How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's

I would suggest that in a lot of cases, e.g. "where does the local slaughterhouse go?" or "should we allow small, affordable apartments for poor people?", there are also significant positive externalities...except, if you live in the area, the benefits don't outweigh the costs. That's what gives NIMBYism its name: the proverbial NIMBY likes to buy a steak dinner on Friday night, provided the cows aren't slaughtered nor the workers housed in their backyard.

Therefore, a community wanting to ban a business from residence is the kind of problem that can only be dealt with from a higher level of government, which can distribute negative and positive externalities in a more-or-less even way. It is absolutely not "valid", on the assumption that valid means permissible, for a community to defect on its share of the negative externalities while still taking in the positive externalities from the rest of the country.

> the benefits of the business goes to the private person running the business from their residence.

Typically a business sells services enjoyed by the community. A grocery store shortens the time to buy food and so on.

> the benefits of the business goes to the private person running the business from their residence.

Throughout my life I have benefited from the fact that I live in a place with successful businesses and a strong economy.

>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.

Thanks for replying! I liked the article overall. I guess I read into something that wasn't really there.

What 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.

Yeah, Lars isn't really the axe grindy type—I think the tone isn't meant to be negative here.

Community 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.

Members 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.

Incentives 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?

The 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.

It's a bullshit disingenuous media tactic trying to make people outside an area who would benefit from a project appear just as valid as the community members opposing it.

The fact is it's not actually your backyard just because you've added that label to yourself. (See the DPRK)

"If they sell their land, then presumably they'd receive a substantial windfall with which they could buy a new cheaper place, or rent."

Not really. You might be forcing someone out of a 2.5% mortgage into a 6% mortgage on a new property, incurring property transfer taxes, moving costs, loan underwriting, and other fees. You very well could lose money in some situations. Your argument also assumes they are not in the cheapest homes already. If they are, they could be forced out of the geographic area altogether if there are no cheaper homes (and inherently rents will be more expensive than the cheapest mortgages under that system).

Land is worthless under LVT. Its entire revenue stream is captured by the tax, an asset without revenue is definitionally worthless.

> NIMBY/YIMBY is a strawman argument designed to keep the masses distracted

Distracted from what? I do in fact view NIMBYs as the biggest roadblock to expansion of housing supply, so I must be part of the distracted masses you're referring to. What am I missing?

It sounds like you want to just move the undesirables to a ghetto (in the real sense of the word). Why shouldn't someone be able to buy a home and live there until they die if they can pay reasonable taxes? Redevelop the land as the population turns over instead of marginalizing people.

"You shouldn't be able to hold land hostage while also paying low property tax"

What property are you holding hostage that I can liberate from you?

Serious question: What about when you are old? Okay being forced to live in a one room shack in the middle of nowhere just because you are retired?

Implementing Georgism before deregulating land use seems like putting the cart before the horse.

It's quite likely that once you can legally build a skyscraper on any piece of earth you own, that resorting to a tax extortion fest for old people in desirable areas will seem far more absurd than it already does.

High land values are in large part because zoning requires oversized land ownership for a token to build a housing unit, creating mass artificial demand. The other piece is in places like some of California the regulatory / licensing / permit costs cost more than it cost me to build my whole house.

> seniors and disabled people can't just live somewhere cheaper?

> I think they should be pushed out by the wealthy.

This pretty well summarizes why there is so much opposition..

Seriously? Dump the elderly and disabled on the street to favor the very rich?

The point of the system where you have to accept an offer at your supposed valuation is that it forces accurate valuations.

If you now say that we need to provide two different valuations (land + structure) but we're only taxed on one, don't you think we'll find that everyone lives in very expensive houses on worthless plots of 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.

WHAT? This is ridiculous. What happens if someone buys the land out from under your skyscraper, and you can't afford to move it a couple blocks over? Do you live in a LEGO world?

> In other words, your property is more valuable, to you.

That's fine, but then it becomes a property tax rather than a land value tax.

>Is this really not common? I constantly see internet claims about how it would cause violent uproar from evil land owners if we taxed land value, but as a land owner I can tell you it’s already happening.

LVT does exist in several places in the world but it's usually around ~3-5%. Unusually for most taxes, it can be raised probably to almost 100% without any economic ill effects, but the land ownership classes would raise absolute hell.

This is how their propaganda mouthpieces reacted in the UK at the proposal: https://archive.ph/6gtRC

>That would be awesome for the people with giant, new construction houses around me but not so good for those of us with smaller, older construction buildings

Not sure why you feel specifically singled out, but ok.

It would be most awesome for people living in high density apartments and least awesome for people who live in crappy low density housing in high value areas which ought to be converted to apartments.

>It would be really bad for the old people living out their final years in their modest old houses which need a lot of repairs (and therefore have low structure grades in the tax system and low structure taxation).

Only if you pretend that those people can't move, and they would. Those people would just downshift to apartments in response - this used to be a lot more common anyway - my grandmother did this.

If you want somebody to feel sorry for, though, feel sorry for old people living out their final years in rented accomodation. If you rent, by definition, you have to pay LVT (to a private landlord), and if you can't pay - to the street for you.

ideally this would always happen equally everywhere, such that everyone is forced to list an accurate price.

If you are low-balling the price to save on taxes, you run the risk that someone swoops up your property for cheap.

For $10M? Maybe. But the real scenario is they hire analysts to figure out what price in taxes you can't afford and bid the house price that will force you to sell at the lowest cost to them.