Lars Doucet

What happens when America's Monopoly board fills up? What a board game and the Law of Rent can teach us about the housing market

In which I use the game of Monopoly to explain the American Housing Market.

"Imagine you are invited to play a game of Monopoly, only to discover the other players started without you and all the property cards have already been snapped up."

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/what-happe...

Congrats to Max and the entire @cayimby.bsky.social team. This a tremendous victory for CA and for all the housing advocates who have tirelessly worked towards passing SB 79 and so many other great housing bills this session.

This Texan is calling it: Y'all won 🏆🎉🏘️

We have a LIVE webinar at 2:00 PM central USA time today on LVT momentum in the USA. We'll discuss *active* legislation, emerging interest, and we will have on multiple candidates from around the country running for local office on the LVT issue.

Register now!
us02web.zoom.us/meeting/regi...

Valuing Land: The Simplest Viable Method The least we can do to improve land valuation methodology right away

Land valuation is a key question when it comes to implementing Land Value Tax, so today I ask -- what's the simplest method that could even possibly work?

Turns out there's one weird trick that can greatly improve existing land valuation methods.

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/valuing-la...

Assistant *to* the regional pig-keeper

Had a little fun with the writing prompt

Unless they're immortal vampire hedge funds, then they might have sufficiently low discount rates and long investment horizons

The Cook County assessor's office has a cool new tool you can use to look up how your home valuation was determined

www.cookcountyassessoril.gov/news/does-lo...

Greg spends a *lot* of time talking to city councilors, and legislators, and staff. We're well aware that most of the energy for legislative wins comes from having lots of very offline talks

Scott Alexander gave us a small grant to start us up, but our chief funding comes from the Center for the Study of Economics.

As for strategy, I'm only one person on the project. My colleague is Greg Miller, formerly of Housing and Urban Development in the last administration. He leads Baltimore

GitHub - gregmiller00/LVTShift: Model Land Value Tax Shifts in counties across the US Model Land Value Tax Shifts in counties across the US - gregmiller00/LVTShift

Honestly this other library of ours is probably even more important (and simpler!)

github.com/gregmiller00...

My colleague Greg Miller made it. If existing assessments are good enough already, this just models the tax shift

So You Want to Abolish Property Taxes Or: "how to not turn your red state into California"

(That's from this article I wrote trying to redirect anti-property-tax energy in my home state of Texas:
progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/so-you-wan...)

Don't know how things are across the pond, but on this side of the Atlantic the winners vs. lowers chart looks pretty politically tractable:

And yeah, lots of state law (including in my own state, Texas) blocks the kind of reforms we want, but we have to start by generating interest. If there's enough hunger for the reform, we can get the enablement legislation we need to implement locally.

But always open to suggestions if there's anyone who's not on our radar yet!

The banner covered our report as did some other local outlets! We're working closely with various people and group in in both Baltimore and Maryland.

we can have nice things if we try

shit i missed this release. okay well if we get georgism in the next few years this specific library is likely how bsky.app/profile/lars...

Not even kidding 50% of my political theory of change is "do the math, put it on a map"

But we've already been able to cut down our *own* time to produce a report by a whole lot, and if we can build up a community of volunteers we can eventually copy-paste the procedure across the country.

Yeah, doing my best on that front, my tools aren't super user friendly just yet, but I'm hoping we'll get there over time.

You can in fact improve things

Kudos.

More where that came from coming up soon!

Arigato 🙏

Cook County Assessor's Office The CCAO's Data Department creates models, tools, and analyses to improve Cook County's property tax system - Cook County Assessor's Office

Fun fact: Cook County assessor's office is famous for having the best open source appraisal repository in the business!

github.com/ccao-data

They were the direct inspiration for my own project, www.openavmkit.com

Especially if you sell it as a "Universal Building Exemption"

this actually looks georgism would win a majority vote in any city in america

How Georgists Valued land in the 1900's The lost art of the "Somers System" of land valuation

There are also many places in the USA where an LVT was never formally passed, but the effective tax policy still moved in a net Georgist direction, simply by doing assessments better

progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/how-georgi...

I have intensively studied the history of LVT in the United States over the last century and the #1 reason it's failed is lack of attention being paid to assessment quality.

So I quit my job and dedicated myself to becoming an expert in mass appraisal.