yonran

> Doesn't seem they had a lot of choice in the matter:

Nonsense. The restrictively zoned cities in the Bay Area are leaving a lot of value on the table in order to protect their squat neighborhoods. If Mountain View truly preferred tenant protections over protecting neighborhood character, I’m sure they could have made a win-win solution with the developer to provide replacement rent-controlled units in exchange for an upzoning, even late in the process.

I disagree with your premise. There are people on the margin who decide to drive or not because of the traffic (or who are forced to queue unexpectedly). If the roads and parking garages had infinite capacity, then there would be hundreds of thousands more cars on the road in Manhattan. It’s implausible that all the people who remain on the road today are purely inelastic.

I also disagree that the tax would be incident on those with the lowest paying jobs. Higher-paying workers are more likely to pay more, since people with price-inelastic demand for driving are more likely to be those who value their time more highly.

Finally, I don’t think the primary purpose is to raise money for the government, but instead to manage the road resource so that the throughput is high.

Yes, and in my opinion those are both valid assumptions to make.

1. You’re right, congestion pricing forces drivers to reveal the marginal price for time. In a congested road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a specific time? Because he knows that it will take too much time due to traffic (or because he is simply forced to queue). In a toll road, what makes the marginal driver decide not to drive at a given time? Because he knows it will cost too much money. At the margin, congestion pricing turns a time cost into a monetary cost.

For those individuals whose value of time is lower than the marginal driver (i.e., people who would rather have a traffic jam than pay the toll), congestion pricing itself can make them worse off, but when the proceeds are reinvested in transit I think it’s probable that congestion pricing will generally benefit lower-income people.

2. Congested roads already force people to change their travel time. If you try to cross a congested bridge at a specific time, you will be queued until all the people in front of you have passed. So I suppose you could say the road already is extracting rent and throwing it away. Congestion pricing harnesses the value (of all the drivers whose value of time is above the marginal driver) instead of discarding it.

I think Emily Badger sort of misses the point. A scarcity tax is completely different from a user benefit fee for road maintenance. For public goods, it’s a good thing for the government to subsidize the fixed costs of the public good. But where there is traffic, the road is not entirely a public good anymore and we are already paying the cost of congestion, but the price is in the form of time and inconvenience rather than dollars. A congestion charge converts the time price into a monetary price. It makes sense to charge a congestion charge because it is merely harnessing a price that drivers already pay and using it to improve the city.

The same is true for land value taxes. Tenants pay the scarcity price for land anyway (in the form of land rent) regardless of the level of tax, so the government might as well harness that energy and use it to benefit all the people instead of a few.

Oops. I linked to some other book with a similar name. This is the correct book: https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Alms-Economic-History-Prince...

This matches some of Greg Clark’s descriptions of a preindustrial Malthusian economy in A Farewell to Alms (https://www.amazon.com/Farewell-Arms-Ernest-Hemingway/dp/068... or see his lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYJJlnyDpps). When the population is limited by scarce natural resources and the technology to alleviate the scarcity does not exist (or is forbidden in the case of San Francisco), then virtue is vice and vice is virtue. For example, disease increases mortality, leading to increased average incomes, so he argues that the dirty Europeans had higher average incomes than clean Japanese.

> Yet in capitalist America...?

Restrictive zoning is the prohibition of creating housing capital, so it’s ironic and incorrect to blame capitalism for the housing shortages in restrictive metros such as the Bay Area. Landlordism or rentierism might be better words for the capital repression.

It’s not the inequality of capital ownership that is the problem. It’s the inequality of land ownership (specifically zoned housing capacity). A few thousand hundred-millionaires hardly hurt people any more than a few thousand millionaires. But a few million middle-class homeowners hurts when they are not allowed to share their land with the landless. So the most worrysome inequality is the numbers of landed vs. landless, not millionaires vs. ten millionaires or hundred millionaires.

The article (and Sidewalk’s blog post https://medium.com/sidewalk-toronto/sidewalk-toronto-project...) has few details, so everyone is only responding to the suggestion that tax increment will be paid to Sidewalk Labs. It’s odd to see the outrage over that; it is one of only a couple ways that a government can pay a developer for public works:

1. Government buys land (including surrounding land), pays for development, and takes the risk that the increased rents don’t pay back the bonds

2. Private developer buys land (including surrounding land), pays for development, and takes the risk that the increased rents don’t pay back the bonds

Property taxes (and tax increment) let the government take partial equity in the surrounding land rents, allowing the government to make any linear combination of how much ownership to give to existing landowners, the developer, and the government. It seems odd that there should be moral outrage over having the developer take more of the risk vs. the government taking more of the risk.

Alon Levy wrote a related blog post discussing taxation vs. ownership in regards to subways here: https://pedestrianobservations.com/2017/09/07/meme-weeding-l...

> What you're proposing would institute CL as a de facto utility in perpetuity with an API that innovated at the rate of the old Ma Bell.

I don’t think so. For one thing, requiring established networks to be interoperable can enable other companies to create their own enhancements with additional features (e.g. 3Taps, PadMapper, MSN Messenger), so the original network is not the only game in town and is incentivized to innovate faster. For another thing, requiring open protocols does not mean the process needs to be slow; there are slow standards consortiums (e.g. W3C), and there are reasonably fast ones (e.g. WHATWG). I’m not even sure that a consortium would be required; perhaps a company can satisfy its interoperability requirement simply by documenting its API and authorizing competitors to use that API.

We could go back to the world where the AIM vs. MSN Messenger Chat Wars were legal (https://nplusonemag.com/issue-19/essays/chat-wars/). But reverse engineering APIs required an adversary with deep pockets, so I don’t think that is sufficient. We need an explicit regulation that a company’s monopoly over its network doesn’t last forever, just as patents are not forever.

The moat that each tech company owns is its network. Rather than trust-busting these companies up into their different businesses, I think it would promote more competition to impose network interoperability requirements once the network is entrenched for too long.

A useful example is craigslist: a company with virtually no innovation for decades that still dominates the classified listings space. Other companies that try to offer a better experience face the hurdle of creating their own network or attempting to scrape craigslist’s items (and then being kicked off by their lawyers). What regulation would allow meaningful competition? A policy that requires craigslist to provide an API to competing firms for reading and writing at a reasonable price, and a requirement that changes to the network not favor craigslist vs. other firms.

It’s true that the current income tax has shortcomings due to the mobility of capital owners. I think it would promote competition to focus more on wealth taxes on immobile assets (on e.g. land, patents, spectrum, and ownership of networks) as an alternative to some income taxation. See e.g. Glen Weyl’s book Radical Markets on this topic (https://www.amazon.com/Radical-Markets-Uprooting-Capitalism-... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2818494)

Investment in housing and low interest rates would actually spur new construction and thus reduce rents if the housing supply were more elastic. It is the fact that supply is inelastic in a few cities that makes investment harmful for homebuyers.

> Zoning exists for a reason. People don't want short term rentals

Zoning exists to separate industry from residential and also to separate middle-class households (people who can afford to use their home only for consumption, whose only animals are pets and whose only crop is grass) from the working-class (people who made income on their home by taking in boarders, growing chickens, doing home businesses, etc.) Middle-class zoning banned these working-class activities (see https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think it’s really tricky to separate who is harming whom in the modern day when houses are seen as an investment and there is insufficient zoning for working-class people, and where the norms of what a house is for may be changing.

While the state of California and some cities have been making it legal to construct accessory dwelling units, cities commonly prohibit short-term rentals in these accessory dwelling units. (Reference: Berkeley’s BMC 23C.22.020.D [1], and San Francisco’s Planning Code 207(c)(4)(D) [2]). In such cities, it seems that the law discourages you from adding an ADU with kitchen if you want to rent it out on Airbnb (or if you want to rent it out long-term, for that matter, if rent control would apply). It’s less restrictive to add bedrooms without the kitchen. I don’t think Airbnb will be able to build test homes in these restrictive cities either.

[1]: https://www.codepublishing.com/CA/Berkeley/html/Berkeley23C/...

[2]: http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/planni...

> It's fundamentally _odd_ to me that people are looking at rental costs.

I think it was good that he focused on rent instead of for-sale price. The sale price includes other factors (property taxes, interest rates, expectation of rent increases) that do not affect the cost of living, and many authors get confused when they complain about rising prices while ignoring rents; see https://www.idiosyncraticwhisk.com/2017/10/housing-part-264-... for further explanation

It sounds like the big box stores themselves are validating the Strong Towns interpretation that towns have invested far too much public infrastructure compared to the property value of the big box stores (https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/3/big-box-stores...). Perhaps these towns could zone every big box store for subdivision and redevelopment so that the stores will have to pay taxes based on the upzoned value. As an added benefit, the stores will be encouraged to use the land more productively.

Is there anywhere you can get a good blower fan for the purpose of filtering the air, instead of a box fan that has a lot of space around the blades?

Chrome’s auto-update forces you to trust the author of any extension you install for as long as you use the extension. Google’s “Trustworthy by default” effort doesn’t change this model since it still provides no guarantees. This works for some extensions backed by companies (e.g. Adblock), but it doesn’t work for extensions that add simple functionality.

For small extensions that add basic browser functionality (e.g. reorder tabs, enable autocomplete), I wish Google would enable users to verify open-source extensions. I trust the version of the code that I have reviewed on github. I do not trust that the kid who wrote this extension won’t go rogue and upload a malicious version in a future autoupdated release. So the only way I can verify the code that I run is to install it from the Chrome Web Store, copy the code and verify it, uninstall the Chrome Web Store version, and then load the unpacked extension (or even publish my own copy of it to the Chrome Web Store). This is pretty cumbersome.

Rather than blaming the company Airbnb for a city’s ills, it may be more helpful to examine why it has popular support in the first place, while family-only zoning is declining in popularity. Short-term rentals in residences were already illegal in San Francisco and New York; they were legalized to allow Airbnb because short-term rentals have popular support from voters. Single-family zoning was designed 100 years ago to create neighborhoods of families who were protected from the nuisances of the lower-class apartment “parasite”s (Euclid v. Ambler) and lower-class houses that were used to raise chickens and take on boarders (https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/it-time-bring-back-bo... or https://www.amazon.com/American-Nightmare-Government-Undermi...). I think exclusionary zoning has been so extreme in some cities that it is beginning to lose its support among the middle class, for whom it is now more necessary to use their property as a business rather than only as consumption.

Edit: Related point: In some places, it is ingrained in our culture since the 1970s that housing should be a good investment. Low property taxes (Proposition 13) and zoning restrictions are designed to increase the private gains to this investment (https://www.amazon.com/Homevoter-Hypothesis-Influence-Govern...). A small change of use to short-term rentals is perhaps the next incremental step for house investors. It sucks for people who want to use housing as only a peaceful consumption good, but in my opinion that ship sailed a long time ago in Closed-Access cities.

One of Chrome Web Store’s terms is that a developer is not allowed to publish an extension that “knowingly violates a third party’s terms of service.”[1] So even if the author has the 1st Amendment right to publish the extension on his own website, Google will likely take it down from the Chrome Web Store.

[1]: https://developer.chrome.com/webstore/terms

Yes, the limit on increase of assessed value helps the elderly. All the other property investors (such as grandchildren and corporations) are just happy to reap the benefits. In other words, the design does not target the elderly.

There’s no insurmountable conflict between stability and efficiency. Just as landlords offer 10-year leases to commercial tenants who desire stability, the government can offer 10-year (or longer) insurance products against the risk of increased land value.

A proper tax relief program for the elderly would actually target the elderly, as many states do.

Proposition 13 does not target the elderly. It gives tax breaks to all property investors, including corporations and (due to Proposition 58) inherited estates.

If you want to blame state law for not setting aside enough low-income housing, it seems to me that the original sin was the zoning powers that the state conferred to local governments a hundred years ago. SB 827 itself would have taken back minimal powers from local governments—namely, the right to set arbitrarily restrictive height limits, single-family density restrictions, and parking minimums near transit. Of course, SB 827 could have included any number of additional changes (e.g. eviction reform, low-income funding, tax reform, price controls), but these are each worthwhile policies in and of themselves and are complementary to SB 827, not opposed to it.

One factor that may limit the deployment is San Francisco’s permit requirement, which specifies that stationless bike share companies must commit to a “service area” which must have at least 3 bikes per square mile all day, and 20% of bikes must be in Communities of Concern. See regulation http://library.amlegal.com/nxt/gateway.dll/California/transp... and permit application https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/projects/2017/Bike...

Now you’re asking normative questions instead of the positive question I responded to above. So I can give my opinion, but of course you are free to disagree.

> That proposition exists as a protection from homeowners being screwed by the government being unfair about the value of their land

According to The Permanent Tax Revolt (https://www.amazon.com/Permanent-Tax-Revolt-Property-Transfo...), Proposition 13 was largely the opposite. Previously, homeowners benefited from informal and corrupt tax assessments that lagged market values. After assessment practices were modernized and standardized, homeowners demanded protection from the market. And while many states created protections (e.g. low-income circuit breakers, elderly exemptions, and homeowner exemptions), California’s Proposition 13 protections (along with the later Proposition 58/193 hereditary privileges) are probably the most regressive among the states.

> does property tax really even make sense? This person PURCHASED the land but still has to owe the government taxes even though they own it?

Yes, a property tax (particularly, on the unearned portion which is the land value) makes sense as a progressive way to enable the fruits of the community to be used to benefit the community. For one thing, a private owner should not reap all the benefits from the economic activity around him that he did not earn. For another thing, private ownership should not last forever because that leads to concentration of wealth; one could similarly ask whether copyright and patents should last forever.

> Secondly, it is really important to think of real estate as an investment more than a physical asset. These people got in the market early and their investment is giving them great returns. I think that is fair.

I disagree. The economic justification for investing in capital is that investors help to make the country more productive. Driving up the price of land does the opposite; investment in land crowds out investment in capital. The value of land comes from the neighborhood’s economic activity and public investments, not from the individual landowner. Now, you could argue that giving the landowner some incentive will encourage more civic-minded engagement, but I think it’s a far cry from justifying giving him 100% of the increase in ground rents.

For a recent book on the moral foundations of land ownership, I recommend Rethinking the Economics of Land and Housing by Josh Ryan-Collins,‎ Toby Lloyd,‎ Laurie Macfarlane (https://www.amazon.com/Rethinking-Economics-Land-Housing-Rya...)

California’s Proposition 13 (1978) is the anti-Land Value Tax. Instead of taxing away the land rent and encouraging improvements, it does the opposite by protecting private land rent and taxing turnover and improvements.

• Under Proposition 13, the statutory tax rate is only about 1.2% (1%, plus voter supermajority-approved bonds). Ideally, a land value tax would be higher.

• You’re taxed according to acquisition value plus an inflation adjustment (instead of current fair market value), so the average effective tax rate is only about 0.7%. What this means is that property investors (instead of the community) pocket 100% of the unearned value increase until they sell.

• But it also causes reassessment when you renovate or rebuild. So if you construct an addition, the effective tax rate on the addition is actually greater than the effective tax rate on the land. (Contrast to land value tax, in which the tax rate on improvements is 0%.)

From talking to SF Planning Department, my understanding is that a school district can own housing and use it for employee housing, but another entity (such as the Mayor’s Office of Housing) can’t rent only to a specific profession.