything but the most high value land use. Unless there are a lot of regulations (like today) limiting use of land in particular areas, the highest value use version of housing might not be great to live in (if housing were even to be the highest value use in a lot of places).

For example, the current condo in a 40-story tower might well be far less valuable than some tiny serviced flats.

Efficient use might be a very unpleasant target to go for.

protocolture6• 1 year ago

A land value tax does not make home ownership expensive. It makes land consumption expensive.

Distinction without a difference, a home includes the costs of the land it sits on, at least until you find a way to teleport a home to cheaper land without a cost.

But if someone wants a sprawling estate, they should expect to pay more

LVT isnt about taxing sprawling estates more than other homes. Its about charging tax based on proportional value of the land being occupied. Land value is largely informed by factors that home owners cannot control.

It doesn’t punish ownership — it rewards efficient use.

It does both, and it very obviously does both.

keybored4• 1 year ago

As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part.

Wealth of Nations

scotty79• 1 year ago

I think cars and now navigation mess this up a lot. But it could be great for walkable areas in the cities.

lordnacho3• 1 year ago

How do people separate their land value from the development value?

If I see an Apple shop across from a parking lot, it may not be immediately obvious that the land part of the valuations should be similar. I could see the crowd systematically getting this wrong.

Having said that, it's not a damning criticism. I think LVT is a good idea, and people are generally going to know what piece of land is worth more than another. You can then stitch the relative values to some sort of exchange-based anchoring to give your map real dollar values.

I do tend to think a Harberger system makes a lot of sense, though. Maybe something a little bit like:

- Everyone puts a value on their land. We take the total, figure out what percentage needs to be taken, and everyone pays their share of the tax take accordingly.

- Your land is for sale at the price you put, but you can change up the price if you don't want to sell it, and thus pay up extra tax. If you have land set at 1M and someone comes and offers 1M, but you don't want to sell, you can pay the tax at whatever price is too high for him, eg 2M would double your tax. The offer needs to be firm so that you have an actual choice, someone can't just double your tax bill on a whim.

jstanley4• 1 year ago

But just because my land is worth £100k doesn't mean I should be forced to sell the house that is on it for only £100k!

If you must have that sort of system, there probably ought to be an obligation on the buyer to first pay to have the entire existing structure demolished.

lordnacho3• 1 year ago

Hmm that's a good point actually. Gets hard to separate the land from the stuff on it.

ajb4• 1 year ago

That seems a rather pyhrric right. You don't actually get any value from them destroying your house.

I think the offer is supposed to be on the improved value (IE including the value of the building) but the tax is on the unimproved value, so you do get the value of your house if they buy the land.

Perhaps more reasonable would be, if we imagine a new Georgist city on undeveloped land, to require that every building is detachable from the land; IE it is attached to its foundations, by twistlocks, like intermodal containers, with the utilities also being supplied via some standardised connector. Not only would you then just be able to move your house to somewhere else, but it would have several other advantages. It would be a universal argument against NIMBYism - if you don't like new infrastructure being built near you, you can just move your house elsewhere. It would make it less disruptive to build new infrastructure anyway, as houses could be moved out of the way instead of being demolished.

giantg219• 1 year ago

You could technically separate the house from the land using separate deeds and deed restrictions. That could create an interesting workaround that would effectively render the value of the land useless for most lots, thus avoiding the taxes.

beeflet10• 1 year ago

But just because my land is worth £100k doesn't mean I should be forced to sell the house that is on it for only £100k!

Then you could "value" the land at £200k and pay a higher property tax to secure that preference. In other words, your property is more valuable, to you.

If you must have that sort of system, there probably ought to be an obligation on the buyer to first pay to have the entire existing structure demolished.

I think you are right, which is a problem. Or you could stipulate that all the buildings are demolished before the land bought in this manner is used.

I think this system would evolve into people overvaluing their land to be between the land and the land+building value, and then keeping a public offer for the land+building value. That strategy would minimize the land-only sales and encourage buyers to buy the entire building instead.

ajb4• 1 year ago

Improvement value is commonly estimated, eg by insurance companies. Eg, you insure your building for 100k even though the market price was 300k, because it would only take 100k to rebuild it. So you then know that the 'unimproved' value was 200k. (This ignores dilapidations etc that you'd also have to account for).

bombcar8• 1 year ago

This often undervalues the land as a side note - because an empty lot is more valuable than the same land under an “undesirable” structure (because demolition comes at a cost) - even if it’s perfectly serviceable.

pydry2• 1 year ago

The calculation of land value isnt the hard part. There's a good description of how on the wikipedia page.

The hard part is that its implementation would cause a significant (& possibly violent) backlash from land owners intent on defending their privilege.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

The value of my land is already evaluated separately from the value of my house by my county.

I already pay a land value tax. I also pay a tax on the house.

The same goes for commercial properties here.

Is this really not common? I constantly see internet claims about how it would cause violent uproar from evil land owners if we taxed land value, but as a land owner I can tell you it’s already happening.

Switching to a full land value tax would just redistribute the taxation entirely on to the land and make the structure tax free. That would be awesome for the people with giant, new construction houses around me but not so good for those of us with smaller, older construction buildings in the same neighborhoods. It would be really bad for the old people living out their final years in their modest old houses which need a lot of repairs (and therefore have low structure grades in the tax system and low structure taxation).

immibis8• 1 year ago

Let's suppose I have a billion trillion dollars and I hate all people who live in Springfield. Could I just bid ten million on every Springfielder's house and they all get forced to move out with no choice?

lordnacho3• 1 year ago

They'd love that, wouldn't they? You'd have to pay them and I would think ten million is way more than you'd get for your house.

giantg219• 1 year ago

Yeah, imagine pissing off a person and they put a bid in just high enough to raise your taxes but not high enough to make selling worth it.

giantg219• 1 year ago

"Your land is for sale at the price you put, but you can change up the price if you don't want to sell it, and thus pay up extra tax."

This is how you end up with homeless seniors and disabled people. In my opinion, we shouldn't be working up schemes to force people out of their property. Otherwise you get a developer that comes in and offers you a price you literally can't refuse, pushing the market entirely in favor of the wealthy.

WillDaSilva• 1 year ago

If they sell their land, then presumably they'd receive a substantial windfall with which they could buy a new cheaper place, or rent. If they don't receive a substantial windfall, then the amount they were paying for the LVT must've been low.

beeflet10• 1 year ago

seniors and disabled people can't just live somewhere cheaper?

I think they should be pushed out by the wealthy. If you're holding onto residential land in a developing city, and someone wants to build a skyscraper there they should be able to buy you out at a reasonable price. You shouldn't be able to hold land hostage while also paying low property tax

detourdog3• 1 year ago

My experience is that if a community feels that land is underutilized they will simply tax at the value the community would like to see the land used.

We had a family farm that had our taxes go from under $4,000 to around $25,0000 in a single year. There was no warning it just happened. We ended up selling the farm in a few years at a value it was being taxed.

I also think that NIMBY/YIMBY is a strawman argument used to keep the conversation from developing.

rcpt7• 1 year ago

Wait you don't have homeless seniors where you live? Here in California they are everywhere.

This is despite Prop 13 and all the laws on top of it that are designed to keep seniors in their forever homes. Feels like maybe handouts to real estate investment is not the way to give people a roof over their head.

Aurornis2• 1 year ago

How do people separate their land value from the development value?

This was already done in every place I’ve ever lived. The local assessor has rules and algorithms for valuing land and valuing structures for tax purposes.

Insurers do the same.

It’s so common that I’m confused about why it’s a sticking point in these conversations. I think a lot of LVT proponents don’t even understand that land is currently taxed in many (most?) places. Switching to a pure LVT would just make the structures free from taxation and redistribute the missing tax revenue on to the pure land value.

Great for people with big, nice, new houses who would get to shift some of their tax burden to their neighbors with smaller, older, less nice houses on similar land.

kemotep5• 1 year ago

As an advocate for the Single Tax this is a great article explaining a land valuation method I had never heard of before.

This would work locally, maybe even up to the county level but how would we reach a consensus at the State and Federal levels?

Here is a link to a Federal study of land value: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/papers/WP2015-3.pdf

There is roughly 1.4B acres of private property that is worth $21,200B or $14,763/acre on average. At a 100% LVT of this average would generate ~20 Trillion in tax revenue. Giving the Feds 8, States seem to spend a total of around 3 or let’s say 4 to put towards debt payments, and then another 5 for local governments. Leaving 3 trillion to redistribute as a people’s dividend which with something like 150 million tax returns submitted each year would be something like $20k per household/tax payer.

This would 100% cover all costs of the government with a Single Tax. No more sales taxes, capital gains, corporate taxes, etc. And as someone who lives on less than an acre paying a fraction of $14,000 for taxes would be such a massive tax cut for me and most people I know.

Tragically this would cause most land in the US to have zero or negative market value, leading to massive distortions and trillions of dollars of wealth destruction. In addition farms would have onerous tax burdens also destroying them. Leading to them either needing to be nationalized or require significant (90+%) tax breaks.

So completely unrealistic and highly disruptive so will never be adopted. But with this Somner method maybe we could get closer to adopting the Single Tax.

andrepd• 1 year ago

Land is just one (the most historically significant) of the factors that should be charged a Single Tax. Others are perhaps even more important in a modern economy: natural resources (minerals, water), and crucially externalities in general (pollution, other abstract societal harms).

beeflet10• 1 year ago

it's not really a "single tax" then is it?

I agree but some things like pollution are hard to quantify.

kemotep5• 1 year ago

The Single Tax is just that. And extracting (or not extracting) natural resources off the land would either count towards or against the unimproved land value depending on how we value it in that specific context.

The second tax you bring up is pigouvian sales taxes and those should absolutely be implemented. They are the second least bad kind of tax.

But of course the Two Tax Movement is not what Georgism is referred to as.

AnimalMuppet• 1 year ago

Yeah. It's not 1900 anymore; value doesn't primarily come from land. So in today's economy, for example, maybe we should tax patents, copyrights, and domain names. These days, those things are more important than land.

adverbly3• 1 year ago

Tragically this would cause most land in the US to have zero or negative market value, leading to massive distortions and trillions of dollars of wealth destruction

Would it though? Nothing is actually destroyed. The land is still there so it's basically just a redistribution. Why not issue some bonds to existing land owners or something as compensation? That's what Britain did when they made slavery illegal? It might delay the benefits to the state by a few decades, but well worth it to fix incentives I would think...

kemotep5• 1 year ago

If we said an acre of land in New York City is only worth $14,000 and an acre of land in middle of nowhere North Dakota was equally worth $14,000 that it wouldn’t have some kind of distortionary effect?

sokoloff4• 1 year ago

Did you just look up the total value of land and assume that that same total amount of value could be assessed as a land-value-tax each year?

I can’t read your post any other way, but it is so spectacularly unreasonable that I can’t imagine that’s a thing you think is remotely feasible.

kemotep5• 1 year ago

You’re reading too much into the half-assed back of the napkin math I used. The simple dumb end I posit is compared to the Somer method in the linked post. The Somer method is night and day. The point is that the numbers add up to fully fund all levels of government with more than enough left over to service debt and payout a dividend. Even a stupidly self-destructive implementation would on paper fund the entire system. But we shouldn’t do it that way, no one would accept it, and it would have second order effects I talk about in the original comment.

bobajeff• 1 year ago

It would be great if any place in the world could solve the problem of land speculation and unaffordable housing. So far every country/province around the world even countries without real private land ownership (China) are dealing with the same problems in more of less the same ways.

Maybe Land Value Taxes can solve the problem but I'm beginning to think that these problems are part of our characteristics as a species in ways that might be nearly impossible to successfully solve.

SwtCyber3• 1 year ago

Worth trying, even if it won't be perfect

ty68533• 1 year ago

The biggest land horder in the USA is our government, they own ~25+% of the land and refuse to let people homestead anymore, no matter that much of it is far better than the land I 'homesteaded' for a high bid in literal desert shithole where people are willing to pay lots of money to be in bumfuck nowhere with far worse positioning than much of the BLM and national forest land. It's brilliantly clear people would homestead this land if it were opened and be a significant relief valve.

Our government literally just sits and sits and vast quantities of land that goes barely used for the lols, while our young people would happily build a shack on a piece of it instead of being relegated to hopelessness.

randallsquared• 1 year ago

I'm pretty close to a geolibertarian, given that it's otherwise hard to allocate uncreated value, but this method of valuation seems really arbitrary. If some outside developer wants to buy a piece of land that the owner would rather not sell for the community-derived price, and both are stubborn, and eventually it's sold for 10x the Somers system price, then the value of that land is (evidently) far above the community consensus. There has to be some way of getting this updated value besides everyone who lives in the area this month spending more weekend afternoons arguing about it.

That strip is the most valuable piece of real estate in the whole city, a fact anyone who’s lived there for any amount of time knows intuitively. Take a moment and imagine yourself attending such a meeting in your own town, what would your answer to [what the most valuable stretch of street frontage in this city is] be?

I am astonished that the author thinks this is intuitively obvious.

Anyway, some kind of "registering a value for property is the same as putting in an offer to buy/sell that property" is needed to avoid subjective and perceptively unfair valuations.

SwtCyber3• 1 year ago

The irony is that this 100-year-old process actually solves some modern challenges

tax• 1 year ago

Just ask people what the base land value of each location is.

This “step 1” mentioned in the article doesn’t scale, as for example to get enough individual-reported valuation data for each parcel of land that one would have to get an entire community to “vote” (answer) on the land value for each part of their jurisdiction (for example the entire county of San Francisco). For areas outside of one’s jurisdiction (to reduce bias by asking people to vote on land value outside their jurisdiction), the amount of information one has is limited and thus the reporting can be biased. The safest way to get the best valuation of any asset, is to take a playbook from the financial markets for whereby buyers have a direct incentive to best judge the valuation of the asset of any financial instrument for in order to maximize profit from the direct sale of the said asset. However, with the above valuation method cited in the article that there is no direct incentive for people to get correct or incorrect about their answers to land parcel valuations.

Furthermore, the part which LVT doesn’t address well is the valuation adjustments for the property built on the land itself, for example a good Leed certified building with a “good view” versus a run-down building requiring maintenance would have different valuations for which only a property taxation system (based on market value of the property value) will be able to infer. However, overall having a world where built properties on valuable parcels of land can be monopolized, just “seems” wrong.

How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's

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