APEC is proof San Francisco can be a model city

So much of downtown San Francisco is easy on the eyes this week during which the city hosts the Asian Pacific Economic Conference (APEC). Market Street is rinsed several times a day. The unhoused have been provided shelter. The hungry have been fed. The sidewalks are pedestrian-friendly for the first time in years. The city belies the nasty (but accurate) press Fox News et al shovels the rest of the USA regarding San Francisco. By gum, this APEC week aspires to rival the glorious rebound of The City after the earthquake and fire of 1906.

Why not give APEC a permanent home in San Francisco? Or host world events every week of the year? Life is good this week for the poor and the wealthy in San Francisco. Somebody's paying to put the household clean and kempt, and it's working! The problem, of course, is who, in fact, is going to foot the cleaning bill for all those weeks of the year this week's Potemkin Village isn't called for in the name of US honor? This past Sunday's New York Times (11/12/23) holds an answer. It's not an answer most readers have gumption for, sadly, but it's the Mother of All Answers. Treat the Earth as a commonwealth.

The Times article is poorly edited. It lures us in by suggesting a great fix is in the works for restoring derelict Detroit. The fix is land value taxation LVT): a public policy that would socialize 99% of location value, thus abolishing land speculation and thereby driving market optimal use of land. Full implementation would terminate unearned income and vaporize debt related to nature values. It's only liability is that everyone who stands (or wishes) to gain privately from ownership of location won't vote for it. The NYT article draws us by the prospect of a city actually taking public ownership of land value (not ownership of land, mind you, but of land value), and then dashing the brains out of the idea by highlighting the quirky nature of its most devoted advocates. There are a few hard to dismiss real estate voices introduced in the article, but after presenting the wholesome effect of even a milquetoast edition of LVT, the article goes off on a needless survey of mom and pop personalities who are cult-like committed to socializing land values. The reader interested in what LVT actually is and how it works is left in the dark.

All it takes to illuminate LVT's social perspective is a short paragraph telling a story. Imagine a townhouse or condo or business location in Manhattan or San Francisco. Now move that habitation or business to Paducah, Kentucky. The rent changes, doesn't it? All but a smidgen of that difference is land rent. Land rent is not a value created by the owner of land, but instead is generated by the presence of community. LVT would socialize all the location rent differential that falls between Manhattan/SF and the sage brush barrens of Nevada. In short, LVT holds that the economic value of the Earth belongs to society, not to individual land owners.

We're talking trillions of dollars per year aggregate across the USA, and tens of billions per year in San Francisco. That's where the annual heap of dough can come from to replace the APEC week's show-town with a year-round great place to live for everyone. The currently landless most of all.