Wealth and Want theme: Patchwork Remedies

Walter Rybeck: What Affordable Housing Problem?

Like all creatures -- goldfinches, squirrels, butterflies, cicadas -- we humans are squatters on this planet. We all need a part of earth for shelter, nourishment, a work site and a place to raise the next generation. Otherwise we perish. ...

In the 1980s, Washington, D.C., was concerned about its growing army of homeless. At that time I found there were 8,000 boarded-up dwelling units in our Nation's Capital -- more than enough to accommodate some 5,000 street people. I also found there were 11,500 privately owned vacant lots in the District of Columbia, mostly zoned for and suitable for homes or apartments. Decent housing on these sites held in cold storage would have provided an alternative for the many low-income families squatting in places that were overcrowded, overpriced, overrun with vermin and overloaded with safety hazards.

These issues spurred my research described in a 1988 report, "Affordable Housing -- A Missing Link." Evidence from the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics and other sources over a 30-year period revealed the following average cost increases of items that go into the building and maintenance of housing:

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

Why do those statistics not seem to jibe with what you have been told, seen with your own eyes, and felt in your own pocketbooks?

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?

The answers would be obvious except that, so far, I have not mentioned what happened to the price of the land that housing sits on. Many of those who talk and write about housing conveniently overlook the fact that housing does not exist in mid air but is attached to the land, and that the price of this land has gone through the stratosphere.

In contrast to those 11- to 14-percent annual increases in housing-related costs, residential land values nationwide rose almost 80 percent a year, or almost 2000 percent over those three decades. ...

A close friend in Bethesda bought a house and lot there 40 years ago for $20,000. Two months ago he sold the property for a cool half million. That 2400 percent increase was entirely land value. The buyer immediately demolished the house to put up a larger one, so he clearly paid half a million for the location value -- the land value -- alone.

Officials, civic leaders and commentators who bemoan the lack of affordable housing nevertheless applaud each rise in real estate values as a sign of prosperity. Seeing their own assets multiply through no effort of their own apparently makes them forget the teachers, firemen, police and low-income people who are boxed out of a place to squat in their cities and neighborhoods. ...

Many of our Founding Fathers, George Washington included, had amassed huge estates. But the property tax induced them to sell off excess lands they were not using. ...

One of the many virtues of a tax on land values is that it can be introduced gradually. Cities that take this incremental approach report that homeowners-voters-taxpayers hardly notice the change. What's important in modernizing your taxation is not the speed of change but the direction you choose. If you keep the present tax system with its disincentives for compact and wholesome growth, you will experience the treadmill effect that has been so familiar in so-called urban and housing "solutions." You will have to keep running faster and faster with patchwork remedies to keep from sliding backward.

A caution. Revising taxes as proposed here will not end the need for housing subsidies, at least not in the short run, but it will do three things that should greatly reduce subsidies.

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.

In Conclusion, I have tried to show that America has a housing land problem, not an affordable housing problem. This problem can be substantially alleviated by freeing the market of anti-enterprise taxes and by turning the property tax right side up -- that is, by dropping tax rates on housing and by raising them on publicly-created land values. Read the whole article

Walt Rybeck: Have We Forgotten The Foundation?

However, too few have a clue about how to deal with land issues, or any notion that archeological digs into our history might provide useful answers. Instead, consider what's happening:

Habitat volunteers build houses for the poor, making recipients and its volunteers feel real good. This is a fine example of charity combined with self-help, and it spreads awareness of a great social ill. But more housing is being abandoned and demolished than Habitat is able to build.
This same treadmill effect undermines federal efforts. HUD has spent billions on public housing, urban renewal and enterprise zones. Some of these programs have retarded urban decline but their strongest advocates would not claim they have come close to stopping or reversing it.
Cities offer tax abatements to revive decaying business districts. Yet after new buildings are established, the cities hit owners with the same tax burden that helped cause decay in the first place.
Some builders turn to what I call "designer sprawl." They mimic old towns and are clearly less wasteful of land than unplanned sprawl. Yet they often invade wheat fields and wood lots far from the job centers, transit lines and cultural institutions that comprise real communities -- while large quantities of usable sites that are well served by infrastructure lie fallow in those real cities and towns. These stumbling efforts recall an architectural parallel -- when people first tried rather pathetically to restore old neighborhoods with false storefronts, tarpaper bricks and Permastone.

Urbanologists and the public need to be awakened to the central role played by taxation. They need to see that loss of our historic land tax has made speculation our top national sport -- a treacherous one at that. As Hans Blumenthal wrote in Metropolis...and Beyond (edited by fellow panelist on this program, architect Paul Spreiregen):

There is no doubt that the present real property tax...contributes more to depressing the standard of housing than all government housing policies combined do to raise it. The current property tax may fairly be called the upside-down tax. It taxes land values too lightly, buildings much too heavily. It rewards bad land use, penalizes good land use. Consider three identical homes and lots:

Owner No. 1 adds a rec room, new roof, great landscaping. The assessor comes by and says, in effect: "As punishment for making a showplace, and for generating jobs and profits for local businesses, we're raising your assessment by the amount of your investments. Your tax bill will go up, not just for a year, but for as long as you keep the house in good condition."
Owner No. 2 lets his house of the same size run down -- loose banisters, torn screens, broken gutters, junk-filled yard. The assessor tells him, in effect: "Because you created an eyesore for your neighbors and an unsafe dwelling for your tenants, we're reducing your assessment and your taxes. If your place is more dilapidated next year, we'll reduce them even more."
Owner No. 3 tears his building down; the idle lot neither houses nor employs anybody. The friendly assessor tells him, in effect: "For completely wasting your property, and for making no use of the infrastructure provided for this area, we'll give you the lowest assessment and tax bill of the three."

These all-too-familiar examples condemn not the assessor but our present tax system. And the same perverse property tax incentives apply to commercial properties. Is it any wonder cities are torn apart? The wretched tax on buildings is only the half of it. The low land tax is the other half. A speculator sees that the annual increase in his or her land value is greater than the tax bill. This signals the owner to do nothing, to sit back and collect the values generated by productive neighbors and the community.

Speculation feeds on itself. The more land held out of use, the tighter the supply of available sites. This raises land prices further, seducing more speculators into the land game, hastening the flight of residents and businesses from central cities and even small towns. This is far from the only cause of sprawl, but one of the most potent. It cannot be stressed too much because it is one of the least recognized causes.

If we continue on our present course, overtaxing production and undertaxing land, the outlook is dismal. It is heading us toward the very conditions seen in extreme forms in Latin America and other continents. Read the whole article

H.G. Brown: Significant Paragraphs from Henry George's Progress & Poverty: 14 Liberty, and Equality of Opportunity (in the unabridged P&P: Part X: The Law of Human Progress — Chapter 5: The Central Truth)

Wealth and Want
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