[mtrovo]

In general I agree with you. IMHO there's a big disconnect on how we approach housing based normal market dynamics with the reality where land is a resource that not only is scarce but also keeps getting more scarce over time when you account for population growth and immigration dynamics.

It's crazy how we normalized just sitting on a empty land downtown as a way to accumulate wealth. And not just that, we encourage it as this could very easily outrun any gain you would have by doing constructions on that plot of land. And the cherry on top is that this "investment strategy" is good not just for the owners of the plot of land, but also for all the neighbors that also own land around the area, which make their NIMBY argument a very conflicted one. So I agree that making sure there's no money to capture on this situation is really important.

Another thing that's important to understand is that the use of land also should be adjusted according to the population growth expected. It's ok if you could have a single family home downtown with a huge backyard 50 years ago, it's not ok to have it now while people on the top 1% income struggle to find a place to live with a commute time lower than 60 minutes. If you do want to maintain it you should probably have to pay the difference on taxes based on whatever could be built on that area. You want to have a small house on a place where a 40 apartment building could be built? Fine, pay a property tax for 40 apartments and you're good to go.

Overall I think we approach home ownership as something that should never change after you built it but the very simple fact that lots of these plots of lands we know live on were one day just farms tell you how this is simply not true.