The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.
The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.
There are plenty of places without zoning issues that have that same housing problems.
More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.
That's why you'll find in old economics textbooks that it's up to the government to fix these issues, by hiring and raising compensation for (all) their employees. This then forces other employers to raise compensation as well and so makes housing affordable again.
>, it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes.
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
It's not simplistic. It is literally the core problem with housing. Zoning had a first objective of preventing Black families from moving into white neighborhoods, and then, in the 1980s, assumed a new role of driving scarcity (and thus the price of houses in areas of opportunity, to the benefit of existing homeowners).
You're missing the point. If the states come along and override it and say houses can go anywhere they'll find another thing to use. They'll block the ancillary services (food and basic commerce) or they'll block the jobs. If not via zoning the same useful idiots will find some other avenue by which to micro manage. Environment is a common one, but not the only one.
Once again, the race thing is a distraction because it lets the useful idiots who are peddling stuff that's just as short sighted claim that it'll work out simply because they're not peddling racist policies this time.
Nobody has the balls to put their foot down and say that your neighbors have the right to build stuff you don't like and you can move if you don't like it.
Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
The first comment suggests that it was always like this and life has got worse. The second says it has almost never been like this, it was a short-lived condition only. That is in no way a normative statement on how it should be.
The first comment does not suggest "it was always like this", only that it was known, commonly accepted, even declaratively established to be like this.
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.
They owned their homes just as much as you own yours. Oh sure technically the state/king owned their home, but that is just pedantry when our government could also eminent domain our homes at any time and also demands taxes to maintain control. Subsidence farmers built and maintained their own homes and worked the same land usually for their entire lives. If strangers came onto their land and bothered them they could force them off, potentially even legally kill them, and if there is some more complicated dispute they could go to their government/lord and demand a legal ruling on their claim.
Peasant farmers didn't sign up for and get given random plots of land by their lord for temporary holding that gets taken back later. They lived and died in the homes they themselves built on land they managed and worked in basically perpetuity down their family line, provided their family survived or wasn't driven off by or killed by war.
We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.
One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.
The majority of teaching is done by "adjuncts" who are not professors, are ineligible for tenure, and don't do research. They have to re-apply for their job every semester. People rarely do it long-term, though it sometimes employs academic spouses and people who are using it for health benefits while pursuing a side business. It's certainly not a career.
My mom was a public high school teacher. When I described the conditions of working as an adjunct, her knee jerk reaction was: "That's why teachers have a union."
> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?
Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.
> Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting?
First, the issue with teacher pay is that it is low. OP and you would instead say that the issue is that it's not low enough for some low performers, and that such a correction would lead new teachers to enter the market. Is there an economics study that shows a similar phenomenon occurring?
> I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly.
I doubt this, because if you cared you would get enough of the mostly-useless degrees in order to get to a pay level that makes sense for you.
Anyway, there are private institutions you could go teach for; instead I hear you saying that you could do better than these unionized public school teachers if your assured brilliance were recognized monetarily.
I would be more likely to teach in a private school than a public one, for sure. But I have a different job for now so am not pursuing it. That doesn't negate the point I made (and which a sibling commenter has said also applies to his/her case).
I'm not sure the point of your last comment. Of course everyone wants to be paid fairly for what they accomplish, which is not just based on intelligence, but also hard work. I have done a very good job educating my own children and have seen enough laziness in our public schools that I'm certain I would be more effective than a great many of the teachers.
But more importantly, if the incentives were aligned then even better teachers would enter, perhaps leaving me in the bottom part of the distribution. Nothing would make me happier than if schools were filled with teachers who were so effective!
My SO was a teacher before moving on and would see offers like this all the time.
A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.
The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.
I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.
It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.
I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!
Exactly. I have a plot of land in inner Portland and they won't let me build on it. I mean they will, but not at the density needed to satiate demand such that home prices fall to the proper amount a home should cost. Should be a simple proposition with someone trying to spend his own money to build housing but it's not because they make it as hard as possible.
A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.
An LVT addresses the incentives underling zoning. The LVT imagined by Georgists would very probably result in radically altered zoning rules. Zoning, after all, exists primarily to prop up the finances of homeowners.
A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would increase the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to afford the taxes on the property.
On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.
I mean, I agree with you about zoning; we're fourth and inches from eliminating SFZ in my muni, and an LVT isn't going to happen anywhere, so the rest of the debate is kind of academic.
An LVT results in new McMansions getting built on quarter acre lots and being taxed at the same rate as SFHs and trailers on quarter acre lots. It's the perfect way to allow rich people to buy out poor people and pay the same tax as poor people. Welcome to unintended consequences. Institute an LVT if you want, but don't expect low cost housing to spring up.
That is an irrelevant counterargument, since the idea of dense housing leans towards tall apartment buildings, not trailers. No one should have to live in a trailer.
The idea of what should happen is irrelevant, because we have not seen this "dense housing" actually materialize in US LVT jurisdictions any time in the past 100 years.
The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.
There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?
> but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
There exist plenty of old buildings in urban centers that meet this criteria. There is nothing in principle that is stopping their construction. It's in the same imaginary league as LVT for that matter, meaning that if one can manifest, so can the other.
Luxury buildings are made because of a profit motivation. Even so, once the supply is increased by 10x or 20x, their prices too will come down. China is a supreme example of having cheap apartments.
Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.
The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.
Yeah sorry I was in a hurry. I’d originally vouched for your comment (it was dead/flagkilled), then threw up that link as a quick support for your numbers.
The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.
In Chicago at least land use and closing of schools is extremely contentious.
The areas losing the most students are also the areas that have historically been underserved or down right biased against by local governments.
So when it becomes time to consolidate schools it falls disproportionately on poor neighborhoods, which at the very least looks a lot like punishing the victims.
So there is a lot of community push back. So I wouldn’t say they don’t feel any pressure to deal with school land use, it’s a generally contentious problem with pressure on both sides.
Sure there's some pressure but as you note it comes from the communities that couldn't stop their school from being closed. So ultimately it's a lot of noise that doesn't lead to much action.
Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.
In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.
At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.
Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.
The core fabric of society - the deal that was offered by society to the people - to work in a job, own a house, raise a family, have a retirement - has decayed away entirely for many people.
The housing part never 'decayed', it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes. That's why you see things now like California actively overriding local zoning.
There are plenty of places without zoning issues that have that same housing problems.
More people. Same amount of land, and features people want to live by - cities (which in the past often meant rivers but always meant jobs)/in my area, lakes. It’s really that simple. Everything else is missing for forest for the trees.
That's why you'll find in old economics textbooks that it's up to the government to fix these issues, by hiring and raising compensation for (all) their employees. This then forces other employers to raise compensation as well and so makes housing affordable again.
>, it was actively blocked by the people who already had homes.
You're not wrong but this is too simplistic and avoids holding up a mirror that really ought to be held up. Zoning was the "we're gonna regulate our way into utopia" of their time. The class of useful idiots who made it happen and the class of useful idiots who will go to bat for it's continuance because they make a buck on it is far broader than that.
It's not simplistic. It is literally the core problem with housing. Zoning had a first objective of preventing Black families from moving into white neighborhoods, and then, in the 1980s, assumed a new role of driving scarcity (and thus the price of houses in areas of opportunity, to the benefit of existing homeowners).
You're missing the point. If the states come along and override it and say houses can go anywhere they'll find another thing to use. They'll block the ancillary services (food and basic commerce) or they'll block the jobs. If not via zoning the same useful idiots will find some other avenue by which to micro manage. Environment is a common one, but not the only one.
Once again, the race thing is a distraction because it lets the useful idiots who are peddling stuff that's just as short sighted claim that it'll work out simply because they're not peddling racist policies this time.
Nobody has the balls to put their foot down and say that your neighbors have the right to build stuff you don't like and you can move if you don't like it.
Well states need home prices to increase because the majority of their pension funds for their employees is invested in hedge funds seeking outsized returns that use single family homes as an investment vehicle.
This can never be solved until we resolve the public pension crisis.
Lawmakers in my state of Oregon are soon going to debate how the state invests in hedge funds but the simple truth of the numbers says that there's no possible way Oregon can meet its pension obligations without their stated returns.
This is quite a new deal and not one enjoyed by most people for most of history.
What is the purpose of what you're saying? Because people lived like serfs and slaves for a lot of history, we should be okay with that?
I don't mean to be shitty, and I fully understand that contrary takes are what HN is great at, but I genuinely fail to see what the point of your comment is other than a knee jerk nothing?
The first comment suggests that it was always like this and life has got worse. The second says it has almost never been like this, it was a short-lived condition only. That is in no way a normative statement on how it should be.
The first comment does not suggest "it was always like this", only that it was known, commonly accepted, even declaratively established to be like this.
Truly, though, we did used to own many things in common that are now privately enclosed.
Is that not how the 95% of the population of farmers lived before industrialization? The only difference is the job being their own farm or trade.
They didn’t own their own houses.
They owned their homes just as much as you own yours. Oh sure technically the state/king owned their home, but that is just pedantry when our government could also eminent domain our homes at any time and also demands taxes to maintain control. Subsidence farmers built and maintained their own homes and worked the same land usually for their entire lives. If strangers came onto their land and bothered them they could force them off, potentially even legally kill them, and if there is some more complicated dispute they could go to their government/lord and demand a legal ruling on their claim.
Peasant farmers didn't sign up for and get given random plots of land by their lord for temporary holding that gets taken back later. They lived and died in the homes they themselves built on land they managed and worked in basically perpetuity down their family line, provided their family survived or wasn't driven off by or killed by war.
We are very fortunate that my wife got to work at the local school. She now walks to work and I work from home about 4 days out of 5 workdays.
The benefits are huge in terms of time available and costs, and not needing childcare before or after school.
It’s hard to solve couples having two jobs in different places, but having at least one person get to work basically instantly and for zero cost is a massive boon to society.
The issue I saw is that the government department in charge of education is not the one in charge of housing and infrastructure, and there are no incentives to hire locally or make it easier to move locally. Instead you get teachers in suburb A travelling to suburb B and vice-versa, and no way that they can choose to swap roles. We lucked out.
Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
Maybe we could use college teaching as a model. College teachers are for the most part non-unionized.
Disclosure: I was one of those teachers for a semester, many years ago.
Also, teacher pay is not as rigid as it seems. In my state, the good teachers advance by moving to better paying districts. Very few teachers stay in rural districts for more than a year or two.
I thought the same thing regarding professors not being unionized. However, in top universities they are paid as much based on research (or outside offers based on research) as they are on teaching capability.
One thing that is truly bonkers about K12 education is that they can get tenure in just a few years. This is much faster (and easier) than a professor getting tenure. But they both result in the near-inability to be fired.
The majority of teaching is done by "adjuncts" who are not professors, are ineligible for tenure, and don't do research. They have to re-apply for their job every semester. People rarely do it long-term, though it sometimes employs academic spouses and people who are using it for health benefits while pursuing a side business. It's certainly not a career.
My mom was a public high school teacher. When I described the conditions of working as an adjunct, her knee jerk reaction was: "That's why teachers have a union."
That’s funny, at least in my neck of the woods a lot of teachers prefer the rural jobs.
I’m not sure if the pay increase of moving the city balances out anyways with the increase in housing costs.
> Teacher recruiting wouldn't be so hard if pay weren't lockstep, as it is in so many places. Unions demand this, and it keeps some potentially-effective teachers out of the profession (and keeps old lousy ones in, unfortunately).
This is an unhelpful, anti-union sentiment with no actual relevance to the problem of teacher recruiting.
How would it be easier to recruit new, potentially-effective teachers if we had incentive pay based on meritocratic pay scales? There is no rational way to credit someone from a different area for their ability to run a classroom effectively until there's evidence on how that person runs a classroom.
You don't have to be anti-union to be anti-teachers-union. I know a guy who worked in private schools for a couple decades, and then couldn't get work in public schools because the union would have required a very high pay rate for someone of his seniority. He said they could hire 3 younger people for the same money. I guess freezing out one old guy and hiring three new ones is an increase in recruiting though, right?
Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting? I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly. My impression, from seeing my kids go through public schools, is that the lockstep pay (which can be bumped by getting mostly-useless online degrees) creates bad incentives. There is no way to move up quickly by being an awesome teacher, and mediocre teachers are impossible to get rid of. This hurts morale and drains districts of resources that could be used to pay better-performing teachers.
> Why do you think it is not relevant to the problem of teacher recruiting?
First, the issue with teacher pay is that it is low. OP and you would instead say that the issue is that it's not low enough for some low performers, and that such a correction would lead new teachers to enter the market. Is there an economics study that shows a similar phenomenon occurring?
> I would be more likely to go into teaching if I thought it could be a good place to work and I would be paid fairly.
I doubt this, because if you cared you would get enough of the mostly-useless degrees in order to get to a pay level that makes sense for you.
Anyway, there are private institutions you could go teach for; instead I hear you saying that you could do better than these unionized public school teachers if your assured brilliance were recognized monetarily.
I would be more likely to teach in a private school than a public one, for sure. But I have a different job for now so am not pursuing it. That doesn't negate the point I made (and which a sibling commenter has said also applies to his/her case).
I'm not sure the point of your last comment. Of course everyone wants to be paid fairly for what they accomplish, which is not just based on intelligence, but also hard work. I have done a very good job educating my own children and have seen enough laziness in our public schools that I'm certain I would be more effective than a great many of the teachers.
But more importantly, if the incentives were aligned then even better teachers would enter, perhaps leaving me in the bottom part of the distribution. Nothing would make me happier than if schools were filled with teachers who were so effective!
I too would be more likely to be a public school teacher if it paid more.
My SO was a teacher before moving on and would see offers like this all the time.
A few of the rural school districts here offer this incentive to move out there. Sometimes they include a car too. Note they tdo not do repairs though.
The issue with taking one of these rural offers is that it's a dead end. Your schoolhouse of many grands gets smaller and smaller over time until they don't need you anymore. And then what? Your career as a teacher is essentially useless for any larger district as they do not care at all about teaching multiple grades at once and barely (or not) making state standards. And then you don't even have a house left over to sell (likely for a loss), it's the district's.
I know it's the reverse of the article, but the incentives are the same and they don't make sense for any of the parties.
It used to be like this in rural communities even up into the 70s and 80s. The town's branch manager would be young, shipped out for a few years and live in a house the bank owned and given a stipend to maintain it. Same with the postmaster and other professions.
A land value tax would fix this
I know the Georgism joke here, but we don't need an LVT to fix this; we just need states to override home rule on minimum density requirements for residential and mixed-use zoning. The core problem here is in fact very simple!
Exactly. I have a plot of land in inner Portland and they won't let me build on it. I mean they will, but not at the density needed to satiate demand such that home prices fall to the proper amount a home should cost. Should be a simple proposition with someone trying to spend his own money to build housing but it's not because they make it as hard as possible.
Not on its own. You also need to relax or remove direct (and indirect, eg parking minimums) restrictions on residential density.
A land value tax without changes in non-tax land use regulations would not fix, and a land value tax would not be necessary after removing the non-tax land use restrictions which this responds to.
How?
It would allow housing to be substantially denser.
How would an LVT do that when the barrier to dense housing is zoning restrictions?
Changing the tax structure doesn't remove that restriction.
An LVT addresses the incentives underling zoning. The LVT imagined by Georgists would very probably result in radically altered zoning rules. Zoning, after all, exists primarily to prop up the finances of homeowners.
A Georgist LVT is based on the value of the bare land, which is constrained by permitted uses. Adopting it without first removing zoning restrictions would increase the incentive for homeowners to defend the existing zoning rules, since the removal of the rules would increase the scope of alternative uses of the land in ways which would make it economically impossible for most existing single family homeowners to afford the taxes on the property.
On the other hand, once you remove the zoning restrictions, the existing economic incentives will produce densification without LVT, tbat's the whole thing the zoning restrictions exist to stop.
I mean, I agree with you about zoning; we're fourth and inches from eliminating SFZ in my muni, and an LVT isn't going to happen anywhere, so the rest of the debate is kind of academic.
An LVT results in new McMansions getting built on quarter acre lots and being taxed at the same rate as SFHs and trailers on quarter acre lots. It's the perfect way to allow rich people to buy out poor people and pay the same tax as poor people. Welcome to unintended consequences. Institute an LVT if you want, but don't expect low cost housing to spring up.
> trailers on quarter acre lots
That is an irrelevant counterargument, since the idea of dense housing leans towards tall apartment buildings, not trailers. No one should have to live in a trailer.
The idea of what should happen is irrelevant, because we have not seen this "dense housing" actually materialize in US LVT jurisdictions any time in the past 100 years.
The township of the Fairhope Single-Tax Corporation near Mobile, Alabama was originally conceived as an artist's colony but is now occupied by families with a median income of $95K. Density is almost exactly 1 housing unit per residential acre. The feds have built 140 Section 8 subsidized units, but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
Can you point to an LVT place in the US where developers have chosen to build large numbers of actual NON-LUXURY high rise apartment buildings for the benefit of non-rich people? That would be a big newsworthy success story if it actually happened.
There are developers that make their money building high rise apartment blocks. Are any of them lobbying for an LVT so they can build more low cost housing?
> but there do not seem to be any privately built high density tall apartment buildings of the type you want to see.
There exist plenty of old buildings in urban centers that meet this criteria. There is nothing in principle that is stopping their construction. It's in the same imaginary league as LVT for that matter, meaning that if one can manifest, so can the other.
Luxury buildings are made because of a profit motivation. Even so, once the supply is increased by 10x or 20x, their prices too will come down. China is a supreme example of having cheap apartments.
Could just, you know, pay more…
Teachers in major metro school systems already have quite a good deal. Rural schoolteachers really do have the deal everyone heard about in 1990s politics, but urban schoolteachers are generally economically privileged.
(That doesn't mean they aren't impacted by housing scarcity in ways that disrupt the administration of school systems; they are. But the problem isn't compensation, the problem is corrupt regulation written to prop up homeowner assets.)
I genuinely need to see what data you're citing with this statement. Until recently, I worked in education and often worked with urban schools. Starting salaries of 55-60k/year living in a major metropolitan area is not what I would call economically privileged.
The average CPS salary is somewhere around $75k, with 10+ weeks of vacation, but that undercounts it dramatically because CPS teachers get defined-benefit pension plans and often earn tens of thousands in additional cash comp for extracurricular work, and that's before what happens when you get a masters.
> the average is around $96,000
https://www.cps.edu/media/community-updates/2025/january/neg...
What are you trying to say by posting this link?
(The commenter responded to me inline in their original post, I think; I now understand why they posted the link.)
Yeah sorry I was in a hurry. I’d originally vouched for your comment (it was dead/flagkilled), then threw up that link as a quick support for your numbers.
The other half of this is that with declining enrollment city school districts are finding themselves with a lot of land. They don't feel any pressure to sell the land. Nor do they feel any pressure to use it for other government services.
In Chicago at least land use and closing of schools is extremely contentious.
The areas losing the most students are also the areas that have historically been underserved or down right biased against by local governments.
So when it becomes time to consolidate schools it falls disproportionately on poor neighborhoods, which at the very least looks a lot like punishing the victims.
So there is a lot of community push back. So I wouldn’t say they don’t feel any pressure to deal with school land use, it’s a generally contentious problem with pressure on both sides.
Sure there's some pressure but as you note it comes from the communities that couldn't stop their school from being closed. So ultimately it's a lot of noise that doesn't lead to much action.
Why not make housing cost less instead?
Because we’ve been sold the story that your house has to appreciate in value 2-3 times over the period you live in it, consequently, homeowners vote against anything that lowers housing costs.
Except it's not much of a lie. The actual return on housing is basically not much higher than inflation
The only way that works is to build more housing. Austin has shown the way.
You could also cut back on the number of people who own multiple properties.
They're not mutually exclusive goals. Wanting a more affording salary and scalable housing both are valid goals.
Governments may be uniquely positioned to offer housing incentives as they often own the land, and control the zoning.
In some areas like the San Francisco Bay Area, schools would have to pay astronomically more in order for teachers to compete against software engineers. I’m a community college professor in the Bay Area making a low six-figure salary, but even a townhouse in the neighborhood my college is in is easily $1 million for a two-bedroom, and rent for a two-bedroom apartment is easily $3500/mo. A modest salary boost can help me rent a two-bedroom apartment, but if I hope to buy closer to work, my salary would need to double, and there’s still the challenge of saving for the down payment, since there’s no such thing as RSUs in a not-for-profit institution.
At least teacher housing provides a way for teachers to obtain secure housing closer to work without having to directly compete against highly-paid corporate workers with RSUs.
Around here, similar to the Bay Area, community college and K12 pay is around $65k, and your typical new mortgage is $45k annually.
Or allow pay that is not lockstep/tied to mostly-useless degree completion. Unions fight this stuff like hell because the people in charge have gone through the current system and therefore benefit from it.
It is not that hard to do outcome-based pay over a multi-year period, but this is the main criticism. You can either track kids over a number of years and track their relative growth in each year, or you can use bargaining up-front whereby teachers can vote on a "multiplier" for each class before they know who will end up with which class.