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Comment by aketchum | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in Fairhope, Alabama which was established as a single tax colony inspired by the theories of Henry George. One of the most interesting things to me is that on the bay, you can have two houses next to each other, both for sale and both equivalent in terms of house quality. One house happens to be on colony land and the other is not, so when you buy one house you own the land, but the other you get the 99 year lease. What I find interesting is that there is little to no difference in price between the two. The market prices the 99 year lease the same as owning the land. Just an interesting tidbit about this in practice that I have always found counter-intuitive.

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A new 99 year lease is probably about the same value as buying the land.

Does a new tenant always get a new 99 year lease, or is it the remainder of the previous lease? I would not consider a lease expiring next year, for example, to be of equivalent value.

The leases are transferable and renewable. Other than the odd legal arrangement it's functionally not that different than owning land and paying property tax on it.

My family has a "99 year lease" on a property from the federal government in the US, and even though it's called that, it really just renews something like every 20 years. Not sure if in the UK they literally count 99 years. (Edit: To be clear, it's been in the family since the 1930s, so it's gone through several renewals already.)

Question about Fairhope:

I spend a lot of time in Arden, Delaware which is also a single tax community. Many of the people of Arden love the town and Georgism. So much so that there seems to be several people from Arden that were named either Arden or George.

Does the same naming thing happen in Fairhope?

In the UK, you see homes in England marked as either freehold ( you own the land) or leasehold (someone else owns the land and you had a long term lease and traditionally paid a small fee each year called ground rent). The issue was if the lease didn’t have long left then selling or getting a mortgage on it was more difficult.

Recently the home builders on new houses have sold the house and then also been selling the leases to a 3rd party as an investment. These 3rd parties have been radically increasing the annual ground to much higher levels. I’m never going for a lease hold property.

For clarity, does the lease term renew every time the home changes hands?

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