alienation, bread, gasoline, air conditioning

Marx wrote about alienation, as a way to explain how workers were alienated from the work they do, as the factory system devalued craft and skill and turned workers into tools — easily replaceable and limited in function. Workers should, within reason, be able to buy the things they make or at the very least value their work as if they were responsible for the effects of it. How many people work making things whose purpose and function they disagree with? Social media, advertising delivery systems, and high-frequency trading systems often recruit some of the brightest graduates, who could be working in medical research or education or other more valuable work but the pay differentials make it hard to resist the less meaningful jobs they accept. How many people go to work in those fields to earn enough to do what they really want with their lives and how much of their lives do they spend getting to that point?

On a recent trip, I saw a bumper sticker message that stayed with me…”We miss Trump at the gas pump.” How do you unpack that? Do people really think the POTUS has that much control over the price of gas at the pump? Sure, they can pursue policies that could lower the price of gas but there is no direct link. Under Obama, the USA became the number one oil producer in the world but I don’t recall any Venezuela or Saudi Arabia gas prices.

But why gas? Why not bread as in other times? Bread riots are not a historical footnote. We hear about food shortages, food deserts, food pantries, all kinds of inequalities related to food but by and large, food is abundant in the USA and much of the developed world: the distribution of it through markets is the issue. The fact that people are more concerned about the price of gasoline and the perceived loss of security that high gas prices could cause than about food, the shortage of which might create a situation they might need to flee, seems to be a kind of alienation. They are estranged from the common reality and choose to live in their own self-reinforcing reality.

So what does gas represent to those people who miss the world their leader created for them? One could argue it represents freedom or independence…but from what? What power does it grant? It offers the power of movement, to avoid having to adapt or work or live with people they don’t want to. Coupled with ruinous land use policy that allows speculators to pocket the unearned value of land and transportation policy that favors cars over people, you end up with white flight, with voluntary segregation…but not where people are forced to move. They move willingly, leaving little of value behind but location…which cities fail to value properly. Built-out, heterogenous/diverse urban streetscapes are devalued and abandoned, replaced by new car-dependent suburbs or new towns. And the cycle of gentrification repeats.

This is another form of alienation, from society and their fellow citizens, where they don’t recognize their commonality, and as a result they turn inward, absorbing self-curated news and information from social media or the narrowly-defined media providers that reinforce their beliefs. They have become alienated from the consequences of the choices they make, as a result of not seeing themselves as part of a society. Recent events reject that idea.

A lot of this comes from Adam Curtis’s video documentary series, the Century of the Self, Hypernormalization, and Can’t get You Out of My Head. He explores and explains the changes in society over the 20th century as people in the developed world have been turned away from the feeling part of a society and into more individualistic thinking, disconnected from shared purpose, even as they share work spaces, schools, and the responsibilities of civic life. But as we see all too often, people value their rights more than they accept their responsibilities. Rights without responsibilities are entitlements or privileges, unearned carveouts of the commons.

So what does this have to do with land, which seems to the dominant theme here? Land is the physical manifestation of the commons, and much of the foregoing touches on the break between private and public goods, including two different UK prime ministers — from the same party — denying the existence of society and then, 40 years later, affirming it.

I see this split between individualism and society everywhere it seems, right down to our recent heat wave, where so many people feel compelled to buy air conditioning, ignoring that air conditioning is part of what the reason for the heat wave — the increased demand for energy that will be met by fossil fuels, which drives a greater need for A/C and so on and so forth. And now, two days after the heat wave, the temperatures are normal, but once people install A/C, they will turn it on in June and leave it on until September, closing off the world. We seem to have lost the ability to share any kind of sacrifice, if there is any way to buy our way out of it.

why so many restrictions on building use downtown?

I was more surprised at what wasn’t previously allowed than that the mayor actually did something here:

Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan is sending an ordinance to the Seattle City Council that would allow the hundreds of empty storefronts in the downtown area to be used by more of the city’s entrepreneurs, according to a Tuesday news release from the city.

As it stands now, those spaces are permitted only for very specific use. The mayor says this temporary ordinance, if approved, would change that by allowing the spaces to be used for bike parking, art installations, gyms, medical offices, museums, and other items not currently allowed under the city’s usage guidelines.

So what was previously allowed? I guess retail shops, restaurants…and that’s it? So much for a vibrant and dynamic downtown core.

The land in this city should be working as hard as the people who live here but our ownership/speculator class has no incentive to put land to productive use. This new program might help but I expect the landlords to push back against ideas they don’t like and with cost to hold land so low, there is no way to break their grip. Any city with a housing/affordability crisis and empty land/parking lots downtown has failed.

Kropotkin on land

Moreover — and it is here that the enormity of the whole proceeding becomes most glaring — the house owes its actual value to the profit which the owner can make out of it. Now, this profit results from the fact that his house is built in a town — that is, in an agglomeration of thousands of other houses, possessing paved streets, bridges, quays, and fine public buildings, well lighted, and affording to its inhabitants a thousand comforts and conveniences unknown in villages; a town in regular communication with other towns, and itself a centre of industry, commerce, science, and art; a town which the work of twenty or thirty generations has made habitable, healthy, and beautiful. A house in certain parts of Paris is valued at many thousands of pounds sterling, not because thousands of pounds’ worth of labour have been expended on that particular house, but because it is in Paris; because for centuries workmen, artists, thinkers, and men of learning and letters have contributed to make Paris what it is to-day—a centre of industry, commerce, politics, art, and science; because Paris has a past; because, thanks to literature, the names of its streets are household words in foreign countries as well as at home; because it is the fruit of eighteen centuries of toil, the work of fifty generations of the whole French nation.

from “The Conquest of Bread

is this a serious question?

As usual, a quick search for the word “land” turns up a disappointing number, in this case, 0.

As Congress argues over the size of the infrastructure bill and how to pay for it, very little attention is being devoted to one of the most perplexing problems: Why does it cost so much more to build transportation networks in the US than in the rest of the world?

Flip the question around and ask why China and Japan and various countries in Europe have built out their transit networks and compare their land use/ownership policies to those in the US. Private land ownership as a vestige of feudalism is one of the issues this country needs to address, not through expropriation but through recapturing the value through a ground rent/land value tax.

I do not propose either to purchase or to confiscate private property in land. The first would be unjust; the second, needless. Let the individuals who now hold it still retain, if they want to, possession of what they are pleased to call their land. Let them continue to call it their land. Let them buy and sell, and bequeath and devise it. We may safely leave them the shell, if we take the kernel. It is not necessary to confiscate land; it is only necessary to confiscate rent.

a couple of quick ones

Land use decisions, reflected in zoning and tax/assessed values on land, drive inequality.

Rich Houston teems with greenery and public parks.
But unfair zoning laws mean its poorer communities of color bake in the hot sun

Every weekday at 6am, 68-year-old Ana Adelea-Lopez walks through her Houston neighborhood to the bus stop.On the way, she passes a series of apartment complexes, telephone poles and metal fences on a long stretch of sidewalk. For the entirety of her walk, there’s not a single tree in sight.

“You can’t even be on the street because of the heat,” said Adelea-Lopez who takes the bus to her seamstress job. “There aren’t a lot of trees. There are a lot of apartments. A lot of cement.”

And alongside housing policy, road and transportation policies that favor car owners are driving a new kind of segregation, where those who can afford to migrate to cheaper housing will take their unearned wealth to the suburbs, leaving behind neglected city cores to fall in value until they are redeveloped by those who reclaim them — gentrification is never far behind.

As the US has become more diverse, it has also become more racially segregated, a new study finds. Its lead author, Stephen Menendian, speaks about America’s failure to integrate

Washington state’s “Uniformity” clause is what needs to be fought

The lawsuits say taxing capital gains is unconstitutional because capital gains are property, and all property must be taxed at a uniform rate in Washington because of a 1933 state Supreme Court decision.

I haven’t yet found the context for this decision but I suspect this was put in place to ensure the single tax (ground rent/land value tax) was never given a chance. Mason Gaffney has written about how economics has treated the idea of land as a part of capital: a moment’s thought would disprove that, as land predates labor and capital, as the fruit of labor, comes even later than that.

Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. — Abraham Lincoln

houses are no longer homes but assets, and every street is Wall Street

Invest in a rental home for $100/share

Imagine if you could invest $100 in a home of your own, at a reasonable multiple of your annual salary. Time was, you could buy a home for about 10,000 working hours, or 5 times your annual salary. Not really possible anymore but by all means, go off about the sanctity of single family assets homes.

At a $15 minimum wage, that’s $30,000 a year, so there should be $300,000 homes — either freestanding or some kind of terrace/rowhouse or even a flat or apartment. Turns out even Seattle has houses that are valued at $300,000 but the land under them — something no one needs to buy — is worth more than the house.

“Arrived is entirely focused on single-family homes, which we are very bullish on during the next 10 years,” Chouza said. “As new home construction has not and will likely not keep up with the growing demand, we believe there are strong appreciation trends over the next decade.”

New home construction hasn’t kept up because land values encourage holding and discourage development: if the cost to hold an appreciating asset is 1% of its value, why would you develop it and pay tax on the development? And what do you bet the VCs and other investors in housing as an asset will fight any move to force land into productive use through ground rent or land tax? And they can count on local homeowners to go along, even as there is no evidence that development lowers existing property values and plenty that it raises values of nearby properties.

“While single family homes sometimes can go through short-term cycles, the asset class has proven to be incredibly resilient and has shown consistent upward movement for the past 100 years,” Chouza added.

“The asset class”…these are homes for families, not assets, but this is where late stage capitalism has brought us, to a place where everything is for rent, not for sale, where the media — music, books, movies — are a service, where you hope that Uber/Lyft can get you where you need to go.

Turns out this was foretold…Imagine waking up one day to find that virtually every activity you engage in outside your immediate family has become a “paid-for” experience. It’s all part of a fundamental change taking place in the nature of business, contends Jeremy Rifkin. After several hundred years as the dominant organizing paradigm of civilization, the traditional market system is beginning to deconstruct. On the horizon looms the Age of Access, an era radically different from any we have known.

The Transactional Age, where you can’t do anything without an exchange, but where your own value is undercut by the same entities who own what you need.

The highest bidder, but not the highest bid

Councilwoman Mosqueda has argued for an end to the sale of city land

but I wonder if she knows how much this deal left on the table? It may been to the highest bidder but I don’t think it was the highest bid.

My reading of the RFP was that the eventual buyer offered a ground rent option that would have paid about $1 million per acre per year for the 3 acre parcel.

Maybe $3 million/year didn’t look like a good deal against $143 million but by those calculations, whoever negotiated that deal left more than $1 billion (with a b) on the table. True, it would have taken 99 years to collect it all but think of what kind of financial position that puts you in, to have a guaranteed revenue stream of more than $400 million per acre for one parcel. Imagine that across the full 500 acres set aside for downtown. That’s $4.25 million annualized, every acre, every year.

I’ve never been able to learn who negotiated this on behalf of the city but I wonder if they ever ran the offer through a future value analysis and if so, how they opted for the fee simple sale.

another take on a sovereign wealth fund

This is a useful corollary to the idea of land rents or other sovereign wealth funds. These tiny nations cooperate to manage their local fish stocks, creating a prosperity dividend for their people and maintaining the health of their fisheries.

The key to success, said Ludwig Kumoru, the outgoing chief executive of the PNA, was to jettison a system in which the PNA nations undercut each other in trying to sell fishing rights in their waters to foreign fleets – and replace it with another, called the Vessel-Day Scheme. That scheme sees them calculate how much tuna fishing is sustainable and then divides that amount up into fishing days for which fishing companies bid.

“We set the minimum price of a day at US$8,000 a day, up from $2,500 at the beginning, but demand was so high that we’ve been getting $12,000 to $14,000 a day,” Kumoru said.

“All our fish stocks are healthy,” said Transform Aqorau, a Solomon Islands lawyer who became the first chief executive of the PNA in 2010, and was largely responsible for introducing the scheme.

“And they are likely are likely to remain healthy if recent levels of exploitation continue,” confirmed John Hampton, chief scientist as the Secretariat of the Pacific Community, the region’s top fisheries scientist.

Like land, those increasingly valuable fish were not created by man: being owned by no one doesn’t mean anyone can take them for their own. Land, oil, the electromagnetic spectrum, as well as fish and wildlife of all kinds were not created by us or for our use: they should belong to all and their value recaptured for the benefit of all. These tiny island nations understand that better than the G7 leaders or any of the so-called developed nations.

Don’t you need land for this to work?

This isn’t a new idea but I get the argument that it’s bad for tradesfolk.

“At 1,738 square feet of livable space, the custom, single-family home will feature three bedrooms, two full bathrooms, and overlook Clark Park, a center of activity with its community garden, ballfield, playground and recreation center. Approximately 70-80% of the home will be 3D printed, including all the internal and external walls; the remainder will be built using traditional construction methods. The home will be solar ready once construction is completed; Habitat Central Arizona is also pursuing LEED® Platinum certification and IBHS FORTIFIED Home™ designation.”

The good news is, they needn’t worry as these “solutions” need land to be useful: if land was affordable in Tempe or anywhere else, houses would be built as needed. This might lower the cost by removing the need for labor — and the limitations that creates are called out in the article — but don’t laborers need jobs and houses too?

Now, if someone was making these to be stacked in a multilevel arrangement, like the Habitat project at Expo 67 or the various “apodment” or capsule hotels we see, it would make more sense. And that would be a more interesting design challenge: how to make a living unit that would be installed into a larger cluster, where services (sanitary, power, ingress/egress) all meet up, would be something to see.

But if the answer is always single family homes on their own lot — a private park at the expense of a more useful public space — we are asking the wrong question.