Category: land and how we use it

As a motto or slogan, it’s vague enough to allow the reader to add their own meaning. Some would assume it’s the dreadful weather (you know it rains all the time here) or the omnipresent clouds.

But what came to mind when I came up with it was that it really doesn’t have room for everyone who wants to live a complete life: just as an overpopulation of grazing animals will first destroy the landscape before a population crash, Seattle can’t support the 750,000 people who live here now unless they are willing to pay more of their wage income to rentiers and speculators. The crash, if it comes, will be an exodus, not a die-off, but all it will mean is greater traffic issues as more people have to drive further to their jobs in the city.

The pandemic might have given the tech crowd the option of working remotely but the schools as well as the food — both retail and service — industry doesn’t have that option. So the things that make people brave the dreadful weather — the food and culture and access to the outdoors — all rely on the very people who are being priced out, marginalized like elk or deer when the balance of nature gets out of whack.

The solution, as with the way wolves restored the rivers of Yellowstone, is re-introduce the apex predator…in this case, it would be a tax on land that forces landowners to build and gets local people back in the game. We hear lot from the professional activist community about Vienna’s social housing. But we are never told how it works, as if it all appears by magic…

So there is the key: the city controls the land outright, buying up suitable parcels and getting them developed. Seattle couldn’t afford that but it doesn’t need to as it owns plenty of developable parcels it could allow developers to build on with a ground rent and an upfront of $0. The old Seattle PD headquarters site (at 601 4TH Ave) is more than an acre in size and right downtown, across from city hall. It could have been developed under this model 15 years ago, but is still idle, a hole in the ground. I’d call it Durkan’s Folly but it predates her and she has plenty of her own mess to own.

The current owner is a Canadian developer who has done nothing with it in the years it’s been theirs and may not for years yet. Right now, it pays $567,937.38 in property taxes on a parcel valued at 100 times that: what if that was assessed a $2 million per acre per year land rent, double the Mercer Megablock rent but for a better location? That would be $4.6 million a year plus the revenue from the actual development — jobs, retail sales tax, etc. And that’s just a pure ground rent: we could adopt a split rate with a lower ground rent and a small property tax on the development.

Either would be an improvement over a speculators hole in the ground, right here in the crane capital of the USA. The key to affordable housing is affordable land: if you aren’t including that in the conversation, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

With 2.5% annual increase and a 99 year term, this is what $4.6M ground rent would mean for Seattle: A little — or a lot – more of that and maybe we can say that Seattle is for everyone.

This article offers a deeper examination of the term groupthink and I think I see it in our local (and possibly) national discussion (never debate) about housing and homelessness.

You don’t have to read many article or tweets from the local urbanists/professional activists to see themes repeating, about new affordable construction techniques/building designs (by architects and designers) or arguments for the creation of more landlords (!) by people who either want to build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) or hope to find one they can afford. But they never mention land, without which all these ideas are just that.

But the same themes also exist in the news coverage: more encampments, more RVs on the streets, more homeowners disappointed or angry about all of that, but no solutions. Just more chin stroking or what looks like mutual aid but might just be a hobby. I remember a Girl Scout troop 15 years ago putting together hygiene kits for people who were living rough on Seattle’s streets: I don’t see any adult-proposed solutions that go any further than those of a group of 10 year old girls. If you are still delivering clean socks and hygiene products to the same people in the same location over a period of years, are you trying to make things better or just make what we shouldn’t accept more comfortable?

It might seem unduly harsh to say that but this is such a longstanding problem. If this was a natural disaster like a hurricane or earthquake, we wouldn’t see the same people on the street 15 years after the fact. But this manmade disaster, the unwillingness to actually share the land, to put land to work through taxes and zoning, seems to be unsolvable.

Utah, not a state known for its progressive ways, decided years ago that simply renting apartments and housing people was the most cost-effective way to get people off the street and, more importantly, to give them some stability, some consistency. An apartment, some rented furniture, a place to safely store one’s few possessions, a bathroom, and some social services gets people off the street and keeps them off at a lower cost per person.

Of course, this might prove difficult in a market like Seattle where the high value of land drives up shelter costs but again, there is a solution to that: tax commercial land to fill out its highest and best use as a development and see what that does to rents. Developers need cheaper land and people, those currently housed or those who are priced out, need cheaper housing. But land is never mentioned in the myriad discussions about housing. Walk — don’t drive — through Seattle’s neighborhoods, along arterials like Lake City Way or Aurora Ave and see how many empty or underused parcels you see. Go on Google maps and see how many parking lots you see downtown — not structures but just paved lots that could be mixed-use developments, making far more for the city than the property taxes are bringing in.

Casting back to the RVs on neighborhood streets and all those parking lots, you begin to see Seattle as a city built for cars, not people. And you see Seattle itself as a collection of car-dependent suburbs, rather than a city — too much annexation and too little integration of the small cities around the old pioneer/port city.

You hear more about setting up RV parks for those who were able to get one vs any support besides sweeps for those in tents or sleeping in doorways. Years ago, there was a city-supported lot in a disused restaurant parking lot: it has since grown to become a formalized service. So we accept turning what could be remunerative land into an ersatz car camp, with services, while allowing our public spaces — sidewalks and city parks — to become tent campgrounds with no support. That land could be paying for the services people need, but we fritter that value away, like there will ever be more land. And then we wonder why this problem seems to be intractable.

The various Twitter threads here and here have been a kind of thinking out loud, taking observations and news stories and trying to apply the ideas of Thomas Paine, Tolstoy, and Henry George to them.

If we are serious about inequality, about putting housing within reach of working people, we need to look at why it got away from them. And the answer to that is land. Whatever city you live in, it’s a fixed size: no matter how many people move there, it won’t get any larger so those who own the existing land will be able to charge more in rent or as a sale price. Seattle is 85 square miles: adding 150,000 people since 2000 raises the value of every one of those square miles, down to the foot.

What needs to be more clearly explained is who gets that increased value and how it’s created.

The first part is easy: if the property is sold the seller gets the windfall. And I don’t use that term lightly: it could be millions of dollars on a purchase that might have been hundreds of dollars, if it goes back far enough. But if it’s a rental, like 20% of the houses in Seattle along with thousands of apartments, the landlord can set the rent to match the wages of the new arrivals. As the economy has changed from manufacturing and construction and other trades to programming and other work that is not dependent on location, the wages have gone up and with them the rents and home sale prices. We saw during the Pandemic that rents dropped as many of these location-independent workers left the city. Those jobs don’t require presence, like a teacher or firefighter or barista: they can do their work where they can get a cell phone signal. Yet here they are. The apartments didn’t become more or less valuable. The value of the location did, based on the activity around them.

The second part is a little more complicated. The value in a piece of land is created by everything going on around it, not just on it. There is a network effect, of sorts: as I develop or improve my land, yours becomes more valuable because of the potential value created. If I build an office tower, you could develop your land to accommodate a restaurant or grocer to feed the people who work in the building I made. Also, roads and utilities — public investments — make land more valuable. That cost should be recouped through taxes.

Or you could simply leave it idle, until it reaches whatever value you hope to get from it. As long as you can pay the property taxes, you can hold onto it as long as you care to.

And that value is unearned, as the illustration explains: the value of a parcel of land reflects the investment of those nearby, meaning the owner of a vacant or underdeveloped parcel is a free rider, watching the value of their property rise with no effort on their part.

What can municipalities — cities, counties, even states — do about that? They could adopt a new tax system that, as most already do, assesses land based on the highest and best use, and from that basis imposes a land value tax or ground rent based on what the land could be doing. So a parcel that has a low present value as a parking lot or a low-rise/single story retail shop when it could — and should — be a mixed-use multi-story development would be taxed on that value, what’s needed. So a parcel that is valued at $100,000 and pays 1% might suddenly be assessed a tax based on a $1,000,000 valuation, if that land is in demand or located near other developed parcels.

This would have the effect lowering the cost of buying that land…if I was considering selling it for $100,000 with a 1% tax liability and it is now assessed with a 2-5% tax, I won’t get $100,000 for it: I may have to settle for half that and be glad to get it. Or I could develop the land so that it makes more money than it did as a retail store or parking lot, so I can cover my rent. If I develop a mixed-use building with retail, offices and residential, I’ll make more, even with the taxes. Seattle has many brownfields and empty parcels, as well as surface parking lots in the heart of downtown, all of which should be taxed until they are transformed from a speculative asset to a productive one. Right now, a $1,000,000 parcel can be held, as in the image above, for $10,000/year in property taxes that don’t reflect the productive value of the land or serve as an incentive to put it to work.

The optimal price to acquire land for development is $0…the rent should be calibrated to put the land to work without any speculators cashing out. Why do we even accept that we can own land, that we can put up a fence or, as in the Eddie Izzard routine, plant a flag and claim it as our own? Owning land is like owning time. We didn’t consider either time or land as having value until we could charge for their use. But nothing we do will create more of either.

And coincidentally, land value is a function of time…the longer you hold a parcel, the more value accrues to it through the efforts of your neighbors as well as your own.

There is more to this: there are two levers cities can use to maximize and recoup the value of land, taxation and zoning. Through zoning, the density and other requirements — parking — can be addressed, and a split-rate tax that taxes land at a higher rate than what gets built on it, land can find it’s highest and best use and over time that use can change to meet the needs of the people who created that value.