There was a fascinating conference filmed and on youtube at UCL on this subject (in my history, looking for it).
The upshot is roughly that the owner of farm (hedonic) land knows how much their land is worth both with and without planning permission and the minute housing is thought of the price of the land 10x.
And that's fair - no one wants to look like a chump. So any house building scheme to solve the housing crisis suddenly has this price built in, and thus any house building scheme immediately becomes too expensive to undertake.
There was a solution in UK in early 1950s. A 100% land value tax. If you bought land for 10k and sold it for 100k you owed the government 90k.
This quite simply took the heat out of the market, and allowed the government to invest in roads and schools and hospitals and so on. It mean that UK built two whole New Towns (widely seen as concrete monstrosities) but the point is they got built - enough new housing in a handful of years to create towns that still live breathe 80 years later.
If we want house building schemes we have the answer.
"A 100% land value tax. If you bought land for 10k and sold it for 100k you owed the government 90k."
I think this is fair - the land itself is a natural resource that the owner has (presumably) done nothing to improve - they are just hogging it so that nokne else can use it
The upshot is roughly that the owner of farm (hedonic) land knows how much their land is worth both with and without planning permission and the minute housing is thought of the price of the land 10x.
And that's fair - no one wants to look like a chump. So any house building scheme to solve the housing crisis suddenly has this price built in, and thus any house building scheme immediately becomes too expensive to undertake.
There was a solution in UK in early 1950s. A 100% land value tax. If you bought land for 10k and sold it for 100k you owed the government 90k.
This quite simply took the heat out of the market, and allowed the government to invest in roads and schools and hospitals and so on. It mean that UK built two whole New Towns (widely seen as concrete monstrosities) but the point is they got built - enough new housing in a handful of years to create towns that still live breathe 80 years later.
If we want house building schemes we have the answer.