131–140 of 262 posts
Land tax is a must but I have an even funnier idea. Tax corporations per employee and adjust the amount to the housing shortage. Make the tax truly terrifying if there is a big shortage. If you really must run your shop in that ultra expensive location you just pay for it. If you cant afford it you simply do not have what it takes, the area is not for you and you should leave. Make room for a business that belongs OR…
Anyone who has seen how public owned goods turn out would realize how much of a bad idea it is: for a budget similar to the DoD, you may get wait lines like in a DMV, with as much administrative fiddling as the NASA, with a quality of service as good as the DHS. If you are lucky, you may get as many choices as their are public transportation option in the midwest. Thanks but no thanks.
Care to provide some evidence to back up your claim or are you just on the red scare train.
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And competition drives it down.
In the case of land, no, competition drives attempts to curtail supply, in which case the value goes up further . Which is why something that works the way a Georgian land value tax is designed is ultimately necessary.
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Habitat For Humanity[1] works in a similar way. At least in my town, families help to build or renovate the home they move into, and their mortgage payments are capped at a reasonable percentage of their income (I think 30%). 1: https://www.habitat.org/about/faq#homeownership
HfH typically provides the mortgage with a 0% interest rate also. They are a tremendous program that should be scaled up.
Handling EVERY case is much more difficult (not that we shouldn’t expand HfH-style programs). A multitude of solutions are needed and trying to limit the types is part of the problem.
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The term for an opportunistic escalation in pricing (of a critical commodity) due to a rapid-onset shortage is price gouging. Like many US markets, local rental prices have ~doubled in the last two years. As in every case of price gouging, sufficient supply would have prevented the opportunism that is presently causing broad harm. Huzzah for supply and demand, I guess.
The alternative to "price gouging" is imposing some form of price controls. Since housing cannot be created out of thin air, that means some people will get lucky and everyone else will have to do without. I'm not sure that's any less a harm.
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People cannot actually choose the location, without giving up their work. "You can only find work in a big metropolitan center that demands 60% of your salary in rent? Though luck..." Let's say that you work in London... if you are 1h away from your work, you're still likely in zone 3 or 4, which is pretty expensive. Your choices then are: a 1h30/2h commute (each way) or giving up on having a place only for yourself,…
Yes, we should probably treat land as much more of a public good, especially in cities. The true value of land has much more to do with the services nearby: jobs, shops, parks, emergency services. The majority of tax should be based on the land value, independent of the cost of structures built on that land. A single-family home (whether it be a shack or a million dollar mansion) in a city center with high land value…
This is the central idea of Georgism, and it extends neatly to other things which are not the product of anyone's labour, like natural resources, pollution, or even issuance of credit (currently the banks have a monopoly on the power to create money/credit).
It's all very interesting, a nice balance which retains the good features of markets but prevents or at least limits the harmful stuff: rent-seeking leeches, pure speculation divorced from fundamentals, etc.
> especially in cities
This reminds me of the “Lockean proviso”:
Nor was this appropriation of any parcel of land, by improving it, any prejudice to any other man, since there was still enough and as good left, and more than the yet unprovided could use.
That is to say, taking natural resources, labouring, and keeping the profits of that activity, is only legitimate insofar as there is still “enough of it, and as good, in left in common for others”.
> The true value of land has much more to do with the services nearby
Oh absolutely! If a road is built, shops, the neighbourhood improved, schools, businesses, jobs, and therefore the desirability of your land increases... it's you that has to pay society back for what it has given you! It's not the resale value of your land that should rise.
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Yeah you can buy your dream house in the middle of nowhere for 200k but if you're a teacher, nurse or electrician job opportunities are likely scarce. People don't just live in cities for the opera.
You listed 3 occupations where opportunities aren’t that scarce and every town needs those people.
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> Subsidies for historic populations without price controls would be a windfall for landlords How is it a windfall for landlords? If the rent prices are going up, they will be making the money regardless of whether the renter is paying for it or the government is paying for some of it. If your point is that a subsidy will shift demand and increase the price, that is exactly what we want! A price signal to the market…
> I think there is some level of societal interest in preventing displacement, Why? ‘Historic populations’ is a euphemism for Black in most cases. In most large cities I’ve lived in, there is typically a section of town plagued by bad schools, high crime, bad infrastructure, and crumbling residences, and it is usually monoethnic. Why is this a good thing? It seems that whites in the more affluent areas and suburbs ar…
See: gentrification.
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The author's proposal is laid out in his book, The Affordable City . Unlike many policy books, the table of contents, available at the publisher's site, is both detailed and descriptive, and does convey the outline of his proposals: https://islandpress.org/books/affordable-city The ebook is a $5 download, which I'd strongly encourage for the curious.
$3.82 for the ebook on Amazon.
This is an introduction of a discussion about removal of ownership of means of production, basically. This is a step towards socialism.