Tax the Land

For instance, say I want to have a small patch of grass for my dog to run around, and moved to my area so that I could have that. As the value of my land grows, you're definitely right that I could sell it to a developer and then move into a more affordable apartment in a multi-tenant building. For humans, though, housing isn't fungible: the home that I grew my family in, the availability of that patch of grass for my dog, and the privacy I enjoyed were all things that cannot be replaced by more dense housing. While the cost of any home is stabilized (which is why it benefits newcomers), the cost of equivalent homes is not (which is why it works against existing residents).

To be clear, I'm not saying that it's wrong to prioritize density. I'm only trying to point out that any policy is going to benefit one group to the detriment of another group; taxation to incentivize more efficient land use is doing so at the expense of those who want to stay in the homes they've lived in.

Restrictive zoning and rent/tax controls benefit incumbent residents at the expense of newcomers, which is widely recognized. Land value taxes improve the efficiency of land use to benefit newcomers at the expense of incumbent residents.

To reiterate, I think land value tax is a good tool for what it aims to accomplish. The main point of my post, though, is that there are legitimate reasons for existing residents to oppose it (e.g. being priced out of their existing home) which most discussions on the matter tend to skip over.

Not so fast. Rome wasn't strengthened by the Visigoths.

More to your argument, while London is arguably unchanged by the addition of 1k or even 10k people, it is changed by the addition of 100M or even 10M. Maybe it's still good, but by a different definition.

Forward reference: adding 10M people to London will necessarily destroy many of the "iconic neighborhoods" you're so fond of below.

> Even in those places that are crying out to be more urban, like the vacant lots within or the slightly lower intensity suburbs

There's a huge difference between a vacant lot in Manhattan and the burbs, which aren't "slightly lower intensity".

> the cores of our thriving cities

Our thriving cities where?

> The iconic neighborhoods, vistas, differences the character of the built environments of different places mostly comes down to how much is left, of which eras, prior to the disastrous suburban mania we’re stuck with today.

There's a typo in the above that I can't error-correct.

That said, the suburbs didn't cause urban decay. As to the vistas, you're only counting urban vistas, and nothing that has happened in the suburbs has affected the NYC skyline.

I get that you want to live in an "iconic neighborhood", whatever that means, but the other residents of those neighborhoods get to vote too, and many of them have decided "the hell with that." More to the point, what happens in suburbs has nothing to do with how those neighborhoods have fared over time.

For instance, single-family homeowners voting to keep their areas single-family zoned are cast as "pulling up the ladder". This is fair: incumbents are trying to keep newcomers from changing the things they prioritize.

One could make a similar case for public lands, though: why is it fair that residents of a city should allocate huge tracts of land for public parks, when that land could otherwise be used to build dense housing and make the city more affordable for newcomers? It feels strange, but this seems like the same tradeoff: incumbents enjoy the presence of parks, so they prioritize them over the potential needs of newcomers (more affordable housing).

Or at a more global level, we could make a similar (very controversial) case for climate change regulation: the current rich-world countries built up their economies largely on the back of environmentally damaging practices. Now that we're developed, though, there is a large push for global regulation of climate policy, punishing polluting countries. This is because the incumbent rich countries prioritize a solution to global warming over the desires of some (though certainly not all) developing economies looking to grow rich through the same environmentally-damaging practices we used.

The phrase "pulling up the ladder" feels like it's always used to illustrate the greed or selfishness of those who want to deny others the privileges they had. It's very clear, though, that there are some cases where we're totally fine with "pulling up the ladder" when it's the things that we ourselves prioritize (in this example, public parks over affordable housing, or climate-change prevention over economic development).