Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.
replyThis is generally a big problem in Pittsburgh where huge areas of the most valuable land is owned by “nonprofits”
replyDo you mean people underestimate how steep the gradient is, or they don't know it at all?
replyIt seems kind of dubious to me that "everyday" people don't understand that land in cities is worth more than land in suburbs. It seems very transparent that you get a smaller lot size for the same price.
Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.
reply> I was waiting to read about what these "wildly incorrect intuitions" were, but it's never explained. The maps correctly matched my own intuitions.
replyIf you are into land value tax discourse maybe, but from my experience at least there is a big lack of awareness of the impact of economic activities on land values as they are not reflected by anything that people get in contact with. That's especially true because neither rents nor property taxes (the one thing people might have exposure to) fully capture it.
I had guessed land in Manhattan vs the bronx as 7x more valuable, based on living in the Bronx and paying rent. For the joys of living in the Bronx my rent was under $1k and I had a separate bathroom that was part of my studio apartment. Meanwhile Manhattan apartments wanted $2k and I had to use a bathroom shared with the floor.
replySame. My assumption, before seeing this, was "ok, I'm going to guess land in a city is worth 100 or 1000x land anywhere else", and I guess I overestimated a bit.
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