land value – Page 3 – The Menace of Privilege

“The hero turns out to be Henry George”

Ray Kroc’s first McDonalds in Des Plaines, IL, is now a historic site. Image credit: Matt Thorpe CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I’ve complained before about Russ Roberts’ Econ Talk failing to note the importance of economic rent and land costs. So I was pretty pleased to hear his guest Philip Auerswald say

I think the hero in all this, and I talk about this in The Code Economy, turns out to be Henry George. I mean, I think he really, you know, the 19th century U.S. economist–and he really anticipated these phenomena more clearly than anybody.

Pleased enough to read Auerswald’s new book. And he does get a lot of what George wrote about.

Auerswald’s main point seems to be that an economy doesn’t just have inputs and outputs, but what’s more important is the methods by which the inputs are used to produce the outputs. That’s “code,” and folks have been using it for 40,000 years. In recent centuries, standardization and automation of various kinds have increased productivity — the amount of stuff which a given amount of inputs could produce.

And, as we see computers and machine-driven processes increasingly capable of replacing human labor, what will humans do? He endorses Henry George’s analysis that, as productivity increases, rents will increase. And he supports the citizens’ dividend (tho he does not use the term), to be funded by a land value tax.

But his concluding pages seem to assume that, of course everyone will have a guaranteed income from land rent, no problem there, but what will people do with their time? To George, the problem was to get a fair distribution (not redistribution, because by right the rent belongs to everybody) of wealth, which he expected would result, over time, in social progress and a more constructive community. When I look at Wikipedia, Flickr, some blogs and a bunch of other internet resources, I tend to agree with George. Auerswald assumes the wealth distribution, but doesn’t assume that people and the community will improve. If I looked at Facebook or some other sites I might agree with him.

Auerswald also makes interesting use of the concept of comparative advantage, applying it to humans exchanging work with machines. Machines can do certain kinds of work millions of times faster than humans, so logically machines should do such work. In other tasks the difference might be much less, so those tasks would remain with humans (tho I would guess at much lower wages than currently.) And then there are some “low-volume, high-price” tasks which might remain human monopolies.

*****If you’re not the editor of Auerswald’s book, stop reading here*****

This book is full of irritating errors. On page 2 is a list of ingredients for chocolate chip cookies, comprising butter, sugar, water, salt, and chocolate chips — but no flour. Page 92 says “slavery was abolished in the British Empire in 1807,” while Wikipedia provides various dates, depending on your definition, in the 1830s or 1840s. Page 120 places Ray Kroc’s first McDonalds in “Desplaines, California.” Page 175 calls Zipcar a “ridesharing” platform, corrected on page 213 to “car-sharing.” “As Henry George understood nearly a century ago” on page 232 doesn’t seem likely regarding a man who died in 1897 mentioned in a 2017 book. There are probably more, that historians or various kinds of geeks would notice.

Land Cost Note from Singapore

Singapore Skyline by Bernard Spragg .NZ (public domain)

According to Bloomberg, “Malaysian Tycoon” Quek Leng Chan’s company spent S$1.62 billion (reportedly equivalent to US$1.2 billion) for a development site. Bloomberg doesn’t tell us the size of the site, but the local source Today says it includes permission for a building of up to 950,592 sq ft., thus requiring a site cost of S$1704, or about US$1262, per square foot of building. My guess is that you could produce a very nice office building for construction cost less than $1200/sq ft, in which case site cost will actually be greater than the entire construction cost of the new building. Today notes a couple other costs for the developer:

He has to replace the police station currently on the site
This isn’t a fee-simple purchase, but a 99-year lease

Which I guess indicates that land is still a nontrivial part of the cost of doing business. No surprise.

Another example of location value

Don’t know if fair use permits me to use Bloomberg’s picture, so here’s a goose in Aurora, maybe somewhere near the site of interest. Image credit: Kenneth Cole Schneider (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Just in case anybody doubts that location has value in the 21st century, here’s a report from Bloomberg about a 31-acre Aurora parcel that became valuable because it’s adjacent to the CME Group‘s data center, enabling one to trade a millionth of a second faster. The site sold for $14 million, “probably twice as much as it’s worth” according to a local real estate exec. I would argue that it must be worth $14 million, else the buyer would not have paid it.

The article reports a couple other nearby deals, but provides no parcel numbers nor even a map, so we can’t see what the assessment of this parcel is. There’s also no indication who the seller was.

How come a LaSalle County TV station is the most valuable in the country?

image credit: Brian Smith (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

Well now, more precisely, how come the spectrum held by a TV station broadcasting from Ottawa fetched a higher price than any other station offered? WWTO is owned by Trinity Broadcasting and broadcasts on five digital subchannels according to the Wikipedia article. According to the report today from the Federal Communications Commission, their spectrum sold for $304 million, highest in the U S. , while WYCC’s spectrum in Chicago fetched only $16 million. I know there are all kinds of technical considerations that might explain the difference, but it’s a curious one. Some of us are suspicious when government-owned assets are sold for a comparatively low price. Both stations are reportedly going off the air.

Nationwide, most of the spectrum has been “purchased” by wireless companies but apparently some will be returned to the “unlicensed” category for use by wifi and similar low-power devices.

So most of the spectrum will be used by private corporations to provide services from which they expect to obtain a profit. Kind of like commercial land, which everyone agrees is subject to tax. So why does the government not tax privately-held spectrum?

Let’s watch the Assessor on this one

Some people are Cubs fans, others find it more interesting to watch the Assessor.

Crains reports that a very prosperous Cub, Jon Lester, has purchased and demolished the building next door to his home,apparently so that he could have a side yard. Purchase price was $1.35 million, so the land must be worth that much. It cost Mr. Lester more, of course, since he had to pay to demolish the place, but let’s take the $1.35 million over to the Assessor’s office. There we see that the property was assessed at $100,463, indicating a market value of $1,004,630 for the land + building. Land alone is about a quarter of this, so the Assessor seems to be saying the land is worth $250,000. But it isn’t. Obviously it was worth over a million dollars. (And, checking Zillow, I see that the price isn’t out of line for the area. A 3125 sq ft lot at 1450 W. Grace is on offer for $1.05 million. )

Now, under Cook County’s current rules, the tax bill is based on the assessment of the total parcel and it makes no difference which part is land and which part is building. But with the building gone, it’s important for the assessed value to represent what the land is really worth. Otherwise the rest of us taxpayers have to cover part of Mr. Lester’s share.

(In case the link above stops working, you can readily find the parcel on the Assessor’s web site. Search for 1446 W Berteau, or parcel number 14-17-305-025-0000)

Extreme land value follies in Vancouver

Credit: tglucas500 via flickr — Credit: tdlucas5000 via flickr

Up in Vancouver BC, analyst Jens von Bergmann calculates that the increase in land value for single family houses over the past year exceeded the total income earned by the entire population of the City. Median increase was $262,000, average was $318,877. Von Bergmann estimates this to be equivalent to $126/hour, assuming people work a 40 hour week 62 weeks per year (allowing for multiple-worker households). By comparison, actual labor yields an average income of $26/hour (all figures in multicolored Canadian dollars, of course).

But the land price appreciates every hour of every day, so it might make more sense to calculate the median increase as $29.89 (mean $36.38) per hour.

Of course this cannot continue indefinitely, but something like it has been going on for a long time in Vancouver, as well as a few other cities. Wealthy international buyers from less stable places want a refuge, as well as perhaps an investment. But even this group, depending on developments overseas, must eventually be limited. Some analysts — Garth Turner comes to mind — have been warning of a crash for years and years.

What really impresses me about von Bergmann’s analysis is that BC assessment authorities appear to do a decent job of estimating land value, and making the data broadly available. It’d be worth something to live in a place like that.

h/t Wealth and Want.

People are willing to pay more than fares for transit

This is really nothing new, except that it is a new data about an old truth:

Analysis of Philadelphia suburban data shows that people are willing to pay more than fares for rail transit, as indicated by house prices in areas near the stations. These are really land prices since characteristics of the houses are already filtered out. Interesting to see that people living more than a half-mile from the station seem willing to pay more for frequent service than for extensive parking, but I wouldn’t want to conclude too much from this limited analysis. The study considers only parking and frequency of service, nothing about travel time, availability of feeder bus, or anything else, but the main point remains. See the full report here.

Local land prices show that location still matters

taken about 8 years ago by Zachary Korb, via flickr (cc) — A different vacant parcel, about 8 years ago by Zachary Korb, via flickr (cc)

Crains reports the sale of a vacant parcel in the fashionable North State Street neighborhood for $70 million — $4075 per square foot. The article says that “Under a zoning agreement the city approved in 2006, a developer could build as many as 261 residential units on the parcel,” which would work out to about $268,000 land cost per unit. You can buy a nice residential lot in many decent neighborhoods for a lot less than $268,000 (and in less-decent neighborhoods land is practically free). Perhaps the buyer is expecting to obtain an increase in permitted density.

The article also reports that the seller, a “Miami-based developer” who has held the parcel only four months, will realize a $42 million profit. It’s unfortunate that none of this profit goes to support the intensive and expensive infrastructure which helps keep the neighborhood functional.

It matters how we own what nobody produced

Tenant farmers paid rent here

[I]n Bill Clinton’s encapsulation of political strategy, “It’s the economy, stupid.” But the success of an economy can only be measured by its growth. Since growth requires the accelerated consumption of limited natural resources, it is not a sustainable model in the long run.

If you concentrate on how a place is owned, however, the perspective changes. As this book demonstrates, matters of laws, of rights and of politics become crucial, taking precedence over economics. From that point of view… “It’s the neighborhood, stupid.”

…Around the world and throughout history, neighborhoods have succeeded in a million different ways. It all depends on how the earth is owned.

That, the conclusion of Andro Linklater’s Owning the Earth, illustrates what is right and what is wrong with the book. Our quality of life does does depend on how the earth is owned, and Georgists are aware of the importance and practicality of recognizing each individual’s right to what no one produced. But must a sound economy necessarily use more of the earth’s limited resources? Is there no practical way to use resources more efficiently? And is there no possibility that economic improvement could be measured by anything other than economic growth?

The book is wide-ranging and (mostly) well-written, making connections in place after place between how the right to use nature is recognized, and how well the community developed. It draws some connections that I hadn’t seen before, such as how the growth in mortgages on American farms followed logically from the end of homesteading.

And Linklater does devote a couple of pages to Henry George, but seriously misunderstands why George’s proposals weren’t widely adopted, saying “[I]t is notoriously difficult to arrive at a valuation system that can clearly separate earned from unearned capital appreciation.” Here he means “separate improvement value from land value,” and he is wrong. Practical methods of doing so on a mass basis were described back in 1970 in TRED #5 (outline), which is not posted on line to my knowledge, and in this more recent paper by Ted Gwartney, MAI. And, of course, land values are routinely estimated by appraisers and are a component of almost every U S income tax return that involves commercial or investment real estate.

It is true that, with limited exceptions, George’s proposals weren’t adopted, but for a different reason. Mason Gaffney has provided a compelling and well-sourced explanation (also available in a book), and it is unfortunate that Linklater seems to have been unaware of it. One wonders what else he did not know.

March 1 2015 update: I just discovered that Ed Dodson has produced a more thoughtful and detailed review of Linklater’s book.

Land sales price vs. what is paid for land

In order to fund community needs from a tax on land value, assessors need to estimate what that land value is. Conceptually the task need not be difficult (Ted Gwartney outlines some options here, but a more complete and still-valid examination is in this book.) Basically, you look at sales prices for actual land transactions, and make adjustments for parcels which haven’t sold recently or where land comprises only a small part of the value. But what happens if the buyer pays something additional, “off the books,” for the land?

According to Peter Katz, that seems to be what often happens. This presentation at APA last March starts off slow (and self-promotional), but moves along thru some interesting territory. Regarding the price of vacant land, he asserts that, in many desirable areas, developers have to first buy (or option) the land, then negotiate with local authorities to get permission to build. Getting that permission might require agreeing to donate money (or land) for public use, or perhaps less savory expenditures, and to the developer this is part of the cost of land. If an area of any size is subject to such constraints, all the land sales are below market prices by the amount of such costs, and all sites, whether sold or not, receive assessed land values that are lower than what developers actually pay to get a buildable site. This results in less public revenue, implying a need for other taxes, as well as a tendency to develop at lower densities than might be appropriate, when developers choose to settle for existing zoning rather than what they might be able to negotiate. Katz suggests that a formal study of this effect should be done, and nominates Lincoln Institute to make it happen.

Katz’s remedy seems to be a combination of form-based zoning codes, plus a sophisticated (and presumably accurate) fiscal impact analysis that might show denser development to actually be more “profitable” to governments. But, responding to a question about 65 minutes into (and near the end of) his talk, he acknowledges that funding government from a land value tax would be a good way to obtain the desired development pattern, and that Henry George was a great guy. His observation that Georgists tend to be wacky has been made before, and I can’t say it’s wrong.