• Wages of general building construction workers rose 14 percent a year.
• Wages of special trade construction workers rose 11 percent a year.
• Construction material costs rose 11.5 percent a year.
• Combined wage-materials-managerial costs for residential building rose 12.5 percent a year.
• Fuel and utility costs for housing rose 13.8 percent a year. All of these costs closely tracked the Consumer Price Index which, over these same 30 years, rose by 12 percent a year. According to those figures, housing prices and housing rents apparently were held in check

• How to explain that, during the last decade of my research period, U.S. households with serious housing problems increased from 19 to 24 millions?
• What caused the portion of renters paying more than 35 percent of their income for housing doubled from 21 to 41 percent during the last two decades of the study period?
• Why were over 2.4 million renters paying 60 percent or more of their income for rent?

• One, by deflating land costs it will enable the private market to offer homes and sites at lower costs.
• Two, this will shrink the number of families needing subsidies.
• Three, it will stretch subsidy dollars farther because sites for publicly assisted housing can be acquired far more cheaply.

The current property tax combines land and building taxes; recently, it has become a tax mostly on buildings. As a result, owner-made building improvements are overtaxed, while land is under-taxed. And undertaxing land encourages its disuse. The Methodist petitioners’ simple proposal was to tax land, not buildings. The possibilities are great for achieving social justice through this easily implemented change in the property tax. ...

Biblical justice in this instance, as Walter Brueggemann asserts, "is to sort out what belongs to whom, and return it to them." ...

The generally held belief that ours is a nation of small landholders is a myth. According to Gene Wunderlich, quoted in a 1979 Harper’s article, "about 3 percent of the population owns 55 percent of all American land." And that same 3 per cent holds "95 percent of the private land." Furthermore, while 64 per cent of families own or are in the process of buying their residences, the residential sector occupies only 2 per cent of the 1.3 billion acres of privately held land.

Feudalism, it seems, is still with us; its new face is the landlordism that lets a few benefit from what belongs to society. This lopsided arrangement denies the Bible’s insistence that an equitable share of the Lord’s resources is the birthright of all humans. While the U.S. is infinitely better off than the countries of Latin America, Asia and Africa, our situation is worsening. Consider these facts:

• Poor people pay inordinate rents. While in 1970, 25 per cent of income generally went for rent, today, according to National Low-Income Housing Coalition reports, that percentage for many renters, especially the poor, has doubled.

Early in the century, poor immigrants in New York City could buy or lease a shop with a fair chance of prospering. Now many minorities face site costs that almost doom new businesses from the start. A front foot costs more than the whole lot would have 70 years ago, a startling change even when considering inflation.

•Large firms are deserting the cities for cheaper suburban sites, taking with them employment and badly needed tax revenues.

•Large agribusinesses represent only 13 per cent of U.S. farms but take in 72 per cent of agricultural sales, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service. At the other end of the scale, 50 per cent of the farms account for only 3 per cent of sales.

• Land-holding is gaining ascendancy over land-using. Land speculation -- holding land for its future worth rather than putting it into current production -- has become standard practice for the affluent.

What gives value to land. Any real estate textbook will explain that the three factors for determining land value are "location, location and location." And any property owner will affirm this truth. But what generates locational value? Three phenomena: God, people and public activities.

• God the creator, Genesis tells us, "looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good." We recognize this goodness in the fertility of the soil, natural harbors, scenic beauty, the availability of water, and the subsurface riches of coal, oil, gold, iron and other substances. The land has a God-given goodness and is one of the gifts through which God sustains us.
• People create land values simply because they are social beings, consumers and producers. The more people concentrated on a piece of land, the higher its value. The press of population intensifies the demand for homes, jobs and services; this is what makes Manhattan far more valuable than downtown Richmond, Virginia, and Richmond more valuable than Anderson, Indiana, and Anderson more valuable than an uninhabited Utah crossroad.
• Finally, the public or government generates land values by providing streets, schools, police protection and other infrastructures. Opening a subway system for the District of Columbia in 1976 gave Washington’s blighted downtown a new lease on life. The subway and its riders are stimulating the economy along all of its corridors. According to a 1981 congressional study, "a minimum of $2 billion in land values has already been added to the existing land value base." However, it concluded that "only a trickle" of these new values finds its way back to local government through the property tax. The biggest share goes to people "lucky enough to own land within easy access of Metro stations."

This idea of the land belonging to all humanity, to the community as a whole, is not entirely inoperative today. National parks, school grounds, public building sites, many wilderness areas, lakes and ocean fronts are recognized as the common property of all.

The immorality of landlordism. An increasingly small elite is taking possession of the nation’s land, enabling them to squeeze more and more from the landless. This is runaway landlordism, and current public policy fuels its progress.

• The Joneses have a well-maintained home. The local tax office, seeing that they have has added air conditioning, a recreation room and a new roof, raises their assessment. Never mind that the Joneses improved their neighborhood and generated jobs and business. The result will be higher taxes not only this year, but as long as they keep the house in good condition.
• The Smiths’ home of the same size and age is an eyesore. The yard is full of junk, gutters are rusted, screens are torn, paint is peeling. The tax office says it is worth less than last year. The Smiths’ taxes are reduced, a "reward" for blighting the community.
• The Greens do not use their lot at all. They offer no production or housing on it. For wasting the site’s potential, they enjoy the lowest tax bill of the three.

Overtaxing good land use while under-taxing blight and empty lots invites slumlords and encourages land speculators. This type of landlordism -- or modern feudalism -- is an injustice. It allows individual landowners to siphon off the lion’s share of land values.

The ethical foundations of land value taxation. The biblical Jubilee prescription -- redividing the land every half century -- may have been feasible for a people practicing crude agriculture. However, a modern civilization cannot reshuffle the land without confiscating unmovable property or discouraging economic progress. The land value plan suggested here -- increasing land taxes, while decreasing taxes on labor, production and buildings -- achieves the same Jubilee goal without negative effects. It lets everyone share the economic value of the land rather than the land itself, just as a corporation, instead of carving up physical portions of itself each year, lets shareholders enjoy portions of the profit. ...

Poverty, joblessness and homelessness have been central concerns of religious social-action groups. There is a growing awareness that neither private nor public charity is sufficient in dealing with these problems. Shifting property taxes offers an effective way to encourage public policy to be responsive to blighted cities, farm dislocation, declining industries, chronic unemployment and growing poverty. The need to infuse biblical principles into solutions for these problems seems imperative. Acknowledgment of this necessity is already evident in the Catholic bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy and parallel works by the Presbyterians, United Methodists and the United Church of Christ. The need to address poverty’s basic causes, including the unhealthy concentration of America’s land and resources in the hands of so few owners -- who have tended to misappropriate land values -- ought to be high on our religious and public policy agendas.