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georgiststeve.bsky.social Profile picture
georgiststeve.bsky.social
@GeorgistSteve
Urban economist from Aotearoa. Share the land rent, build housing, foster thriving cities. Anti-feudal, pro-feuding.
May 22, 2024 • 12 tweets • 7 min read
✨ Blog: Universal Land Dividend ✨

Why we should have a Universal Basic Income (UBI) funded from natural resource rents, and why it works so well with a Land Value Tax (LVT).

Let me explain 🧵 💰 What is a Universal Basic Income? 💰

UBI has these key features:
💸 it is a cash payment (rather than vouchers or direct provision of eg housing/healthcare)
👍 it is unconditional (no means-testing, no welfare cliffs if your pay goes up)
🌌 it is universal (everyone gets it) Image
May 17, 2024 • 10 tweets • 7 min read
🔰 Here's the basic case for turning property taxes into a land value tax (LVT), as presented to the Colorado Commission on Property Tax back in January 🧵

LVT shifts:
🔰 boost business activity & construction of multifamily housing
🔰 are neutral for the typical homeowner, tend to increase tax bills on vacant/underutilized land, provide tax relief for multifamily housing
🔰 are strictly better for tenants as a tax which does raise rents is replaced by one which does not.

leg.colorado.gov/sites/default/…Image 🔰 What is a land value tax? 🔰

* LVT is a recurring tax charged to property owners in proportion to the value of the land they own (which includes its location value).
* LVT shifts involve a revenue-neutral increase in LVT used to fund tax cuts for homes & other buildings.Image
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May 3, 2024 • 13 tweets • 8 min read
Patrick Condon's housing model is wrong. But it's wrong in some pretty interesting & pseudo-Georgist ways.

So let's go through them. 🧵
Image
Image First, let's steelman him:

@pmcondon2 says that when you upzone a single family home to allow apartments, you a) gift land value to the property owner, because the additional redevelopment option immediately makes their property more valuable.

His model also claims b) that even if you build the apartments, their internal per sqft price will be unchanged, and thus that there's no affordability gains.

From this, he argues that you should not upzone without a tax on the gifted land value, and that affordability can not be improved by YIMBY, only public housing.Image
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Feb 21, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Homeownership is a lumpy, non-diversified investment asset, whose value derives in large part from rents, whose owners become fanatically devoted to lobbying government to limit their taxes, ban competing supply or poor people living nearby.

It's a garbage thing to promote. "But homeownership is a great mechanism for forced savings"

a) only for people who can get a downpayment together,

b) if forced savings is a policy goal, let's just do Singapore-style mandatory savings accounts.
Feb 18, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
"Why are YIMBYs only concerned with upzoning and never with cutting immigration?!"

One simple answer to this question is that, while you *can* reduce prices either by reducing demand or expanding supply, the latter *increases* wellbeing while the former reduces it:

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Image There are other reasons of course, such as a principled belief that it's good when people are free to move to locations which give them better opportunities in life, and that it's bad when govt force is used to privilege incumbents instead.
Feb 15, 2024 • 14 tweets • 8 min read
Wanted to share my Prop 13 lit review from last night's @CACommonGround event.

Details in 🧵 below, but basically Prop 13 led to:
💰 worse taxes instead
🚚 people moving less
🏗️ fewer houses built (=⬆️prices & ⬆️rents)
☹️ welfare loss
⚖️ iniquity

stephenhoskins.notion.site/Lit-Review-Cal… 🕰️ Quick history lesson: California passed Prop 13 in 1978 and had five key features:

1⃣ Property taxes capped at 1% of assessed value
2⃣ Assessed value of property is pegged to purchase price, not its current market value
3⃣ Assessed values grow at max 2% per year
Jun 13, 2023 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
📌 As an urban economist, YIMBY, Georgist & altogether adequate bloke, this pinned tweet contains an ever-expanding collection of my favorite poasts 🧵

🗺️ How does zoning change the size & shape of land rents?
🔰 Land & Liberty to Build: The Great LVT-YIMBY Symbiosis 🏗️
May 16, 2023 • 4 tweets • 4 min read
Cory: these dumb Georgists don't know that LVT is identical to a 99-year lease because Price=NPV(ΣRents)

ADB (2010): China should shift from leases to annual taxes
Purves (2023): Singapore should shift from leases to LVT
Poon (2011): Hong Kong should shift from leases to LVT ImageImageImage ADB: adb.org/sites/default/…
Purves: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
Poon book: abebooks.com/9780973876000/…
& article summary: carnegieendowment.org/hkjournal/PDF/…
May 4, 2023 • 20 tweets • 8 min read
🔰What do you mean by LVT?🔰

I think there's some confusion about Land Value Tax (LVT) charged as a percentage of the *sale price* of land, versus those charged as a % of the *annual ground rent* the land generates (which I'll call LRT, Land Rent Tax).

So let's compare 🧵 ImageImage Imagine a property that's rented out for $3,333 a month, half of which is generated by the building, and half by the land & location. We can say that the land is generating rent of ($1,667 x 12 =) $20,000 per year.

This land rent is what Georgists really want to capture. 💸
Apr 27, 2023 • 31 tweets • 8 min read
About to listen-in to this forum about how hot cities should handle rapid population growth, especially those in the South and West.

Might 🧵some notes along the way Starting-off is @MayorAdler. He's former mayor of Austin, which is one of the fastest-growing cities in the US.

He says that the key challenge has been rising house prices, which have resulted in a building-boom, but also gentrification.
Dec 1, 2022 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
🚨Wake up babe, new study of market-rate housing just published🚨 (Spoiler: it's a banger) 🧵

Xiaodi Li found that when a new luxury apartment is built in NYC:
📉 nearby house prices fall
📉 nearby rents fall
🧑‍🍳more restaurants open up &
⚖️low-rent units do not see rent hikes They key challenge in studies like this is accounting for the fact that developers will build more in exactly the places where rents are already rising

That's the error people are making when they say dumb stuff like "we've built heaps but rents keep rising, supply doesn't help"
Nov 16, 2022 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
Just to be clear about the laundering that Alex Ferrer is doing in the quote tweet:
- Kevin Rogan wasn't just "being mean online", he called for a specific urbanist to be "put down like a dog"
- There has been no evidence shown that a YIMBY called the cops
- Ferrer repeatedly dodges my clarifying questions
- Calls me a "sniveling little shit" for finding death threats unacceptable
- And uses 'just a joke bro' to attempt to whitewash Rogan's intimations of violence as some kind of casual everyday occurrence
Nov 6, 2022 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
You can tell Harlo doesn't actually care about affordability because he completely ignores that Auckland's rents have fallen in real terms since the 2016 upzoning.

Instead he frantically googles for a stat that reflects one year of price gains from covid interest-rate cuts. ImageImageImage His primary goal is dunking on YIMBYs, he doesn't actually care about affordability.

It's why he doesn't see $50 dip in rent after a building boom & bust as a cause for celebration and to highlight the usefulness of public construction. Hating YIMBYs is more important. ImageImage
Jul 4, 2022 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
I was so frustrated with debates about YIMBY that I wrote my whole masters thesis on the topic. 👨‍🎓

This 🧵 summarizes what I learned about land use regulations (LURs) and urban land values (LVs), with some comments that might help elevate the ✨discourse✨ LURs can raise or lower LVs through three key pathways:

1. Amenity Effect: by changing the desirability of a given location

2. Profit Effect: by changing how much housing can be built on a given parcel

3. Scarcity Effect: by making housing more/less scarce
Jan 17, 2022 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Plups with a brilliant depiction of the Law of Rent: owners of land in more productive locations know that they can hike up the rent until the amount left over for the worker is the same everywhere. This Law was formulated by the classical economists (Smith, Mill, Ricardo) and takes a modern form in the Alonso-Muth-Mills monocentric city model, which explains why land is more expensive closer to the city-centre.