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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

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the movement against SFH zoning is not about destroying single family zoned neighborhoods, it’s about not forcing every lot to require a SFH. i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read, but SFH zoning itself is more of a taking. people who want to live in a single-family-only neighborhood should find a spot on the edge of town where development pressure is low, not weaponize land use regulations to make it illegal to build what the market wants near jobs and amenities.

and while an LVT doesn’t really care about zoning, depending on how close to a city center your SFH is, a well calibrated LVT might dramatically increase your overall tax burden even if you dropped all other taxes. SFH zoning is manufactured scarcity; LVT prices scarcity correctly, and there’s no upper bound on that value, especially since land taxes become divorced from income.

>> i’m not sure how your comment on expropriation was meant to read

I should have clarified that. I meant it in the context of Georgism. The concept of Georgism was manifestly against the government actually redistributing owned land; instead, landlords would divest themselves of the land if the only utility they got from it was rent. What Georgism says you're paying for when you pay LVT on the land you own is the exclusive right to private use of that land, which comes at the expense of everyone else who doesn't "own" (or essentially, lease) the right to live on it or build on it.

Georgism distinguished between ownership by individuals for productive use and ownership by either (a) individuals for rent-seeking or (b) governments as stewards.

You may be right about LVT pricing scarcity where I live winding up higher than my current tax basis, but even that would make sense since I have to earn a lot and therefore pay inordinate income tax to have the ability to live in a single family home near to a city center already. If where I lived were less important to me, under Georgism, I could simply move to the burbs. But there is a funny corrolary to that which Georgism seems to intuitively grasp and which is orthogonal to the argument between manufactured scarcity and progressive housing policies. (And maybe this is a gap in Georgism's argument):

I live in inner southeast Portland, Oregon. Along all our east-west avenues there are tons of Amazon boxes (what we call studio / one bedroom 4-6 story cheaply constructed wooden apartments with a patina of modern amenity). And tons of local businesses. Between the major arteries it's almost all single family homes. This makes it one of the last cities in America where you can live in a SFH within walking distance of everything, including downtown. Street parking is still free here, and a lot of people don't need a car at all. I live in an SFH within two blocks of apartments where the waiters and bartenders and shopkeepers live who work at the businesses on the avenues. It's truly mixed use. However, they've now rewritten the zoning law to allow tearing down houses as small as mine (1200 sqft) and replacing them with 4-plexes. The problem with the Amazon boxes is that they don't provide room for families. No one is building 3 bedroom apartments with a yard where you can raise your kids in the city. My Dad grew up in a shared row house in Baltimore. No one's building that.

Which gets to the heart of the matter, which is that a major reason that this city and this area are so desirable is precisely because those SFHs exist between all the major streets. The spending value (and social value) of the essentially middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center is widely overlooked by people campaigning to eliminate SFH zoning; but without those people, you end up with neighborhoods where everyone is under 30 and relatively transient, without much money to spend in the local economy or any deep ties to the place. The apartments decay, and most of the work reasons for living there disappear.

Eliminating SFH zoning is an opinionated, political form of slow redistribution that preferences a certain age group and a certain socioenconomic position over others. It reduces actual diversity, and produces monocultural places like Seattle and Santa Monica where only the very rich can raise a family in town, and everyone else is a young renter.

And here's the kicker where Georgism may be right: In the end, eliminating SFH zoning only redistributes property from individuals and families (like me) to corporate landlords.

i appreciate the thoughtful response, and the fact that it’s rooted in a desire to maintain some element of diversity.

i’d play your observation back at you though: there’s more than just young renters and nuclear families in terms of household typologies, and nearly all of the other ones (childless couples, empty nesters, older singles aging in place) would also benefit from ownership (or “rooted”) housing opportunities that things like a quad would provide in these neighborhoods. household size across the US has been shrinking for decades, and there is truly a lot of demand for smaller homes at all stages of life. instead of looking at the quadplex in the SFH neighborhood as a way for “young renters” to displace families out of the neighborhood, it’s an opportunity for other households to take root or make a life transition without having to leave.

if quads in SFH neighborhoods are just being overrun with young transient renters, it probably means there’s not enough “amazon boxes”, and may be related to broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum.

also, this is all without saying… it is entirely possible for children to be raised in a home that is not a detached SFH! it is certainly a preference for a lot of people, but it is not a hard requirement. and missing middle buildings like the 2/4/6 plexes are some of the best non-SFH buildings for doing that, where you can more easily have 2-3 bedrooms and some sense of a yard.

I think we largely agree on the fact that SFHs should not be the only option for young families or empty nesters or aging couples. (As an aside, all of the above live in SFHs on my block, as well as young single renters in their 20s who share SFHs as roommates). I brought up Baltimore rowhouses for that reason. My Mom grew up in a duplex in LA with a backyard... my brother is raising his own kids in almost an exact copy of that duplex.

I'm not sure what you mean about the lack of new construction of that type coming from broken zoning at the upper end of the spectrum. Maybe uou could elaborate. The upper end of the spectrum in Portland is... almost everyone with money moves to either the oldest exclusive homes in one of two very non-diverse neighborhoods (Laurelhurst or the West Hills), or else they move to the exurbs and build McMansions out in the farmland. Neither is really actively engaged in a community beyond a homeowner's association, and neither is walkable or a place where people of different economic and cultural backgrounds get to interact for everyone's benefit.

So maybe what I'm trying to say is that the high upper end (homes over $1M, let's say), is going to remove itself anyway, and that yes there should be more construction of 2-4-plexes which are not Amazon boxes... but there seems to be no incentive to build those things, and I don't even know how you could do so on a 1200 sqft lot.

In the interim, Portland has eased lots of rules on the use of ADUs and trailers in backyards and even yurts. I bought my home for $450k and the range in the area goes up to $800. This tells you that what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard.

But I do feel like the crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class, anti-family quality to it... and what I mean to say is that it is the working middle class families in the upper end of housing on those avenues who anchor those blocks and keep the neighborhoods livable and loved and who keep the businesses in business. I've seen what's happened to such inner city SFH neighborhoods in Los Angeles, and it turns into somewhere that no one would want to live if they didn't have to, with no community or neighborhood to speak of. Row houses and shared brownstones in East Coast cities have fared slightly better as an attractive living pattern.

Ultimately too, your argument is that not everyone should live where they live, because more people want to live in that spot, so if they want space they should move to the suburbs. My argument is that not everyone can afford to live exactly where they want, either way, but that doesn't logically imply that you should increase density as much as possible in a mixed and vibrant neighborhood just because people want to live there. At a certain point it will lose the very thing that makes people want to live there in the first place. Not even to get into the fact that no one actually works downtown anymore or commutes away from the neighborhood, so this is purely a choice for most people.

You still didn't address my point that every SFH torn down for a 4-plex just redistributes individual middle class ownership to financial corporations.

Many places have all of the single-family homes also owned by corporations. I think the problems you are concerned with here are predominantly increasing financialization of the economy and increasing wealth inequality rather than anything to do with zoning changes.

> what I'm arguing for is a working middle class that should have access to living in the city with a modest back yard

If housing has gotten so expensive that the "working middle class" has to live somewhere else and commute in, the way to attack that is to increase the stock of available housing, not continue to sharply restrict it.

> crusade against SFHs has a distinctly classist, anti-middle-class

To the contrary, relaxing zoning requirements most strongly benefits people who are less wealthy and currently end up overspending on housing or getting priced out.

I think this all depends on what time and place you're living in.

I'm definitely living in a very weird bubble in eastern Portland. It was a working-class, blue collar town of single-family homes. It was colonized in two separate waves, in the 90s and in the 2020s, by people who couldn't afford rents or homes in city areas of San Francisco or Seattle. But it never really took off economically as an international city, and it's still stagnant, and much more reminiscent of Seattle in the 1980s.

There's a lot to like about that pattern, and under Georgism it would make lots of sense for people to move here because the land value close to downtown isn't really that great. Or to move to Cincinnati, or Lexington, or Des Moines. If all people had to pay was fair rent on the land, new local communities and diverse downtown areas would be springing up all over America.

Not everywhere that people rush into and want to live because it was shown on the Real World needs to instantly resemble the same monocultural sort of housing that a big city like Los Angeles or Seattle has had to adopt.

Moreover, there's nothing inherently immoral about retaining the shape of a city when more people move into it; presumably, they are moving there because they like the city.

When I see working people being priced out of Seattle or LA, they're being priced out by financial groups and offshore investors, with the help of local boards that allow homes to be torn down and replaced with half-empty investment apartment blocks... destroying the very thing they're investing in.

We may be clinging on as homeowners and holding to a way of life that is incompatible with the kind of colonization other cities experienced, but: We take care of our parks. We know each other. I can't go 4, or 8 or 12 blocks that I don't see people I know. Up in the Amazon boxes, we meet the people who come for a year and go.

What equity is there for us in the plan to remove single family zoning? Not even as a parable:

10 miles west of Portland, Intel built a giant facility, and there is a commuter train stop out there which has Amazon boxes for miles around it. But no SFHs in their new construction, nor anything that would be attractive to anyone over the age of 29.

Why should I move out there and they move here, when in reality, that wouldn't even exist without the ancient core of SFHs that defines the character of the city they ostensibly want to live in?

The problem I have with your line of thinking is that it basically seems like the main reason you like your SFH neighborhood is that it's right next to one that's not SFH; if you were surrounded by multiple layers of SFH, you'd lose the ability to have the nearby businesses staffed people you're describing as not living in that type of zoning. It's not clear that the non-SFH home neighborhood with all of the businesses near you gets anywhere close to as much benefit from the proximity to your neighborhood (the closest thing to this I can find is that you mention you have well-maintained parks, but it's not clear why you think that this couldn't exist in a large cluster of non-SFH neighborhoods as well; I've lived within a few blocks of very large, well-maintained parks in separate neighborhoods where there were no SFH neighborhoods anywhere close by).

Combined with some kind of odd ways is describing things (cities being "colonized" in recent decades, people moving to LA because it was on The Real World, as if there hasn't been close to a century of tropes of people moving to Hollywood to pursue show business, implication that eliminating SFH zoning requires you to "move out" when it certainly does not require any individual homeowners to do anything different than what they're already doing), it's hard not to get the impression that you're basically trying to argue in favor of NIMBY without actually saying it.

An aside - I was talking about the wave of mostly white, young, single, affluent people colonizing and gentrifying Portland, not LA. The Amazon boxes are a form of gentrification that push out existing homeowners. Portland's historically Black neighborhood of Albina was a thriving mix of SFHs and medium density. Now those houses are torn down and it's a wall of condos and apartments that all look the same, each with a sushi restaurant or an organic market.

You're right, it is that there is denser zoning in close proximity that makes us want to live where we do, and makes it walkable. Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals. I also don't want to live in the only SFH surrounded by condos. I think your point is that the SFHs don't contribute anything to the mixture, and are somehow parasitic on the higher density zones. I think that's not true. Both sides of the mix are important. It gives the neighborhood a character that doesn't exist in most American cities, which is: People of different backgrounds sit together outside cafes and talk. On any given day we hang out with other homeowners, their kids, young professionals, and also people who work in the service industry who live in the neighborhood and go to the same places they work on their days off. We go to concerts with them, they come over when we BBQ and hang out at our house.

My argument is that this arrangement is much better for society as a whole, and for individuals across the socioeconomic spectrum, than a division between all-SFH suburbia and all high-density inner city. Especially now that most people don't commute to an office, and most of the commuting is done by wage workers who have to commute out to the suburbs to work in a strip mall. The homeowners close to downtown provide an economic base for higher-end local businesses that renters would not be able to support. The people who work in those businesses earn enough to rent in the neighborhood where they work. With all high-density, families are essentially exiled to the burbs, there is little to no socializing between economic classes, and everyone has to commute.

Sure, re-zoning doesn't affect individual homeowners immediately, but the endpoint or goal of it is to ultimately get rid of SFHs in inner areas, not to leave a healthy mixture standing. That's what I see as the problem. And I think it's a politically motivated goal based on the idea that no one should really own a SFH (or if they do, as one poster put it, they can move somewhere far away from the city).

I've lived or spent significant time in a bunch of places around the US - rural NJ, suburban NJ, NYC, Philly, Orlando exurbs, San Diego, San Francisco, South Bay, and I now live in inner SE Portland. And I agree with you that there is something really special about it.

In some ways it's similar to the tourism or gentrification problem - the very things that make a place desirable lead to the destruction of those things. Some people view the world through a purely economic lens and treat individual people as abstracted production/consumption units. And unfortunately there's no real way to put a dollar value on "all the neighbors know each other and help each other out". And even if you could - you can't just BUY your way into that, no matter how much money you have! The only way to unlock that value is to live there and engage with the community. Obviously there will be turnover but what some people don't seem to grasp is that there is a tipping point, where enough newcomers overwhelm the "old timers" and destroy the culture of a place. And think about the game theory of it from the point of view of a resident - why invest time and resources in a community if you're just going to leave in a year or two? Or if the beneficiaries are future random people who are not going to give a shit about the community?

Nice to hear from a fellow Portlander who feels the same way! And your explanation is clearer than what I tried to describe as "character". There are a lot of people here of course who do just view residents as economic units, but there's just as much resistance.

"you can't just buy your way into that" is a great insight.

> Which contradicts the idea that I'm making a NIMBY argument. I don't want to live in an all-SFH suburb or in a high density zone that's all rentals.

I don't understand what you're trying to say here at all. If you're trying to argue against some sort of development or planning change that doesn't change anything about your own property due for reasons that are purely about how it would affect you personally, that seems like NIMBY to me. The fact that you happen to not be arguing for universal SFH doesn't somehow make it not NIMBY.

Independent of that, I don't really find the rest of what you're saying compelling. You're arguing against a change to eliminate something with concrete, known problems on the basis of wanting to preserve "character". I still maintain that this is indistinguishable from any NIMBY argument.

This comment makes me wonder: is the actual issue perhaps not so much the single part of SFH but the family part?

I can imagine a sensible zoning rule requiring an appropriate fraction of housing units to have 2+ bedrooms and another fraction to have 3+. (There is no particular reason that a multi bedroom unit needs to house a family. Plenty of 20-somethings are happy to have housemates.)

Due in part to suboptimal fire codes, the US has trouble building nice multi-unit buildings with 2+-bedroom units. Other countries manage just fine.

What is the median price of one of these SFH in this neighborhood? I doubt very much that "middle class people who are willing to buy a house where they don't need a car and want to raise their family in the city center" is an accurate assessment here. This is a housing policy that allows the most valuable land for high density housing to be monopolized by a small cohort of rich people who have enough money to afford both the convenience of proximity to downtown and also the luxury of a whole house + yard to themselves, probably making up less than 1% of the metro area population.

That's really not the case. Which is why I'm saying that inner SE and NE Portland are very unique in their walkability, zoning pattern and the resulting social effects for an American city.

Prices have risen in the past 10 years, but the median SFH in Portland sits at around $550k. 54% of the housing stock in Portland is SFH.[0]

The 1% don't live in the city, they live in Lake Oswego and other suburbs where the average SFHs are twice as large (at least).

[0] https://www.portland.gov/phb/documents/2024-state-housing-po...

> That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

> Isn't restricting what people can lawfully do with their own land a form of expropriation?

Imagine you own land subject to a restrictive covenant. The restrictive covenant might actually have positive value to you – if the entire neighbourhood has a restrictive covenant prohibiting certain land uses, that gives your neighbourhood a character, people are willing to pay for the character the covenant enforces – maybe the existence of the covenant was actually a factor in convincing you to purchase this specific property. Suppose a legislative change invalidates the covenant – that's the government taking away from your land something you value about it. Isn't that an expropriation?

And I don't think there is a fundamental logical difference between a restrictive covenant on the title, and zoning as a government-imposed land use regulation. Some buyers choose a property because of its zoning, its zoning is something they know about and value; if the government changes the zoning, and that takes away from their property something they valued about it, isn't that an expropriation?

Note, I'm not arguing that removal of zoning and restrictive covenants is always wrong – maybe sometimes it is the right thing to do, all things considered. I'm simply arguing against the position "land use limitation = expropriation, removal of it = not expropriation" – even if something is expropriation, sometimes expropriation is justifiable

I mean, I personally loathe the concept of HOAs so the government abolishing them sounds like a wonderful thing to me.

And if you just buy a property and don't actually make this agreement, I definitely don't see a problem with abolishing it. We're talking about the government telling you what you can do with your land, and then stopping doing that.

Real property is a bundle of rights in land and its fixtures – that's the standard definition in academic legal theory

If there was already a zoning or restrictive covenant, and you knew about that when you bought the land – then the ability to do with the land what that zoning or covenant prohibits is not part of the rights to the land you acquired, and the enforcement of that zoning/covenant isn't denying you any of the rights you paid for.

Besides that, private property is (almost always) a creation of the government. [0] I own a house. If I trace the chain of land titles, it ultimately ends in a government land grant; the government got it by stealing it from the Indigenous people. The government land grant was issued on the condition of obeying the government's laws as in force from time-to-time. You can't sell what you don't own; the original land grant recipient didn't own the land independent of that condition, so none of the subsequent purchasers could either. So the government restricting my ability to use the land I purchased isn't an infringement of any of the rights I actually paid for.

[0] I live in Australia; under Australian law, "native title" is considered to pre-exist Australia's current British-imposed system of governance, but all other land titles derive their legal existence from being created by that system; I don't think the situation in the US is fundamentally different, all non-Indigenous US land titles derive from action of the state or federal governments, or the colonial governments, or the Mexican or Spanish or French or Dutch or Russian or Hawaiian governments

Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?

Uh, no, that's not the case at this point in time. There were racist HOA compacts like that up to the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Pretty few people alive today have bought houses where they were given an "explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people" as you said.

I live ten blocks from a neighborhood in Portland called Laurelhurst. Laurelhurst sits on a hill, about 30 blocks east of downtown, and contains the largest 100-year-old mansions east of the river. At each main entrance to Laurelhurst, there are massive stone archways. The arches were built to define the points where Black people were not allowed to enter after sundown.

This is not the case today.

Speaking as someone whose Dad grew up in segregated Baltimore, my grandfather was a bar owner who wasn't even allowed to own or work at a bar in the white neighborhoods. They couldn't rent or buy a house in the white neighborhoods.

The situation today has nothing in common with that. We own homes and businesses wherever we want to. Fold up your manufactured guilt and sympathy and take it elsewhere, we didn't need your help and we still don't.

The more fair reading of the parent comment is that some people bought homes prior to 1968 with racial covenants attached that were subsequently made illegal. Those homes built in that regime still exist. So we have precedent within the lifetime of the _homes_ for this sort of change.

Also just as an interesting historical oddity, here is a map of home deeds in Chicago that still have (obviously illegal and unenforceable) racial covenants. Including tons in the Washington park neighborhood made famous by Raisin in the Sun!

https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/32c7a747127e46dda11...

Aside from everything else you missed, plenty of people today live in the houses their parents or previous generations bought before 1968.

Within my lifetime, the municipality in which I live enacted policies (historic preservation and racial steering of apartments) specifically to limit the number of Black families that moved in. The preservation-based restrictionism continued into the 1980s (and, of course, remains in force today); the steering into the late 1990s. Our Fair Housing Ordinance included an escape clause allowing our board to resegregate specific blocks, and just a year or two before I was born, they used it.

This is not ancient history.

> Remember that there are plenty of houses today in America which were bought under the explicit promise that their neighbors would always be white people. That got taken away. Why should the promise of single family housing be any more precious?

I'm not saying I oppose abolishing either racially restrictive covenants or single family zoning. On the contrary, I support the abolition of the former, and am open-minded about the abolition of the latter.

What I'm opposing is particular arguments to those conclusions – what one might call libertarian(-adjacent) arguments – not the conclusions themselves.

I think, a legal right to racially homogenous neighbours is a property right, and taking it away was an expropriation of property – but an expropriation I support. And I don't think one is always owed compensation for such expropriations either. Legally speaking, not all "regulatory takings" are entitled to compensation; and I'm unconvinced the answer is different if we look at that question through a moral lens rather than a legal one.

Was it ever an explicitly legal right, or just one that hadn't been explicitly illegal? I don't know offhand if there was any prior legal ruling that this sort of thing was legal or if it was just something that in practice the government never did anything about before 1968. I feel like there's a difference between a legal status quo and a legal right, and it's not clear to me that this was ever a right (although maybe you're aware of a specific case or something I'm not)

The US Supreme Court upheld racially restrictive covenants in the 1926 case Corrigan v. Buckley; they then overturned that decision in the 1948 case Shelley v. Kraemer.

So, between 1926 and 1948, there was a US Supreme Court case upholding racially restrictive covenants. There were also many state court cases reaching the same conclusion. So yes, the US courts had reviewed them and found them to be legally binding.

Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that for any given form of racial discrimination, there was some point in US history where a court directly ruled that it was legal.

> Furthermore, although from 1948 onwards they were officially legally unenforceable, it didn't stop new such covenants being made, which served as a social signal that non-white residents weren't welcome; the 1968 Fair Housing Act made it illegal to create such a covenant, as opposed to them merely being unenforceable in the courts.

Yeah, this is more what I was wondering about in my comment above. You had mentioned the idea of a "legal right to racially homogenous neighbours", and I was curious if that was actually an explicit legal right at any point rather than just something that in practice people did without getting into trouble. It sounds like there were a couple decades where it was explicitly a legal right, and then another couple decades after where it was in the "implicitly allowed despite not being considered legal" territory (and presumably for an indefinite period beforehand was also basically allowed, just without the definitive legal ruling on it).

To clarify, I didn't expect that you were wrong by using that phrasing earlier; I just had no clue either way, and it seemed like it might be useful context for the discussion either way.

I think racially restrictive covenants were originally legal basically everywhere; but only in the US, Canada and South Africa did they become common.

Under English real estate law, while there are some constraints on your ability to make covenants, the rules are quite broad. A century ago, racial discrimination wasn't illegal or clearly contrary to public policy in most common law jurisdictions – indeed, many of them had explicitly racially discriminatory laws on the statute book – so racially restrictive covenants weren't obviously disallowed. The US, with its constitutional prohibition on discrimination in the 14th Amendment, was actually the only common law country in which there was a decent argument they weren't legal – but SCOTUS rejected that argument at first, then changed its mind over 20 years later. In the 1945 case Re Drummond Wren, the Ontario High Court ruled them illegal – but it cited the just signed United Nations Charter as grounds for doing so.

I agree. And really the Supreme Court ruling that racial zoning couldn’t be enforced and was an unlawful property taking is an even more direct analogy.

I think you’re missing the point. It’s not you gaining more freedom with the land that’s the problem. It’s that all your neighbors now have the same freedom.

I bought my house with a close neighbor because I know the neighbor can’t build a steel mill in their backyard. If the government comes in and says we’re all free now to build steel mills, that gain in freedom is a loss in value for me.

Yes but unfortunately you never paid for what rights your neighbour had, so nothing is being taken from you

No, that’s not expropriation. There’s a really important difference between a restrictive covenant on the title and a zoning regulation. The former is part of what you bought. The latter is something that happened to exist, and nothing about your purchase carried any sort of promise, express or implied, that this would continue forever.

It’s no different from buying a house with a great tree in the neighbor’s yard, and then they cut it down. Was that part of the value of the house to you? Yep. Was there a promise that it would stay there forever? Nope. Is cutting it down expropriation? Nope. Should you have assumed it would be there forever? Absolutely not.

Like, that's a clever response, but it's not describing expropriation, and you know that. Expropriation literally means taking away property, so it's not a matter of degree: It's saying we are taking your property and redistributing it.

Here's where Georgism gets clever: The initial Georgism says that land should be taxed up to the value of its land-rent. Some progressive people said, well, that means the landlord wouldn't make any money anyway, so the government should just take (expropriate) the land. George said, basically, no. Let the landlord decide if it's worth it for them to keep the freehold.

Then, there are varieties of Georgism that disagree about whether the government should be allowed to tell you anything at all about what to do with your property. Some say you should be able to do anything on it. Others say not.

When I bought my house, across from an elementary school, I knew I didn't have a right to drill oil on it, or to build a factory making solid rocket boosters and dumping perchlorates in the basement.

That's all written into the code governing the land before you buy it. The Georgist question is: If I'm paying 100% tax on this land's rent value, does that mean I get to despoil it any way I want? Or do some rules apply?

That's a separate and more nuanced question; the answer is probably that the same rules would apply as do now, but that doesn't equate with expropriation.

So IIUC your argument is that what do you do as a landholder when actually land development is forbidden/restricted because the absence of certain developments actually what provide the value ?

I have no idea what georgists would say about that. My guess is that being a the holder of such land would work as luxury/status-signal because you are only incurring the cost of the land and no/low revenues from it

It really doesn't have much to do with planning or zoning, I imagine it predates that. A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

Zoning and planning distorts land values so georgism alone won't solve land use problems. E.g. Demand for land with fewer property rights (such as single family zoning, or a heritage restriction) will be lower than the site next to it that allowed building a 200 floor residential tower. In turn its land value will be lower.

It might still yield a high rent tho, but maybe not more than a new well maintained apartment.

> A lot YIMBYs are also georists but a LVT wouldn't really address issues created by planning.

It wouldn't directly address those planning issues, but it aligns the financial incentives of the body politic between residential homeowners and the rest of the community. Normally residential homeowners have huge financial incentive to make housing scare and expensive, the LVT removes that financial gain from causing misery.

LVT is a good reform to do, but if the goal is to improve housing affordability through supply it's quite an indirect measure and occur at a glacial pace without proper planning reform.

Many areas where people want to live and where homes should be built, can sometimes have a large portion of home owners like Mosman, Bondi, Croydon or Woollahra in Sydney. A tax on the unimproved value of land just doesn't get home building started here if no one is a renter (I recall increases in rent were tied to LVT in Progress and Poverty). And if its based on valuations the valuations will again be distorted by planning controls.

If you upzone these areas for towers, the moment the first person takes the gazillion dollar offer from a developer suddenly homes get built, and suddenly everyone else want to exit. And besides if you have LV Tax their land value will got up because their land will have fewer development limitations, higher demand, etc, etc.

Georgism is cool, land tax is cool, but it's not a silver bullet.

If your goal is to make homes more affordable, reforms like the ones they did in Auckland (loosening planning controls) is the way to go. https://onefinaleffort.com/auckland

Similar thing is taking place in Austin Texas right now as well. https://www.pew.org/en/research-and-analysis/articles/2026/0...

If your goal is to redistribute wealth Georgism is not a bad option, but again planning controls (zoning, Floor space, height limits, heritage controls, parking minimums, upper setbacks, excessive lower setbacks) can suppress the true size of the tax base.

Nobody is expropriating your land by upzoning it, they're giving you and all of your neighbours stronger property rights through the freedom to develop your land.

Denser developments are also much more fiscally productive than SFH zoning [1]. This means that cities that upzone will tend to have lower taxes, less debt, and better services in the long run.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmQomKCfYZY

I think UBI is pretty squarely a progressive issue. Maybe you're conservative for the area you live in (Cali?) but many conservatives would consider your view to be pretty extreme left.

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