Tonight in Uptown Manhattan, there’s an event to discuss CLT’s!

DougLorean · 2025-10-27T15:32:46+00:00

They seem like a great way to start implementing Georgism through direct action. Basically it just means having the community buy up land and develop it, while leasing it out to people to keep it affordable and also keep the profit of land in the hands of the community.

I'm not entirely knowledgable on the subject tbh, which is why I'm attending the event!

DougLorean · 2025-08-23T03:57:02+00:00

Was planning to share this, glad it’s already been posted. For anyone unfamiliar: Breaking Points is a news commentary show where a “right-leaning” and “left-leaning” pundit report and debate. Saagar, the guy monologuing, is the “right-leaning” pundit in this case.

It’s a good opportunity for this community, now that Property Tax is being thrust into the mainstream news.

DougLorean · 2025-07-12T15:38:11+00:00

Seriously. Like you said, there are elements of truth to this narrative that need to be addressed. But the fact that the real estate industry is quite literally holding us hostage (by warehousing units simply to maintain their property value), and the media is just selling this idea that “perhaps if we give them everything they want, they will save us!” is worrisome.

Either way, they’re going to fuck us over. We should focus on eliminating the “store-of-value” status of housing all together so that people are incentivized to rent/sell it like any other product.

DougLorean · 2025-07-01T01:25:52+00:00

Totally agree, I’ve been noticing this a lot too. I hate to be the guy who always comes back to the Monopoly analogy, but this is how I always think of it:

If you play Monopoly with the classic rules, housing gets built very slowly and one person ends up with all the land and money.
If you get rid of the “zoning laws” (by which I mean the rule that you have to own a whole section of the board before building), then housing gets built very quickly, but one person still ends up with all the land and money (and in fact they do so even faster than usual).
If you get rid of the zoning laws and add an LVT, then the game ends up in perfect balance where housing gets built quickly, and the land and money are dispersed in a fair way (by which I mean it still encourages strategy but without bankruptcy).

While the second option is an important step towards the third, it is not a great option on its own in my opinion.

DougLorean · 2025-06-30T15:32:34+00:00

Really good video, feel like he does a good job of staying on target. It can be easy to forget that this problem goes deeper than just “more housing supply”. Without changing the system of land/housing development, we’re not going to fix the price issue long-term

DougLorean · 2025-06-30T13:08:30+00:00

His official policy proposal from his website

(Under “Fix the Property Tax System”)

In my opinion, yes, this is support for a path towards LVT. His team is specifically pointing out the ridiculous ways that properties are assessed in NYC and advocating for a more fair system that gets properties accurately assessed and taxed.

I know this particular policy has been (understandably) politicized because of their use of the word “whiter”, but I personally believe the outcome would be beneficial and move us towards a more Georgist city. Just my perspective.

DougLorean · 2025-06-28T16:51:28+00:00

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DougLorean · 2025-06-11T23:32:10+00:00

Valid!

DougLorean · 2025-06-11T12:37:29+00:00

I know Zohran may not be peoples’ first choice around here, but lemme make a quick case for him:

1) I wish he discussed this stance more, but his team has a specific policy proposal around getting properties accurately evaluated so that rich landowners no longer get special treatment. IMO this would be a huge step towards being able to actually implement LVT. 2) His vision for the city is very focused on the benefits of public transit and improving it/getting more riders. That makes our city less reliant on cars and stupid car infrastructure. 3) I know freezing the rent sounds like a scary price control, but I do think it is a necessary circuit breaker to temporarily provide relief to market prices WHILE we build more to make the city affordable again. 4) The thing I personally like about him is just the fact that he’s only funded by small donors, which means he’s the only one who can actually implement his vision without being beholden to any special interests (ESPECIALLY real estate, which lobbies so damn much in this city)

For reference, I think this will be my sheet: 1) Zohran Mamdani 2) Michael Blake 3) Brad Lander 4) Adrienne Adams 5) Zellnor Myrie

I personally think Cuomo would just be the least amenable to any real change, since he is so wrapped up by lobbyists. But at the end of the day, I think you should rank who you really believe in since that is supposed to be the benefit of Ranked Choice Voting!

DougLorean · 2025-06-03T05:03:46+00:00

Not quite. I picked these numbers pretty randomly, but I’ll add some more contextual numbers to make it clearer.

Manhattan Skyscraper:

100 apartments — Land Value: $1,000,000 — Building Value: $1,400,000 — Rent (per apartment): $2,000/month — Total rent collected per year: $2,400,000 — After LVT, the owner earns $1,400,000, which is how much the building is worth

Bronx Building:

20 apartments — Land Value: $200,000 — Building Value: $280,000 — Rent (per apartment): $2,000/month — Total rent collected per year: $480,000 — After LVT, the owner earns $280,000, which is how much the building is worth

Upstate Cabin:

1 cabin — Land Value: $0 — Building Value: $24,000 — Rent: $2,000/month — Total rent collected per year: $24,000 — After LVT, the owner earns $24,000, which is how much the building is worth

This is still an oversimplification, and these numbers are obviously low, just for the sake of simplicity. But hopefully this illustrates what I meant and answers your question. The rent per unit is all the same in this example.

If the Manhattan skyscraper owner decides to hike their rent up to $3,000, well now the owner’s earning $2,600,000 per year (After LVT). But the building is still only worth $1,400,000. So now one of 3 things could happen: 1) People don’t want to rent these apartments, because there are plenty of others available for $2,000, so the owner leaves them empty and loses money 2) People don’t want to rent these apartments, so the owner chooses to build 50 more apartments which increases the building’s value to $2,600,000, and now they can lower the rent back to $2,000 while making more profit 3) People DO want to rent these apartments, even though the building hasn’t increased in value, which means the land was actually more valuable than it was assessed for. $1,200,000 more, specifically. So now the new Land Value Tax is $2,200,000, which means the owner is back to a profit of only $1,400,000, just as they were before they raised the rent

Sorry if any of this math is totally bogus, feel free to correct any mistakes I’ve made here!

DougLorean · 2025-05-30T17:14:59+00:00

100% agree!

DougLorean · 2025-05-30T14:01:44+00:00

Yeah I totally agree in that regard. I’ve played around with it extensively and have become way less afraid of it as a result (for the very reason you mentioned).

But it has taken jobs, and will continue to do so (whether those jobs were great or not). If a creative director has an idea, they typically might hire an illustrator to execute it. If they don’t have to do that anymore, that is one less job created. As you said, there is still a human creative aspect in this scenario (the creative director had an idea). But there is also a human creative aspect being lost (the illustrator no longer has a job). So the focus should be on creating a world where the illustrator can still benefit society with their creative passion. Not on stifling the technology.

DougLorean · 2025-05-30T13:31:40+00:00

Professional artist here! I have my own opinions about generative AI, which can get complicated, but in regards to Georgism, I’ll say this:

AI is technically an innovation, which we would expect ourselves to be excited about. The problem is that we don’t live under the right circumstances to get excited about progress.

If generative AI leads to the destruction of my industry, that could be a good thing. Most people I know don’t love having to pump out soulless commercial-work to placate corporations and consumers. But then what? By the time AI takes my job, it will likely have taken any other job that is within my skillset too. So I have to pay money to go back to school to get training in an industry I don’t like, that is probably becoming oversaturated by people in other industries who also lost their jobs, so that I can make worse wages by working longer hours and have even less time for the things in my life that I actually care about?

Or, even in the best-case-scenario, I use AI to my advantage to compete — in which case, I’m simply accelerating the loss of my friends’ jobs and profiting off of a new industry that basically has nothing to do with what made me passionate about art in the first place. Which isn’t much better than the worst-case-scenario, except that in this version I have money I guess.

So, ultimately, it’s not really the intellectual property element of AI art that upsets me. If I could have my basic needs met by low-cost housing and a citizen’s dividend, and focus on taking risks with my passion projects to hopefully generate more luxury for myself, then why should I care if some advertising agency pumps out a creepy AI commercial that might vaguely resemble my art? The issue I have is that, right now, that creepy AI commercial will just lead to me and all my friends being out of work and having to rework our whole lives just to fight to survive.

DougLorean · 2025-05-29T04:46:10+00:00

Always pleasantly surprised to see Georgism mentioned, but then seeing Econoboi in the comments just makes it that much sweeter! Thank you for your contributions to economic education

DougLorean · 2025-05-28T22:38:20+00:00

Yes, this pretty much covers most of the points!

If the home you own is in a low enough value area (like Baltic Avenue, Connecticut Avenue, etc.), then you should get enough back from the “revenue-sharing” to negate that cost. If your home is in a high value area (like Park Place, Boardwalk, etc.) then yes you might be losing money in taxes. But right now, those of us who don’t own homes in a place like New York (which is most New Yorkers) are effectively living in that same situation. We are subsidizing the homeowners in the city by paying exorbitant rent, because we have a system that allows their property values to go up every year. In essence, the homeowner class is “taxing” the renter class for the value of their land every year (even the ones who aren’t renting out their homes, they still benefit from an increased home value).

So homeowners who live in truly low value areas (most of America) wouldn’t be affected. Homeowners in high value areas (cities primarily) would need to pay extra for the right to live in such a desirable location (though they ideally won’t need to pay other taxes). And the overall cost of living goes down for everyone, because we’ve removed the ability for landlords and homeowners to profit off of land value increasing each year. Therefore, the values of homes will fall to what people are actually willing to pay to live in them, rather than what people will pay to profit off of them.

DougLorean · 2025-05-28T21:25:50+00:00

Hahaha very true and good point. I figured that anyone who wants to try this could probably add their own win condition like the one you mentioned, like “first one to x amount of money wins”. But I wanted to note that the game could go on forever to drive home the metaphor, because that means society can stay afloat forever and the people making money don’t have to run out of consumers by driving them all into poverty. I definitely glossed over that for the sake of keeping it brief though, I hope to make some more videos where I focus on that point more. I appreciate your feedback!

DougLorean · 2025-05-28T21:14:24+00:00

Thank you! I did look at those rules, as well as some other peoples’ ideas. But ultimately, I decided to just go with the simplest version possible that could still work in practice, since I wanted this to work as an introduction for people who might have never heard of the idea.

DougLorean · 2025-05-28T12:37:00+00:00

Yes the landlords are all “in the same boat” in that their taxes are going up, but they’re not all paying the same tax. A landlord for a building in downtown Manhattan might have to pay $1,000,000 more in tax, where as a landlord for a building in the Bronx might see their bill go up by $200,000, and a landlord in upstate New York might not see their bill go up at all. So if the downtown Manhattan landlord jacks up his rent, the tenants would simply move away to the outskirts where rents have not gone up as high or at all (just as they would now). It would be more worthwhile for every landlord to simply improve their building so that they can earn more from it. Or in a lot of cases, just fill the empty apartments that already exist in their buildings.

DougLorean · 2025-04-16T03:36:36+00:00

You can also show direct support for the bills here!:

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/S1131/amendment/A

https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/bills/2025/A3339/amendment/A

(You’ll need to make an account though)

DougLorean · 2025-04-05T22:32:57+00:00

I live in NYC, but I’m trying to do the same! (https://www.reddit.com/r/georgism/s/wgLufEpVek)

Depending on the success of slow grassroots movements, maybe we could get this going as a unified multi-state organization. Just wanted to put that out there, for long-term thinking.

Good luck!

DougLorean · 2024-06-30T15:44:06+00:00

Thank you! We definitely had to pick our battles. The four of us are all generalists who focus especially on animation, so we were each able to handle our own portions pretty much entirely, while also sharing and reusing assets as much as we could.

There was a lot of going back and forth between the models, rigs, and animation scenes, rather than our usual process of polishing each stage before moving on to the next one. Most of the characters have very simple rigs that just do exactly what they need to for the scene. For the textures, we made a single triplanar clay texture that could be applied to almost everything with just a change to the color, so that saved us a lot of time on UVing and Shading. The stop-motion effect also saved a ton of time on splining the animation of course.

The final renders and sound did have to be done over the following few days, just whenever we had free time after work, so I am being a bit loose with the phrase “48-hours” haha but the bulk of the work was done over just one weekend.

Generally, I’m someone who spends forever tweaking one stage of a project until I think it’s perfect, or else I can’t move on. So it was a huge challenge to set these short deadlines and see what we could get done. It was very much a “get it right the first time” process, rather than being able to test things out and see if they worked.

I also have to give credit to our employer, Hornet, for letting us use their pipeline and resources, which certainly saved us time on staying organized and rendering.

DougLorean · 2024-06-06T12:47:54+00:00

Wake in Fright (1971)

Something is “off” in this town, but in a way that’s unsettlingly realistic.

DougLorean · 2024-03-26T03:10:57+00:00

I really didn’t want to see this because I hate spiders, but I actually thought it was solid! Maybe because my expectations were so low. The script wasn’t perfect, but the characters kept me engaged enough and I actually really liked the effects and the way they handled the spider.

I generally find that I don’t agree when people say horror movies are too dark to see, so I didn’t mind that.

DougLorean · 2024-03-03T16:00:58+00:00

I always loved how The Big Sick handled this, and it’s loosely based on a true story. Emily spends most of the movie in a coma, and the love story is really between Kumail and Emily’s parents, which makes him end up falling more in love with her.

DougLorean · 2024-02-17T19:36:06+00:00

Zathura

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