Category: Georgist/geoist

Olcott's Land Values Blue Book

One of the challenges for many beginning Henry George School students is to understand that land has value, and that the value of land is really not very difficult to determine.  One example that we used to use was Olcott’s Land Values Blue Book, an annual publication that, until the early ’90s, reported the estimated land value for every block in Chicago and much of suburban Cook County.  I don’t know exactly why the series was discontinued, but I assume it was because professionals now find the Internet a more convenient source of information.

The 1939 edition of Olcott’s has been scanned and posted to the Internet Archive.  Below is an example page.

Sample page from Olcott's
Sample page from Olcott's

The numbers in most areas are value per front foot for a standard-sized lot.  The book includes adjustment factors for use where lots are other than standard.  For unsubdivided parcels, a value per acre is shown.

The Secret Life of Real Estate

It’s a new book by Phil Anderson of Economic Indicator Services.  Some may remember Phil from his talk at the 2006 CGO conference, and earlier from his 2001 Mastering Wealth course at HGS/Chicago.  (We offered a money-back guarantee, which no attendees claimed, so it seems the course was quite satisfactory.)  The book unfortunately doesn’t seem to be available yet in the US, tho it can be ordered from the UK.

Phil is one of several Georgists who predicted the current economic meltdown. Anyone who’s taken courses at any Henry George School will be familiar with the general patterns. but Phil has studied them in detail and applied them specifically to financial forecasting.  He has devised helpful descriptive models, a real estate clock(pdf) and an investment clock.

In the ’90s, Phil produced some studies relating to land value tax in Australia (where they call it “site value rating”), including one showing that land value tax seems to lead to increased manufacturing activity, and another reporting that, when popular vote is taken, in the overwhelming majority of cases land value tax is preferred by the electorate.

Not much progress in 112 years

Even on matters such as in other sciences have long since been settled, he who today looks for the guidance of general acceptance in political economy will find a chaos of discordant opinions.

– Henry George, 1897

How many fields [other than economics] are there in which a big practical question pops up and the Nobel-level guys are on opposite sides yelling at each other?…They aren’t dickering over some minor proposal or detail. They’re talking about whether or not we should dump nearly a trillion dollars’ worth of stimulus money into the economy. And it isn’t a question that should be sitting at the far cutting edge of research, like how many dimensions your string theory needs to have. The raison d’etre of the discipline is to deal with stuff like this.

— Ezra Klein, 2009

Too much to post

That’s why I’ve not posted much lately, there is simply too much to post about. So I need to accept that some things will be missed, but here are two:
(1) UK Georgist journal Land & Liberty “commissioned ten top American economic reformers to address Barack Obama’s election call for ‘change for America’ and to offer ideas for a programme for President Obama’s White House.”  Results are in the Winter ’08-’09 issue, which unfortunately hasn’t been posted yet on their web site, but one can request a subscription.

(2) Saving Communities has posted the entire contents of the first issue (January 8, 1887) of Henry George’s weekly newspaper, The Standard.

Charity and money

Searching (of course) for something else, I found myself looking at Tom Johnson’s account of the recovery from the Johnstown Flood of 1889.  Initially, the community organized for its own relief, everyone was assigned a job and there was no quibbling over money.  But after a time…

To meet the problem of a community with no money was not easy, but we were presently confronted with the graver problem of a community with too much money. The greatly exaggerated reports of the loss of property and of human lives, the first press dispatches placing the number of the latter at ten thousand, brought a correspondingly great volume of relief. Continue reading Charity and money

We are Madoff-free

A few prominent foundations have lost most or all of their assets in the Madoff mess, and many of their donors have also suffered.  So I’m pleased to note that the Henry George School of Chicago, and (as far as I know), all the Georgist organizations, are untouched by this fraudster.   We have suffered somewhat from the economic meltdown, but as Georgists we didn’t lose  nearly as badly as  Harvard University.

This doesn’t mean that we don’t need your donations, of course we do.  If you agree that what the School does is important, and can afford to help out, we hope you’ll do what you can.  And even if you can’t afford to send money, you can sign up with igive to provide the School with cost-free donations. Thanks.

Strange pricing in the book business

This post isn’t about how the field of economics was corrupted, but rather about the strange pricing of the eponymous book by Mason Gaffney and Fred Harrison. I’ll use it in a course next term, so I wanted to get some copies because Henry George School policy is to include the book in the registration fee.

Schalkenbach, the U S distributor,  is charging $16 plus shipping. They’ll probably give us only a small discount, so since the book is 14 years old I decided to check other sources including used copies.

According to bookfinder4u, abebooks,  froogle and amazon, nobody is selling this for less than $21.88 plus shipping.  Amazon says that a used copy costs $35.64 while a new one can be had for $22.95. No sign of it on ebay at all. Of course this can all change very quickly, but it’s curious to see it at all.

I suspect that no one at Schalkenbach reads this blog, at least not right away, so I shall hasten to order a few copies from them.

Unjust Deserts

The full book title is
Unjust Deserts: How the Rich Are Taking Our Common Inheritance and Why We Should Take It Back
by Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly
Now, all I know about this book is what I read in this review by Mark Engler, but clearly the point being made is that, whatever one earns by one’s own efforts, some share legitimately belongs to the community in which one lives.  What share? Measured how? Collected how?

The collection of land rent by the community seems to be a pretty good way to accomplish this, as it won’t reduce the incentive to produce and it will tend in multiple ways to benefit other community members, not only in its direct revenue effects but also in its tendency top raise wages for the poorest.

Funding Amtrak from land rent

Real estate developer Jimmy Gierczyk spent $1.5 million to build a New Buffalo station for Amtrak.  It’s  adjacent to his real estate development.  The source article doesn’t give a lot of detail about the project, but notes that he can now more easily market his condos to Chicagoans. Who are accustomed to paying much higher prices than folks in New Buffalo, I’d guess.

All of which raises the question, why can’t Amtrak collect more of the location value it generates or preserves?