Here’s an (audio) interview with economist Richard Werner, who remarks on the problems high land prices have posed for the Japanese economy in recent decades, and the relevance for the U S and other nations. Dropping interest rates supports higher land prices, as well as facilitating financial engineering, but does little for actual investment in the real economy. Small businesses, who actually provide useful goods or services, still have trouble borrowing because big banks don’t want to deal with them. The number of small “community” banks, more likely to actually meet the needs of small businesses, in the U S has been declining. He suggests that having more local banks, especially co-operative banks, would be an effective way to make loans available. This seems plausible, as ILSR says that “In 2018, community-based financial institutions made 52 percent of all small business loans, even though they controlled only 16 percent of banking assets.” Yet it seems there’s no shortage of local banks, as least in medium and larger cities.
In this interview he never mentions the possibility of a substantial land value tax as a way to curb land speculation. As Keizo Takagi wrote in 1989, Japan’s land value tax “has been so low that [it] has not functioned properly as a holding cost,” [p. 129] thus failing to control speculative prices.
Perhaps deliberately or perhaps ignorantly, the Bloomberg interviewers didn’t bother to bring this up in the interview. Werner’s conclusion seems to be that, rather than ZIRP, interest rates should be allowed to rise to a level where local banks could more easily find loans profitable. I suppose that might be better than nothing.
Crains reports today that rising land costs, as well as increases in construction costs and uncertainty about real estate taxes, is slowing construction of single family housing on the north side. One might think this would result in lower land prices, but a builder is quoted as saying lots in Lincoln Park and Lakeview, which recently sold in the $700,000 range, are now going for $900,000 and up. This makes it difficult or impossible to build a new house selling for the $1 to $1.5 million that buyers seem willing to spend.
So if it’s not demand for houses, what is driving up the price of land? Possibly more multi-family is being built? Or other uses? (Other than the City’s massive database — which doesn’t specify type of structure nor how many units, except as inconsistent text fields — I can’t find any statistics on housing construction within the City. Must be somewhere…)
Or possibly the supply of vacant lots, or deteriorated structures on lots that could be made vacant, has depleted? Or purchase and sale of vacant lots is used to launder money?
The article also notes that land costs are much lower in an isolated part of Bridgeport/Chinatown, specifically Throop & Hillock, where a recent development of attached and detached houses paid $55,300 per unit for land.
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.
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.
From Crains we have a report that McPier — the Metropolitan Pier and Exposition Authority which controls McCormick Place and Navy Pier — has paid $5.5 million for about half an acre which sold last year for just “over $1 million.” It seems to be an awfully nice profit for Drapec USA, the California-based Australian real estate operator who earlier was expected to develop the property themselves.
I don’t know that this deal was in any way particularly corrupt or dishonest. Maybe the parcel actually quintupled in value over 14 months. Or maybe Drapec really has better “analytical and negotiating skills in finance and real estate” than McPier (or the seller last year, BMO Harris). But there are two things I do know:
(1) The multi-million dollar profit will be paid by everyone who patronizes restaurants in or near the central part of Chicago, where McPier imposes a 1% tax on all meals. To keep the math easy, figure the average fast-food meal costs $5.50, yielding 5½¢ for McPier. At that rate, it’ll take a hundred million meals to buy this real estate. Of course, McPier has other tax revenues, too. And actually, not quite all meals are subject to the tax, since some nonprofit organizations, as well as governmental agencies including McPier, are exempt.
(2) The asserted purpose of McPier is to “strengthen the local economy.” Why should the economy need to be “strengthened?” What are the obstacles preventing people from finding productive employment? Certainly one of these obstacles is taxes, not only the amount of taxes paid but also the difficulty and expence of conforming to all the applicable tax rules and regulations. Another, perhaps more important obstacle, is the vacant and underused land throughout the City. Land can be forced into productive use by collecting its full economic value through a land value tax. Since nothing can be produced without labor, productive use means wages will be earned. That is the way to strengthen the local economy. Of course, under a full land value tax, the selling price of that half-acre parcel near McCormick Place would be nominal, and Drapec would not have bought it unless they planned to begin development promptly.
[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’sOwning 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.
An informed review by political economist Ed Dodson of Tim Howard’s new book about the collapse of Fannie Mae. The senior people understood that they were in trouble due to politics and ideology, and they saw the collapse of underwriting standards, but most had no interest in addressing the fundamental cause.
New York’s housing situation (image credit: David Shankbone (cc) via flickr)
Melissa Kite had a piece in Thursday’s Guardian complaining about the escalating cost of London housing. She starts off well, observing that she can’t earn as much in a year as the increase in the value of her flat. “[W]hat does it say about our society when we can, in theory at least, make more money doing nothing than we can by the sweat of our brow?” Agreed, it’s a problem. So what does she recommend?
In New York, 45% of people live in rent-stabilised accommodation where landlords are limited to increasing rates by a certain percentage each year. This is not rent control – which accounts for only 1% of tenants – but rent with controlled increases, an important difference.
I will wait to hear from New Yorkers about how this has solved their housing problem. Going back to the Guardian article, Kite gets pretty close when she observes that “a British company is selling a flat-pack self-assembly ‘house in a box.’ But she doesn’t take the next step to ask: “If you buy one, where are you going to place it?” The answer, of course, will be that anyone who can afford only the flat-pack house will be unable to obtain a suitable site anywhere near London.
The problem isn’t house costs, it’s land costs. And land costs would be a lot lower if all land was subject to a stiff site value tax, because there could be little or no speculative premium. (To be clear, the cost of obtaining a site for your house, purchase financing plus tax, would be much less if landholders weren’t pricing sites based on their future hopes rather than current usefulness.) This point is readily made, for example here and here. It’s unfortunate that the writer of the Guardian article seems unfamiliar with the concept.
Finally I’ve stumbled over a simple explanation by an Austrian of what causes housing bubbles. According to data cited in Mark Thornton’s article, Oslo’s housing prices continue to rise even as other places have slowed or tumbled.
What explains the large increase in prices is an increase in the demand for housing. Part of this increased demand takes the form of people simply being unwilling to put homes on the market in the face of persistently rising home prices….[Also] Oslo, the capital city with almost 1/5th of the nation’s population, has land-use restrictions that keep much land unavailable for construction. This is the same fundamental case that was given for the severe housing bubble in Las Vegas: the government prevented land from being developed. Housing prices in Oslo, however, have not risen much more than the average increase. The largest increases have occurred in areas associated with the oil and oil exploration business…. Norway’s rosy economy is not the result of good policy, but of oil revenues that subsidize their socialist government.
Another factor is Norway’s central bank holding interest rates at an “artificial” low, because they don’t want their krone to appreciate too much (it is viewed as a “safe” currency in a world of depreciating euros, dollars, yen, etc). Low interest rates of course drive housing prices higher.
If the central bank did act and raised interest rates and simply allowed their currency to float, the krone would appreciate and Norwegian savers would get a windfall as the value of their savings increased. This would encourage them to work more, save more, and become wealthy. Every krone would buy more goods from around the world and would buy even more goods tomorrow than today. This appreciation would indeed hurt exporters, such as oil and cheese exporters, but most importantly it would stop and reverse the housing bubble before things get even worse and more distorted.
So, if you were to “get a windfall as the value of [your] savings increased,” would you “work more and save more?” Or would you be inclined to work less, at least for money, and maybe spend some of the windfall?
Thornton doesn’t tell us much about the incomes of ordinary Norwegian working folks. If exports drop, might unemployment increase? How, if at all, does Norway’s sovereign wealth fund contribute to incomes? What proportion of personal income in Norway comprises economic rent, and how is it distributed?
A couple of other issues: Thornton says that Norway looks good not because its citizens govern themselves intelligently, but because they have oil revenues. If that’s true, how to explain Venezuela? They have oil too, but don’t seem to govern themselves so well. Some other explanation?
Then there’s the assertion that land use restrictions exacerbate housing bubbles. A smart growth policy coordinates land development with provision of needed facilities such as roads and sewers, and allows some leeway to avoid worsening the land monopoly that exists everywhere, and in case forecasts don’t exactly come to pass. Over time it makes development less expensive and the cost (monetary and nonmonetary) of living lower (which would increase land prices unless land rent is publicly-collected). The example of Las Vegas is cited, but I always thought Portland had much stricter controls, yet much less of a bubble. Is there somewhere data about this?
Proposals for a small tax on investment transactions seem to make some sense. Ordinary investors, small or large, are likely to buy or sell a small percentage of their holdings each month or year, while high-frequency traders could turn over theirs dozens of times per day. A tax of, say, 0.1% would hardly be noticed by investors, but could make high-frequency trading (HFT) unworkable. If HFT helps destabilize financial markets, then taxing trades this way would raise some revenue while improving economic stability.
Though I don’t see such a tax as consistent with geoist principles, it seems a lot less damaging than many of the taxes we already face. The problem is that it cannot be enforced. Trades can always be done in some way “off the books,” probably legally but otherwise if necessary. Since those who benefit from HFT also have resources to control relevant regulatory decisions, any such tax will have loopholes or other means to prevent effective enforcement.
Sure enough,
most investment banks offer significant UK traders “contracts-for-difference” which are contracts that precisely simulate equity ownership while circumventing UK taxes on transactions (“Stamp Duty”).
— J Doyne Farmer and Spyros Skouras
“An ecological perspective on the future of computer trading” (pdf)
So what to do about HFT? If we consider what HFT deals in, which is largely securities issued by corporations, it may be appropriate to modify the privileges that government grants to corporations, in ways that would make HFT less damaging.
