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Comment by luddaite | Hacker News Reader

I recently heard homeowners referred to as a cartel on a podcast. It was definitely thought provoking. Is there any way to create a home ownership system where existing homeowners are discouraged from making it harder for other people to get homes?

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A land value tax works well, by removing the gains from land appreciation. This taxes the land value but not the property value, so the land owner captures the value of their improvement but not the value of rising land prices generally.

If you think about a land owner in SF, they didn't really do anything to earn the value of the appreciation of their land. They might have improved their house but the land value went up because of the tech boom.

In such a scenario, at the state level, you would also reduce or eliminate other taxes like the income tax and sales tax.

Supported by such diverse economists as Paul Krugman, Milton Friedman, and Joseph Stiglitz.

Good overview here: https://www.economist.com/free-exchange/2015/04/01/why-henry...

and

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2018/02/henry-georges-lan...

Repealing prop 13

Anti-cartelling usually works by trying to prevent agreements, associations etc. from forming, it is taken as a given given that the players have some incentive to do that. You can't do this for towns, because the association already exists in the form of the local government.

That doesn't you are wrong to look at it from a incentive point point-of-view. It's just that thinking in terms of cartels might not help you much.

If you think of city/town governments as legal cartels then can't you think of the approach in SB 827 as an action by the government to regulate what the cartels can/can't do? The analogy probably falls apart if you push it any farther but it is interesting to think about.

Yep, the cartel model is probably good for understanding things like SB 827. Of course the straightforward interpretation is also correct: the bill was an argument about what powers different levels of government should wield.

Perhaps the cartel idea gives guidance here: power should be held at a level high enough that the electorate doesn't represent the interest of a cartel. (Since as we all know, special interests never have special access to the corridors of power at high level).

Do you recall the podcast or have a link to the episode? Always keen to hear new perspectives on housing and housing policy.

I think it was this one: https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...

It would be EconTalk with Glen Wyle.

Batshit crazy. A Georgian land taxer who is just as batshit as all their fellow travellers.

No, it wasn't that one. I linked the one I listened to under the parent to this post.

The person that compares homeowners to a cartel was Paavo Monkkone. He is a professor of public policy and urban planning at UCLA.

Cartels use violence to gain profit.

Homeowners invest their own money, at significant interest rates, to obtain a place to live. They do of course have an interest in protecting that investment - with increased density comes increased crime, stressed parking, and other problems.

To call homeowners a "cartel" as if they're extorting their local community for protection money is inherently misleading.

A cartel just means colluding to limit supply to increase profit for cartel members. There is nothing in the definition of a cartel that requires violence or illegality.

For instance, Canada has a legal maple syrup cartel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federation_of_Quebec_Maple_Syr...

Not just supply, cartels are a group working together to manipulate markets in a variety of ways, also including:

Hold prices for their own suppliers artificially low by agreeing a price cap and refusing to pay more. They rely on suppliers having nowhere else to sell. e.g. British supermarkets have been repeatedly accused and sometimes IIRC convicted of operating a cartel to demand unfairly low prices from food producers.

Agree to split geographies so that there's effectively no competition to supply and each member of the cartel has local monopolies in all or most territory. This should be familiar to US folks who want High Speed Internet outside of a major city.

All agree never to offer a product which would hurt the overall market but be profitable for the first to offer it. Some have claimed the long delay in electric cars coming to market is evidence of this sort of cartel.

Cartels are illegal in much of the world (but ordinary laws don't apply to sovereign entities). If you're ever part of some big industry insider meeting and the lawyers make everybody agree not to talk about prices, future products or other commercial issues it's not because they're commercially sensitive, it's because your executives could do jail time if a court decides your group is a cartel.

> with increased density comes increased crime, stressed parking, and other problems.

Increased density does not increase crime. There's no evidence for this. There are very dense places with low crime and very low density place with lots of crime.

"stressed parking" is probably true, but part of the point of increased density is that you have less need for a car.

"other problems" is dog whistle.

>Increased density does not increase crime. There's no evidence for this.

I think I agree with you, but you are over simplifying the issue. Increased density does not increase crime per capita. It does increase crime per other measures of crime intensity (crime per square ft?). https://nycdatascience.com/blog/student-works/pressure-cooke...

Accusing me of dog whistling seems to be an extremely bad faith interpretation of anything I said. There is absolutely a well supported, highly researched and discussed relationship between density and increased crime rates and that you simply dismissed my point reeks of preconceived notions that you aren't attempting to actually grapple with.

http://theipti.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/covariance.pdf

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/13030.html (non-primary)

If I attempt to build an apartment building on your block, on land I own, the police will eventually arrest me and take me away.

Damn right you're using violence to gain a profit.

That sounds like more of a zoning issue. You can't just build an apartment somewhere because you own the land.

That's exactly what the parent was saying, just differently.

When you violate zoning they don't ask nicely you know.

So I should be able to build a fracking site next to your apartment building then, since it's "land I own".

Unless you are an anarcho-pacifist, you have accepted that there are some legitimate uses of violence, so just because they don't think you should be able to frack next door to them doesn't mean that they don't think violence is involved in keeping you from fracking next door to them.

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