jlhawn

From the abstract:

> These results challenge the prevailing view of local housing and labor markets and suggest that easing housing supply constraints may not yield the anticipated improvements in housing affordability.

If their finding is that increases in incomes leads to increases in demand which then increases prices, that’s not surprising. But their claim is that reducing artificial constraints (onerous land use regulation, discretionary entitlement and permitting, etc) would not have any impact on the supply curve. That’s highly suspect.

To make a plainly true statement which sounds similar to the paper title, "Increasing Incomes Coupled With Supply Constraints Explain House Price and Quantity Growth Across U.S. Cities." Spot the difference.

This paper primarily considers house prices and quantities in terms of single-family homes. They use data sources like the single-family repeat-sales index and the median home value from the American Community Survey, which mostly tracks single-family homes.

This focus limits their analysis by not fully accounting for multi-family housing units or rental markets, which are far more significantly impacted by supply constraints.

This emphasis on single-family homes in their data sources affects the generalizability of their conclusions about the impact of supply constraints across different types of housing markets, especially in dense urban areas where multi-family units and rentals are more prevalent.

They also only go as far back as 1980. The difference between supply constraints between 1980 and 2025 is very small compared to the difference between 1965 and 1980. Take Los Angeles as an example [1]. The zoned capacity of many metro areas was dramatically reduced by the mid 1970s.

[1] https://www.lewis.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/17/2020/...

Land value tax didn't destroy the British Liberal Party in the early 1900s. The flawed neoclassical economic consensus (capital vs labor) did. The Labour Party absorbed most of the ex-Liberal voters and then became the Conservatives' main rival.

Then the wide adoption of technology like the automobile (which made it possible for many to simply commute to and from the city instead of be there all the time) eroded the political necessity to tackle difficult urban land issues for decades. "Drive until you can afford to live" only gets you so far though and we're hitting the limits of that in many places now.

This critique assumes that because land parcels are not perfectly fungible, it is impossible to determine unimproved land values with sufficient accuracy for taxation. However, this is an overstatement, and several counterpoints undermine the argument:

1. Property Tax Systems Already Differentiate Land and Improvements

Nearly all property tax systems already distinguish between land and structures. While not perfect, assessors routinely estimate land values separately using standard appraisal techniques, such as sales comparisons, income capitalization, and residual valuation.

Many jurisdictions with split-rate taxation (e.g., Pittsburgh, Harrisburg) have successfully implemented higher land taxes without insurmountable assessment issues.

2. Market Transactions Provide Usable Data

While land parcels are not perfectly fungible, land is frequently bought and sold. Vacant land transactions, teardown sales, and comparable properties provide pricing signals that allow for reasonable estimates.

Even when improvements are present, sales can still reveal land values through statistical analysis. Techniques like hedonic regression and Computer-Assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) leverage large datasets to isolate land value.

3. Land Value Is Already Implicit in Market Prices

The value of land manifests in rental and purchase prices. Two identical buildings in different locations will sell or rent for different prices, with the difference attributable to land value.

Land residual analysis (subtracting improvement value from total value) is a well-established method used by appraisers and economists.

4. Perfect Accuracy Is Not Required

No tax system relies on perfectly precise assessments. Income taxes, sales taxes, and corporate taxes all involve estimation and compliance issues, yet they function well enough for governments worldwide.

Even if some inaccuracies exist, a Land Value Tax (LVT) still improves economic efficiency by discouraging land speculation and incentivizing productive land use.

5. Technological Advances Improve Assessment Accuracy

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), machine learning models, and mass appraisal techniques are making land assessment more precise.

Many cities and countries, including Denmark, Estonia, and parts of Pennsylvania, have successfully implemented LVT systems.

6. The Alternative Is Worse

Even if land assessments involve some degree of uncertainty, it’s still preferable to the distortions created by property taxes on buildings, which discourage construction and improvements.

Current property tax systems often undervalue land, leading to inefficiencies and speculative hoarding.

Conclusion:

The claim that it is “impossible” to determine unimproved land value is empirically false. While perfect precision is unattainable, the same is true of all tax assessments. Practical methods exist to estimate land value with sufficient accuracy, and jurisdictions that have implemented LVT-like systems have demonstrated their feasibility.

The real question is not whether it can be done at all, but whether the benefits of LVT outweigh any challenges in assessment—historical evidence suggests they do.

that function name `copyItemAtPath_toPath_error_` sounds like it was ported directly from objective-c!

My favorite theory is that it's related to zoning, permitting, and the urban built environment. What happened in the early '70s is that many of the US's major cities saw broad downzoning which compounded the effect of urban flight to suburbs, urban renewal, and the construction of freeways in cities which started the decade prior. This ensured that the traditional productivity gains of cities could not be shared as equally any longer. It led to a lower labor share of income (higher share to rent/land) and longer commutes for suburbs which effectively lowered their share of wealth. Productivity gains since have mostly went to increasing economic rents for land owners and monopolistic capital owners. After California's Prop 13 in 1978, many other states followed with their own property tax caps in the late '70s and early '80s which led to even more of the share of economic gains going to property owners.

> ... who owned the land ...

they didn't use the word "owned", only "occupied". The indigenous groups probably didn't even have anything like our modern concept of land "ownership" and would think of it more like land alienation. As a Georgist, I'm personally very annoyed by these sort of empty indigenous land acknowledgements. I'm more excited about stuff like this Squamish Nation housing development in Vancouver, BC [1] where they actually get rights to use the land how they want even if it doesn't fit local expectations of "indigenous ways of knowing and being".

[1] https://senakw.com/

The main idea behind the popular book _The Happiest Baby on the Block_ is that true cause of colic (inconsolable crying by newborns) is "The Missing Fourth Trimester". During the first 3-4 months after full term, the best methods for soothing an infant are recreating the conditions it experienced in the uterus. Humans evolved to "evict" their babies earlier due to the species' growing head sizes necessary for larger brains. After the infant's first 100 days, they are better able to self-sooth and can explore their environment (with help and supervision) to best continue brain development.

As a self-identified pro-housing (ie, YIMBY) advocate, I am not opposed to the California Forever plan. However, I very much doubt that it will end up being the type of community they are claiming it will be. I expect it will end up being another exurban car-centric community as it's still very far from the major job markets of the core SF Bay Area.

Given the location, I expect most potential residents would prefer to live in a community more like Mountain House, CA (with relatively larger private living space with a few schools and a single strip mall shopping center) than to live in a community with homes built like Noe Valley in SF but without all the benefits of urban amenities that come with living in SF because those benefits are endogenous to the urban economics of a place like SF.

edit to everyone talking about how the backers have the influence to attract tech jobs to their new city. Great, but even if that's the case ... a community like this can't be maintained by people who work in tech alone. It's going to require service workers who will need to live somewhere and while it's nice that the houses in this new city will cost less ($400k to $600k), the more affordable housing stock for service workers will mostly be found in the nearby (yet still to far for public transit so they will need cars) communities of vallejo, fairfield, antioch, stockton, etc. I have yet to read anything about how they plan to fund any subsidized housing in the community (this article only mentions subsidizing businesses). As a Georgist, I know they _could_ do it by establishing something like a community facilities district with much higher taxes on land, but as this project is fundamentally a speculative land investment for its backers I doubt they'd be interested in that.

So you think the congestion fee should be means-tested (or, more accurately, affluence-tested)?

How might such a system work? Have the DMVs from the metro area (NY, NJ, CT) link registered vehicle owners with their taxable income last year and share this info with MTA to adjudicate fees? I think that makes it too complex. You could achieve a similar equitable outcome by making the fee universal and using the revenue to improve alternative transit services (and/or lower fares) that are used more by lower income households.

When I read the title, I thought it was a new operating system-level containerization image format for filesystem layers and runtime config. But it looks like "container format" is a more general term for a collection of multiple files or streams into one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Container_format TIL.

OS containers could use an update too, though. They're often so big and tend to use multiple tar.gz files.

Recently in the SF Bay Area, there's been a lot of displeasure by transit activists that object to VTA's BART to San Jose extension (it's being built by VTA not BART) who had the choice between two tunneling options:

1. Two small-bore TBMs ~2 stories underground, one for rail in each direction. This would require cut and cover for the stations only

2. One large-bore TBM ~7 stories underground, with technically enough space to fit an entire station platform inside but displaces a HUGE amount of soil/rock along the entire line, and require very deep stations that take a long time for riders to enter/exit.

VTA consultants went with option 2 because they didn't want to disrupt the surface (again, only for the few blocks where the stations would be built) even though it costs $$ billions more.

Many transit activists (including me) are upset because it makes the project both take much longer and cost more. We could save money by literally just giving billions of dollars to the businesses on the affected blocks. There's no geo-technical reason to go with the large-bore option. This has also led to a lot of recent VTA-negativity among these activists.

Here I was thinking you were talking about elevated rail and putting trains back on the lower deck of the bay bridge... but no, you're talking about freeway expansion in the core Bay Area? Not gonna happen.

It seems they'll do anything but tax land values

Imagine if Apple behaved this way for mac OS. A significant number of Mac users I know:

- do not use the Mac App Store for anything other than first-party apps like keynote, et al

- Use chrome or firefox as their default web browser

- download and install software from trusted 3rd-party marketplace apps like Steam all the time

And it's not the end of the world.

I've been playing a lot of Baldur's Gate 3 lately and this kind of reminds me of when you have to roll a d20 in a skill check. Early in the game there are skill checks with a difficultly class of 2 (need to roll a 2 or higher to succeed) but you might have proficiency in that skill so you get a +3 modifier to your roll.

But if your base d20 roll result is a 1 then this is considered a critical fail and your modifiers are not added – you fail no matter what. So there is a 5% chance of failing no matter what (1 in 20).

However, you can have special items or spells which can grant you advantage in a roll: you roll 2 d20 instead of 1 and take the higher of each. Now the only way to critical fail is if you roll a 1 with both d20s. This has only a 0.25% chance (1 in 400).

So the "2 random choices" cache eviction policy feels kinda like rolling with advantage in D&D: Roll 2 die (pick to random keys) and evict the higher time since last access to evict.

that's an argument which works for capital goods (like livestock) but not for what Henry George considered to be natural opportunities of fixed supply like lithium ore (and land in general).

Henry George, if he were still alive today, would probably say that valuable raw mineral deposits like this would be more likely to be discovered and brought into productive use earlier if they were taxed. The argument being that people would have no reason to speculate on a large untapped reserve of it. There would still be an incentive to bring it into production because the earned profit would be made through extraction, processing, and distribution of the material even if the higher holding cost of the land is factored in as a cost.

There are construction defect laws in California which, infamously, only apply to multi-family buildings and exempt single-family homes. There's a 10-year window after certification of occupancy where the builder is liable for any construction defects, not just those that may lead to death of occupants. In practice it's mostly cosmetic/finishing issues that people complain and file lawsuits about. Leveling the playing field here would be nice.

it would increase the tax rate on land to be much higher. In the most extreme case, the annual tax on land value would so high that vacant land could be purchased for close to zero purchase price because the holding cost of the tax is high enough to capture all the value which is capitalized into a purchase price.

also fire suppression system (sprinklers) and pressurized stairwells are mandated.

Can I build a 6-story, multi-family, point access block apartment building with this system?

The high speed rail authority is not only tasked with building and operating the final high speed rail route but also has had to deal with land use politics of dozens of jurisdictions along the alignment. HSR has no at-grade crossings which means everywhere along the route that it crosses a road there needs to be an overpass or underpass. In the central valley where most construction has been happening that's at least one every mile for about 150 miles. They also had had to do multi-year environmental impact studies (because California law requires it for any major change from the status quo) which have to be incredibly thorough because people can just appeal any part of the project for any arbitrary "environmental" reasons such as "the overhead wires alter my view of [something, usually nothing]" if they can claim that it wasn't considered in the study.

Can we build it? Yes. The issue is mostly that we have so much process that delays building and scope creep for what does get built.

I'm glad to hear that you're in the camp of "Capitalism has failed to build badly needed housing" because it seems like so many anti-capitalists are in the camp of "Capitalism has built enough housing".

I have zero problem paying for ad-free... but what I do have a problem with is that I have no ad-free only option. You have no choice but to also pay for their music streaming service for $14 per month when other, subjectively better music services are only $11 per month. They should have an ad-free a la carte option for something like $6 per month.

Just let me pay for youtube premium without bundling a music streaming subscription please. $14 per month for no ads is not worth it when I already pay $11 per month for my preferred music streaming service.

> Previous studies have estimated this “enhanced” rock weathering could store 215 billion tons of carbon dioxide over the next 75 years if spread across croplands globally.

This is an average rate of 2.8 Billion tons of CO2 per year. We currently emit over 35 Billion tons of CO2 every year so this could potentially offset about 8% of global emissions. Obviously not enough to get us to net zero but that is very significant in my opinion.

I'm not certain how the economics of this solution would work. Is it easy to source, produce, and distribute this crushed volcanic rock? Would farmers get carbon credits for doing so? Or direct subsidies paid for by taxes on net-positive CO2 generating industries (which ironically is a lot of Ag itself)?

Hey! Have you met Ted Gwartney? He's great. I have the pleasure of serving with him on the board of Common Ground California.

Land Value Taxes are different. Nobody produces land so taxing it doesn't add to production costs and there is no deadweight loss. The economic burden of the tax falls only upon the land owner (in their role as a land owner) and cannot effectively be passed onto tenants. Land value is an economic rent which is arguably what we should tax more of and reduce taxes on consumption and income.

More available because increasing the holding cost of underutilized land means owners would be marginally pressured to sell.

More affordable because the tax increases the holding cost of land which is factored into a buyer's purchase budget, much like how mortgage interest rates factor into a buyer's budget.

First let's assume the supply of land for sale is fixed. Of course land is in fixed quantity but I'm talking only about sales inventory – what is actively on the market to purchase. Say I can afford $4,000 per month. If property tax is $1,000 per month and interest rate is 6% maybe I say my purchase budget is $500,000. If interest rate decreases to 3% maybe I say my purchase budget is $700,000. Now consider if the property tax increased to $2,000 per month. Now if interest is 6% my purchase budget becomes $330,000 and if 3% then $475,000. In either case I still pay $4000 total per month. The economic incidence of the tax falls completely on the seller (the previous owner).

Now let's remove our prior assumption about the quantity of land for sale. we earlier established that land would be more available under a higher land value tax because of the increased holding cost incentivizing more sales. That increase in supply (of land for sale) should reduce the market price for land. I can either get the same land for less purchase price or more/higher quality land for the same.

For anyone who think "oh this is just California's Proposition 13 but with a time limit"... not exactly. The tax rate in California is 1% of assessed value where assessed value can't grow more than 2% or the rate of inflation (whichever is lower). In this alternative system the base tax rate would be significantly higher. Ideally, high enough to capture the majority of the land's rental value at first. It also sets inflation as a floor while prop 13 has it or 2% as a ceiling.