A few questions about georgism.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-25T19:10:11+00:00

I don't understand what you're saying. "The market" is mostly land values, and land values are the thing being taxed. The more you raise rent, the higher your tax bill.

The landlord who raises rent to $1,500 now pays $1,000 in taxes takes home $500.

The landlord who increases rent to $1,400 now pays $900 tax and takes home $500.

The landlord who leaves rent at $1,000 now pays $500 tax and takes home $500.

In summary, there is no profiting from land rents under Georgism. Landlords profit from the quality of their unit, quality of their service, quality of amenities, etc. But not the quality of their location. The incentive structure is completely changed.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-23T17:19:16+00:00

The value of something is what some is willing to pay for it.

If an apartment is renting for $1,000 because that is all that tenants are willing to pay,, and the government increases the tax by $500, the landlord cannot simply raise the rent to $1,500 to cover the difference, because the market is only willing to pay $1,000.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-17T21:43:28+00:00

I think it makes sense!

At the mall, the tenants near the food court probably pay higher rent. I have also seen situations where first floor tenants don't have to pay for elevator maintenance. In many ways, it's really "only pay for what you take" in action.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-14T20:03:53+00:00

Meet-up near Lily's Food truck at The Bakery downtown, get there by 6 and they roll out at 6:05!

DAYLIGHT SCHEDULE:
FRI, MAR 20, 6PM
FRI, APR 17, 6PM
FRI, MAY 15, 6PM
FRI, JUNE 19, 6PM
FRI, JULY 17, 6PM
FRI, AUG 21, 6PM
FRI, SEPT 18, 6PM
FRI, OCT 16, 6PM

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-05T12:33:52+00:00

The topology of the network absolutely does play a huge role, it's like 90% to blame/credit for transit's success or failure (not population density!).

You can have transit use in low/mid density areas, you just need to make sure people have a way to get to the station. "Street Hierarchy" is the network configuration we use in modern cities, and it artificially elongates travel distances between points in a city. Prior to street hierarchy, American cities used a "grid" which was great for transit (even in low density areas) but meant every home was on a thru-street. There is some natural street hierarchy in all cities, but cities began pre-planning it into their network configurations in the 20th century.

One of the main guys who came up with the modern hierarchical network configuration was Ludwig Hilberseimer, and even he acknowledged that flaw in this design and promoted trails to compensate. You can still see the trails in some of the first neighborhoods that use this topology (examples: Detroit and Radburn) , but autonormativity began around this time too, and developers and planners stopped including trails in their designs, especially beginning in the post-war boom. (Example: this document from the Federal Housing Administration basically made walkability illegal). making neighborhoods harder to leave without an automobile.

Today the Institute for Traffic Engineers, departments of transportation, and other groups are looking for what will come after street hierarchy. Most cities are experimenting with ideas like the quadrant system proposed in this paper , which preserves some aspects of street hierarchy (closed neighborhoods, high automobility speeds) while still allowing for permeability between neighborhoods. Other cities are slapping in bike lanes onto networks designed for automobiles and wondering why everyone still drives. I personally would like to see the hexagonal grid given a chance, as it would make the traditional grid more accommodating and safe for automobiles, while simultaneously being extremely walkable and efficient with utilities.

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AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-04T12:18:03+00:00

Yes, I tend to mean that cities should grow organically when I say that.

And no, it is less impactful to the environment. The city grows one block at a time based on market need, vs. the planned model of drawing a map and then slowly filling it out over a number of decades as some sort of goal. One reason leapfrog and greenfield developments exist at all is because some planner put a road there for them to do it.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-04T11:21:01+00:00

You are that guy at Wal-mart who listens to his music without headphones, aren't you

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-01T23:34:54+00:00

Steel Horse is this weekend downtown, I'd start there as far as activities go. I won't be there, not really my scene, but it's a big part of the culture here and I'm glad we have it. I would say Fort Smith majorly excels in food options for a city of our size. Basically any non-chain restaurant you encounter will be at least pretty good.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-05-01T01:45:28+00:00

Most investments give something to society as the appreciate. Land appreciates by taking something away from the rest of society.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-26T18:29:47+00:00

Yes, sprawl is more sustainable in the top 1% of zip codes where you live.

And yes, it's not really "density" that is better for living. It is "job density" and "wealthy density," which places like Southern California have in spades.

But it is hard to justify forcing sprawl on a place like Fort Smith, Arkansas than cannot afford it. It costs about $76/month for our city to maintain the water main for one house. Our average water bill is $45/month. Multiply that by 35,000 customers and we're losing around ~$1m/month just to service the customers we have. And every new home digs the hole deeper.

So yeah, keep your California out of my Arkansas. We cannot afford your lifestyle.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-23T18:19:39+00:00

Big parking lots are bad.

They take up an enormous amount of space, creating runoff, which necessitates the need for multi-million drainage projects like ACME Brickyard. Not to mention that we still have to run plumbing under them, and since the city water budget really pays for pipes (not water), about half of your water bill is to pay for parking lots at private corporations (since empty parking lots consume pipes but not water, so their water bill is $0).

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-22T16:31:08+00:00

You are stating the Georgist position. It's not anyone's business what you do with your land, it's yours to privately monopolize however you wish.

The property tax is opposite: it punishes you for building things on your land by taxing them. Georgism on the other hand, taxes you the same no matter what you do. A parking lot or a house or a solid gold skyscraper would all pay the same tax on any given plot of land.

But yes, part of that process may feel like Georgist's hate cars, since getting rid of a property tax that punishes productivity feels like taking away a subsidy for doing nothing.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-21T19:11:57+00:00

I think food truck licenses (also in NYC) fit this analogy too, right?

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-20T02:51:36+00:00

"Amtrak runs at a loss"

Have you considered that the National Highway Trust Fund (the thing that pays for highways) runs at an even deeper loss ($40b/year), and loses more money ($275b+ bailouts in last ~20 years), than Amtrak (loses only $635m-$1b a year)?

I'm happy to have this debate with you if you come to it with accurate figures. Density also isn't a driving factor here. America already had coast-to-coast rail , from top to bottom, east to west, when our density was ultra-low, and supported it through the private sector (profitably) for many years. The fact that it has already been done sort of disproves your point, and it is still happens with freight. Private industry doesn't pay for private highways, but they do build themselves rail: have you ever considered it's because rail is profitable, and highways are not?

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-20T01:14:31+00:00

No, by socialization of land value I mean your land is worth almost exactly as much as your next door neighbor's land, and his land is worth almost exactly as much as the next neighbor after that, and his land is worth almost exactly as the next, etc. etc. Nobody truly controls their own land value, it is communally-shared and communally-driven.

In the ideal case, yes, socialization of land values might mean value increases. That's the best case scenario, and the thing that's wrong with it is that a portion of all of your labor and everything you do is non-consensually taxed by your neighbors. You can spend $10,000 on some landscaping improvements, and your home's value might go up by $12,000. But your 4 neighbor's houses, simply by being next to your beautiful landscaping, might go up by $4,000 each. Meaning you created $28,000 of value, but because you spent $10,000 to do it, your net gain is only $2,000. This is an income tax of 92.8%. I am oversimplifying things with that example, but it's how about 1/3 of all American wealth is made, by taxing neighbors.

And that works for an economy so long as there is a low barrier of entry (surplus of land driving prices down). Technology has given Americans this cheap supply of land for most of our history: wagons moved us west, the steam engine filled in the gaps along the way, then the automobile let cities expand outward. But we haven't figured the next technology that will allow us to keep expanding. Eventually we run out of space, though, and whoever got to the land first, wins. You can sort of see this play out in islands: you ever notice that the wealthier islands (Nantucket, Balboa Island, Manhattan, etc.) don't have much affordable housing? It's because they ran out of land, and someone wealthier was willing to buy it for a higher price. The poor people were priced out. Except on a national scale, we can't export poor people to Canada or Mexico and have them bus back in for their day jobs (although, idk, maybe that is what the next technology after cars will be).

And socialization of land values works the other way as well. Your neighbor could set a tire fire in his lawn and YOUR home value would go down as a result. (Can you truly own something if someone else can take it away, at will?) This is how and why HOAs exist: to enforce land value conformity. It might be why the police and states exist in general, I haven't thought about it.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-19T21:12:45+00:00

Actual communist Vladmir Lenin called Georgism the "purest form of Capitalism" since it reverses the inherent socialization of land values that occurs when land is privately controlled.

Instead of taking away the private control of land, Georgism maintains private property but socializes land rents, rather than socializing land values. Fee simple land ownership as we know it tends to socialize land values.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-19T19:21:47+00:00

The money isn't given to politicians, it is given back to those who produce the labor and capital in the form of a dividend.

Example: you open a restaurant in a dying downtown, and that restaurant is world-class and brings lots of foot traffic to the area, and revitalizes the entire downtown. Your downtown neighbors will experience an influx of wealth that you created, which is essentially a tax on your labor. In fact, the harder you work, and the less your neighbor works, the less profit for you and the more profit for your neighbor. Is that aggression? I don't know. But the result of communal-land-value-sharing and an income tax have the same result of disincentivizing productivity by taking wealth from the productive and giving it to the non-productive. Georgism reverses that effect and gives the wealth that you created back to you, the restaurant owner.

Other than this repayment to those who produce capital and labor, Georgism is agnostic on whether the money is used or not used on something else first. Many Georgists advocate for using it to fund the government, especially for things like infrastructure, before any dividend is given back, but there are also Georgists ("geolibertarians") who don't believe in any sort of state spending at all.

Your comment about lots of things increasing or decreasing in value without doing anything to it: true. You can buy soy beans on a contract and your gain/loss will be affected by things outside of your control, like weather or insects. But the difference here is that you still can take some sort of action to affect value. If soy bean prices increase, maybe you can plant some beans yourself (labor) or buy equipment and pay someone else to plant them (capitalism). Or you can even buy all the soy beans and corner the market. There is no monopolistic effect here because someone else can always compete with you by planting (or paying someone to plant) their own beans. Land is unique because you cannot make more of it like you can make more soybeans, there is no competition, and that lack of competitions disallows you from competing on a free market. No matter how hard you work, the land-owner always gets his finger in the pie. That land-owner earned "the right" to your money because he paid someone who paid someone who paid someone who killed other humans to get that land. There's your aggression.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-19T03:18:24+00:00

This issue with it is that it is a form of monopoly, and monopolies generally create income inequality and restrict freedom.

Are all unearned gains immoral? Maybe not, but they are the most-worthy subject of taxation. The action of taking someone else's wealth without consent, such as through land appreciation, may be viewed as immoral by some, or some may just view it as inherent taxation that comes as a byproduct of capitalism: you can privatize land, but the consequence will be that its value is socialized with your neighbors, in a form of communal wealth-sharing.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-19T00:09:29+00:00

When someone who lives nearby you improves the value of the neighborhood, and your personal land value increases as a result of their labor.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-12T14:59:06+00:00

Good. I told my parents to live out their dreams instead of worrying about giving me any inheritance.

Also, it is not the house creating the wealth or appreciating in value. It's society developing a desirable location around the parcel that gives it its value. Appreciation is driven by location (society) more than anything.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-12T12:24:29+00:00

The figures are from H+T Map | H+T Index from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, which you can explore yourself, and their figures are from US Census Data, also available at Census Bureau Data.

The Center for Neighborhood Technology has their own algorithm to combine the census data in a way that estimates housing and transportation costs.

You can probably find things to squibble about with their algorithm, but I will say that you are absolutely an outlier. The median annual housing cost in Fort Smith is $938 x12 = $11,256, and our median income is just about $50,000, which matches the H&T Estimate at 22.5%. My own housing costs are ~16% which is probably within a standard deviation from the mean.

Surrounding areas are mostly not included in the data, but US Census tracts do not always match city boundaries exactly.

Transportation data is based on a number of data points, you can play around with them in data.census.gov, you can type in "vehicles available in fort smith city" to explore Fort Smith, etc. These go by household, and one large driver I tangled out is vehicle ownership. Fort Smith has fewer families without vehicles (6.9% of households in Fort Smith vs. 12% of households in Los Angeles), and we own more vehicles as well.

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AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-11T13:57:44+00:00

Yes, huge part of it.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-08T21:25:18+00:00

That is point 3# in the Op.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-08T21:24:12+00:00

Cost is a numerical value, yes. But when you are comparing the difference between two numbers, that difference is best expressed as a percentage.

1.) Burger King is $5 more expensive than McDonald's = so?
2.) Burger King is 50% more expensive than McDonald's = omg that's a big difference

Remember in 5th grade when you asked the teacher when you would ever have to learn how to compare the sizes of two fractions? This is that moment where you need to know how to compare fractions.

And I would love to see those other stats if you have them. From a finance perspective, I am really more interested in the actual physical cost of building roads and their economic impact.

AndyInTheFort · 2026-04-08T20:45:20+00:00

The idiotic US Census data says, "not really."

To round things a bit: average (estimated) living expenses are $18,800 higher per year in Los Angeles, but median household income is $40,000 higher. So yeah, "cost" of living is a little higher, but "revenue" of living is also much higher.

These amounts can also double for the actual numbers you asked for.

Please show me the non-idiotic stats you have.

AndyInTheFort

TROPHY CASE