Introduction
Many Nuance-oors like the promised pragmatic arguments for LVT (densification, lack of deadweight loss) and lament some of the principled arguments against (kicking out grandmas, unbounded gentrification). Here I build the intuition for the economic efficiency of the status quo (from here on SQ) over LVT which moved my opinion from “There is another way, have you heard of LVT?” to “Build more 1. houses 2. transport, it’s literally the only way”. It is not going to exhaustively prove any point or crunch many statistics but singularly gesture at a theoretical level why SQ has stronger economic arguments and LVT weaker ones than I have once believed. My intent is to put this perspective into the Overton Window, such that smarter people than myself may develop it. https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really serves, as far as I know, the best low down on the idea. Please be familiar with LVT or read that article series first as a primer.
(also this is my first poast so if I make a big nono—let me know)
Land Values ARE Property Values
First let’s put aside underground minerals, land marks, etc which Georgists would agree with and broadly define a property as a building ontop of land. The Georgist claim is that the value of the land is inexplicably independent from the value of the building. This is equivalent to “Here is AD and AS and yea.. that’s the economy”. This fundamentally claims that somehow property, land and buildings are all fungible amongst eachother. This is clearly incorrect but let us demonstrate why:
Property fungibility: A school next to a prison is not the same school when it is not next to that prison. A kindergarden adjacent to a primary school adjacement to a highschool is not the same as the set of properties in which these are split apart.
Building fungibility: A lighthouse next to the sea is not the same as a lighthouse not next to the sea or a more charitable example: a house with a sea view. A school next to public transport is not the same as a school not next to public transport.
Land fungibility: A building with a garden will not have that same garden if it’s land is smaller. A large building physically imposes requirements on the land it is built upon (such is the case for most buildlings) which may be even impossible for other plots of land.
Even the same building on the same plot of land can be different (depending on orientation + placement it might have different views, shades, easements, etc)
Approached at differently:
Las Vegas is in a desert with its main economic activity deriving from entertainment and gambling, both of which do not in anyway depend on the land it was built on. In such a way, there are plenty of other deserts which fulfill this same low bar. Does the land value of Las Vegas differ to the other identical deserts which could house Las Vegas? Indeed why does the land value within Las Vegas differ?
The land value of many cities is high, the land value of farms is low (with magnitudes inbetween). Say we picked up the city and swapped it with the farm, what happens to the corresponding land prices?
And finally:
Consider the beginning of Las Vegas (or any city) in which there is nothing but empty lots of land. We know that currently land prices are high, and previously they were cheap. It stands to reason that each successive building that was built increased the value of the land it was on.
In a set of empty lots, the land values are all low. You build a building, the corresponding land value increases, but so do all the adjacent properties. If the next building is built adjacent to your property as opposed to further away, the cumulative increase on land prices is greater.
All this to say, land prices represent aggregation effects / density / access / proximity of buildings. They are the cumulative result of being surrounded by positive externalities which necessarily result from other buildings not land. It is the case that as more and more buildings are built, the impact of a single building to its land value diminishes although the value of its land is still due to the aggregation of and proximity to the buildings that surround it. Price is a signal. High land values signal being close to things. Low land values signal being far from things.
Principal-Agent Problems
LVT introduces the Principal-Agent problem by changing the nature of occupancy from ownership to renting. This is problematic for both building decisions and occupancy decisions.
Building Decisions
There are good buildings and bad buildings. Good buildings (shops, restaurants, schools) will increase the value of land, and bad buildings (garbage dumps, prisons) will decrease the value of land.
Consider an empty lot on which you can build either a garbage dump or a theme park, each of equivalent economic value. Under SQ, the theme park is built as the excess land value is capture by the land owner. Under LVT, the garbage dump is built as the reduced land values reduces their tax burden. The SQ encourages positive externalities, LVT encourages negative externalities.
Under LVT, to offset this the state will have to exhaustively categorise each building and value their expected positive / negative externalities such that proper incentives / disincentives can be made (and save us if those incentives can be gamed). Under SQ, individuals are incentivised to 1) occupy land 2) provide as much positive externalities as possible.
Occupancy Decisions
Similarly, under LVT as all increases in property value must be assessed as improvements—the state must exhaustively categorise all actions an occupant can take which may effect building values and then proportionately value them as improvements / deprovements.
Unfortunately this is impossible because land value is in essence a public good shared by proximate neighbours and actions can be taken which reduce public land value yet cannot be considered deprovements.
Someone might decide to litter because that will drop land values and thus tax burden when they are ambivalent to whether there is litter on the street.
This is slightly contrived, but it still stands that under LVT, the disincentive exists whereas under SQ, it does not (in fact the incentive exists).
Taxing What You Don’t Want
From above: land values represent the increasing returns building aggregation (you must at least submit that high land values are generated by the same forces which cause that aggregation). In taxing land values, you are taxing building aggregation (or at least the forces causing aggregation). In such a way, a land value tax has a regularisation effect on building density, necessitating a spread of concentration. Let’s assume a 100% LVT and then agree that the reality will be somewhere inbetween.
Consider a simple 1D row of empty lots. You are deciding where to build both a pharmacy and bakery (assume corresponding foot traffic uplift from the other is 0). Under the SQ, you build them next to each other such that you can maximally capture the land value increase of the other. Under LVT, you build them maximally apart to reduce your land value tax burden. The increased land value you obtained under SQ that was partially captured by you is now a cost being bourne out as inconvenience to the public under LVT.
Now we extrapolate to a simple 2D town with a baker, grocer, jeweller in the middle of that town (this is a stylised mall or main street) and a banker comes along (once again all corresponding foot traffic uplift is 0). Under the SQ, the banker is incentivised to join them in the middle by buying in and setting up shop because they instantaneously receive an increase in land value (of which all the others would welcome and partially capture). Under LVT, not only would the bank locate itself far away from the others, they too would be incentivised to move away from each other, in such a way minimising the total land value of the town and thus its total tax burden. Once again, this reduced land value represents the loss in convenienve of living in this town and now that cost is bourne out by the public whom must travel much further to reach all the stores.
If you find this thought experiment believeable then you might also agree with the intuition that this spreading does not necessarily have to occur simulateously and on a blank state but also sequentially in an already established set of properties.
The caveat of foot traffic uplift is essentially representative of the returns to aggregation which is the exact thing being taxed. They will spread proportionately to the tax. Any building which does not benefit from convenience or aggregation (i.e. those buildings that are essential and necessary to visit) is incentivised to be as isloated (the same as under SQ). A land value tax of 100% will make every building share that property.
Taxes Rule Everything Around Me
Taxes matter and they are in all ways optimised, managed and minimised. They change how humans behave, the buildings they inhabit and the fate of nations.
LVT seems to assume that people have so little attachment to their dwellings that they won’t mind destroying a home to rebuild more densely or being forced for an economical downsize. It also seems to assume that people have so much attachment that they are inelastic in where and how they live that they won’t meaningfully take action to reduce their tax burdens (and its unintended consequences)
Conclusions and Copes
LVT is probably overall a good thing in some places despite everything I’ve said (after more houses and transport). It’s clear that housing is a huge problem and solving that huge problem for a smaller more abstract problem is an easy trade to make. Hammering the bent nail hard in the other direction is sometimes the only way to keep building.
In most cities, the land price in the centre is a magnitude larger than those in the suburbs which is another magnitude larger than those that are rural. As such, LVT would disproportionately impact the ubran centre and force empty lots to be utilised which is a good thing. My love of density extends to my hate of emptiness.
There is much more to be said about this debate and this piece is very very simplistic and isolated in all its considerations and largely unsubstantiated. There are other principled considerations (what it means to own land as property) and pragmatic considerations (YIMBYism, taxes vs zoning, political capital) which may utterly trump the above. But I have not seen any piece which represents this view and thus believe it is important and send this economical meme out, if only to be dismissed.
for more:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really obviously
https://www.thediff.co/archive/ ($) has good pieces on housing though I lost access to the archive so I can’t find you the links
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/
The arguments you make seem backwards to me.
Yes, this is the standard Georgist position, and it’s the reason why land owners mainly capture (positive and negative) externalities from land use around them, not in their own land.
This seems wrong. The construction of a building mainly affects the value of the land around it, not the land on which it sits. Consider the following example in which instead of buildings, we have an RV and a truck, so there is no cost of building or demolishing stuff:
There’s a pristine neighborhood with two empty lots next to each other in the middle of it. Both sell for the same price. The owner of empty lot 1 rents it to a drug dealer, who places a rusty RV on the lot and sells drugs in it. The owner of empty lot 2 rents it to a well-known chef who places a stylish food truck on the lot and serves overpriced food to socialites in it.
Under SQ, who do you think would profit from selling the land now? The owner of lot 2 has to sell land next to a drug dealer that a prospective buyer can do nothing about. The owner of lot 1 has to sell land next to delicious high-status food, and if a buyer minds the drug dealer he can kick him out. Who is going to have an easier time selling? Who is going to get a higher price?
Now, suppose there is a LVT. If the tax is proportional to the selling price of the land under SQ (as it ideally should), which owner is going to pay more tax?
The case of the theme park and garbage dump is exactly the same, with the added complication of construction / demolition costs. An LVT should be proportional to the price of the land if there were no buildings on top of it (and without taking into account the tax itself), so building a garbage dump is not going to significantly reduce your tax payments.
There are several separate effects here, if you are a landowner. Under LVT:
You are incentivized to reduce the density in surrounding land
You are incentivized to build as densely as possible within your own land to compensate the tax
Under SQ:
You are incentivized to increase the density in surrounding land
You are not incentivized to increase density in your own land
The question is, which of these effects is bigger? I would say that landowners have more influence over their own land than over surrounding land, so a priori I would expect more density to result from an LVT
That brings up the splitting question.
If two people owning adjacent parcels of land each build a garbage dump, they will in fact reduce both of their taxes since they each affect each other’s.
And if we’re going with “the government tracks such things and does calculations to prevent splitting from mattering” then it should be possible to build it on your own land and still get the tax reduction.
Well if a person wants not to pay taxes so much that they are ready to split part of their land to another owner and make sure that garbage dump is built on both their pieces… why not just sell your land to someone who would use it more productively to beguin with? There is no incentive to simply occupy land under LVT. And as long as LVT is not above 100% using it productively is more benefitial than trying to decrease its value as much as possible.
Because the market price of your land is zero.
Its zero only with 100% LVT, and usually people are proposing something like 85%.
But even assuming 100% LVT and zero price of the land. Why not give it for free to someone who would use it more productively? This is more economically sound than keep paying taxes for the piece of land you do not use.
You’re also stuck with the land since you’ve got some buildings on it and you can’t move the buildings, so selling it has huge switching costs.
Of course, you’ll need land to build the garbage dump on, but the garbage dump can affect the property values of a larger sized area than the actual dump. Also note that the garbage dump unequally reduces the value of different uses of the land, so the querstion “doesn’t the garbage dump reduce the value of the building by enough to make up for the tax savings” may not be a yes. In some cases, the building that’s already on the land may even produce a garbage dump as a side effect—consider a factory, for instance.
I feel that you are loosing track of the conversation.
The initial example was about an empty lot and the incentives of the owner what to build there. Now you are suddenly talking about already having buildings on the land.
We can talk about this different case, of course, but first lets finish the case we started with. Do you concede that LVT does not, in fact, motivate to build garbage dumps on empty lots more than SQ?
No, I don’t concede that. Even for an empty lot, the guy who owns it presumably owns it for a reason. Like buildings, it’s plausible that this reason 1) cannot just easily transfer to a new piece of land, and 2) is not reduced in value so much by the garbage dump that building the garbage dump isn’t worth it.
Also, if he sells it, someone else can build a building on it, thus increasing the taxes he has to pay on the remaining portion. And if he builds a garbage dump, it discourages other people from building nearby and raising his taxes; selling doesn’t do that.
I mostly disagree with your example (the use of RV’s is nice, although I think it changes the equations too much) but I can grant you (and Malcolm Ocean) the point:
>Yes, this is the standard Georgist position, and it’s the reason why land owners mainly capture (positive and negative) externalities from land use _around_ them, not in their own land.
Might we agree that positive externalities outweigh negative ones as evidenced by high land prices? If we take this position at it’s best, at the end of the day, how is taxing the capture of a positive externality (LVT) any better than the taxing the creation of value (SQ)? (Given that the positive externality already exists and would be captured for free under the SQ.)
>The question is, which of these effects is bigger? I would say that landowners have more influence over their own land than over surrounding land, so a priori I would expect more density to result from an LVT
The effects you’ve identified I think are fairly comprehensive. However I think that “Moving to a less dense place” is actually a method to reduce density in the surrounding land i.e. picking up all the skyscrapers and spreading them apart (the regularisation effect over density) and is a decision which landowners frequently make.
Taxing creation of value leads to existence of less value. Taxing capturing of value by land leads to less value been captured by land. The latter is much better outcome because both having more value is generally good and land capturing value is generally bad—its the source of huge amount of problems with the economy.
There is one case where land capturing the gains of economic actvity can at least seem fair. A Disneyland scenario—where you own a lot of land in close proximity and create all the economic activity on it. But in absolute majority of cases your land is capturing the fruits of labour of other people. Other people create businesses and amenities around you and you benefit from them twice—both by consuming the products and amenities that you want without needing to travel and by having your land increase in value without you doing anything. This creates opportunities for rent seeking behavior. And land speculation, which itself leads to even greater land prices. And therefore progress is followed by poverty.
You seem to be confusing citation and the referent for “surrounding land”.
Let’s say that you live in land A0, surrounded by land A. You would rather move to less less dense neighbourhood, to land B0, surrounded by land B. When you do so, you stop calling land A as “surrounding land” and start calling land B as “surrounding land” and can say that the density of the surrounding land has decreased. But actually, the density of both A and B stayed the same.
Regarding, “Land Values ARE Property Values”, I initially thought LVT advocates were doing a motte-and-bailey (LVT is better because you tax land not improvements; oh actually all improvements are Land), but I think it’s more that “land” is defined as everyone else’s improvements. So, if I build a casino in the desert, my Land is just land but everyone else’s Land around the casino includes proximity to my casino.
I think this causes different problems though, including the one you mention with garbage dumps, especially once you take merging and splitting properties into account.
If Alice and Bob build casinos next to each other in the desert, Alice’s casino benefits from being on Land near Bob’s casino and Bob’s casino benefits from being near Alice’s casino, but if Alice buys Bob’s casino, she transmutes Bob’s casino into an untaxed improvement.
If Bob owns a factory with a toxic waste pool, he can transmute the toxic waste pool into (negative-value) Land by giving it to someone else. Or he can save money on taxes by intentionally creating a toxic waste pool and giving it to someone else.
(And I don’t think it’s possible to prevent these things without turning your LVT back into a normal property tax)
The bit about merging the casinos… in the limit, you’ve got an entire town/city in the desert that is completely owned by one owner, who pays nominally zero land value tax because the property itself isn’t worth anything given there’s nothing nearby. But it seems plausible to me that having an equation for tracking a multiplicity of independent improvements on a single nominal property and taxing the whole situation accordingly… would be relatively easy compared to the other LVT calculation problems. (I have not done the math here whatsoever.)
The splitting and merging thing is a great point. I sense that @Blog Alt is continuing to missing the point about the “everyone else’s improvements” by how they frame it, but once you take splitting and merging into account...
...well, for people who actually live there, hopefully the presence of a new garbage dump would itself be more costly than the decrease in tax. And in principle, if it’s NOT more costly, then it would then be correct to build it! (Maybe it’s not a dump, maybe it’s something else.) So there’s a bringing back in of externalities.
But of course, if someone doesn’t live there… maybe this can be solved by zoning? I’m normally suspicious of zoning but “you can’t put a garbage dump next to a school in a neighborhood” seems pretty basic.
That still doesn’t solve the simple notion of a factory toxic waste pool, but once again, maybe such things should be solved by directly addressing the reason why they’re bad.
Such zoning would itself raise the taxes you pay on your land.
Sure but ideally it would raise them an amount that’s worth it. That’s kind of the whole idea. People aren’t infinitely incentivized by money and zero incentivized by anything else.
This is a really interesting thought (which I will be using in future) but I think it arises from the fact that the tax incidence has to terminate on someone at the very end. Like say income tax (and a wealth tax), depending on how you cut the pie, there are multiple different options for the set of cash flows and corresponding total tax amounts. Moving the assets / cash flows to a business / trust / a separate business / an offshore business / another person all throw a wrench into the works. When we try reconcile infinitely complex real world processes onto paper, there will be problems.
I think you make some good points. But this part stuck out to me a bit:
It seems to me that in reality, the effect of business attracting customers to other nearby businesses (through foot traffic, more people moving into the area, incentivizing more transport nearby, etc) is very much nonzero and might cover the whole LVT increase.
That said, I agree that LVT is a nonobvious thing and might be off target from what we really want. The real problem is making sure there’s enough low-income housing in cities, it’s better to just solve that directly.
I’ve always been a bit confused by “low-income housing’. Is the plan to make the housing cheap via price capping? Won’t that have the usual economic issues and cause demand to continue to outstrip supply forever and ever? Is the plan to make the houses ugly as fuck so that they will cost less than the pretty houses nearby? That won’t really work; people will rent a closet for $1000/mo in SF sometimes.
It could be owned by the government and rented out for cheap, but only if the renter uses it as primary residence. Or it could be means-tested.
Seems like you’ve aggregated lvt with central planning problems. There are multiple proposals to do it other ways.
I have a problem imagining a situation where this would make economical sense. Theme parks profit from “there are many people around” way more than garbage dumps do, so it feels unlikely that the same place would be the economically correct choice for both.
Also, in general I think that many of your objections can be solved by taxing the land value less than 100%, which I think is what most Georgists want.
The “land values are property values” section struck me as a weird strawman of LVT. A huge part of the point Georgists are making is that the value of a given property depends in most urban cases FAR MORE on what is built next to it, than what is built on it. And thus by making property taxes go up when you build things on a property, you disincentivize building, whereas by making them the same regardless of what is built, you incentivize building. Whether you accept any of the other arguments, this is straightforward math afaict. Thus when you say “Build more 1. houses”, if you intend to achieve that by market means and not coercion, then you probably want to get your incentives aligned.
There are a bunch of buildings currently sitting empty in Berkeley, CA and my understanding of why is that if they were to rent them at market rates (which have declined) then the sale price would go down, but currently the sale price is still going up. So “build more houses”...
I am glad that you have discovered Georgism by way of Lars’ article. The article has indeed received a lot of attention! I would suggest familiarizing oneself with the extensive literature from generations of economists on the subject whether they are ‘Georgists’ (i.e. Harry Gunnison Brown, William Vickrey, Mason Gaffney, Fred Foldvary, Nic Tideman, Terry Dwyer) or not (i.e. Pigou/Ramsey on optimal taxation, Hotelling, learning about ‘tax capitalization’, etc.
A couple pieces in particular that I find valuable, “Taxation: The Lost History”—https://cooperative-individualism.org/dwyer-terence_taxation-the-lost-history-2014-oct.pdf, “Land as a Distinctive Factor of Production”—https://paulbeard.org/files/wealthandwant.com/docs/Gaffney_LaaDFoP.html or “The Philosophy of Public Finance”—https://www.masongaffney.org/publications/G44Philosophy_of_Public_Finance.CV.pdf