<story><title>Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land</title><url>http://www.loukidelis.com/on-land-ownership.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;earn&lt;/i&gt; the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. Someone who has lived in a house for 55 years didn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don&amp;#x27;t invest in them at all because they want to get out.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s theirs. It makes common ground impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>swatcoder</author><text>&amp;gt; The reason neighbourhoods get gentrified is because the residents made them attracitve. The reason neighbourhoods decay is because people don&amp;#x27;t invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don&amp;#x27;t invest in them at all because they want to get out.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;other&lt;/i&gt; neighborhood got too pricey.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>Seeing like a state, progress and poverty, and owning land</title><url>http://www.loukidelis.com/on-land-ownership.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>motohagiography</author><text>&amp;gt;&lt;i&gt;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.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;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 &lt;i&gt;earn&lt;/i&gt; the windfall for the time they spend there without making it worse. Someone who has lived in a house for 55 years didn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t invest themselves in them long enough, or because they don&amp;#x27;t invest in them at all because they want to get out.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s theirs. It makes common ground impossible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>imtringued</author><text>&amp;gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;s and governments pockets.&lt;p&gt;Honestly, the idea that when a town grows from 10k to 100k that it&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;t create. It is the community as a whole that makes land valuable, not the owners of the land.</text></comment>