Awfully convenient reasoning for engineers. Making half a million dollars a year optimizing the invasion of people’s privacy, for a company that dodges taxes, after four years of government subsidized education is real work and if you get rich in a liquidity event you earned it; assembling $1 million twenty years ago when people were fleeing SF, spending two decades maintaining marketing renting servicing paying taxes on and chasing rents on the property in the meantime, keeping up with and complying with city and state regulations — that’s always just parasitism and if the city you chose turns into a boomtown it’s good luck you have not earned.
Not a fan of landlords as a rule but you are slicing your analyses of privilege way too thin.
> spending two decades maintaining marketing renting servicing paying taxes on and chasing rents on the property in the meantime, keeping up with and complying with city and state regulation
Literally none of that matters in deciding who profits from land and who doesn't, and that's my entire point. The landowners in SF who didn't put this work in were still able to capture the rising value, and those in Detroit who did put all these effort in, didn't get anything to show for it.
Land doesn't rise in value because the landowner put in effort to raise the land value. The community and the government increased the value through building a city people wanted to move to (through building public transit, art scenes etc.). Why should the landowner capture that wealth?
Also, your tax point is moot, because California caps property taxes at essentially the level you bought the property at, so all the gains are free.
> the city you chose turns into a boomtown it’s good luck you have not earned
Yes, this is exactly my point.
Let me give you concrete scenario of where the current system breaks down. Let's say I own an apartment building on the edge of town, and the city decides to build a new transit line to the community. Rents in my apartment building will go up; let's say by $100. Renters are willing to pay an extra $100 because they value living near a transit line more than the being far from one. But why should that extra $100 go to my pockets, while the government has trouble even paying for transit system? It's not like I was the one who built transit system, it was funded by the income taxes of the people who work there, and then built by the government.
I guess my question to you is, why are we so attached to this system? As I pointed out, almost all economists agree that land rents "not at all proportioned to what the landlord may have laid out upon the improvement of the land". So why do we want to push forward a system where the reward is completely uncorrelated by the value you provide? Isn't that antithetical to capitalism?
Edit: To address your points about engineers, I'm not claiming that engineers do "real work" or "if you get rich in a liquidity event you earned it". I'm simply stating the reality of the fact that engineers actually produce something (code), while landlords don't (what could they even produce, more land???). If my landlord didn't buy the land I live 20 years ago, it would still be there, no worse for wear.
>Land doesn't rise in value because the landowner put in effort to raise the land value
Let's have some perspective - that's why there are property taxes. Now, maybe the property taxes are too low, but the fundamental issue is recognized by society and the mechanism exists to balance things.
I don't get the impression that the issue is completely recognized by society though. We see articles all the time in the news about how the real estate market is going up. Clearly, most landowners currently have an expectation that they should get some return on their land ownership.
That's why so many advocate for restrictions on building in their communities.
People expect the stock market to always go up too. I don't think that is possible.
I'm not saying it can't be a local, situational problem, I'm saying it's not a universal fundamental wrongness in the way society is structured.
It's like, a certain number of heart attacks happen each year. We may see a trend in heart disease over time. There could be some environmental reason for it. But extrapolating the current trend indefinitely and drawing the conclusion that there is something fundamentally wrong about the human heart's workings that requires a new mechanism is probably excessive.
If they owned it before it started increasing in value at the beginning of time, but how can you make money by buying something that is increasing in value in a perfectly predictable manner? Isn't the seller going to charge you enough to balance out the potential profits, on average?
Not a fan of landlords as a rule but you are slicing your analyses of privilege way too thin.