Land is a major cost element of urban housing. Site values of improved urban lots are about 20 percent of the total value of new single unit dwellings. However, this ratio varies significantly between neighborhoods and regional areas in the United States. For example, for the third quarter, 1967, FHA data for proposed one-family . . . → Read More: Policies and Practices Affecting Urban Land Costs as an Element of Housing Costs
 Comments are closed  Policy Paper, Publication  Land economics -- urban, Land Rent, land value tax, Property taxation, Tax policy, urban development, Urban Economics What is the “message” of Proposition 1 3? Everyone was invoking it this past summer to fill his sails, but what was really blowing in the wind? Howard Jarvis had been fighting property taxation for a score of years with minimal success. Philip Watson, until recently more prominent, led two property tax limitation initiatives . . . → Read More: Proposition 13: An Alternative Reform Comments are closed Policy Paper, Publication Incidence, Inequality, Land Rent, land value tax, Proposition 13, Public finance, Tax policy, Tax Shift How did San Francisco do what a top economist says New Orleans cannot?
Our latest Nobelist in economics, Thomas Schelling, offered the following advice in the wake of Hurricane Katrina: “There is no market solution to New Orleans. It is essentially a problem of coordinating expectations… . . . → Read More: Repopulating New Orleans Comments are closed Essay, Publication Land economics -- Environment, urban development, urban infrastructure, urban renewal Real Estate Taxes and Urban housing is a useful book on a hot subject. Dick Nctzer, in his Economics of the Properly Tax, leaned heavily on it while it was still a Ph.D. dissertation, pronouncing it “by far the best available treatment” of its subject, and citing it to support some of his policy . . . → Read More: Review of James Heilbrun, Real Estate Taxes and Urban Housing In the sections that follow, I first document the rise of inequality in the distribution of farmland that followed a sharp drop in farm property tax rates after 1930. Then I show, by cross-sectional analysis, a positive relationship between higher property tax rates and more intensive use of farmland, which in turn is associated . . . → Read More: Rising Inequality and Falling Property Tax Rates This paper attempts to define land rent net of soil depletion. The paper is an outgrowth of a larger study’ of the meaning and function of land rent, and is not represented as more than a subspecialized monograph focused on its fragment of the wider topic. Some economists will challenge one or more of its . . . → Read More: Soil Depletion and Land Rent NOT MANY YEARS AGO, mention of taxing ground rent was likely to evoke at best pleadings of ignorance, usually well founded, and at worst scorn and rage, similarly founded. More recently, many economists have set out to dispel the ignorance. AJES 31(3):241-58 (July 1972). . . . → Read More: Sources, Nature and Function of Urban Land Rent Comments are closed Publication Land Economics -- General, Land economics -- urban, Land Rent, Urban Economics “Stimulus” is the buzzword du jour of domestic policy, but its old metaphors ring with sad satiety: kick-start the motor, jump the battery, prime the pump, shot-in-the-arm, wake-up call, jolt, multiplier, ripple effect, … . Fact is, “we’ve been there and done that” several times for generations back. We have been doing it again . . . → Read More: Stimulus: the False and the True Comments are closed Essay, Publication Land Economics - Macroeconomics, Macroeconomic stability, Macroeconomics, Politics Taxes on land and buildings are important influences on land use, and are within the control of government. Real estate taxes are a major source of revenue to local governments (LGs) in the United States, as well as being a major cost of owning property. Currently under legal attack in the United States is . . . → Read More: Tax Reform to Release Land |
Review of Donald Stabile, The Living Wage
Professor Stabile’s main thesis is that most classical economists cared about social justice, which he equates with a living wage…
By the end, however, it becomes clear that Stabile is pushing a viewpoint after all: he is invoking classical political economy on the side of labor unions. This is not the same as a ‘pro-labor’ . . . → Read More: Review of Donald Stabile, The Living Wage