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Comment by naravara | Hacker News Reader

You would probably want to include some tax advantaged incentives to maintain a bit of public space, public art, parks, or just green spaces. Giving over some portion of your land for public benefit, even if limited use, should be encouraged rather than penalized. It would also encourage more interesting usage patterns and development than pure land-use maximization would do. The latter might have you end up with block after block of square high rises, which might glide us past the point of diminishing returns to density.

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Frederick Law Olmsted realized early on that even a huge project like Central Park could be funded from the increase in land value it created in the neighborhoods surrounding it.

The risk when extrapolating from Manhattan is when extrapolating to places significantly unlike Manhattan. When Central Park was started, Manhattan already had a population density in excess of 10,000 people per km^2. Even Boston today is little more than half that. Munich, less than half. San Jose little more than one fifth.

Central Park worked because the existing density was already high and there was no way for Manhattan to grow outward (dredging excepted).

>Central Park worked because the existing density was already high and there was no way for Manhattan to grow outward

Central Park was built before the first subway and before the bridges connecting Brooklyn, Queens and Jersey. The dirt dug from the tunnels was added to lower Manhattan. Prior to elevators buildings rarely went higher than 5 stories. There was in fact ways for Manhattan to grow outwards (effectively).

Hmm, but consider that it works in both directions. In places that are not as dense and expensive, the public places won't increase rents of the surrounding properties as much, but neither will they take away as much tax revenue. Both scale proportionately. I think this applies just as much to a park in small town as it does to Manhattan.

most of that population was still well south of the Central Park area. Streets had been laid out, and the occasional building erected in the area. But the population density was downtown, in the tenements.

Astor and others benefited as population expanded north.

There is a theorem (called the "Henry George Theorem", but ironically discovered by Joseph Stiglitz in 1977) [1] that an LVT in the presence of democratic government results in an optimal tax rate and allocation of public/private benefits, and that an LVT can solely fund government.

The idea behind the theorem is that all of these public benefits - open space, parks, museums and cultural attractions, mass transit, transportation, safety, etc. - increase the relative attraction of living in a location. Hence, they raise the rents that landlords can charge. Places like NYC or the Bay Area are attractive in a large part because of public investments in social goods there. The increase in rent due to public goods is specifically the increase in land value - private improvements to an individual property are not reflected in the LVT, but that portion of the property's value that is common among all properties in the area is.

Therefore, every landowner has an incentive to pass a tax increase iff it will raise the rent they can collect (or the implicit rent, for an owner-occupied property) by greater than the amount of the tax. And they have an incentive to ensure that the tax is spent on benefits that actually improve the appeal of living in a place, because otherwise they're losing money on the deal. Hence the theory implies that a LVT is not only the optimal way of collecting revenue for a government, but also leads to an optimal size of government, making it popular among many left-libertarian types.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_George_theorem

It sounds like the argument is that voters are rational and therefore must vote for the correct level of LVT. Doesn’t the evidence show that the ideal LVT rate is zero, since that’s what they have in fact enacted?

Individual voters don't have to be rational as long as their errors cancel out. This is the "wisdom of crowds" / "central limit theorem" argument: statistically, you can get a very good approximation of the true value out of very unreliable individual measurements as long as you have a large number of independent such measurements.

Whether this theorem is robust against systematic cognitive biases is another matter. I don't know the answer to that, but it seems like voters are more likely to eg. vote for a tax that falls on someone else but gets passed along to them as higher prices, which would be an argument against an LVT ever being enacted.

Also, elsewhere in these comments are good arguments why an LVT is very difficult to "bolt onto" and enact a government once it's already been formed, which may be why we don't have one. That's simple path-dependence: Georgism didn't exist when most modern industrial nations were first formed, therefore it can't exist now.

>Individual voters don't have to be rational as long as their errors cancel out.

This, incidentally, is the function of propaganda. You introduce an influence that biases the system to encourage certain classes or error and discourage others, thus skewing the consensus-forming process.

We’re not done with our stochastic gradient descent.

The problem with “privately owned public space” is that it tends to reduce demand for actual public space; the majority of people never do anything that would offend the land owner, so never see the problem, while e.g. political speech, actual freedom, and all the other great things we get out of public space are silenced.

some cities already do this, with, it seems, mixed results

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privately_owned_public_space

https://cooperativecity.org/2017/11/01/privately-owned-publi...

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