larsiusprime

Did you really make this whole project in two weeks???

Have you done the math? Under a revenue-neutral shift that taxes buildings less and land more, the median homeowner comes out ahead:

https://landeconomics.org/reports/spokane-report

I think what you're missing is that land in the wealthiest parts of town is worth exponentially more than land out in the suburbs

Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.

Brilliant!

Is the idea that the commits themselves are also time stamped with the date of the legislation/amendment too?

1. Stop restricting what can be built, especially in the super valuable city centers

2. Shift taxes off of building (which punishes development) and onto the passive holding of land (which discourages idle land speculation)

In other words, change man's laws, not nature's.

We're directly inspired by Urban3 and our hope in releasing these tools is to enable more people to be able to do this work directly themselves and share it with their elected officials!

If you're talking about the Manhattan effect specifically, I'm sure that zoning has a large effect on the extremeness of it. If you're talking about "land gets exponentially more valuable in the city center", then you see that pattern everywhere and indeed we saw it in the historical pre-zoning period as well. Agglomeration effects are sticky regardless of what time period you're in, what changes is the coefficients on the exponential equation.

Author here: most people know that the city is "more" valuable, but drastically underestimate how valuable. I've asked people how much more valuable they think Manhattan is than the Bronx and they will say things like "5x" or "10x", which is off by an order of magnitude.

They also underestimate what this means. In many cities you can have 50%+ of land value concentrated in a rather small portion of area, and this has huge implications for what would happen is you, say, changed property tax policy to shift the tax burden towards land and away from buildings. Most people assume it would kill the suburbs, but in many of our models single family homes come out slightly ahead, or stay neutral.

It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).

Good points! Thanks.

Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.

Author here: it’s a cheap rate limiter and something we are looking to remove soon.

Author here. This is the problem we are seeking to solve, we are property tax reform activists:

https://open.substack.com/pub/progressandpoverty/p/enacting-...

Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.

The main purpose of the 3D is to communicate the extreme differences in scale of value, which chloropleth alone doesn’t always get across as it flattens the magnitude disparity. Keeping true north to avoid confusion is a good point.

Diamond prices are famously crashing now due to artificial lab made diamonds (increased supply)

IceFrog was on the Dota2 team, and valve owns the trademark

This is a good resource on the question -- Land Value Tax is not passed on to tenants, the landlord eats it. This is pretty unique among taxes, which is why LVT is a particularly good way to fund UBI, otherwise you would expect the UBI to result in inflated rents.

https://progressandpovertyinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/P...

Also RE: procgen, one of the hit games right now, Mewgenics, is doing super well and uses it extensively. Obviously it's old school procgen that makes use of tons of authored content, but it's still procgen.

Although they key thing here is that it's not just that effect, but emergent unintended consequences. In the article, it describes how non profit healthcare institutions have an incentive to buy for profit clinics, because (alongside the other incentives), when they do so, the real estate becomes tax exempt because now it's owned by a non profit, even if the work being performed stays the same.

If I understand it, the premise of this article is that because the marginal cost of software production is now free, now nobody can compete against garbage quality code sold by the slickest "sales critter", so everyone should just give up.

I mean, it seems at the very least, that open source and in-house production has a natural advantage here? If the marginal cost of software production is now free, then FOSS/in-house just got easier to create and maintain too. Does that make it easier for FOSS/in-house, both available without a subscription to an external third party, undermine "sales critter" SAAS, by the author's own premises?

It's funny that people always bring this up, but I don't see what centrally planned mandatory setbacks, height limits, and parking mandates have to do with preventing industrial accidents.

This is actually how the popular Texas dominoes game of "42" was invented. It's similar to Spades and other trick-taking games with bids and trumps, but it's played with dominoes, not cards, and therefore it's okay :) Two boys from a Baptist family who got in trouble for playing cards came up with it.

http://texas42.net/42Article.html

Honestly, the surest sign of the existence of vampires to me would be a class of investors with extremely anomalous discount rates, suggesting that they are operating on inhumanly long time horizons, combined with a particular interest in real estate, as first documented in the field's seminal publication (Stoker, 1897).

Thank you!

Cool. I'm already in touch with a handful of civil servants in both Germany and the Netherlands, so I'll do as you say and look for more government led initiatives, and I'll follow up with my existing contacts. Which countries do you think are the most interested in this sort of thing so far?

I had a question since there's growing interest in open source adoption for digital sovereignty purposes in Europe; I produce open source software for civil servants as well (for mass appraisal/property tax valuation specifically), and I was wondering if you could offer any advice about how to best meet the needs of/approach European governments (both local and national) about open source collaboration? Do they prefer to develop their own things in house, or do they like to work with community projects?

Interesting. So basically an individual out in the sticks can genuinely get by with Internet but not plumbing, but urban life would be impossible at scale without plumbing, and without urban civilization at scale we probably wouldn’t be able to maintain the internet at scale?

Socialism might work in that world

Technically, what you've just described is Georgism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism

The real question is, in a truly post-labor future, how do workers have enough leverage to negotiate for any particular change in the economic system?