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by frankus 1406 days ago
That's an interesting dilemma. I don't think Georgism fully solves the issue of returning community-created value to the community members who contributed to it. Of course the same is true under the current system for anyone who rents their residence.

I think the ideal outcome would be to just build additional housing for the people who want to move there, i.e. split the tax per unit land across more units of housing, since that's what the market is indicating that it "wants".

Of course most of the Anglophone world is doing a terrible job of adding housing in high-demand areas, and I'm not clear whether and how that would change under a Georgist regime.

1 comments

If you switch to Georgism without fixing zoning it ends up worse not better. Zoning my land as suitable for a high-rise can destroy the entire value of my home because it becomes an unusable structure due to the higher rates of tax. At the same time zoning my land for high-rise causes the value to go up and that results in a massive tax increase that eliminates any price gain for my land. Since I so firmly don't want my land to be upzoned I become a NIMBY and compromise with my neighbors to also protect their land from upzoning. We all elect politicians that oppose all upzoning. Some Georgists argue that I'm supposed to want my neighbors upzoned because it raises my CD but they seem to have not done the math because if you're applying the CD over the entire US then upzoning a single neighbor raises my CD by fractions of a cent which I care so little about that it doesn't change the incentives for this political alliance.