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How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's
- TulliusCicero 1y ago> Not only does it contradict the received wisdom from the YIMBY movement that community input is bad actually Weird snipe. YIMBYs are certainly skeptical of some kinds of community input, but that doesn't mean they're opposed to all community input or control of everything.
- rcpt 1y agoThe linked article by Jerusalem Demas is worth reading. And, yeah, community input is bad.
- snovv_crash 1y agoIt's an incentives issue, not a community input issue. If the only value you are able to hold onto is the development you do yourself, then you aren't going to block your neighbours from building up their property.
- username332211 1y agoIncentives have nothing to do with it. Until the community recognizes that other people have rights and that rights are rights precisely because you need no "community input" (which is an euphemism for "political interference") in order to exercise them, the results will be the same. While developing a piece of real estate can cause a good deal of damage to the character of a community, ideas are much more dangerous in that regard. Why is it then, that we allow for unscrupulous capitalists to disseminate ideas freely? Why isn't there "community input" into the things newspapers are allowed to publish?
- immibis 1y agoincentives have everything to do with it and you're describing incentives while saying you're not
- rcpt 1y agoMembers of the community have incentives to prevent high speed rail and apartment towers being built near them. The general population has incentives to build high speed and apartment towers in those neighborhoods. But, because of community input, the voice of local busybodies is louder than that of the general population. It is a a disservice to democracy and prevents our governments from functioning in a way that serves the people.
- throw0101d 1y ago> And, yeah, community input is bad. Was the community input to Robert Moses' NYC plans bad? * https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-32-new-york-jane-jacobs-robert-moses https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/28/story-cities-... How about to the Spadina Expressway in Toronto? * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Road#Spadina_Expressway https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Road#Spadina_Expressway * https://www.tvo.org/article/the-streets-belong-to-the-people-why-a-premier-killed-the-spadina-expressway https://www.tvo.org/article/the-streets-belong-to-the-people... * https://transittoronto.ca/spare/0019.shtml https://transittoronto.ca/spare/0019.shtml
- rcpt 1y agoCommunity input is bad. Maybe in the 50s things were different. But that was a long time ago and the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. Robert Moses could not build today. Nobody can build today. Largely because we have given neighborhood busybodies veto power over all decisions. It's a disservice to the people when they democratically vote for something like a high speed rail and then never get it because the voices of local property owners matter more than that of the population.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago> Largely because we have given neighborhood busybodies veto power over all decisions. This is the real problem. There are forms of community input that are fine, but if you let local neighborhood councils veto any kind of building they don't like, they'll do just that.
- TulliusCicero 1y ago> community input is bad Community input is bad when it leads to bad results. Kind of a tautology, but my point is just that you can have good community input, it does happen, even if, yes, the general 'local' culture in the US tends to lend itself to NIMBYism.
- roenxi 1y agoIt might be more proper to deduce that community vetos are a bad idea although the practicalities of that are complex. I can imagine a situation, for example, where a community bans running a business from a residence and accidentally wiped out a major tech company from being founded. In fact, I suspect that probably did happen in the 90s although for obvious reasons it is impossible to prove. We've seen a huge amount of economic success from allowing talented motivated people to do what they think is a good idea without developing a consensus on the proper course of action. That probably scales down into to the small too. Progress depends on letting outliers happen.
- chii 1y ago> where a community bans running a business from a residence and accidentally wiped out a major tech company from being founded. the benefits of the business goes to the private person running the business from their residence. But the externalities falls to the community (or at least, shared by the community). Therefore, a community wanting to ban a business from a residence is very valid imho. However, if the business could either prove there are no externalities, or compensate for it in some way, then there should be room for negotiation, rather than a straight outright ban.
- charcircuit 1y ago>the benefits of the business goes to the private person It's not 0 sum. Someone else, potentially from the community, also gets value in exchange.
- typewithrhythm 1y agoThere seems to be a growing gap between the people who define "community" as the group of people who live in and wish to direct the changes in the area they are in. And the people who define community as the group who receives the benefits of government intervention. YIMBYs is a silly term, since its usually a developers talking about forcing changes in someone else's neighbourhood. Considering the input they like, it's only from the second definition of community, notably people not currently in an area, or standing to endure the downsides.
- natmaka 1y ago> "community" as the group of people who live in and wish to direct the changes in the area they are in IMHO it is the genuine and most adequate 'community', because the less abusive way to decide is subsidiarity ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity ). Constraining people who live near the potential site makes them at best suspicious, they will better memorize this constraint than any benefit from other projects.
- morsecodist 1y agoThe idea behind the YIMBY movement is not that community input is bad it's that the community input process structurally encourages input only from people who don't like the project. The point of YIMBY activism is to show up in your own community (your back yard if you will) to say that you do want housing.
- giantg2 1y agoThe main problem is that many people do want things, until those things present a negative impact to them personally. Yes, build housing, but do it the next street over. I don't personally know anyone who wants an apartment building or trailer park next to their single family home. The real point of zoning should be to group those types of housing together, but it seems many cities are too fragmented, not to mention that consumer preference is strongly aligned with SFH ownership.
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- morsecodist 1y agoIt's such a weird comment that has nothing to do with the rest of the article. The YIMBY movement is concerned with people saying no to housing, it doesn't say anything about community input on assessment or anything else. It seems like the author has some sort of ax to grind.
- larsiusprime 1y agoWhat ax? I’m the author and a YIMBY. Read the linked article, that’s the exact title of it, and I largely agree with it! I wrote that line because it contradicted the expectations of a movement I myself belong to, which I found surprising.
- dejobaan 1y agoYeah, Lars isn't really the axe grindy type—I think the tone isn't meant to be negative here.
- morsecodist 1y agoThanks for replying! I liked the article overall. I guess I read into something that wasn't really there.
- quantified 1y agoWhat does YIMBY have to do with valuing land? I was under the impression that N/YIMBY was about whether projects get done, not land valuation.
- ubersketch 1y agoLand valuation is necessary to implement a land value tax (not to be confused with property tax) which is the main thing Georgists advocate for. Georgists and YIMBYs have an affinity for one another since land value tax disincentives speculation and incentivizes building.
- larsiusprime 1y agoI’m the author and a YIMBY for the record and it’s not meant as a snipe. The link is an article by that exact same title by Jerusalem Demsas
- fake-name 1y agoFor context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism
- twelvechairs 1y agoLand valuation is not hard. Its been done for decades in a stable way in places as diverse as Australia, Hong Kong, Hungary and Kenya.
- flomo 1y agoBack in the 1990s, I lived in the midwest. The state built a freeway through a bunch of cornfields, and long before the road was even done, there were suburban subdivisions sprouting up. My professor points this out, and says this highway had been in the regional plans for 20+ years, and 'capitalists' had bought or optioned all this farm land decades ago. That form of land speculation makes sense to me, but I've never been able to reconcile it with Georgism.
- SwtCyber 1y agoGeorgists would argue that the rising land value came from public investment (the highway), not private effort, so the unearned gains from speculating on that land should be taxed. The idea isn't to stop people from buying land, just to capture the value society created.
- euroderf 1y agoLikewise for subway extensions.
- bombcar 1y agoIn those cases what I’ve seen is as long as the land stays farm land, it is taxed at a low farmland rate, and the moment that the land is subdivided and sold houses on it it gets taxed at the much higher single-family home rate. However, the price to buy the land starts to head towards what it will be worth it developed as soon as the freeway becomes real.
- protocolture 1y agoGeorgism always struck me as a method to shift homelessness onto the elderly and enrich removalists. The absolute ideal method of retirement is home ownership. Its cheap and desirable for the home owner, and it requires the least services provided by the state until things seriously deteriorate. I once met a woman who was being forced out of her home. She bought it when it was behind a naval shipyard covered in rusted warships. The city bought the land off the military, turned it into a lovely park and opened views from her front windows directly to the water. This caused her land valued rates to increase (she said her property had reached 200 times what she paid for it. 30,000 to 6 million. But she also owed quite a decade of rates to the council and wasn't sure what she would have left over) to well beyond what she could afford, and ultimately with only pension for income it became untenable. I really don't mind development, coming to the old lady and offering her a big payday for her to leave that she takes willingly, replacing her inner city house with higher density. But Land value as a mechanism to forcibly move on the elderly and hand their inner city character homes over to richer people who don't increase housing density is completely ass backwards. You get stuck in a cycle of paying taxes -> improving services -> improved services increase land value -> increased land value increases taxes. Its absurd. It honestly becomes an optimal strategy to elect local officials who ruin the neighborhood and decrease value.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- keybored 1y agoHome ownership rates in socialist and former countries are higher than in the West.
- jhbadger 1y agoOnly if you count "home ownership" as just owning your apartment (many Eastern-bloc countries sold cheaply their state-owned apartments to their residents after 1989). At least in the US, "home ownership" largely implies owning a single-family house with a yard. That's the (perhaps unsustainable) "American Dream".
- keybored 1y ago> As soon as the land of any country has all become private property, the landlords, like all other men, love to reap where they never sowed, and demand a rent even for its natural produce. The wood of the forest, the grass of the field, and all the natural fruits of the earth, which, when land was in common, cost the labourer only the trouble of gathering them, come, even to him, to have an additional price fixed upon them. He must then pay for the licence to gather them; and must give up to the landlord a portion of what his labour either collects or produces. This portion, or, what comes to the same thing, the price of this portion, constitutes the rent of land, and in the price of the greater part of commodities makes a third component part. Wealth of Nations
- scotty79 1y agoI think cars and now navigation mess this up a lot. But it could be great for walkable areas in the cities.
- lordnacho 1y agoHow do people separate their land value from the development value? If I see an Apple shop across from a parking lot, it may not be immediately obvious that the land part of the valuations should be similar. I could see the crowd systematically getting this wrong. Having said that, it's not a damning criticism. I think LVT is a good idea, and people are generally going to know what piece of land is worth more than another. You can then stitch the relative values to some sort of exchange-based anchoring to give your map real dollar values. I do tend to think a Harberger system makes a lot of sense, though. Maybe something a little bit like: - Everyone puts a value on their land. We take the total, figure out what percentage needs to be taken, and everyone pays their share of the tax take accordingly. - Your land is for sale at the price you put, but you can change up the price if you don't want to sell it, and thus pay up extra tax. If you have land set at 1M and someone comes and offers 1M, but you don't want to sell, you can pay the tax at whatever price is too high for him, eg 2M would double your tax. The offer needs to be firm so that you have an actual choice, someone can't just double your tax bill on a whim.
- jstanley 1y agoBut just because my land is worth £100k doesn't mean I should be forced to sell the house that is on it for only £100k! If you must have that sort of system, there probably ought to be an obligation on the buyer to first pay to have the entire existing structure demolished.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- lordnacho 1y agoHmm that's a good point actually. Gets hard to separate the land from the stuff on it.
- ajb 1y agoThat seems a rather pyhrric right. You don't actually get any value from them destroying your house. I think the offer is supposed to be on the improved value (IE including the value of the building) but the tax is on the unimproved value, so you do get the value of your house if they buy the land. Perhaps more reasonable would be, if we imagine a new Georgist city on undeveloped land, to require that every building is detachable from the land; IE it is attached to its foundations, by twistlocks, like intermodal containers, with the utilities also being supplied via some standardised connector. Not only would you then just be able to move your house to somewhere else, but it would have several other advantages. It would be a universal argument against NIMBYism - if you don't like new infrastructure being built near you, you can just move your house elsewhere. It would make it less disruptive to build new infrastructure anyway, as houses could be moved out of the way instead of being demolished.
- kemotep 1y agoAs an advocate for the Single Tax this is a great article explaining a land valuation method I had never heard of before. This would work locally, maybe even up to the county level but how would we reach a consensus at the State and Federal levels? Here is a link to a Federal study of land value: https://www.bea.gov/system/files/papers/WP2015-3.pdf https://www.bea.gov/system/files/papers/WP2015-3.pdf There is roughly 1.4B acres of private property that is worth $21,200B or $14,763/acre on average. At a 100% LVT of this average would generate ~20 Trillion in tax revenue. Giving the Feds 8, States seem to spend a total of around 3 or let’s say 4 to put towards debt payments, and then another 5 for local governments. Leaving 3 trillion to redistribute as a people’s dividend which with something like 150 million tax returns submitted each year would be something like $20k per household/tax payer. This would 100% cover all costs of the government with a Single Tax. No more sales taxes, capital gains, corporate taxes, etc. And as someone who lives on less than an acre paying a fraction of $14,000 for taxes would be such a massive tax cut for me and most people I know. Tragically this would cause most land in the US to have zero or negative market value, leading to massive distortions and trillions of dollars of wealth destruction. In addition farms would have onerous tax burdens also destroying them. Leading to them either needing to be nationalized or require significant (90+%) tax breaks. So completely unrealistic and highly disruptive so will never be adopted. But with this Somner method maybe we could get closer to adopting the Single Tax.
- andrepd 1y agoLand is just one (the most historically significant) of the factors that should be charged a Single Tax. Others are perhaps even more important in a modern economy: natural resources (minerals, water), and crucially externalities in general (pollution, other abstract societal harms).
- beeflet 1y agoit's not really a "single tax" then is it? I agree but some things like pollution are hard to quantify.
- kemotep 1y agoThe Single Tax is just that. And extracting (or not extracting) natural resources off the land would either count towards or against the unimproved land value depending on how we value it in that specific context. The second tax you bring up is pigouvian sales taxes and those should absolutely be implemented. They are the second least bad kind of tax. But of course the Two Tax Movement is not what Georgism is referred to as.
- bobajeff 1y agoIt would be great if any place in the world could solve the problem of land speculation and unaffordable housing. So far every country/province around the world even countries without real private land ownership (China) are dealing with the same problems in more of less the same ways. Maybe Land Value Taxes can solve the problem but I'm beginning to think that these problems are part of our characteristics as a species in ways that might be nearly impossible to successfully solve.
- SwtCyber 1y agoWorth trying, even if it won't be perfect
- ty6853 1y agoThe biggest land horder in the USA is our government, they own ~25+% of the land and refuse to let people homestead anymore, no matter that much of it is far better than the land I 'homesteaded' for a high bid in literal desert shithole where people are willing to pay lots of money to be in bumfuck nowhere with far worse positioning than much of the BLM and national forest land. It's brilliantly clear people would homestead this land if it were opened and be a significant relief valve. Our government literally just sits and sits and vast quantities of land that goes barely used for the lols, while our young people would happily build a shack on a piece of it instead of being relegated to hopelessness.
- randallsquared 1y agoI'm pretty close to a geolibertarian, given that it's otherwise hard to allocate uncreated value, but this method of valuation seems really arbitrary. If some outside developer wants to buy a piece of land that the owner would rather not sell for the community-derived price, and both are stubborn, and eventually it's sold for 10x the Somers system price, then the value of that land is (evidently) far above the community consensus. There has to be some way of getting this updated value besides everyone who lives in the area this month spending more weekend afternoons arguing about it. > That strip is the most valuable piece of real estate in the whole city, a fact anyone who’s lived there for any amount of time knows intuitively. Take a moment and imagine yourself attending such a meeting in your own town, what would your answer to [what the most valuable stretch of street frontage in this city is] be? I am astonished that the author thinks this is intuitively obvious. Anyway, some kind of "registering a value for property is the same as putting in an offer to buy/sell that property" is needed to avoid subjective and perceptively unfair valuations.
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- SwtCyber 1y agoThe irony is that this 100-year-old process actually solves some modern challenges
- tax 1y ago> Just ask people what the base land value of each location is. This “step 1” mentioned in the article doesn’t scale, as for example to get enough individual-reported valuation data for each parcel of land that one would have to get an entire community to “vote” (answer) on the land value for each part of their jurisdiction (for example the entire county of San Francisco). For areas outside of one’s jurisdiction (to reduce bias by asking people to vote on land value outside their jurisdiction), the amount of information one has is limited and thus the reporting can be biased. The safest way to get the best valuation of any asset, is to take a playbook from the financial markets for whereby buyers have a direct incentive to best judge the valuation of the asset of any financial instrument for in order to maximize profit from the direct sale of the said asset. However, with the above valuation method cited in the article that there is no direct incentive for people to get correct or incorrect about their answers to land parcel valuations. Furthermore, the part which LVT doesn’t address well is the valuation adjustments for the property built on the land itself, for example a good Leed certified building with a “good view” versus a run-down building requiring maintenance would have different valuations for which only a property taxation system (based on market value of the property value) will be able to infer. However, overall having a world where built properties on valuable parcels of land can be monopolized, just “seems” wrong.