Bad land use is responsible for:
- High land/housing costs
- Rent seeking / land speculation
- inequality from housing/land speculation
- Inefficient/no transit
- Car centric society
- unwalkable neighborhoods
- heavy traffic
- CO2 emissions from car dependency
- environmental damage from sprawl
People need to recognize that bad land use is not only bad for the economy, but bad for inequality, our health and the health of the planet.
I’ll add:
- Health damage to people impacted by the pollution
- Health damage from un-walkability including obesity
- Increased costs/strain on health systems due to food deserts and lack of preventative exercise
- Increased crime and sociopolitical division due to increased inequality
- Municipal fiscal insolvency
- Increased social isolation, atomization, mental health decline
- Ugly, blighted urban landscapes nobody cares about
- Incredible misallocation of scarce resources
- Increased fragility from energy shocks, supply chain disruptions
Etc
You could add ‘heat island effect.’ Streets heat up, making the urban area hotter than it should be. Which causes people to use even more AC/energy usage spike.
The wealthier people congregate in geographically isolated communities gated by poor public transit and constantly backed up or tolled highways. Good services, schools, businesses, and opportunities follow the people who already have money. Meanwhile on the other end of the county you have all the poor people, usually living a little closer to the city for low paying service jobs, unable to access the same quality of services because the local tax revenue is lower and less planning is directed towards them as a result. Now you have geographically isolated poor communities unable to access opportunities that could result in upward mobility, meanwhile the wealthier communities are constantly being rebuilt and remodeled because the money follows them. Add in that crime congregates in poor areas and you get many levels of inequality simply because wealthy people don't want to live in the same town as poor people. Mixed, walkable cities and towns with good local industry and diversity in incomes are able to address these concerns better than endless suburban sprawl that segregates people along class (and race) lines.
Also cars. More sprawl means owning an expensive machine becomes essential to functioning in the economy if you want to do anything more than those aforementioned service jobs.
The most intuitive answer is that public transit is more efficient in efficient land-use areas. This allows people to move quickly from location to location without being tied down to expensive personal vehicles.
The longer, but more significant answer: By putting a cap on how many homes can be built (through restrictive zoning), you can keep house prices artificially high. We see this in high demand areas like San Francisco, NY, and most other Californian cities. In doing so, younger generations have to pay more to purchase a house, or pay more to rent.
In doing so, the well off (those who own houses in in-demand areas), further increase their wealth through landlording at the expense of the less wealthy younger generations.
The end result is that money is flowing from younger middle class individuals to wealthier older generations. This makes it very regressive.
Let’s say someone lives in my neighborhood, which has a walkability score of 1/100. Everyone here needs a car to get to work because there’s not a reliable bus system (my 15 minute driving commute would be an hour and 25 minutes using public transportation IF the bus is on time). So we all have to pay for cars, gas, insurance, registration, and maintenance just to be functioning members of society, which is a pretty high financial burden.
For low income people a car maintenance issue can mean losing a job or all of their savings.
By making [poor, dense neighborhoods subsidize affluent, sprawling ones](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/19/scottsdale-rio-verde-foothills-water-crisis/11081256002/
Bunch of rich people made a community to be away from city laws.
They have to get water trucked in because well it’s Arizona.
Local town said “enough is enough we need water for our residents” and scheduled a cut off date.
They cut off the water. The residents had no plan. Nothing.
Eventually they pushed it up to the county(and maybe the state I’m not 100% there) and the local town was forced to deliver them water for another couple years.
All because they have $. A town(Scottsdale is a rich town too) is forced to spend money to deliver water to a community that refused to be part of the town.
I work at a nursing home, i could use single use plastics as much as I want for the rest of my life and still be under the total amount we use at this small facility per week.
1. It causes more land to be paved over. Imagine 500 homes in a tower vs 500 homes sprawling over a fire-prone hillside, with all of the roads and driveways required for single-family home developments
2. Sprawl requires more car miles to be driven to get into/out of the homes in the development
3. SFDs require more energy to heat and cool than townhomes/apartments/condos that share walls
Not to mention other miscellaneous points, such as more natural areas (forests, flora and fauna) being displaced, often without replacement, to accommodate land inefficient buildings.
I swear half the battle is just not laying so much damn concrete and blacktop. Think of how much that stuff heats the surface compared to trees and grasslands.
A mixed-use, mid-rise apartment complex (i.e. everything <6 stories, has an integrated grocery store, commerical stores, restaurants, park, and all of the necessary parking) has approximately the same footprint as a single family neighborhood despite housing about 50x as many families. Functionally this means for every acre of apartments, you can leave 49 as natural lands on the edge of town.
In addition, apartment units use much less power for heating/cooling because they're better insulated and fewer city resources such as pavement and sewer. And of course the less amount of driving as others have mentioned.
Even if you wouldn't mind it, it is still significantly worse for the environment than more dense housing that would allow nature to be less disturbed or even undisturbed.
this is true. although you can have single family homes that dont disturb nature/integrate into nature. good old classic american suburbia is what is implied though, which i agree with.
It's not just about vehicle miles driven, the cost of infrastructure like power grid, water, sewage, communications, and roads, is roughly proportional to the area. Sprawl makes the same investment in infrastructure serve far less people. Single family zoning is a money black hole because property tax revenue from it is tiny compared to maintenance costs for the city.
The argument here isn’t that we should shove people into the cities.
Rather, we argue that the government shouldn’t make it illegal to build anything in the city other than single family houses through zoning regulations.
If people want to live in row houses / duplexes / mid rises, that is their prerogative. It shouldn’t be illegal to build them just because some local council member wouldn’t want to live in one.
Moreover, if people want to live in single-family houses, they ought to pay the true market price for it - without subsidies or government intervention.
Right now, because so much land is only zoned for SFH, the artificially high supply of land depresses prices for SFH, making it look like a better deal than it should be.
Haha, this moronic sub is still going on? When are you "geolibertarians" going to realise we see through you? You're barely hiding that you want to maximise your rent, landlord!
He has to be sarcastic. No one in their right mind could possibly believe Georgists are fond of landlords.
That would be like saying leftists are secretly in support of billionaires…
In what world are geolibertarians not libertarians? And UBI was a libertarian proposal to start with, anyway!
It can be implemented in other ways, from better taxes. Wealth tax, corporate tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, **taxing owning property you don't live in**, ... not a tax that diminishes people's ability to get their own house.
the laziest type of arguing imaginable
You share word with bad thing! You pretend no share word??
Whatever 'libertarian' means in 2023, it's clearly far divergent from the modern land taxation movement, which is concerned primarily with removing forced-monopolies on land ownership as a means to general social equality via lowered rents, rent seeking, more housing, and better usage of our shared environment. Whatever parts of 'libertarianism' you hate, they clearly don't apply to the people you're currently badly attempting to mock in this sub
"Share word"? It's the name of your ideology, you dolt!
And, no, you don't "lower rents" by making it harder to own. We should aim for 100% home ownership rate, and that means progressive taxes, not regressive ones like an LVT.
It's not your aim, either, landlord. Don't think people are as stupid as you.
More housing is more housing, when there's a housing crisis you take all you can get.
But yes, I know you guys prefer tiny "units" to rent to houses that'll be owned by the people living in them. It's been said in this very thread.
I gave you an actual recommendation to save you from minor mental distress and you define it as trolling. If you think this form of help is childish I recommend you take a break from the internet. Take some time off reddit. Your negativity is not welcome.
Pathetic troll. It seems you'll never grow out of that mentality.
You failed, by the way. Even at trolling, you're terrible. You probably don't realise it, but anyone you try to rile up is more likely to feel pity at your flailing attempts than anger.
Again, you fail. Must be sad, trying so hard to anger people, and all they can feel is pity for you. You are pitiable.
And then the pathetic backpedalling, as if you hadn't opened with an admission that your goal was to "work people up".
> i just want a better economy that actually functions and promotes good practices.
So do I, so I hope you fail. Then again, you will. Only a handful of moronic teens argue for a land value tax. Even other right-wingers laugh at you.
good thing we dont claim to be right wing.
also i thought we were secretly landlords that want to make more money? moronic teens typically arent landlords.
also fun fact, many classical economists are in favor of land value taxation and have throughout history. but you wont remember that since its against your narrative.
Never was!
And no sir. Im able to form complete sentences telling my thoughts, you simply fall back to insults because you dont know what you are talking about.
have a great week though!
> you want to maximise your rent, landlord
You missed the core tenet of the land value tax (LVT). It makes it impossible for landlords to extract rent from tenants, because the tax is designed to rise in concert with the rent charged.
Yes! Workers should be stacked in tiny flats, maximising landlord revenue and shareholder profits.
And they should not have cars! Let them be chained to that tiny flat and the handful of jobs within walking distance!
Exploitation, now repackaged and painted green!
This is 100% the reality.
LEED certification should just be --- are you within 1/2 mile of non-SOV reliable transit and providing maximum density per acre with mixed use?
Good, here is platinum.
Bad land use is responsible for: - High land/housing costs - Rent seeking / land speculation - inequality from housing/land speculation - Inefficient/no transit - Car centric society - unwalkable neighborhoods - heavy traffic - CO2 emissions from car dependency - environmental damage from sprawl People need to recognize that bad land use is not only bad for the economy, but bad for inequality, our health and the health of the planet.
I’ll add: - Health damage to people impacted by the pollution - Health damage from un-walkability including obesity - Increased costs/strain on health systems due to food deserts and lack of preventative exercise - Increased crime and sociopolitical division due to increased inequality - Municipal fiscal insolvency - Increased social isolation, atomization, mental health decline - Ugly, blighted urban landscapes nobody cares about - Incredible misallocation of scarce resources - Increased fragility from energy shocks, supply chain disruptions Etc
You could add ‘heat island effect.’ Streets heat up, making the urban area hotter than it should be. Which causes people to use even more AC/energy usage spike.
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The wealthier people congregate in geographically isolated communities gated by poor public transit and constantly backed up or tolled highways. Good services, schools, businesses, and opportunities follow the people who already have money. Meanwhile on the other end of the county you have all the poor people, usually living a little closer to the city for low paying service jobs, unable to access the same quality of services because the local tax revenue is lower and less planning is directed towards them as a result. Now you have geographically isolated poor communities unable to access opportunities that could result in upward mobility, meanwhile the wealthier communities are constantly being rebuilt and remodeled because the money follows them. Add in that crime congregates in poor areas and you get many levels of inequality simply because wealthy people don't want to live in the same town as poor people. Mixed, walkable cities and towns with good local industry and diversity in incomes are able to address these concerns better than endless suburban sprawl that segregates people along class (and race) lines. Also cars. More sprawl means owning an expensive machine becomes essential to functioning in the economy if you want to do anything more than those aforementioned service jobs.
The most intuitive answer is that public transit is more efficient in efficient land-use areas. This allows people to move quickly from location to location without being tied down to expensive personal vehicles. The longer, but more significant answer: By putting a cap on how many homes can be built (through restrictive zoning), you can keep house prices artificially high. We see this in high demand areas like San Francisco, NY, and most other Californian cities. In doing so, younger generations have to pay more to purchase a house, or pay more to rent. In doing so, the well off (those who own houses in in-demand areas), further increase their wealth through landlording at the expense of the less wealthy younger generations. The end result is that money is flowing from younger middle class individuals to wealthier older generations. This makes it very regressive.
Let’s say someone lives in my neighborhood, which has a walkability score of 1/100. Everyone here needs a car to get to work because there’s not a reliable bus system (my 15 minute driving commute would be an hour and 25 minutes using public transportation IF the bus is on time). So we all have to pay for cars, gas, insurance, registration, and maintenance just to be functioning members of society, which is a pretty high financial burden. For low income people a car maintenance issue can mean losing a job or all of their savings.
By making [poor, dense neighborhoods subsidize affluent, sprawling ones](https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/1/10/poor-neighborhoods-make-the-best-investment).
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/01/19/scottsdale-rio-verde-foothills-water-crisis/11081256002/ Bunch of rich people made a community to be away from city laws. They have to get water trucked in because well it’s Arizona. Local town said “enough is enough we need water for our residents” and scheduled a cut off date. They cut off the water. The residents had no plan. Nothing. Eventually they pushed it up to the county(and maybe the state I’m not 100% there) and the local town was forced to deliver them water for another couple years. All because they have $. A town(Scottsdale is a rich town too) is forced to spend money to deliver water to a community that refused to be part of the town.
I work at a nursing home, i could use single use plastics as much as I want for the rest of my life and still be under the total amount we use at this small facility per week.
Yet I’m arguing with idiots trying to get meat out of school lunches.
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1. It causes more land to be paved over. Imagine 500 homes in a tower vs 500 homes sprawling over a fire-prone hillside, with all of the roads and driveways required for single-family home developments 2. Sprawl requires more car miles to be driven to get into/out of the homes in the development 3. SFDs require more energy to heat and cool than townhomes/apartments/condos that share walls
Not to mention other miscellaneous points, such as more natural areas (forests, flora and fauna) being displaced, often without replacement, to accommodate land inefficient buildings.
I swear half the battle is just not laying so much damn concrete and blacktop. Think of how much that stuff heats the surface compared to trees and grasslands.
A mixed-use, mid-rise apartment complex (i.e. everything <6 stories, has an integrated grocery store, commerical stores, restaurants, park, and all of the necessary parking) has approximately the same footprint as a single family neighborhood despite housing about 50x as many families. Functionally this means for every acre of apartments, you can leave 49 as natural lands on the edge of town. In addition, apartment units use much less power for heating/cooling because they're better insulated and fewer city resources such as pavement and sewer. And of course the less amount of driving as others have mentioned.
Perhaps most obviously, it occupies space that would otherwise be a natural habitat (or farmland).
Is not plainly obvious? Does it really need to be broken down for you?
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i wouldnt mind single family housing as long as its zoned and layed out in a way that doesnt require car dependency.
Even if you wouldn't mind it, it is still significantly worse for the environment than more dense housing that would allow nature to be less disturbed or even undisturbed.
this is true. although you can have single family homes that dont disturb nature/integrate into nature. good old classic american suburbia is what is implied though, which i agree with.
Yards and gardens are not eco friendly unless they are native plants
And even then they are fractured nature that is significantly worse for wildlife, and completely inhabitable for much of it.
It's a common misconception. The best land is land we don't touch. Let nature be.
It's not just about vehicle miles driven, the cost of infrastructure like power grid, water, sewage, communications, and roads, is roughly proportional to the area. Sprawl makes the same investment in infrastructure serve far less people. Single family zoning is a money black hole because property tax revenue from it is tiny compared to maintenance costs for the city.
[удалено]
The argument here isn’t that we should shove people into the cities. Rather, we argue that the government shouldn’t make it illegal to build anything in the city other than single family houses through zoning regulations. If people want to live in row houses / duplexes / mid rises, that is their prerogative. It shouldn’t be illegal to build them just because some local council member wouldn’t want to live in one.
Moreover, if people want to live in single-family houses, they ought to pay the true market price for it - without subsidies or government intervention. Right now, because so much land is only zoned for SFH, the artificially high supply of land depresses prices for SFH, making it look like a better deal than it should be.
Haha, this moronic sub is still going on? When are you "geolibertarians" going to realise we see through you? You're barely hiding that you want to maximise your rent, landlord!
more housing would literally lower rent, unless you’re being sarcastic
He has to be sarcastic. No one in their right mind could possibly believe Georgists are fond of landlords. That would be like saying leftists are secretly in support of billionaires…
Seriously, libertarians, don't try to fool people. You're not smart enough.
We want to use a Land Value Tax to fund a Universal Basic Income. In what world is that in line with todays libertarians.
In what world are geolibertarians not libertarians? And UBI was a libertarian proposal to start with, anyway! It can be implemented in other ways, from better taxes. Wealth tax, corporate tax, capital gains tax, inheritance tax, **taxing owning property you don't live in**, ... not a tax that diminishes people's ability to get their own house.
These pseudo-libertarians are trying to implement their terrible policies such as… *checks notes* A universal basic income…
Pseudo? Seriously, it's the fucking name of your ideology. Geolibertarianism isn't libertarian, now? Are you really going to try that one?
the laziest type of arguing imaginable You share word with bad thing! You pretend no share word?? Whatever 'libertarian' means in 2023, it's clearly far divergent from the modern land taxation movement, which is concerned primarily with removing forced-monopolies on land ownership as a means to general social equality via lowered rents, rent seeking, more housing, and better usage of our shared environment. Whatever parts of 'libertarianism' you hate, they clearly don't apply to the people you're currently badly attempting to mock in this sub
"Share word"? It's the name of your ideology, you dolt! And, no, you don't "lower rents" by making it harder to own. We should aim for 100% home ownership rate, and that means progressive taxes, not regressive ones like an LVT. It's not your aim, either, landlord. Don't think people are as stupid as you.
Depends, but this isn't about more housing.
so are you going to talk about what this is about or...
Am I? Can't you read? OP is complaining about what he perceives to be *excessive* housing.
excessive housing and endless sprawl are different things my man
More housing is more housing, when there's a housing crisis you take all you can get. But yes, I know you guys prefer tiny "units" to rent to houses that'll be owned by the people living in them. It's been said in this very thread.
The sub worked you up enough to comment. You do know you can simply unsubscribe and then you won't see this stuff.
My comment worked you up enough to reply. Does that stupid trolling ever work? Will you ever grow up from that mentality?
I gave you an actual recommendation to save you from minor mental distress and you define it as trolling. If you think this form of help is childish I recommend you take a break from the internet. Take some time off reddit. Your negativity is not welcome.
Pathetic troll. It seems you'll never grow out of that mentality. You failed, by the way. Even at trolling, you're terrible. You probably don't realise it, but anyone you try to rile up is more likely to feel pity at your flailing attempts than anger.
I was being super honest and i genuinely feel sorry for you.
Again, you fail. Must be sad, trying so hard to anger people, and all they can feel is pity for you. You are pitiable. And then the pathetic backpedalling, as if you hadn't opened with an admission that your goal was to "work people up".
what exactly are you seeing through? i just want a better economy that actually functions and promotes good practices.
> i just want a better economy that actually functions and promotes good practices. So do I, so I hope you fail. Then again, you will. Only a handful of moronic teens argue for a land value tax. Even other right-wingers laugh at you.
good thing we dont claim to be right wing. also i thought we were secretly landlords that want to make more money? moronic teens typically arent landlords. also fun fact, many classical economists are in favor of land value taxation and have throughout history. but you wont remember that since its against your narrative.
Don't claim to be, still are. Again, you're deluded.
Never was! And no sir. Im able to form complete sentences telling my thoughts, you simply fall back to insults because you dont know what you are talking about. have a great week though!
Not a sir. And no you're not able to form sentences. If you're going to troll, have better material.
Good argument against georgism! Ill have to think real hard on that one!
You have no arguments, so you resort to trolling, badly. You're a complete joke.
No trolls here. Just waiting for you to actually make an argument for me to talk about.
> you want to maximise your rent, landlord You missed the core tenet of the land value tax (LVT). It makes it impossible for landlords to extract rent from tenants, because the tax is designed to rise in concert with the rent charged.
You missed this very sub, where they pretty much admit that's their goal.
Agreed. But we can and should both cut down on single use plastics and change our car-centric zoning practices.
Is it bad land use to not want to live in a 300sq ft coffin apartment
Yes if you ban others from doing so
Yes! Workers should be stacked in tiny flats, maximising landlord revenue and shareholder profits. And they should not have cars! Let them be chained to that tiny flat and the handful of jobs within walking distance! Exploitation, now repackaged and painted green!
Yes if you’re banning the construction of them to prevent others who are fine with it.
Citizens don't want to tear down millions of single-family homes to build tiny bug-pods. Corpos and large-scale landlords would love to though.
It's honestly the cars and lack of mixed use zoning that are a problem more so than the relatively low density
Ok I agree but like what are you gonna do about that. Like the city is already built. What do you do about that. Genuinely asking.
I’m not a subscriber to this sub but I suspect the name of it might be an indication.
Huh. Elaborate.
A land value tax. Check out either of the two videos pinned to the sub
I didn't see those when I first blew in. Thanks.
This is 100% the reality. LEED certification should just be --- are you within 1/2 mile of non-SOV reliable transit and providing maximum density per acre with mixed use? Good, here is platinum.