Critiquing YIMBYs, 48 Hills on the housing debacle

Wow! YIMBY wants more housing. 48 Hills publishes stuff about getting more affordable housing. Housing, housing, housing!

And yet neither voice . . . or any other, for that matter, takes on the Donnie Trump in the room, namely who owns the land values under whatever housing gets built. What's so important about land values? In your imagination put any piece of San Francisco housing in, say, Fresno. What happens to the rent? It goes down, doesn't it? That differential is land value.

Neither YIMBY nor 48 Hills talks about land value as properly belonging to society rather than the public, but they should. Land is not produced. It's not capital. It's a gift of nature. And its value is created, place to place by the presence of community.

You're welcome to attend a roundtable--and you'll be at the table!--critiquing all the SHOULDS that YIMBY and 48 Hills lay on us. SHOULD build more. SHOULD build subsidized by taxes on rich people.

The deep social question is, "Why should we go on subsidizing people who own the earth by allowing them to keep as equity or rent income the value of the earth as portrayed in that SF - Fresno land value differential?"

Silence on the land question is the "Donnie Trump factor." Donald Trump's fortune, whatever it is, is predicated on owning the land on which your housing and job sits.