I hear a lot about "affordable housing" in Seattle and other cities that are showing both strong economic growth and a tight housing market. My interrogation of this tells me that without affordable land, affordable housing is a dead letter… 1/ #LVT
Here is the property tax assessment for a modest 4 BR house in NE Seattle…note the price of the land relative to the house. Note how the land gets more expensive, eventually passing the value of the house. But isn't the house all that you want? 2/ #LVT 
I mean, what can you do with the land? You can't farm it or mine it. It's zoned residential so you need special permission to run a business out of it. So why buy it? Why take on a much larger mortgage just to own something you can't use except as a place to keep a house? 3/ #LVT
Annual property taxes on that parcel are about $6600. So about 1%. What if you didn't own the land but rented it from that city for that amount? What if you could now buy that same modest 4BR house for $257k rather that $641k? That looks like an affordable house to me. 4/ #LVT
And to make it fair, your land rent would be just for the land: call it $3000/year. That's how we get to affordable housing…through affordable land. We can talk about new building techniques or upzoning but as long as land is a speculative asset, nothing will change. 5/ #LVT
That's why Seattle is so much a renter's town…buying and holding land is a sure way to make bank, at the expense of working people and the local residents whose investment makes your land valuable. 6/ #LVT
"But that means property tax receipts go down…what will do to the city budget?"
What if we assessed ground rents on commercial land as well? And what if we knew that an acre of land could command $11M a year in rent? What if landlords became property managers/tenants? 7/ #LVT
What if we assessed ground rents on commercial land as well? And what if we knew that an acre of land could command $11M a year in rent? What if landlords became property managers/tenants? 7/ #LVT
What if property managers now had to make rent, not just sit back and collect it? And what if by assessing rents on land, the city could drive development? If you're on the hook for $11M/year, you're not building a strip mall: you're building up as high as zoning allows. 8/ #LVT
Which brings us to the other lever…zoning. If Seattle were to apply both, we could put idled land (held off the market until the price is right, at 1% tax) into productive use. If the optimal price to acquire land is $0, how much more affordable would housing be? 9/ #LVT
For reasons I can't fathom, the value/cost of land seems to be left out of any urbanist/housing conversations. Without land, where do you put housing? Seattle shouldn't be selling surplus land when it could rent it (and developers are offering to pay rent vs purchasing). 10/ #LVT
And even the local school district is in the game, renting out disused parcels for commercial development, for far less than the land is worth, I expect. That value belongs to the investors, the local taxpayers. But as the kids say, don't hate the player, hate the game. 11/ #LVT
We're reminded that cities like Barcelona or Paris, with all their culture and amenities, will fit in a fraction of Seattle's area. How do they manage it? I think that's the point…they *manage* it. They don't leave it to speculators and rentiers. 12/ #LVT
The takeaway for me here is that land = wealth and offers a secure retirement income/asset base that people would be reluctant to lose. But that wealth was built by everyone, renter or homeowner alike. Shouldn't we all share in the proceeds? Land rents would do that. #LVT
NB: property tax information is public information, so no skulduggery was required to get the information above. King County helpfully breaks out land and improvement/house valuations so a lot of the work has already been done. Seattle could lead on this issue…
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