for SF Mayor
What if you really believed that there was such a thing as community. Wouldn't one way to detect that community be how much energy you would devote to joining it?
How much effort would you make to be in the place you live and work in? Well, in fact, we can measure that effort in terms of dollars. The price you pay above and beyond the value of your house or apartment itself, in other words the price you pay for the location of your business or home is locational value. And most San Franciscans are paying a lot to be here. What would your house or apartment or business cost you in, say, Fresno? The difference in locational price is land value . . . land value generated by community.
No one person made that value. It may take a moment for you to realize it, but the value of any particular piece of land is not given to it by its owner. Rather, land value is a community-generated value.
The people who created Leon Phat, cyber-candidate for Mayor of San Francisco, do believe land value is community generated. We do believe that land values belong to the community.
One of our aims in producing this site is to to arouse in you an awareness of your contribution to San Francisco's land value. We'd like you to ask the other candidates for mayor why they don't see this relationship between community and land values. Or, if they do see it, why they're making so little to-do about it.
Why do they gibber and holler for low income housing but leave high income land rent--community-generated--alone?
Why do they talk about the need for homeless shelters when land goes under-used?
Let us be plain about the transfer tax and rent cap options which are being discussed by others. The first will dissuade "flipping" properties, but will not dampen real estate values much if at all. Rent caps will help those who now in a contract, and will help new long-term renters, but it will also dissuade investment in new construction in the district unless similar restrictions are implemented in neighboring districts.
Why do they talk about the need to bring jobs to San Francisco when, if only land owners had to pay the land rent, those land owners would go begging workers to use their land so that the land owner could cover the land rent? That would mean more business and higher wages.
Why do they talk about the need for subsidized incomes--food stamps, housing subsidies, minimum wage increases, charity--but leave the community-generated value of land in the pockets of big, medium and yes, small-time land rent takers?
They either need to be informed by you, or they're drafted, pimped and run by those who know the power of community in land and are content to see the "peasants" pay the nobility's closet, kitchen and mansion.
We are really focused. We're pro-business. We love people making stuff and exchanging it. We're small business.
And in principle we like big businesses, too. But much of big business income is really community-generated land value. The value of oil in the ground or beneath the sea floor, for instance, is land value.
Also the value of ore deposits, forests and coal fields. But most especially the value of urban commercial land is community-generated. Take that value for community and we could abolish sales tax altogether. And business taxes and taxes on work.
Copyright 2010 Leion Phat for SF Supervisor. All rights reserved.