bob's burgers urbanist

Alas, I'm just passing through. Doing my duty to counteract the "people on Bluesky are celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder" disinfo gigaslop I keep seeing on the bad place

Murdering people is bad.

Prior to five minutes ago, I had seen absolutely nothing about the protests on Twitter. I'm sure the brain worms currently occupying Elon's brain had nothing to do with that.

Screenshot of a paper Title: Land values can be estimated more accurately than property values in parameter recovery simulations. Author: Russell Richie. Abstract: Land value taxation is favored by economists (Clark Center Forum, 2025), yet rare in practice. This is commonly attributed to land being harder to value than total property values, because unimproved land transacts infrequently in urbanized areas where the vast majority of land value lies. Here I show with parameter recovery simulations of a simple, banal city that land values can actually be estimated more accurately than total values. I discuss how this model can be extended to more realistic settings.

Interested in why assessment, maybe the biggest objection to Land Value Tax – the least bad tax – might not be such a problem?

Check out my new working paper: Land values can be estimated more accurately than property values in parameter recovery simulations.

Thread!
github.com/drussellmric...

West Philadelphians appear to be worried that an apartment building is gonna gentrify this neighborhood of $600k homes.

One standard way to start with LVT is to raise the millage on land and lower the millage on improvements in a revenue-neutral way, so there's no short-term loss of municipal revenue.

Land value tax would (have) solve(d) this

You've done the Lord's work today

Local homeowners and "left" NIMBYs have successfully killed the 48th/Chester "poop building". Congratulations to "Protect Squirrel Hill" on blocking a mixed-income, mid-sized apartment building, including 15 affordable units, in favor of a set of luxury homes.

This is the way.

dude with shaggy hair and short shorts lying down in rave lighting. vastus medialis visible

Greetings, new followers

meme comic of three people sitting around a post-apocalyptic campfire. text: "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we ensured that Californians had ample free parking."

I would simply do a Red Vienna, and I would do it without residency requirements, means testing, cross-subsidy, raising anyone's property taxes, replacing any existing buildings, imposing unwanted noise or density, exacerbating parking or traffic problems, casting any shadows,

Same. Once I hit 10k, I had to seriously reconsider whether I wanted to be known for dunking on people. (Being a dad and wanting to set a good example for my kid helped)

The year is 2030. Zoning overlays have made it illegal to build apartments in West Philadelphia. The median home price tops $1 million. UPenn professor Valerie Ross leads a successful campaign to prevent Clark Park from adding a public bathroom, for fear that it might gentrify the neighborhood

This kind of smart, walkable, mixed-use urbanism is illegal to build in many American cities.

Lol ok

I don't like the fact that vaguely lib-coded spaces (e.g. TPOT) are friendly to/tolerant of reactionaries, but "left" spaces are just as bad in this regard–the Bobby Salvins and John Mirisches of the world are viewed as "left" even though their land use opinions are right of Tucker Carlson

I realize that, according to this second (idiosyncratic) definition, even privately-owned market-rate housing would qualify as a "public good", and I've happily died on that hill

No (insofar as it's excludable and rivalrous) but also yes (insofar as it benefits everyone)

Nothing is more radical than expecting a private entity to furnish a public good

Feels wild that the centrist neoliberal trickle-down YIMBYs are the ones who want to build affordable housing with taxpayer money whereas the radical revolutionary Marxists are the ones who favor messy neoliberal kludges like inclusionary zoning mandates

Housing Twitter is people who are left of 95% of the electorate and people who are left of 98% of the electorate calling each other fascists

I don't know exactly what the Venn diagram of "TPOT" versus "SSC readership" looks like but probably worth noting that
1. there's a lot of overlap
2. most readers of SSC are lib-left; almost 2/3 identify as either social democrats or American liberals, and around 20% identify as libertarian

I like how you can't tell whether she's on the left or the right

I mean yeah, it has no deadweight loss, so it doesn't deter any kind of productive economic activity, barring weird edge cases

If anything, a land tax is a way of recreating the commons–land essentially becomes commonly owned, and the "tax" is the rent you pay to the rest of society in exchange for occupying it.

The nice thing about a land tax is that it's essentially a wealth tax, except it hits a form of wealth that can't be created, destroyed, moved, or hidden in overseas accounts.

A land value tax would be an obvious incentive for governments to sell off some of this land to private individuals and collect tax revenue (though the most valuable land is still in urban centers, and this disproportionately IS owned by wealthy people)