Japan does a lot of things wrong but it manages to largely avoid NIMBYism, at least on this kind of development scale, and that's despite a very prickly middle class population. Part of that may be culture and tradition but I think a lot of it is simply that living next to a building site in Tokyo is much less unpleasant than living next to one in London - partly because they'll do prosocial things like only coning off parts of the roadway during work hours (taking cones away every afternoon and putting them out again every morning) and partly because they will reliably get on with it and finish in reasonable time. People living next to a station tolerate its rebuilding because in a few months they'll have more trains and better connections. High trust and state capacity is self-reinforcing.
Wow! Could the problem be that we in the USA do all these anti-social things?
Liked: "High trust and state capacity is self reinforcing."
Whereas, here in America, where we let the DOGE out, and it is attacking the neighbors, and with AI looking to raze whole neighborhoods, it is pretty much the exact opposite. Which is why we famously are such a relaxed, contented bunch, admired the world over.
What did I just say?
:-)
Meanwhile, did you see the report today in STAT that United Health Care accidentally leaked an internal secret memo about how they hope to bamboozle the investors about all the s--t happening at their company? They must have a whole BS Department working overtime right now.
The strong form of Ricardo's Law of Rent is obviously wrong. Look at a list of the richest people in the world, you don't see a lot of people who earned their money from being landlords. I guess Ricardo just missed the way future techniques for vertical construction would increase the effective supply of land, reducing rents?
Also, the idea that crippling NIMBYism is an inevitable consequence of having a middle class in a democracy doesn't seem right, since different countries have radically different levels of NIMBY-related problems. And the big push in the US to move zoning-type decision-making from the local level to the state level seems to be working and paying dividends, which I think is ruled out by your theory.
I think your 2nd point shows DD is focused on a subset of NIMBY problems (sector agglomeration) and not the much more common, generic "people need someplace to live but homeowners don't want density near them" issue.
What do you mean by IP is the new land? Ricardian land is interestingly different from Ricardian capital because it comes from nature and you can’t make more of it. None of that applies to IP.
I don’t get the sectoral agglomeration argument. Oil companies like being near other oil companies in Houston. Oil executives in Houston make good money. None of that causes NIMBY issues, because the legal framework there doesn’t make things easy for NIMBYs. Middle class Houstonians still live in a democracy, right?
What can you do if you're the old activity, not the new activity?
Let's say that a century ago, an organization went out to the middle of nowhere and started to build where the rent was dirt cheap. Fast forward a hundred years, and they now have a pile of extremely expensive buildings and equipment they can't relocate, and everyone else has built important things around their location too. Now rent is through the roof, and the part of their workforce that bought cheap houses is retiring, and all the young people are unable to live on the kinds of wages that used to be enough.
You can't move: you have too much invested in your existing location. But the rentable area is too choked up with NIMBYs to be able to lower rents. New organizations could go elsewhere... but not you. What can you do?
Either you're productive enough to afford the rents and salaries that justify your location at what it currently costs, or you're not and the market should make it worth your while to move out and make way for those who are. The sunk costs of your equipment and buildings only add up to so much, and it's not like you can't see the increased rents coming from decades away and plan for them.
I wonder whether this scales to arbitrarily large institutions. Rather than a brewery, imagine shuttering a research center like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It seems difficult to justify spending billions to relocate, no matter how high the housing prices get for your employees.
Dan, where I come from micro-breweries are what the old abandoned factories are turned into. What happens in London when even the breweries can't make it? Where would the Brits be without their pubs?
What is thriving in London right now, and what is starving? And where do the little orphans go if there is no room even in London?
Never been to Britain, so I have no idea, as you can tell!
I was just reading about my health insurer, United Health Care, the exemplar of every evil tendency in our economy. The HQ sits on acres and acres of beautiful land I am sure in Minnesota. Why should it get to? Nobody wanted to look under that rock while the money was coming in.
Same here in CT, USA, nobody wanted to look inside GE while Mr. Neutron was America's Executive. Now the old HQ is a half-empty college classroom building. I've been inside of it. For me, it is a monument to everything we've got wrong in our money-worshiping culture. The spirit of Thomas Edison is long gone.
People can worship money, but eventually it won't even answer their messages.
The other thing about NW1 is that just other side of Hampstead Road from Somerstown there are a lot of very expensive Georgian townhouses overlooking a massive scar in the landscape that is due to have more or less active construction work going on for another decade or so having already been dusty dirty and noisy for probably 7/8 years already!
Back in the mid-1980s, I was told by property analysts at the City brokerage I worked at, that the place to buy, if you were brave, was in King's Cross. It was then rather seedy, not to mention dangerous. Yet, it seems that was good advice for the brave and hardy.
However, where do you build a new hi-tech cluster in England? Cambridge is now very expensive. Perhaps in one of the new towns around London, like Milton Keynes? What would be the theoretical ideal place to build a new hi-tech cluster with [initially] affordable homes nearby, access via roads and public transport, and local amenities to raise a family? California's Silicon Valley was a unique place, where the land was mostly orchards, so expansion was easy. Now, it is very expensive, somewhat filled up, and very costly to fund a start-up without a lot of venture capital. Where to go next?
I think this is a good local example of what you are speaking of.....there was an application to add extra retail to the Coal Drops, but local residents (which I assume are very local to Coal Drops, and would have only moved in over the last 15 years) lobbied against it....as it "jeopardises the cultural and historical integrity of the area". https://artlyst.com/news/controversy-kings-cross-development-grows-antony-gormley-joins-criticism/
The answer to how to achieve group functional outcomes is that culture is a product of institutional design and quality. Agglomeration is a product of interpersonal and institutional trust; the higher the trust, the greater the agglomeration.
Thus, the answer to how to maximize agglomeration is; public ownership of about a quarter of the economically viable land and housing stock, and universal access to the other necessary goods and services that maximizes individual human potential.
It's no accident that it's easier to start and run a business in Sweden than in America or the UK. It's no accident that it's easier to become rich in Sweden than in America or the UK. It's no accident that social mobility is greater in Sweden than in America and the UK. It's no accident that it's more difficult to become poor in Sweden than in America.
(As long as ideology, economics and poli-sci determine public policy, public policy will be suboptimal).
Sweden’s economy is like 40% controlled by like less than a hundred dudes and over 70% of their billionaires inherited their wealth. Sure you can become middle class there but definitely not rich
Would you like to borrow our Steve Bannon? He just suggested that Musk's Space X should be nationalized, since it is an essential industry, and Musk was threatening to shut down rocket flights, just one of the many ways he can hold a dagger to the country so he can get his way. Since Boeing can't get their space capsule to work right, and Bezos is busy with cringy tourist flights, Elon holds the keys to space.
I think that last bit is key. We as a species have a strong tendency towards expecting and somewhat desiring nothing to change, especially the big institutions and landmark items we grew up with. However, none of these things are permanent and circumstances change on infinite margins; as a result these fixed points we wish to perpetuate become increasingly maladaptive. What has to happen is new institutions and environments crop up in new places as old ones pass away and are repurposed. That is uncomfortable for us as we perceive it, but very beneficial for us over all.
Consolidation just makes it worse by making it harder for these organizations to multiply into the best places and instead just doubles down on the previous choices that are now no longer fit.
"Which is where I cash in the cheque that I wrote in the first sentence; once a place is gentrified, it tends to be full of the kind of people who are a lot more difficult to push around than the original residents." Urban Renewal in the US.
You and the "Abundance" people should have a talk.
It would be nice if the economists got in a room with the technologists, and the political scientists, and the anthropologists, and the ecologists, and maybe some regular people with no titles ending in "ist."
I don't believe any of these individual fields have a true "theory of everything," even if they think they do.
EconomIST is like communIST, or any other IST.
I still like the old joke "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around."
Also: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
The American colonists had problems with the British and that big Company of theirs, and in turn, the native Americans, and the black slaves, had problems with the colonists. Everybody screws somebody else.
When the state of Connecticut though a more productive use for the land my grandfather's factory in Shelton sat on was an off ramp for a new bridge, and he should move, that was all good, except the state didn't want to pay for the money it would cost him to actually move all that heavy machinery ($$$) to the new site where he put up a new building. My grandfather had to sue the state to get repaid the cost, and he had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court, where he finally won.
In our imperfect world, the big fish eats the little fish until the little fish gets a lawyer who can bite back at big fish.
My grandfather came to the US from Canada because the US had more opportunities. It must have been a bitter blow when the government here tried to steal from him, and he had to hire someone to defend himself.
Final irony: he loyally served on the board of apportionment and taxation in Shelton, not that that did him any good; it was the state that abused him.
"When you're a celebrity, they let you do it" said a well-known political philosopher.
Sometimes, people have power.
In short, in this world nothing works perfectly, so there are always problems to fix. We need wisdom to do this, and we will still get it wrong.
But sometimes you have to wonder if that "invisible hand" allegedly running everything has been drinking too much...or maybe he didn't get the memo from Ricardo?
Fun fact: Shelton, CT is where "Whiffle Balls" are made. The little factory has been here forever, so I guess Ricardo is OK with that.
Name me a more productive use of land than making Whiffle Balls!
Once you have driven a freeway through all the black and poor white communities you have to move upscale. I attended a lecture by a group who wanted to build an airport project in NYC. This was back in the mid 1970's. NIMBYs killed it. The locals were questioned about the resistance to the project. They responded that they had been F'd over so many times they believed no one.
I think they can forget about any more permits for helicopter landing pads after...the event.. in the Hudson. That rotor company is in deep doo doo also.
If I were King, I would get rid of the landing pads they already have. Manhattan and helicopters don't seem to mix well. The heli safety record Is like a thousand times worse than for airliners. Let the emergency choppers operate. Tourists: we have nice 4K videos of how it looks.
BC If you ask nicely for trouble often enough, you will get it.
Then they'll probably move the choppers to New Jersey...local problems become regional problems.
In systems thinking I believe this is called "shifting the burden," aka "let someone else deal with it."
Look at Trump vs Musk: "It's my ball, and I'm taking it home!" "Middle school isn't over until I say it's over!" "I always hated you!"
They should move this case to its proper venue, family court...
Fun fact to bear in mind: I once got a parking ticket in NYC, which I protested. I took it to "parking ticket court" or whatever they call it, got the ticket cut in half. I will never forget one of the local residents, also with a case before the court, who offered to lie on my behalf! I declined.
I guess lying is considered just what you do when you can in the city.
I come from the suburbs. Why didn't I think of that?
Residents of NYC are not besties with their government, I concluded.
It was a STOL port to be floating in East River(?) I member the helicopter crash on the pad on top of what used to be the PanAm building. Yes I am old.
Alternatively, we target rentier capitalism through highly progressive taxation that redistributes supernormal profits to those from whom that profit was extracted.
In the short run, LVT makes no difference to land rents. That's part of why it has no deadweight losses and is such a great tax: it has minimal impact on opportunity costs in the economy.
In the longer run, LVT will increase land rents. That's under the assumption that LVT will help allay NIMBY-ism and thus allow greater density. Higher density in eg residential housing will lead to lower rents per apartment, but higher rent per unit of land.
Revenue from LVT will also allow lowering other, less efficient taxes like income tax or capital gains tax etc. Lessening their drag on the economy will make people richer, and that tends to increase land rents.
I guess the other alternative thing you could give up on might be democracy and private ownership of real estate, but that feels like a path that's not available to many places.
Also to make a point to get a Singaporean style home ownership model you'd need to nationalise a lot of land and then choose to allocate it based significantly on market forces. This is off the table in basically every country short of a revolution. To summarise the points stated and implied.
The vast majority of Sinaporean "home ownership" is 99 year lease holds where the state retains ownership of the underlying property. 78% of property is owned for this.
The vast majority of Sinaporean "home ownership" is 99 year lease holds where the state retains ownership of the underlying property. 78% of property is owned for this.
Basically you are mistaking government letting its public housing being rationally allocated by market forces vs the other parts of the world where its private housing arguably irationally allocated by market forces
These are issued by the state on 99-year leaseholds, and the value of the home depends on the inherent utility value of the property (size, type, location), with financing readily available, including that provided by the Central Provident Fund (CPF). The CPF is a social security system that enables working Singapore citizens and those with permanent resident status to set aside funds for retirement. It is a compulsory savings scheme, which includes contributions from employers, to set aside funds for healthcare and housing costs in later life.
Property buyers in Singapore can fund the purchase of a development board flat with a bank loan, a loan from the HDB, with cash, or with funds drawn from the CPF. In a similar way to the leasehold system in the UK, the resale value of an HDB flat deteriorates as the lease end date approaches, in this case when the lease drops to under 30 years. As is the case in the UK, difficulties arise in trying to finance homes with short leases. However, the HDB leasehold system is different as the “owners” have bought only the right to use the flat – the property title and ownership remains with HDB.
Additionally, the development board prohibits Singaporeans from owning more than two residential units at any time. In the case of an inherited flat, ownership is only allowed if the inheritor disposes of their existing private or public residential property within six months of inheriting it.
The HDB remains by far the dominant national housing provider, building and owning most residential housing and playing an extremely active role. Private sector housing is available, but it is much more expensive.
The differences between the approaches in the UK and Singapore are extreme. In the UK, council housing is considered to be a public sector cost – a burden to the taxpayer. For many people this is housing provision of last resort. In Singapore it is treated as an asset to the public purse, as well as a social asset – and carries no stigma, nor is seen as something to be avoided if possible. The UK’s mixed housing economy results in major social and economic distortions, whereas Singapore invests in housing precisely to avoid or counter those distortions.
In the UK, with the exception of the New Towns, housing has tended to involve creating individual assets rather than an approach based on place-making – creating neighbourhoods and communities. Singapore’s HDB housing units are built in HDB towns with housing units integrated with amenities including clinics, community facilities such as parks and sports facilities, and retail. As Singapore has developed economically, so HDB has also begun to produce more upmarket housing.
The fragmentation of housing ownership in the UK makes it extremely expensive to redevelop or make major modifications to existing residential areas – each owner would have to be persuaded to modify their property or sell up as part of a land assembly process. In Singapore, with a history of intensifying land use and population density, HDB ownership means it is able to rebuild old estates and maintain and develop the extent of integration with social amenities.
Japan does a lot of things wrong but it manages to largely avoid NIMBYism, at least on this kind of development scale, and that's despite a very prickly middle class population. Part of that may be culture and tradition but I think a lot of it is simply that living next to a building site in Tokyo is much less unpleasant than living next to one in London - partly because they'll do prosocial things like only coning off parts of the roadway during work hours (taking cones away every afternoon and putting them out again every morning) and partly because they will reliably get on with it and finish in reasonable time. People living next to a station tolerate its rebuilding because in a few months they'll have more trains and better connections. High trust and state capacity is self-reinforcing.
Liked: "They'll do prosocial things"
Wow! Could the problem be that we in the USA do all these anti-social things?
Liked: "High trust and state capacity is self reinforcing."
Whereas, here in America, where we let the DOGE out, and it is attacking the neighbors, and with AI looking to raze whole neighborhoods, it is pretty much the exact opposite. Which is why we famously are such a relaxed, contented bunch, admired the world over.
What did I just say?
:-)
Meanwhile, did you see the report today in STAT that United Health Care accidentally leaked an internal secret memo about how they hope to bamboozle the investors about all the s--t happening at their company? They must have a whole BS Department working overtime right now.
Talk about creating trust.
The strong form of Ricardo's Law of Rent is obviously wrong. Look at a list of the richest people in the world, you don't see a lot of people who earned their money from being landlords. I guess Ricardo just missed the way future techniques for vertical construction would increase the effective supply of land, reducing rents?
Also, the idea that crippling NIMBYism is an inevitable consequence of having a middle class in a democracy doesn't seem right, since different countries have radically different levels of NIMBY-related problems. And the big push in the US to move zoning-type decision-making from the local level to the state level seems to be working and paying dividends, which I think is ruled out by your theory.
Re 1st point, IP is the new land
I think your 2nd point shows DD is focused on a subset of NIMBY problems (sector agglomeration) and not the much more common, generic "people need someplace to live but homeowners don't want density near them" issue.
What do you mean by IP is the new land? Ricardian land is interestingly different from Ricardian capital because it comes from nature and you can’t make more of it. None of that applies to IP.
I don’t get the sectoral agglomeration argument. Oil companies like being near other oil companies in Houston. Oil executives in Houston make good money. None of that causes NIMBY issues, because the legal framework there doesn’t make things easy for NIMBYs. Middle class Houstonians still live in a democracy, right?
Think the argument here is that IP grants you a monopoly. From which you can collect rents.
Rather, NIMBYism is the non-market economy telling us there is something wrong with the market economy
What can you do if you're the old activity, not the new activity?
Let's say that a century ago, an organization went out to the middle of nowhere and started to build where the rent was dirt cheap. Fast forward a hundred years, and they now have a pile of extremely expensive buildings and equipment they can't relocate, and everyone else has built important things around their location too. Now rent is through the roof, and the part of their workforce that bought cheap houses is retiring, and all the young people are unable to live on the kinds of wages that used to be enough.
You can't move: you have too much invested in your existing location. But the rentable area is too choked up with NIMBYs to be able to lower rents. New organizations could go elsewhere... but not you. What can you do?
Either you're productive enough to afford the rents and salaries that justify your location at what it currently costs, or you're not and the market should make it worth your while to move out and make way for those who are. The sunk costs of your equipment and buildings only add up to so much, and it's not like you can't see the increased rents coming from decades away and plan for them.
yep - this isn't a hypothetical, there are loads of foundries and breweries in central London which have been converted to other use.
I wonder whether this scales to arbitrarily large institutions. Rather than a brewery, imagine shuttering a research center like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. It seems difficult to justify spending billions to relocate, no matter how high the housing prices get for your employees.
Dan, where I come from micro-breweries are what the old abandoned factories are turned into. What happens in London when even the breweries can't make it? Where would the Brits be without their pubs?
What is thriving in London right now, and what is starving? And where do the little orphans go if there is no room even in London?
Never been to Britain, so I have no idea, as you can tell!
I was just reading about my health insurer, United Health Care, the exemplar of every evil tendency in our economy. The HQ sits on acres and acres of beautiful land I am sure in Minnesota. Why should it get to? Nobody wanted to look under that rock while the money was coming in.
Same here in CT, USA, nobody wanted to look inside GE while Mr. Neutron was America's Executive. Now the old HQ is a half-empty college classroom building. I've been inside of it. For me, it is a monument to everything we've got wrong in our money-worshiping culture. The spirit of Thomas Edison is long gone.
People can worship money, but eventually it won't even answer their messages.
The other thing about NW1 is that just other side of Hampstead Road from Somerstown there are a lot of very expensive Georgian townhouses overlooking a massive scar in the landscape that is due to have more or less active construction work going on for another decade or so having already been dusty dirty and noisy for probably 7/8 years already!
Back in the mid-1980s, I was told by property analysts at the City brokerage I worked at, that the place to buy, if you were brave, was in King's Cross. It was then rather seedy, not to mention dangerous. Yet, it seems that was good advice for the brave and hardy.
However, where do you build a new hi-tech cluster in England? Cambridge is now very expensive. Perhaps in one of the new towns around London, like Milton Keynes? What would be the theoretical ideal place to build a new hi-tech cluster with [initially] affordable homes nearby, access via roads and public transport, and local amenities to raise a family? California's Silicon Valley was a unique place, where the land was mostly orchards, so expansion was easy. Now, it is very expensive, somewhat filled up, and very costly to fund a start-up without a lot of venture capital. Where to go next?
Great piece Dan. (I live in NW1).
I think this is a good local example of what you are speaking of.....there was an application to add extra retail to the Coal Drops, but local residents (which I assume are very local to Coal Drops, and would have only moved in over the last 15 years) lobbied against it....as it "jeopardises the cultural and historical integrity of the area". https://artlyst.com/news/controversy-kings-cross-development-grows-antony-gormley-joins-criticism/
The answer to how to achieve group functional outcomes is that culture is a product of institutional design and quality. Agglomeration is a product of interpersonal and institutional trust; the higher the trust, the greater the agglomeration.
Thus, the answer to how to maximize agglomeration is; public ownership of about a quarter of the economically viable land and housing stock, and universal access to the other necessary goods and services that maximizes individual human potential.
It's no accident that it's easier to start and run a business in Sweden than in America or the UK. It's no accident that it's easier to become rich in Sweden than in America or the UK. It's no accident that social mobility is greater in Sweden than in America and the UK. It's no accident that it's more difficult to become poor in Sweden than in America.
(As long as ideology, economics and poli-sci determine public policy, public policy will be suboptimal).
Sweden’s economy is like 40% controlled by like less than a hundred dudes and over 70% of their billionaires inherited their wealth. Sure you can become middle class there but definitely not rich
Would you like to borrow our Steve Bannon? He just suggested that Musk's Space X should be nationalized, since it is an essential industry, and Musk was threatening to shut down rocket flights, just one of the many ways he can hold a dagger to the country so he can get his way. Since Boeing can't get their space capsule to work right, and Bezos is busy with cringy tourist flights, Elon holds the keys to space.
I think that last bit is key. We as a species have a strong tendency towards expecting and somewhat desiring nothing to change, especially the big institutions and landmark items we grew up with. However, none of these things are permanent and circumstances change on infinite margins; as a result these fixed points we wish to perpetuate become increasingly maladaptive. What has to happen is new institutions and environments crop up in new places as old ones pass away and are repurposed. That is uncomfortable for us as we perceive it, but very beneficial for us over all.
Consolidation just makes it worse by making it harder for these organizations to multiply into the best places and instead just doubles down on the previous choices that are now no longer fit.
"Which is where I cash in the cheque that I wrote in the first sentence; once a place is gentrified, it tends to be full of the kind of people who are a lot more difficult to push around than the original residents." Urban Renewal in the US.
You and the "Abundance" people should have a talk.
This post actually arose out of an email conversation with my mates at the Niskanen Center!
It would be nice if the economists got in a room with the technologists, and the political scientists, and the anthropologists, and the ecologists, and maybe some regular people with no titles ending in "ist."
I don't believe any of these individual fields have a true "theory of everything," even if they think they do.
EconomIST is like communIST, or any other IST.
I still like the old joke "Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's the other way around."
Also: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
The American colonists had problems with the British and that big Company of theirs, and in turn, the native Americans, and the black slaves, had problems with the colonists. Everybody screws somebody else.
When the state of Connecticut though a more productive use for the land my grandfather's factory in Shelton sat on was an off ramp for a new bridge, and he should move, that was all good, except the state didn't want to pay for the money it would cost him to actually move all that heavy machinery ($$$) to the new site where he put up a new building. My grandfather had to sue the state to get repaid the cost, and he had to take it all the way to the state Supreme Court, where he finally won.
In our imperfect world, the big fish eats the little fish until the little fish gets a lawyer who can bite back at big fish.
My grandfather came to the US from Canada because the US had more opportunities. It must have been a bitter blow when the government here tried to steal from him, and he had to hire someone to defend himself.
Final irony: he loyally served on the board of apportionment and taxation in Shelton, not that that did him any good; it was the state that abused him.
"When you're a celebrity, they let you do it" said a well-known political philosopher.
Sometimes, people have power.
In short, in this world nothing works perfectly, so there are always problems to fix. We need wisdom to do this, and we will still get it wrong.
But sometimes you have to wonder if that "invisible hand" allegedly running everything has been drinking too much...or maybe he didn't get the memo from Ricardo?
Fun fact: Shelton, CT is where "Whiffle Balls" are made. The little factory has been here forever, so I guess Ricardo is OK with that.
Name me a more productive use of land than making Whiffle Balls!
Or, maybe they are just being stubborn.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiffle_ball
Great minds share thoughts.
Once you have driven a freeway through all the black and poor white communities you have to move upscale. I attended a lecture by a group who wanted to build an airport project in NYC. This was back in the mid 1970's. NIMBYs killed it. The locals were questioned about the resistance to the project. They responded that they had been F'd over so many times they believed no one.
I think they can forget about any more permits for helicopter landing pads after...the event.. in the Hudson. That rotor company is in deep doo doo also.
If I were King, I would get rid of the landing pads they already have. Manhattan and helicopters don't seem to mix well. The heli safety record Is like a thousand times worse than for airliners. Let the emergency choppers operate. Tourists: we have nice 4K videos of how it looks.
BC If you ask nicely for trouble often enough, you will get it.
Then they'll probably move the choppers to New Jersey...local problems become regional problems.
In systems thinking I believe this is called "shifting the burden," aka "let someone else deal with it."
Look at Trump vs Musk: "It's my ball, and I'm taking it home!" "Middle school isn't over until I say it's over!" "I always hated you!"
They should move this case to its proper venue, family court...
Fun fact to bear in mind: I once got a parking ticket in NYC, which I protested. I took it to "parking ticket court" or whatever they call it, got the ticket cut in half. I will never forget one of the local residents, also with a case before the court, who offered to lie on my behalf! I declined.
I guess lying is considered just what you do when you can in the city.
I come from the suburbs. Why didn't I think of that?
Residents of NYC are not besties with their government, I concluded.
It was a STOL port to be floating in East River(?) I member the helicopter crash on the pad on top of what used to be the PanAm building. Yes I am old.
Alternatively, we target rentier capitalism through highly progressive taxation that redistributes supernormal profits to those from whom that profit was extracted.
Just use a land value tax.
But that doesn't reduce land rents, it just taxes them away.
LVT is a long-standing Green Party policy.
It should push land rents down though, as LVT removes (or at least materially reduces) the benefit to be gained from owning it.
In the short run, LVT makes no difference to land rents. That's part of why it has no deadweight losses and is such a great tax: it has minimal impact on opportunity costs in the economy.
In the longer run, LVT will increase land rents. That's under the assumption that LVT will help allay NIMBY-ism and thus allow greater density. Higher density in eg residential housing will lead to lower rents per apartment, but higher rent per unit of land.
Revenue from LVT will also allow lowering other, less efficient taxes like income tax or capital gains tax etc. Lessening their drag on the economy will make people richer, and that tends to increase land rents.
> LVT is a long-standing Green Party policy.
I assume you mean the American Green party? Nice!
The impact on land and housing costs depends on
- how you transition from whatever current property/land tax is currently in force
- what level you ultimately set the tax at
My expectation is that it would be used to push down on the ludicrously expensive house prices in the UK.
And to clarify, I was talking about the Green Party of England and Wales - no idea about US Greens: https://www.ftadviser.com/your-industry/2019/11/19/greens-pledge-radical-tax-overhaul/
In Singapore, we keep getting denser and NIMBYism is not much of a problem as far as I can tell.
I guess the other alternative thing you could give up on might be democracy and private ownership of real estate, but that feels like a path that's not available to many places.
US to Democracy: please go away!
Countries are like printing presses: if you own one, you get free speech. Right, Rupert?
Singapore has one of the highest homeownership rates on the globe.
International election observers don't find fault with our democracy.
Also to make a point to get a Singaporean style home ownership model you'd need to nationalise a lot of land and then choose to allocate it based significantly on market forces. This is off the table in basically every country short of a revolution. To summarise the points stated and implied.
The vast majority of Sinaporean "home ownership" is 99 year lease holds where the state retains ownership of the underlying property. 78% of property is owned for this.
The vast majority of Sinaporean "home ownership" is 99 year lease holds where the state retains ownership of the underlying property. 78% of property is owned for this.
By that metric, there's almost no 'home ownership' in the UK as well.
Basically you are mistaking government letting its public housing being rationally allocated by market forces vs the other parts of the world where its private housing arguably irationally allocated by market forces
Singapore's housing is largely in private hands
A good summary of the difference is here:
These are issued by the state on 99-year leaseholds, and the value of the home depends on the inherent utility value of the property (size, type, location), with financing readily available, including that provided by the Central Provident Fund (CPF). The CPF is a social security system that enables working Singapore citizens and those with permanent resident status to set aside funds for retirement. It is a compulsory savings scheme, which includes contributions from employers, to set aside funds for healthcare and housing costs in later life.
Property buyers in Singapore can fund the purchase of a development board flat with a bank loan, a loan from the HDB, with cash, or with funds drawn from the CPF. In a similar way to the leasehold system in the UK, the resale value of an HDB flat deteriorates as the lease end date approaches, in this case when the lease drops to under 30 years. As is the case in the UK, difficulties arise in trying to finance homes with short leases. However, the HDB leasehold system is different as the “owners” have bought only the right to use the flat – the property title and ownership remains with HDB.
Additionally, the development board prohibits Singaporeans from owning more than two residential units at any time. In the case of an inherited flat, ownership is only allowed if the inheritor disposes of their existing private or public residential property within six months of inheriting it.
The HDB remains by far the dominant national housing provider, building and owning most residential housing and playing an extremely active role. Private sector housing is available, but it is much more expensive.
https://theconversation.com/a-century-of-public-housing-lessons-from-singapore-where-housing-is-a-social-not-financial-asset-121141
You can have many flats, the restrictions are only on HDB flats.
The differences between the approaches in the UK and Singapore are extreme. In the UK, council housing is considered to be a public sector cost – a burden to the taxpayer. For many people this is housing provision of last resort. In Singapore it is treated as an asset to the public purse, as well as a social asset – and carries no stigma, nor is seen as something to be avoided if possible. The UK’s mixed housing economy results in major social and economic distortions, whereas Singapore invests in housing precisely to avoid or counter those distortions.
In the UK, with the exception of the New Towns, housing has tended to involve creating individual assets rather than an approach based on place-making – creating neighbourhoods and communities. Singapore’s HDB housing units are built in HDB towns with housing units integrated with amenities including clinics, community facilities such as parks and sports facilities, and retail. As Singapore has developed economically, so HDB has also begun to produce more upmarket housing.
The fragmentation of housing ownership in the UK makes it extremely expensive to redevelop or make major modifications to existing residential areas – each owner would have to be persuaded to modify their property or sell up as part of a land assembly process. In Singapore, with a history of intensifying land use and population density, HDB ownership means it is able to rebuild old estates and maintain and develop the extent of integration with social amenities.
https://youtu.be/-VosvrTlw7c?si=OAgXATesVQirYeqE
A video on the completion of Singapore's first 5 year plan of housing that summarise the pre marketization era of housing.