I think it's good when cities are legal, and I work at Sightline Institute to make that happen. My takes on here, though, are no less than 100% mine.
Dan Bertolet
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For the upzoning skeptics: Auckland.
The effect was strong because the upzone was big.
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Virginia and Kentucky just passed state bills to enable land value taxes.
Renewed interest in LVT has been popping up all of the country.
@sightline.org is working with legislators and advocates to develop a bill for 2027 in Washington.
progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/two-states...
Spokane Councilmember Klitzke is leading the charge for state legislation that would authorize the equivalent of a land value tax:
“A property tax that exempts buildings and shifts the burden onto land would give us a new and powerful tool to fill in our gaps while keeping Spokane affordable.”
Good news for cash-strapped cities hesitant to upzone:
"Building homes near existing jobs, stores, and transit saves public dollars, in both up-front infrastucture and ongoing maintenance, and produces more property taxes per acre than local gov'ts can expect from development at the edge of town."
And as my colleague @andersem.bsky.social wrote:
"Across Auckland, median home prices have receded 20 percent from their COVID peak. Abundance: it does what it says on the tin."
medium.com/@andersem/ab...
Excited to be working on a new approach to a land value tax that would be legal in WA state.
Tax buildings less and land more and you'll get more new buildings and less vacant land.
It's a non-zoning solution for mitigating the housing shortage, and it's value capture done right.
SF should just go all the way and eliminate IZ altogether.
Even at 5% it will kill marginal homebuilding projects. It will do less damage than if it wasn't lowered, but there is no magic threshold below which undfunded IZ is harmless.
It's like watching someone go through the stages of grief.
Yet another vacancy chain paper, but with a new contribution: evidence that some residents downsize into the new condos.
That is, they open up *larger* homes.
Building small apartments is a solution for increasing the availablity of family-sized homes.
morehousing.substack.com/p/honolulu
Pew has a new 3-minute video spotlighting the story of a real person who was able to move into an affordable home because of the vacancy chain created by the construction of an expensive new, market-rate apartment building.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQYM...
Another way to think about this is that if Seattle hadn't built so many new rental apartments, renters would now have housing costs much closer to Seattle's high ownership costs.
www.seattletimes.com/business/rea...
With back-to-back wins in Virginia and Kentucky, land value taxation is re-emerging as a viable policy tool.
Some Spokane politicians want to replace the existing property tax system with one that shifts tax burden from homes, apartments and many commercial properties and place it instead onto parking lots ...
Amid a national housing shortage, momentum is growing at the state and local levels to make it easier to build more homes—a proven way of reducing unaffordable rents and home prices. A key question fa...
A new report modeling a property tax building exemption in Spokane rebalances incentives toward community goals, encouraging homebuilding and discouraging in-city vacant land speculation.
San Francisco is moving in the right direction on inclusionary zoning.
It will reduce its IZ requirement to 5 percent of units, and to compensate, will double its housing trust fund, which is mostly funded from property taxes.
Property tax is a much better way to fund rent-restricted housing!
San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie introduced two proposals to help spur the production of housing in the city. One would reduce the mandated inclusionary rate of affordable units in market-rate develop...
