larsiusprime

Theres also like an entire previous article linked which discusses the published literature which you are free to read if you like

I see how it works but all you're doing is making more efficient use of the given parcel of land. The value of the land already prices in its development potential. A parcel that could legally, physically, and feasibly accommodate a high rise will be worth more.

Author here. My actual point is:

- I've spent the last five years dutifully responding to each and every criticism I've found online. My entire original article series was about responding to the three most significant critiques of the movement. On my blog you can find many other such replies to critiques that have come in since then.

- This is important to do for epistemic reasons. However, it has nothing to do with actually changing things. You simply do not change the world by responding to your most hard-bitten critics. That's an entirely orthogonal problem.

(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.

You never know until you try.

Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.

Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/georgism-through-land-leasi...

The standard reform we actually pitch is a revenue neutral swap for existing property taxes. The tax we are reducing is the building tax, shifted onto land instead.

This is Norway's approach with Hydropower and Petroleum: https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...

I co-wrote the article. Neither Greg nor I are single taxers. We think LVT is better than a poorly designed wealth tax, but we are not single tax maximalists.

Well Mamdani's pied-a-tierre tax was specifically a real estate tax, levied on the real estate of people who don't have residency in the city. It's a marginal tax in the grand scheme of things, but unlike the billionaire wealth tax, it actually works, because the real estate can't move. And the owners can't just threaten to leave because they've already left, that's why the tax hits them.

Lars here. I run the Center for Land Economics with Greg (we wrote the OP blog post). We are not maximalist single taxers.

Henry George was obviously a Single Taxer, but "Georgism" has a generally broader meaning than that. Some Georgists are single taxers, but not all, including Greg and I.

When we talk to elected officials, we don't even talk about Henry George all that much (I did in the ACX article series because it all started with the progress and poverty book review). We mostly speak of "Land value return" and our focus is mostly on pragmatic revenue neutral tax shifts to LVT.

I wouldn't say it's coordinated. This is an old article, published in June. A lot of people came to the land economics blog from the ACX article that ran today, someone likely saw this one and then posted it to HN.

The linked study in OP shows that the single biggest beneficiary of Prop 13 on a category basis was vacant land.

> it seems like you're not taxed for the things you build on your land, but instead for the things other people built around your land.

Correct.

The article includes a section on land valuation that gets into those details.

Not all assessors do this accurately, especially in California, but there are many that do. This article includes a section on land valuation which summarizes and links out to various other articles about various approaches

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-five-yea...

> On top of that, a tax that applies equivalently to all of the land available to the rental market in a given area will simply push prices upwards across the board

Most research asserts that a land value tax decreases the selling price of land.

I prefer sun yat sen’s Land reform ideas to mao’s

I'm not a single taxer.

Rent is a function of supply and demand, not a landlord's costs, otherwise we would expect changes in e.g. mortgage interest costs to be passed on to, but in practice we don't see this effect. We also don't see landlords who own their properties outright (and thus don't have mortgage interest costs) charging lower rents than landlords in the neighborhood with identical properties who have mortgages. When landlords' costs drop, do they drop the rent in response?

Taxes can be passed on when the tax induces a change in supply. Conventional property taxes are partially passed through because the component of the tax that falls on the building. Tax buildings, get less buildings.

Taxes on land do not affect the supply of the land, this implies they are not passed on and the research literature largely agrees with this.

RE sovereign wealth funds, You might find it interesting that the Norwegian approach to natural resource management is also based on the classical principles of Ricardo and George:

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/book-review-the-natural-div...

It seems based on this that the appropriate sci fi metaphor is not the Terminator or the Paperclip Maximizer, but Mr. Meeseeks. A initially cheerful helper who gets more and more deranged and driven to extreme lengths when faced with an apparently impossible task.

Did you really make this whole project in two weeks???

Have you done the math? Under a revenue-neutral shift that taxes buildings less and land more, the median homeowner comes out ahead:

https://landeconomics.org/reports/spokane-report

I think what you're missing is that land in the wealthiest parts of town is worth exponentially more than land out in the suburbs

Texas zoning is only “permissive” relative to other states. Relative to Japan it’s quite restrictive.

Brilliant!

Is the idea that the commits themselves are also time stamped with the date of the legislation/amendment too?

1. Stop restricting what can be built, especially in the super valuable city centers

2. Shift taxes off of building (which punishes development) and onto the passive holding of land (which discourages idle land speculation)

In other words, change man's laws, not nature's.

We're directly inspired by Urban3 and our hope in releasing these tools is to enable more people to be able to do this work directly themselves and share it with their elected officials!

If you're talking about the Manhattan effect specifically, I'm sure that zoning has a large effect on the extremeness of it. If you're talking about "land gets exponentially more valuable in the city center", then you see that pattern everywhere and indeed we saw it in the historical pre-zoning period as well. Agglomeration effects are sticky regardless of what time period you're in, what changes is the coefficients on the exponential equation.

Author here: most people know that the city is "more" valuable, but drastically underestimate how valuable. I've asked people how much more valuable they think Manhattan is than the Bronx and they will say things like "5x" or "10x", which is off by an order of magnitude.

They also underestimate what this means. In many cities you can have 50%+ of land value concentrated in a rather small portion of area, and this has huge implications for what would happen is you, say, changed property tax policy to shift the tax burden towards land and away from buildings. Most people assume it would kill the suburbs, but in many of our models single family homes come out slightly ahead, or stay neutral.

It's not just zoning, though that exacerbates it. City centers are where economic activity tends to be concentrated so even without zoning you would see these exponential land value effects as you approach the centers of economic activity (and indeed, we did see these same relative patterns prior to the passing of modern zoning laws).