Land Is Not a Commodity: Why a Land Value Tax Can Fix the Housing Crisis
The housing shortage is just the surface; the real disease is land monopoly: a land value tax shifts the tax burden from buildings to land, forcing hoarders to develop or sell, returning location value to society instead of enriching landlords.
The argument · tap a timestamp to hear it
A land tax is not a property tax; it's a location tax
Lars sets up his argument with an analogy: the land value tax shares a root with ordinary property tax but splits 'building value' from 'land value.' A building tax punishes you for building, maintaining, and renovating; a land tax only punishes you for occupying a prime location and letting it sit idle. He says land's value comes from the labor of those around you—the fact that you can step out your door to work, study, and make friends depends on your neighbors and the whole city. Landlords lie back and siphon this collective value into their own pockets. That's the paradox of 'Progress and Poverty': a ballpoint pen fell from $270 to 11 cents, but land never does.
— LarsThe build-more crowd is right, but not enough
The host asks: Oakland relaxed density and rents fell—do we still need a land tax? Lars admits the 'housing shortage' is the main cause, but points out that the YIMBYs don't explain a counterexample: Houston has no zoning, yet downtown still has a giant surface parking lot worth $500 million. Why? Because the property tax bundles land and buildings together—the more you build, the more you pay, while hoarding and waiting for appreciation is cheaper. So developers have no incentive to develop, only to lobby for rezoned plans and then keep hoarding. He says reform without a land tax hits a deadlock: 'you changed the zoning, but I still won't sell.'
— LarsObjections are built on imagination
Lars groups the objections into three types and dismantles each. How do you separate land from buildings in assessment? He says about 14,000 assessment jurisdictions worldwide already do something similar; South Korea manually reviews 500,000 sample parcels every year and produces a nationwide land value map in five months; Norway trains a national automated valuation model on the Finn.no property data platform, with a core team of just three people. Worried about protests? He says the real source of protest is 'my land looks the same as my neighbor's, why am I charged more'—under a land tax, your assessment basis is the same location as your neighbor's, so it's actually easier to calculate. The excuse for not implementing is that it hasn't been measured.
— LarsLittle old ladies are not a reason to oppose
The sharpest criticism is 'transition unfairness'—the day a land tax is announced, existing landowners instantly bear the capitalized burden of all future taxes, an expropriation in one stroke. Lars acknowledges this is a Gordon Tullock-style transition trap, then offers safeguards: action is never a one-step national 100% land tax, but a gradual switch by school district or county; run revenue-neutral simulations, and most single-family homes see their tax bill fall. As for the elderly worried about being driven out of their homes, he says Texas already has a tax deferral system: you owe it first, and after death it's deducted from the estate with interest.
— LarsBritain's failure is a capacity problem
The most common counterexample online is Britain's 'People's Budget' of the 1910s: valuation took six years and was overturned by shopkeeper protests and the courts. Lars's response is blunt: the much-discussed article is 'generalizing a universal law from one sample,' and simultaneously claims 'a pure land tax has never succeeded' and 'land cannot be valued'—yet South Korea has been assessing national land values parcel by parcel for decades. He says this only proves Britain's state capacity was weak, not that the land tax is theoretically infeasible. His tone hardens: if you want to be a serious critic, go find counterexamples, don't pass off lazy ignorance as settled truth.
— LarsNorway achieves Georgism through resource dividends
Lars points to a fact that makes Norway a 'success story' today: the entire Norwegian resource management system is Georgist in structure—oil and other natural resources are deemed the property of all the people, extractors pay a very high resource tax, but production and investment themselves are not penalized. This encourages entrepreneurship while channeling the natural dividend into the state treasury to subsidize universal welfare. Norway's Georgism is almost perfect, except it doesn't apply to land value tax. This 'Norway paradox' leads him to assert: the land tax is not the enemy of the welfare state; it can be its foundation.
— LarsThe car opened a second frontier
Lars explains why the land question that filled the air 100 years ago disappeared: the frontier itself was a kind of 'free land' mechanism—as long as you could expand into the wilderness, the lower classes didn't have to face the squeeze of 'high work plus high rent.' America's first frontier was the westward movement; after it closed came Henry George. In the 20th century, the car turned the suburbs into a 'second frontier,' extending the reprieve another 80 years, until it closed again around 2006–2008. He says some now call this the 'second Gilded Age'—just the same script from a hundred years ago with a new cast, and the post-pandemic remote work as a 'third frontier' lasted only about five minutes before capital digested it.
— LarsDon't win online; do homework for politicians
The closing answer is pragmatic: Lars says the most effective way to create change he's learned in the past five years is not arguing with keyboard warriors, but preparing data simulations and ready answers for every objection a state senator or city councilor might raise, and putting them directly on their desks—he says 'doing homework for politicians' is an absurd but remarkably effective strategy. Several states have already passed bills allowing land value tax reform. His action advice: go measure, don't guess.
— LarsIn their own words · checked verbatim
You can't eat, sleep, work, or even poop without access to a place to do so. And if you do any of these things in a place where you're not allowed to be, terrible things can happen to you. You may be arrested. You can be executed, depending on where on earth you do it.
Lars0:07
I think this is what I call the imagined objections of people who haven't measured.
Lars0:21
Measure twice, cut once.
Lars0:28
Stop assuming that if you can't find something written in English or not on the internet, it doesn't exist. There are things called books, there are things called other countries, and there are things called other languages.
Lars0:39
You never know until you look. You never know until you look and run a simulation. And don't let your imagination, your imaginary denial, replace what is really there.
Lars0:51
Don't waste your time winning online arguments with keyboard warriors. Spend your time doing homework for politicians, which is a surprisingly effective method of change.
Lars0:53
Figures
| Henry George's funeral attendance | about 10% of New York's population at the time | 0:03 |
| Ballpoint pen price at invention | about $270 in today's dollars, now about 11 cents | 0:07 |
| Number of assessment jurisdictions in North America | about 14,000 | 0:23 |
| Land value tax rate in German-occupied Qingdao (青岛) | 6% | 0:41 |
Glossary
- Land Value Tax (LVT)
- An annual tax levied on the value of land rather than the total value of property; it does not penalize building improvements.
- Georgism
- The movement founded by Henry George in the 19th century: land is common wealth, and ground rent should be collected for society.
- YIMBY
- The movement advocating for loosening zoning restrictions and allowing more housing construction.
- Mass Appraisal
- Using uniform models and sample parcels to automatically value all properties in a jurisdiction, rather than assessing each property individually on site.
- Single Tax
- The Georgist ideal: tax only land value, abolishing other taxes on labor and capital.
- Natural Dividend
- The high rent extracted from natural resources (such as oil), collected for the benefit of all citizens.
How to listen
Economists concerned with housing policy, urban planners, real estate developers, and investors and policy researchers wondering whether a 'land tax' is worth betting on.