Great work as always, Lars. Not that you necessarily need to cite this, but this recent Glaeser and Gyourko paper is highly consistent with your thesis.
America's Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier?
> The actual immediate effect of remote work was to increase the price of housing. Tech workers moved into bedroom communities across the country, particularly in sunbelt states like Texas, buying up property that was cheap for them. As people with high paying remote jobs moved into town, they raised local demand for housing as well as the earnings potential of those living in the area, and thus housing prices and land rents.
Surely this also lowered the price of housing in urban areas?
Not too long ago, there were rumors of the Barbie movie folks making one for Monopoly. We will see how much history might be included on a big-screen movie.
Good article, but I'm not convinced there's any meaningful restriction on housing supply nationally. It's a collective action problem; what we should do is get a few million people together to found a new city in the middle of nowhere, but nobody wants to be the first to move there, so it doesn't happen.
> I'm not convinced there's any meaningful restriction on housing supply nationally
You have a point here, the chief thing that's scarce is always land *in particular places*, especially those in-demand areas with lots of amenities and access to good jobs. And as for the Ricardian model itself, it sort of implies a closed system, in actually existing America the "margin of production" in many ways is often "move to some other town."
> what we should do is get a few million people together to found a new city in the middle of nowhere
Two thoughts on this:
1. I'm rooting for California Forever too!
2. I wonder to what extent this just spreads existing agglomeration effects around vs. creates nucleation sites for long-lasting new growth. Nice work if you can get it but as you say we are not very good at bootstrapping this.
Yeah it seems to me like the median human wants a level of density that is lower than is otherwise economically optimal, thus NIMBYISM. No perfect solution for this, but one option is to just give them what they want and lower housing prices by building entirely new cities rather than new housing in existing cities.
I wonder if the desire for less density is due to cars. If more density means more cars, people don't want it. Without cars it might be a different story.
However people don't want their neighbourhood to become less car-oriented because that implies less access for drivers like themselves.
As I see it a big part of the problem is that both political parties in the US are against public transit. The right opposes it because "it's socialism", while the left wants to use it as a homeless shelter, so public transit across the US almost universally sucks.
People then very rationally want to preserve car access to everything, because the inside of their car is reliably safe and pleasant.
Yeah the long-distance options are abysmal. I used to travel frequently as cheaply as possible, and I could sometimes take busses by private companies. Trains just weren't good.
But I mostly mean intracity options; I've needed to get around in ~2 dozen different big cities and I consistently found that uber was preferable despite frequently trying transit. In my case I don't even care much about cleanliness, the public transit is just too slow and logistically burdensome. (It's ridiculous that I have to buy tickets or a prepaid card at a physical machine in most places, rather than just being able to tap my credit card. And some stations don't even have the machines!)
Great article. I’m left wondering how these principles fit in with the observations about how much households actually spend on rent.
In Australia, over the long term, rents represent, on average, 20% of incomes, and has held steady at around this level for decades. Does this tell us anything useful about Ricardo’s law of rent?
Some economists would argue that as rents have been steady as a proportion of income over a long period of time, that there is no issue with rents and thus no ‘problem’ to be solved.
It's a good question -- Ricardo's model is a simplification, and arguably of a closed system.
First, I would look at how rents have evolved in specific locations rather than zoomed out on a national level, because an average can hide things.
How are rents evolving in Sydney, for instance? A typical pattern that is in line with Ricardian theory is for rents to stay fairly stable as a % of average income, but at the same time the city sprawls outwards. That's just basic frontier expansion. The real question is what are the limits of said expansion -- comparing a city that is constrained by natural features to one that has no such constraints would be a good natural test of how well the theory holds up -- you'd predict stronger rent pressure on an in-demand constrained city than in an in-demand unconstrained city that's free to sprawl.
San Francisco in the US is very physically constrained by water on three sides, and then they layer NIMBYism on top of that, whereas Houston is free to sprawl out in all directions, and then also are much more YIMBY on what people are allowed to build.
Best explanation of Ricardo's Law of Rent I've ever read, ty!
Something I've struggled with, though, is whether I believe the bottom half of earners are always pushed to subsistence levels. Obviously, if we built more effective transit systems and (putting my YIMBY hat on) instituted Japanese style zoning overnight, we'd massively recalibrate housing costs relative to wages. So, I'm skeptical there's truly is a binding constraint because that assumes the gains from agglomeration are infinite (which seems not true).
But I suppose if density and better transit unblock growth (putting us back on track to pushing real wages back down to subsistence levels for half the pop), that could take decades or even the better part of a century to get back to that point, no?
Under the theory's own rules, "subsistence" is defined as "the minimum amount below which workers refuse to work at all," which has a good bit more wiggle room compared to the typical connotation that word holds. We can imagine many things that will tend to pull this up:
1. Minimum wage laws
2. Tenants abilities to coordinate with each other and increase their negotiating power
3. Laws that directly legislate/distort how much rent is allowed to be charged (tenant protection laws, rent control, etc. etc)
(And obviously more supply will weaken landlord's negotiating power, so yes, let's YIMBY all the things.)
The other thing is that the classical Ricardian model is a bit of a closed system, whereas the American population is pretty hyper-mobile. So the "margin of production" in our situation could just as easily be another town rather than the literal physical margins of the one you're already in.
I think the simple Ricardian model is good for developing basic intuitions, and its core strength is understanding that rents are the result of differential negotiating power and BATNAs, but the real world has a lot of other wrinkles layered on top to account for. We should keep in mind that its predictions are for a situation that is "on average", and "in the long run." A lot of people posting here likely have above-average education and wages. When we think of anyone being "pushed to subsistence" we might look at the working homeless population in any big city -- sometimes the "margin of production" is to live in your car, or a homeless shelter:
"Capitalism vs. Socialism became the dominant economic frame, sucking up all the oxygen and leaving no room for the “third way” of Georgism, which served as a corrective to both worldviews".
This is exactly how I describe Georgism in historical perspective too.
I have a few points for you to think about.
1. WHAT CAUSED THE MOVEMENT'S DECLINE?
Don't forget the erasure of land from economics as documented by Mason Gaffney in "The Corruption of Economics". As Paul Samuelson wrote, "I don't care who writes a nation's laws, if I can write its economics textbooks". We’re still struggling to escape the political consequences of George being cancelled.
I spent 10 years studying economics and was two-thirds of the way through my PhD before encountering the forgotten economics of land. This memory-hole is real. Gaffney's book is careful and scholarly and deserves its dramatic title.
2. CAN'T WE MAKE LANDOWNERS COMPETE?
You say: "Landlords are actors in a free market, right? Aren’t they in competition with one another? Shouldn’t this drive down rents?"
Your article then suggests that when there are multiple landowners, rent is determined by the number of tenants relative to the area of land available.
If that were true, then logically we could skew that ratio via policy (e.g. zoning more land for use).
But you're missing something important: private land acts as a single monopoly even when ownership is fragmented. The ratio of tenants to landlords is irrelevant in this process.
Cameron Murray's has explained how ownership selection and tacit collusion produce this.
Ask yourself: if Smith and Jones were competing with each other to the benefit of tenants then why wouldn't Smith buy out Jones to restore monopoly pricing and maximise total land rent?
This thought experiment shows that if competition threatened to break out, ownership could readily change to prevent it.
A ‘competitive’ outcome of this kind cannot last. Either behaviour or ownership will change to preserve the monopoly outcome.
This means the ECON101 "competition" paradigm bears no relevance to the market for land. The land market has insurmountable barriers to entry, breaching the key condition for competition to occur.
Regardless of ownership, tacit collusion can occur via trial-and-error learning and behavioural change.
For instance, blind trial-and-error choices combined with directional reinforcement can be sufficient to cause a rate of investment in structures (absorption rate) which maximises aggregate land rent.
Consider a simple learning rule like "if the development residual exceeds the market price of the land used, build more, otherwise, build less". This is something even a nematode could pull off.
This rule creates an equilibrium rate of housing supply which maximises land rent. This equilibrium will be reinforced by various characteristics, incentives and industry norms amongst developers, landowners and financiers.
Older thinkers understood the nature of land as a monopoly despite dispersion in its ownership to be self-evident.
Churchill said: "The land monopoly is a perpetual monopoly, and the mother of all other forms of monopoly“. No caveats around ownership concentration there.
3. HOW DO WE EXPAND THE BOARD?
We pay for expansion packs via infrastructure. As you note, the automobile frontier was opened at great cost.
This cost is very important when arguing for rezoning to expand land supply.
Urban expansion enabled by infrastructure has an economic (efficiency) limit defined by the pool of BCR>1 investment projects. Once those projects are exhausted, we're still playing Monopoly, just with a bigger board.
And all Monopoly at any scale is subject to the collusive tendencies I describe in point 2 above.
Board expansions buy time, at a cost. But Georgism should be about rejecting the game, not prolonging it.
This is something Greg Miller's latest piece, "The Housing Crisis as a Land Crisis", seems to forget.
If we rid ourselves of regulatory barriers then, firstly, it won't stop the land monopoly acting as a monopoly. A monopoly able to sell a wider range of products (more land) will not price each product cheaper. And secondly, the natural and economic investment barriers will remain.
4. ENCLOSURE.
The rent-free option you describe when explaining the Law of Rent no longer exists. It was called the Commons, and it was enclosed. That's when Monopoly began in earnest.
This point leads me to a Georgist caution against the "make more land" panacea pushed by YIMBY-Georgists, including in Greg Miller’s post.
What is unpriced upzoning? It is a giveaway to landowners of property rights currently held in trust by the public. The word for that is "enclosure".
One of the terrible ironies of modern Georgism taking on a YIMBY flavour in an attempt to keep adding Monopoly expansion packs is that the primary means of doing so - upzoning - not only works against Georgist distributional principles by enriching landowners, but replicates the historical giveaway that got the game of Monopoly properly started in the first place.
I want to add one corollary. It’s true that sprawl is cheap for the individual homesteader, but it’s not cheap for society. If I buy a cheap home in the suburbs that increases my commute by 30 minutes each way, but the costs of my extra environmental footprint get shared across society. Better public transit would help, but sprawl prevents us from getting good economies of scale, which makes transit and other infrastructure significantly more expensive.
I agree with a long-term conclusion, but I actually don’t agree that the last frontier has already been exploited in America. Precisely because land-use is so inefficient in the states, there is still a lot of opportunity to better utilize the land that exist in cities, even without necessarily incentivizing it with an LVT (although I would be for that!).
For example, almost all American cities have really crappy transit systems and extremely sparse land use, so the total livable capacity within commute distance of economic cores are artificially depressed. One way to fix that as within an LVT, but there are other ways, which we’re seeing around the states today.
Perhaps the YIMBYs today are energized by the opportunity to create a new frontier on the land we already have, inspired by cities like Tokyo that are able to service an impressively large number of people with comparatively reasonable rent zero high density and efficient transport, under the idea that even without a systematic change to the economic structure, the overall population and economy can be satisfied with what we already have.
That all said, regardless of whether or not that turns out to actually be the case, land value tax ought to be a part of that conversation.
Not even! Streets are too big, homes have huge setbacks and parking requirements, lawns are extravagant, smaller homes don’t exist! No transit also means less livable area in commute distance. Tokyo already demonstrates that even with predominantly low rise layout, you can support more than an order of magnitude more people than most American cities in a similar area, with the point being that it is within the realm of possibility that more efficient use of land can actually satisfy the demands for housing without fundamental economic changes (though those certainly would help).
I agree that YIMBYism is part of the solution, however the problem with upzoning alone is that it tends to get immediately capitalized into higher land values. YIMBYism is necessary, but not by itself sufficient:
Yea, I’m not arguing against georgism, just emphasizing that I don’t think most cities are even close to running out of monopoly boards to tape on - their governments and communities just don’t want to do it, for a variety of reasons.
No I appreciate that; I suppose my metaphor has somewhat failed me here; the whole point of the "Monopoly board" metaphor is not to talk about literally running out of space, but to explain the dynamics about what happens as space goes from majority unowned to majority owned -- that's the distinction. The Monopoly board can be entirely bought up and still remain empty--the "frontier closing" is less about "there's no more space" and more about "there's no more space that *is free for the taking*". It's about everything getting priced in. This exchange with you has been useful to help me clarify that, so I thank you for it.
If all the skilled workers are pushed out of the city centre where they're needed, and big tech moves in, I feel like the city would collapse in short order, no longer a place to live, just a hive. Just in time for the modern Henry George to move in.
I feel like personal flying cars and/or flying taxis are going to become common in the next decade or so, which may allow us to pull another massive frontier expansion out of a hat. The only problem from my point of view is the massive destruction of wilderness that may result
Great work as always, Lars. Not that you necessarily need to cite this, but this recent Glaeser and Gyourko paper is highly consistent with your thesis.
America's Housing Supply Problem: The Closing of the Suburban Frontier?
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33876
Thanks for sharing!
Thank you for this writing this article. It is much appreciated.
> The actual immediate effect of remote work was to increase the price of housing. Tech workers moved into bedroom communities across the country, particularly in sunbelt states like Texas, buying up property that was cheap for them. As people with high paying remote jobs moved into town, they raised local demand for housing as well as the earnings potential of those living in the area, and thus housing prices and land rents.
Surely this also lowered the price of housing in urban areas?
It did! At least for a little while, though they've now rebounded.
> Hailed by liberal, conservative economists alike
Typo
Fixed, thanks!
The Monopoly game is Henry George's most enduring and influential legacy. Can you do a piece on the history?
This extended version would work better as a video. If you can find someone to do it - it's quite a big job.
There are lots of great videos on this already, but here’s an interesting one couched within a re-enactment event.
https://youtu.be/AeVOOC4bMAo
Not too long ago, there were rumors of the Barbie movie folks making one for Monopoly. We will see how much history might be included on a big-screen movie.
Good article, but I'm not convinced there's any meaningful restriction on housing supply nationally. It's a collective action problem; what we should do is get a few million people together to found a new city in the middle of nowhere, but nobody wants to be the first to move there, so it doesn't happen.
> I'm not convinced there's any meaningful restriction on housing supply nationally
You have a point here, the chief thing that's scarce is always land *in particular places*, especially those in-demand areas with lots of amenities and access to good jobs. And as for the Ricardian model itself, it sort of implies a closed system, in actually existing America the "margin of production" in many ways is often "move to some other town."
> what we should do is get a few million people together to found a new city in the middle of nowhere
Two thoughts on this:
1. I'm rooting for California Forever too!
2. I wonder to what extent this just spreads existing agglomeration effects around vs. creates nucleation sites for long-lasting new growth. Nice work if you can get it but as you say we are not very good at bootstrapping this.
Yeah it seems to me like the median human wants a level of density that is lower than is otherwise economically optimal, thus NIMBYISM. No perfect solution for this, but one option is to just give them what they want and lower housing prices by building entirely new cities rather than new housing in existing cities.
I wonder if the desire for less density is due to cars. If more density means more cars, people don't want it. Without cars it might be a different story.
However people don't want their neighbourhood to become less car-oriented because that implies less access for drivers like themselves.
As I see it a big part of the problem is that both political parties in the US are against public transit. The right opposes it because "it's socialism", while the left wants to use it as a homeless shelter, so public transit across the US almost universally sucks.
People then very rationally want to preserve car access to everything, because the inside of their car is reliably safe and pleasant.
I wonder if a lot of this is:
- We're not willing to aggressively police transit the way e.g. Asian countries do
- We have airplane networks for inter-city travel which sucks attention away from long distance train routes
Yeah the long-distance options are abysmal. I used to travel frequently as cheaply as possible, and I could sometimes take busses by private companies. Trains just weren't good.
But I mostly mean intracity options; I've needed to get around in ~2 dozen different big cities and I consistently found that uber was preferable despite frequently trying transit. In my case I don't even care much about cleanliness, the public transit is just too slow and logistically burdensome. (It's ridiculous that I have to buy tickets or a prepaid card at a physical machine in most places, rather than just being able to tap my credit card. And some stations don't even have the machines!)
Great article. I’m left wondering how these principles fit in with the observations about how much households actually spend on rent.
In Australia, over the long term, rents represent, on average, 20% of incomes, and has held steady at around this level for decades. Does this tell us anything useful about Ricardo’s law of rent?
Some economists would argue that as rents have been steady as a proportion of income over a long period of time, that there is no issue with rents and thus no ‘problem’ to be solved.
It's a good question -- Ricardo's model is a simplification, and arguably of a closed system.
First, I would look at how rents have evolved in specific locations rather than zoomed out on a national level, because an average can hide things.
How are rents evolving in Sydney, for instance? A typical pattern that is in line with Ricardian theory is for rents to stay fairly stable as a % of average income, but at the same time the city sprawls outwards. That's just basic frontier expansion. The real question is what are the limits of said expansion -- comparing a city that is constrained by natural features to one that has no such constraints would be a good natural test of how well the theory holds up -- you'd predict stronger rent pressure on an in-demand constrained city than in an in-demand unconstrained city that's free to sprawl.
San Francisco in the US is very physically constrained by water on three sides, and then they layer NIMBYism on top of that, whereas Houston is free to sprawl out in all directions, and then also are much more YIMBY on what people are allowed to build.
Best explanation of Ricardo's Law of Rent I've ever read, ty!
Something I've struggled with, though, is whether I believe the bottom half of earners are always pushed to subsistence levels. Obviously, if we built more effective transit systems and (putting my YIMBY hat on) instituted Japanese style zoning overnight, we'd massively recalibrate housing costs relative to wages. So, I'm skeptical there's truly is a binding constraint because that assumes the gains from agglomeration are infinite (which seems not true).
But I suppose if density and better transit unblock growth (putting us back on track to pushing real wages back down to subsistence levels for half the pop), that could take decades or even the better part of a century to get back to that point, no?
Any thoughts?
It's a good point!
Under the theory's own rules, "subsistence" is defined as "the minimum amount below which workers refuse to work at all," which has a good bit more wiggle room compared to the typical connotation that word holds. We can imagine many things that will tend to pull this up:
1. Minimum wage laws
2. Tenants abilities to coordinate with each other and increase their negotiating power
3. Laws that directly legislate/distort how much rent is allowed to be charged (tenant protection laws, rent control, etc. etc)
(And obviously more supply will weaken landlord's negotiating power, so yes, let's YIMBY all the things.)
The other thing is that the classical Ricardian model is a bit of a closed system, whereas the American population is pretty hyper-mobile. So the "margin of production" in our situation could just as easily be another town rather than the literal physical margins of the one you're already in.
I think the simple Ricardian model is good for developing basic intuitions, and its core strength is understanding that rents are the result of differential negotiating power and BATNAs, but the real world has a lot of other wrinkles layered on top to account for. We should keep in mind that its predictions are for a situation that is "on average", and "in the long run." A lot of people posting here likely have above-average education and wages. When we think of anyone being "pushed to subsistence" we might look at the working homeless population in any big city -- sometimes the "margin of production" is to live in your car, or a homeless shelter:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/08/nyregion/homeless-shelters-new-york-city.html
Thanks so much for this fantastic explainer. I will pass it along!
Lovely article. Well done.
My favourite line is this:
"Capitalism vs. Socialism became the dominant economic frame, sucking up all the oxygen and leaving no room for the “third way” of Georgism, which served as a corrective to both worldviews".
This is exactly how I describe Georgism in historical perspective too.
I have a few points for you to think about.
1. WHAT CAUSED THE MOVEMENT'S DECLINE?
Don't forget the erasure of land from economics as documented by Mason Gaffney in "The Corruption of Economics". As Paul Samuelson wrote, "I don't care who writes a nation's laws, if I can write its economics textbooks". We’re still struggling to escape the political consequences of George being cancelled.
I spent 10 years studying economics and was two-thirds of the way through my PhD before encountering the forgotten economics of land. This memory-hole is real. Gaffney's book is careful and scholarly and deserves its dramatic title.
2. CAN'T WE MAKE LANDOWNERS COMPETE?
You say: "Landlords are actors in a free market, right? Aren’t they in competition with one another? Shouldn’t this drive down rents?"
Your article then suggests that when there are multiple landowners, rent is determined by the number of tenants relative to the area of land available.
If that were true, then logically we could skew that ratio via policy (e.g. zoning more land for use).
But you're missing something important: private land acts as a single monopoly even when ownership is fragmented. The ratio of tenants to landlords is irrelevant in this process.
Cameron Murray's has explained how ownership selection and tacit collusion produce this.
Ask yourself: if Smith and Jones were competing with each other to the benefit of tenants then why wouldn't Smith buy out Jones to restore monopoly pricing and maximise total land rent?
This thought experiment shows that if competition threatened to break out, ownership could readily change to prevent it.
A ‘competitive’ outcome of this kind cannot last. Either behaviour or ownership will change to preserve the monopoly outcome.
This means the ECON101 "competition" paradigm bears no relevance to the market for land. The land market has insurmountable barriers to entry, breaching the key condition for competition to occur.
Regardless of ownership, tacit collusion can occur via trial-and-error learning and behavioural change.
For instance, blind trial-and-error choices combined with directional reinforcement can be sufficient to cause a rate of investment in structures (absorption rate) which maximises aggregate land rent.
Consider a simple learning rule like "if the development residual exceeds the market price of the land used, build more, otherwise, build less". This is something even a nematode could pull off.
This rule creates an equilibrium rate of housing supply which maximises land rent. This equilibrium will be reinforced by various characteristics, incentives and industry norms amongst developers, landowners and financiers.
Older thinkers understood the nature of land as a monopoly despite dispersion in its ownership to be self-evident.
Churchill said: "The land monopoly is a perpetual monopoly, and the mother of all other forms of monopoly“. No caveats around ownership concentration there.
3. HOW DO WE EXPAND THE BOARD?
We pay for expansion packs via infrastructure. As you note, the automobile frontier was opened at great cost.
This cost is very important when arguing for rezoning to expand land supply.
Urban expansion enabled by infrastructure has an economic (efficiency) limit defined by the pool of BCR>1 investment projects. Once those projects are exhausted, we're still playing Monopoly, just with a bigger board.
And all Monopoly at any scale is subject to the collusive tendencies I describe in point 2 above.
Board expansions buy time, at a cost. But Georgism should be about rejecting the game, not prolonging it.
This is something Greg Miller's latest piece, "The Housing Crisis as a Land Crisis", seems to forget.
If we rid ourselves of regulatory barriers then, firstly, it won't stop the land monopoly acting as a monopoly. A monopoly able to sell a wider range of products (more land) will not price each product cheaper. And secondly, the natural and economic investment barriers will remain.
4. ENCLOSURE.
The rent-free option you describe when explaining the Law of Rent no longer exists. It was called the Commons, and it was enclosed. That's when Monopoly began in earnest.
This point leads me to a Georgist caution against the "make more land" panacea pushed by YIMBY-Georgists, including in Greg Miller’s post.
What is unpriced upzoning? It is a giveaway to landowners of property rights currently held in trust by the public. The word for that is "enclosure".
One of the terrible ironies of modern Georgism taking on a YIMBY flavour in an attempt to keep adding Monopoly expansion packs is that the primary means of doing so - upzoning - not only works against Georgist distributional principles by enriching landowners, but replicates the historical giveaway that got the game of Monopoly properly started in the first place.
Lars. You are a genius
Monopoly Game started as the Landlords Game to teach about the economics of Henry George. A book has been written about this.
Wonderful article!
I want to add one corollary. It’s true that sprawl is cheap for the individual homesteader, but it’s not cheap for society. If I buy a cheap home in the suburbs that increases my commute by 30 minutes each way, but the costs of my extra environmental footprint get shared across society. Better public transit would help, but sprawl prevents us from getting good economies of scale, which makes transit and other infrastructure significantly more expensive.
This is certainly true!
I agree with a long-term conclusion, but I actually don’t agree that the last frontier has already been exploited in America. Precisely because land-use is so inefficient in the states, there is still a lot of opportunity to better utilize the land that exist in cities, even without necessarily incentivizing it with an LVT (although I would be for that!).
For example, almost all American cities have really crappy transit systems and extremely sparse land use, so the total livable capacity within commute distance of economic cores are artificially depressed. One way to fix that as within an LVT, but there are other ways, which we’re seeing around the states today.
Perhaps the YIMBYs today are energized by the opportunity to create a new frontier on the land we already have, inspired by cities like Tokyo that are able to service an impressively large number of people with comparatively reasonable rent zero high density and efficient transport, under the idea that even without a systematic change to the economic structure, the overall population and economy can be satisfied with what we already have.
That all said, regardless of whether or not that turns out to actually be the case, land value tax ought to be a part of that conversation.
Not even! Streets are too big, homes have huge setbacks and parking requirements, lawns are extravagant, smaller homes don’t exist! No transit also means less livable area in commute distance. Tokyo already demonstrates that even with predominantly low rise layout, you can support more than an order of magnitude more people than most American cities in a similar area, with the point being that it is within the realm of possibility that more efficient use of land can actually satisfy the demands for housing without fundamental economic changes (though those certainly would help).
I agree that YIMBYism is part of the solution, however the problem with upzoning alone is that it tends to get immediately capitalized into higher land values. YIMBYism is necessary, but not by itself sufficient:
https://progressandpoverty.substack.com/p/land-and-the-liberty-to-build-on
Yea, I’m not arguing against georgism, just emphasizing that I don’t think most cities are even close to running out of monopoly boards to tape on - their governments and communities just don’t want to do it, for a variety of reasons.
No I appreciate that; I suppose my metaphor has somewhat failed me here; the whole point of the "Monopoly board" metaphor is not to talk about literally running out of space, but to explain the dynamics about what happens as space goes from majority unowned to majority owned -- that's the distinction. The Monopoly board can be entirely bought up and still remain empty--the "frontier closing" is less about "there's no more space" and more about "there's no more space that *is free for the taking*". It's about everything getting priced in. This exchange with you has been useful to help me clarify that, so I thank you for it.
The third dimension is the final frontier!
If all the skilled workers are pushed out of the city centre where they're needed, and big tech moves in, I feel like the city would collapse in short order, no longer a place to live, just a hive. Just in time for the modern Henry George to move in.
I feel like personal flying cars and/or flying taxis are going to become common in the next decade or so, which may allow us to pull another massive frontier expansion out of a hat. The only problem from my point of view is the massive destruction of wilderness that may result