[motohagiography]

>I bought my house 55 years ago, and in the time that I’ve lived in it the city has grown up around me so that the plot of land that my house sits on is now extremely valuable.

Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place. They earn the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. Someone who has lived in a house for 55 years didn't watch its value appreciate, their lives made the area around them appreciate. The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don't invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don't invest in them at all because they want to get out.

The ostensible justice of taking this investment from people via high taxes is dispicably cynical. Only a bandit looks at what you have and tells you it's theirs. It makes common ground impossible.

[swatcoder]

> The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don't invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don't invest in them at all because they want to get out.

Gentrification isn’t an art project. It’s people with more wealth or income-opportunity coming in and buying up cheap stuff at the prices they can afford. That a prettier coffee shop with gourmet pastries opens up, or that the restaurants have cutesy little parklets, is a second order effect.

In most cases, what makes the neighborhood “more attractive” and starts this in motion is either a growing industry within commute distance or that some other neighborhood got too pricey.

It has very little to do with the prior or new people in the neighborhood, except that the new people have access to more money than the old people and so price them out. Care for community or other forms of moral character have absolutely zero to do with it.

[motohagiography]

This criticism of gentrification ignores the sellers who are glad to take the money for what they invested, and the reason the industry moved to that area in the first place was to get access to the people who were there. The landowners are the community, provided that they are present and managing their investment. This is a fundamental cognitive divide as well, as the positions aren't reconcilable because it's a chicken/egg problem. One is as good a metaphor for either as the other.

I may even have a proof that people mostly migrate to where they can find stability, and away from where there is uncertainty and volatility. Long term residents are the stability.

When there is an imbalance between the sides, it needs correction, and advocating for the people who actually build these desirable streets and neighbourhoods that are so attractive for others to come to seems like the braver cause these days.

[jjoonathan]

> The landowners are the community, provided that they are present and managing their investment

That's a big, gigantic, huge, gnarly, completely unjustified assumption that is responsible in entirety for your conclusion. It's like saying "provided these people did good, they did good." Well, yeah. Duh. What if they didn't?

> This is a fundamental cognitive divide

Oh, I agree. It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary (or should I say rent / land value) depends on not understanding it.

[nine_k]

> The landowners are the community

In cities with multi-tenant buildings it's typically not so. Renters are the community, or a large part thereof.

[imtringued]

>Examples like these ignore that the reason the land around them is vaulable is by virtue of the people living there making it a better and more prosperous place.

You are ignoring that the new arrivals increase the land value of existing residents. You are ignoring that the government uses income taxes etc to invest into the community, not private land owners, effectively punishing the government and renters for good investments as their income taxes improve the value of the land which then results in them paying more rent. Doing the right thing ends up making a lot of people poorer and land owners richer. So now your government is heavily encouraged to do corrupt projects that benefit the politicians rather than the public. Lots of public transportation projects could pay for themselves through an LVT but without an LVT they drain the renter's and governments pockets.

Honestly, the idea that when a town grows from 10k to 100k that it's only the 10k original residents that create the value and those other 90k are just useless deadweights living off the hard work of older residents is ridiculous when land ownership is just about fencing off something that was already there. When you think about it, the real deadweight is someone demanding to get paid for something they didn't create. It is the community as a whole that makes land valuable, not the owners of the land.

[jjoonathan]

The community creates the value but the land owners capture the value. This is just exclusively to the degree these are the same groups of people, invested to the same degree. While the scenario you describe could conceivably play out, so too could the opposite scenario, where the value is created by people who did not get in on the ground floor of the land ownership scheme but is captured by the people who did. In that case it would be the land owners who are the bandits.

In a world of increasing inequality and specialization, the latter scenario is going to be increasingly common. For many people, it is already here: the absentee slumlord who charges a king's ransom and can't be bothered to keep the toilets flushing is a staple of high-value locations. This person clearly isn't creating the value that drives people to put up with these circumstances, but by virtue of owning the correct deed they get to capture the value even as they do their best to unravel it.

[pessimizer]

Why can't you make the same argument about not paying taxes on any accumulation of wealth? Everybody can come up with a way they "earned" it with a bar as low as this, where simply existing in your house is actually heroic work and value generation.

[motohagiography]

Several dozen generations of nations of native peoples may like a word on that. Yes. When you are somewhere, what you bring to it is the value of that place. Newcomers grow it and may increase the value, maybe even drive the residents off as they have, but it was the stewardship of the residents that made it inhabitable in the first place.

It's a lot like founder and startup equity in a way. Is it more fair for people who arrived with money and grew something to reap more benefits, or the people with time and sweat equity who took way more relative individual risk?

[googlryas]

I mean, that might be true, but it might be the steady stream of new people who show up and stay for 5 years before leaving that make the city more valuable, and the people who hunker down just kind of gain the windfall. I'm sure you develop some deep, meaningful personal networks after living in the same place for half a century, but at the same time, outsiders probably aren't using that as a factor when deciding whether some place is a desirable place to live.

[pottertheotter]

At first I thought this comment was made by Marc Andreessen.

[motohagiography]

Naw, he's a punk. ;)

[quickthrower2]

More likely Ayn.

[quickthrower2]

If the person who lived their for 55 years makes $10m from the increase in land value, how much should of this should he give to the people who rented for 55 years, lived in the same neighborhood, and went about their days with smiles as to make the place nice to live in?

Also what if he was a real asshole, rude to everyone, kicking in fences, and his dogs barking 24/7, and the neighbourhood was doing well despite him?

[motohagiography]

Property owners choose the tenants, and didn't sell to developers sooner. I also advocate co-op housing instead of welfare driven projects, where tenants become members who get equity out of their subsidized co-ops. When you compare the safety and quality neighbourhoods with co-ops to pure public and subsidized housing, they're completely different. Even places with 100y land leases and resale value rules are better for permanent tenants.

Renting a single place for decades is less common in north america, as homeowner friendly policies were designed to prevent the society from sliding into the serfdom that is more traditional in europe and elsewhere. If a homeowner was a problem, neighbours have police. There's a dynamic that works pretty well when there isn't a thumb on the scale.

[perilunar]

> Only a bandit looks at what you have and tells you it's theirs.

And almost all land currently owned is the result of banditry. Pretty much every bit of habitable land has been fought over, both in the Old World and the New. It's all stolen goods.

[perilunar]

Also, taxing what should be the common property of all mankind is infinitely more just than taxing the fruits of your labour, which should be yours alone.

[8note]

Who says it's the land owners that are the people that made it more valuable? It could instead be the employees of nearby businesses or more likely renters.