It would allow housing to be substantially denser.
dragonwriter•Aug 10, 2026
How would an LVT do that when the barrier to dense housing is zoning restrictions?
Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
An LVT addresses the incentives underling zoning. The LVT imagined by Georgists would very probably result in radically altered zoning rules. Zoning, after all, exists primarily to prop up the finances of homeowners.
dragonwriter•Aug 10, 2026
A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would increase the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to afford the taxes on the property.
On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
I mean, I agree with you about zoning; we're fourth and inches from eliminating SFZ in my muni, and an LVT isn't going to happen anywhere, so the rest of the debate is kind of academic.
ahazred8ta•Aug 10, 2026
An LVT results in new McMansions getting built on quarter acre lots and being taxed at the same rate as SFHs and trailers on quarter acre lots. It's the perfect way to allow rich people to buy out poor people and pay the same tax as poor people. Welcome to unintended consequences. Institute an LVT if you want, but don't expect low cost housing to spring up.
OutOfHere•Aug 10, 2026
> trailers on quarter acre lots
That is an irrelevant counterargument, since the idea of dense housing leans towards tall apartment buildings, not trailers. No one should have to live in a trailer.
ahazred8ta•Aug 10, 2026
The idea of what should happen is irrelevant, because we have not seen this "dense housing" actually materialize in US LVT jurisdictions any time in the past 100 years.
The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.
There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?
lokar•Aug 9, 2026
Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!
anon291•Aug 10, 2026
Exactly. I have a plot of land in inner Portland and they won't let me build on it. I mean they will, but not at the density needed to satiate demand such that home prices fall to the proper amount a home should cost. Should be a simple proposition with someone trying to spend his own money to build housing but it's not because they make it as hard as possible.
dragonwriter•Aug 10, 2026
A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.
AvAn12•Aug 9, 2026
Could just, you know, pay more…
dpbriggs•Aug 9, 2026
Why not make housing cost less instead?
OutOfHere•Aug 9, 2026
They're not mutually exclusive goals. Wanting a more affording salary and scalable housing both are valid goals.
lumost•Aug 10, 2026
Governments may be uniquely positioned to offer housing incentives as they often own the land, and control the zoning.
ninjalanternshk•Aug 10, 2026
Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.
anon291•Aug 10, 2026
Except it's not much of a lie. The actual return on housing is basically not much higher than inflation
fearmerchant•Aug 10, 2026
The only way that works is to build more housing. Austin has shown the way.
smallerize•Aug 10, 2026
You could also cut back on the number of people who own multiple properties.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
Loughla•Aug 10, 2026
I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.
(The commenter responded to me inline in their original post, I think; I now understand why they posted the link.)
treis•Aug 10, 2026
The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.
apparent•Aug 10, 2026
Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.
andyferris•Aug 9, 2026
We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
wewewedxfgdf•Aug 9, 2026
The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.
crooked-v•Aug 10, 2026
The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.
cucumber3732842•Aug 10, 2026
>, it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes.
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
tptacek•Aug 10, 2026
It's not simplistic. It is literally the core problem with housing. Zoning had a first objective of preventing Black families from moving into white neighborhoods, and then, in the 1980s, assumed a new role of driving scarcity (and thus the price of houses in areas of opportunity, to the benefit of existing homeowners).
SoftTalker•Aug 10, 2026
This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.
AngryData•Aug 10, 2026
Is that not how the 95% of the population of farmers lived before industrialization? The only difference is the job being their own farm or trade.
lazyasciiart•Aug 10, 2026
They didn’t own their own houses.
Loughla•Aug 10, 2026
What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
lazyasciiart•Aug 10, 2026
The first comment suggests that it was always like this and life has got worse. The second says it has almost never been like this, it was a short-lived condition only. That is in no way a normative statement on how it should be.
rexpop•Aug 10, 2026
The first comment does not suggest "it was always like this", only that it was known, commonly accepted, even declaratively established to be like this.
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.
anon291•Aug 10, 2026
Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
morkalork•Aug 10, 2026
It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.
apparent•Aug 10, 2026
Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
analog31•Aug 10, 2026
Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
apparent•Aug 10, 2026
I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.
One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.
bonsai_spool•Aug 10, 2026
> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
apparent•Aug 10, 2026
Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.
beepbooptheory•Aug 10, 2026
I too would be more likely to be a public school teacher if it paid more.
smallerize•Aug 10, 2026
You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?
6 Comments
Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.
On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.
That is an irrelevant counterargument, since the idea of dense housing leans towards tall apartment buildings, not trailers. No one should have to live in a trailer.
The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.
There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.