It is refreshing seeing someone that is taken seriously in the development community is trying to introduce a little sanity to urban policy.

Oh, and Aaron, thank you for introducing me to land value taxation. I have no idea how this idea had never been presented to me before, but this is close to what I believe is the best possible way to tie policy to direct feedback within a compulsory tax regime. Though I have to say that as a government revenue policy, it may be a tough sell politically. Unless there are extreme exceptions made, this could cause sudden huge development shifts and demographic changes throughout the city due to people being “tax priced” out of their homes and being forced to sell their properties to developers of either higher-end or higher-density development. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but pictures of old ladies being “forced” to sell the family home to a “greedy” developer to build a “high rise” would hamper political support for such a plan. I think that LVT districts in high impact neighborhoods could be a great way to test the concept, and to make headway towards developing underdeveloped property in those areas.

Maybe we could move to a LVT system gradually? Say commercial properties will switch immediately, but residential properties will switch to LVT once they change title after a certain date(or after 15 years max)? I don’t know if that would be too slow of a transition, but surely the details could be manipulated. My main concern would be the LVT tax rate having a lot of variability over the transition. And also, I hear that LVT causes a one-time sometimes substantial dent in property values, which might cause many people to balk. But I think it would be hard to argue with a tax system that doesn’t penalize those that invest in their properties.

I could debate all day that the implementation of the housing was a miserable failure while citing Jane Jacobs. I could talk about how poorly executed the green spaces were while channeling William Whyte. And I could babble on and on about how the interstate system fundamentally changed the way people conduct their daily lives in a negative way.

The point is that we solve the problems we know how to solve and have the ability to do so. It’s easy to point out the problems of the past because we aren’t living in it, but there was as much public push for these things to happen as there was outcry against it from neighborhood activists.

Plus, if we solved all of our problems then us dreamers would be out of jobs.

Often it takes a generation or more to see (much less understand) the unintended consequences of altering one system.

And it is absolutely necessary for someone to say “hey wait a minute” and argue against the prevailing cookie-cutter solution to the problem-du-jour.

Let me end with a paraphrased quote from Thomas Sowell: “It is important to analyze not only the intentions of a policy but what the actual result of that policy was.”