[notahacker]

Los Angeles and the Bay Area provides massive windfalls to property owners because the State of California's tax system is not based on the Georgist principle that 100% of the "unearned increment" of land value appreciation should be taxed away.

And in the case of the Georgist system being discussed, a typical poor person who is living on a typically tight budget and typically doesn't own very much of their home equity has very strong financial incentives to avoid unaffordable tax rises. Sure, they still have "options" to pay that bill, just like unemployed people also have "options" to sell and move in with family, take on lodgers or refinance, but if the consequence of house price rises from are that you have to choose between sharing, moving or paying refinancing costs on your house it's definitely not a windfall. And they're not finally priced out of an area when it's a million pound plot attractive to developers who want to build condos, they're priced out of their still-very-undesirable area as soon as the LVT bumps up 20%, perhaps because some well meaning citizen planted flowers instead of syringes in the local park.

The other option, of course, is to try to keep your house in line with your cost of living by attempting to thwart all attempts to generally improve the area. I think it's pretty obvious a lot of people will choose that...