--- author: Money & Macro date: '2026-10-08' guest: '' layout: post.njk source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suiU5b9tmoE speaker: Money & Macro tags: - land-value-tax - housing-crisis - urban-economics - tax-policy title: 地价税能解决全球住房危机吗？从乔治主义理论到现实困境 summary: 探讨地价税（LVT）作为住房危机解决方案的经济学原理与落地挑战。解析其如何通过惩罚土地囤积促进高效利用，剖析估值复杂性与政治阻力两大历史阻碍，并指出其虽具推动建房的实际效果，但仍需配合分区松绑等政策才能真正破局。 insight: '' draft: true series: '' category: business-entrepreneurship area: finance-wealth project: [] people: - Henry George companies_orgs: [] products_models: [] media_books: - Progress and Poverty status: evergreen --- ### 资源错配与乔治主义的理论曙光 在房价高不可攀的洛杉矶，市中心高达23%的土地竟是露天地面停车场；多伦多作为加拿大住房短缺的次中心，有数百块土地长期闲置；而在全球住房负担能力倒数第二的悉尼，大量最宝贵的黄金地段却被用于低密度别墅，甚至多数沦为度假副宅；即便在土地利用率较高的伦敦，也有数以万计的空置房屋未流向急需的普通劳动者。面对这种土地极度低效利用的荒谬现象，大量经济学者与评论者指出了一条经典出路——**地价税**（Land Value Tax: 仅针对未经改良的土地纯价值征税，不对其上建筑物课税）。根据芝加哥大学的一项学者调查，在表达意见的经济学者中，高达98%的人支持地价税。从右翼自由市场代表人物米尔顿·弗里德曼（Milton Friedman），到左翼代表约瑟夫·斯蒂格利茨（Joseph Stiglitz）和保罗·克鲁格曼（Paul Krugman），跨越政治光谱的学者罕见地对该构想达成共识。 这种思想源于19世纪后期的**乔治主义**（Georgism: 由亨利·乔治创立的经济哲学，主张个人应拥有自身劳动与资本创造的全部价值，但土地自然增值应归社会所有）。1860年代，美国记者**亨利·乔治**（Henry George）目睹了纽约的繁荣奇景与赤贫并存：城市财富呈爆发式增长，底层人民却陷入极端贫困。工业家建造了工厂，开发商建成了宏伟住宅，市政当局投资了路灯、治安与公共卫生，而土地所有者无需付出任何努力，仅凭土地升值并定期加租即可攫取巨额暴利。在1879年出版的轰动著作《**进步与贫困**》（Progress and Poverty）中，乔治指出，经济增长的收益之所以没有流向真正的财富创造者，是因为全被地主截留。乔治的主张催生了一场全球性运动，并影响了诸多政党，但随后在20世纪的进步时代因累进所得税的推行与汽车普及催生的郊区扩张潮而逐渐边缘化。如今，随着严苛的城市分区法规限制了郊区无限扩张，地价税的讨论再次迎来全面复兴。
Original English In unaffordable LA. A whopping 23% of downtown land are surface level parking lots. Like this. Toronto, the second epicenter of Canada's housing shortage, has hundreds of lots sitting empty. Meanwhile, in the second least affordable city in the world, Sydney, much of the most valuable land is filled with lush, comfortable villas, many of which are used as second homes. Even in crowded London, where land is used much more efficiently. Property owners are still letting tens of thousands of homes just sit empty, rather than renting them out to the teachers and nurses that desperately need them. How is this possible? And how can we ever solve the housing crisis if land is used so inefficiently? Well, according to hundreds of comments that I always get on every housing crisis video that I make. The solution is simple. It's something called George ism, a land value tax. And amazingly, according to a University of Chicago survey, 98% of economists that had an opinion on the matter agreed that the land value tax would be a great idea from right wing free market. Nobel winning economists like Milton Friedman to left wing counterparts like Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman. It seems like everybody loves land value taxes, at least in theory, because Puzzlingly almost no major city has fully adopted this apparently brilliant idea. So what's going on? Our land value tax is actually only good in theory. Or is there something else holding them back from solving the housing crisis? As always, I'm in macro. We have done a deep dive into the scientific literature and talk to experts like the president of research at the center for Land Economics in Texas. All to find out. Can land value Texas solve the global housing crisis? All right. To answer that question, we need to talk about the popular land tax movement that would change the history of the United States. George is a. Our story starts in 1860, when American journalist Henry George just could not make sense of what he saw in booming New York City. On the one hand, New York was quickly becoming the richest city in the world. On the other hand, in the middle of all that wealth, there was desperate poverty everywhere, even more than in far less developed rural areas. How could that be? Could the answer be land in the undeveloped west? Land was plentiful, but everybody wanted to live in booming New York, driving up the value of its land, making New York's land owners exceptionally rich. But was that fair? Industrialists had built New York's factories. Developers had built its magnificent homes. The city council was paying for street lighting. Police and sanitation. And meanwhile, the land owners and they simply sat back watching the land value go up. And they occasionally increased rent in the year 1879. Book Progress and Poverty, George theorized that the reason that you see poverty persist in some of the richest cities on Earth is simply because the gains from economic growth go not to those who produced them, but rather to the land owners. The book became an absolute sensation, selling more copies in America in the 1890s than any book except the Bible. George's thesis spawned a global movement based on a radical yet elegant principle you should own 100% of the value created by your own labor and capital. But the unearned rent of land and natural resources should belong to society. There's a broader economic philosophy. It's not just like land value taxes. Cool. It's a generalized anti-monopoly philosophy. And more importantly, it serves as a third way philosophy that critiques both what we would now call capitalism and what we would now call socialism. And actually, these ideas became very popular in politics as well, heavily influencing political parties like the Commonwealth Land Party in the United States, the Single Tax League in South Australia, or the Justice Party in Denmark, which even made it into government in the late 1950s. However, after a while, the idea of taxing land to reduce inequality was eclipsed by the Progressive ERA progressives also wanted to reduce inequality, of course, but they proposed doing so through a mixture of progressive income taxes and tough monopoly busting antitrust laws. Meanwhile, thanks to the invention of the automobile, a lot of new land became available for housing, which would quickly become the famous suburbs, arguably so much more desirable, and made housing much more affordable in the 1950s and 60s. So of course, George's land value tax idea became far less popular, even if it never completely left the economic debate. But now that suburbs have stopped expanding due to restrictive zoning regulations, the fight for taxing land is actually gaining momentum again, with several states considering land value taxes to solve their housing crisis.
### 税制扭曲对比：传统财产税与双轨税率机制 经济学界普遍推崇地价税，核心在于其兼具“公平”与“超高效率”。从道德与公平维度来看，土地作为天然要素并非人类创造，个人仅凭圈占土地获取高额增值毫无正当性；反之，若在土地上投资建造房屋或开垦经营，这种劳动与资本投入理应获得回报。从经济效率维度来看，传统税种往往会扭曲激励机制——对劳动征税削弱了工作积极性，对财富征税促使资本外流，而由于土地的物理供给总量完全固定，对土地价值征税不会造成土地供给减少，反而消除了传统税制的**无谓损失**（Deadweight Loss: 税收扭曲市场资源配置而导致的总福利净损失），倒逼持有者最大化开发以覆盖持有成本。 反观现行的常规**财产税**（Property Tax: 对土地及其上建筑物总估值综合征收的税种），它在本质上对开发建设施加了负向惩罚。例如在辛辛那提市中心，大片土地沦为停车场或处于荒废状态。地主选择囤积闲置土地主要出于两大动因：第一是土地的**期权价值**（Option Value: 保留土地暂不开发以等待未来更优规划方案或更高升值预期的经济价值），持有者倾向于观望更理想的市场时机；第二则是现行税制的严重倒挂。德克萨斯州土地经济中心的测算表明，当地低收入住宅单位每平方英尺需缴纳约2美元财产税，工业仓储仅需0.76美元，而闲置地块仅需0.17美元，大型露天停车场的税负甚至不足每平方英尺1美分——税负相差数百倍。因此，推行**双轨税率**（Split-Rate Tax: 对地面建筑物适用极低税率甚至免税，而对底层土地本身施加极高税率），将彻底扭转这一扭曲格局，强力促使停车坪、荒地改造为高密度的可负担住房。
Original English But all of these years later, can George's radical idea still work? Well, economists seem to think so. So why do 98% of economists love the land value taxes? The answer is probably that a land value tax achieve something almost no other tax can. It seems both universally fair and highly efficient. Why is it fair? Because humans did not create the land. It was already there. Why should some humans reap a huge financial reward from land while others get none? On the other hand, if you build a building or a farm on the land, or if you work to mine out the minerals underneath it, then surely you may have profited from unjust labor conditions. But at least you put some effort into it yourself, and thereby should get a share at least of the rewards. On the other hand, just owning a piece of land clearly does not seem like the kind of thing that should determine who is rich and who is poor. Importantly, this principle just owning land, making you rich seems unfair to people both on the political left and right. So that's why a land value tax seems fair to many people. But why is it also efficient? Well, basically because unlike most taxes, land value taxes do not destroy the incentives for economic activity. A tax on labor makes working extra hours less attractive. A wealth tax might lead some millionaires to move their businesses abroad, but Atlantic's while since the amount of land is fixed, you will not end up with less land if you tax it, and therefore where other taxes incentivize things that are bad for the economy, like less consumption or less work land value taxes should, in theory incentivize due to behavior that is, using land more efficiently to make back the tax that is, with a sufficiently high land value tax. You would be crazy to that land. Sit idle in the middle of Toronto, or have service level parking spaces in Central Los Angeles, or to let apartments sit empty in London. But to see fully how the land value taxes can help solve the housing crisis, we need to contrast land value taxes with what they are meant to replace property taxes. For example, let's head to downtown Cincinnati. As you can see here, the city is packed with big parking surfaces and even empty lots. But vacant land earns you no income, whereas land with a building could be leased out or sold by a lots, probably for far more than what you could own by keeping it as a parking lot. So even without the land value tax, why would anyone in their right mind hold a vacant or underutilized land? After all, even if you are just betting on the value of land going up, it would make sense to already build there to collect rents from that building. Well, in our research, we found at least two major reasons why it does make sense to not use the land properly. First, there's the so-called option value of the land... and this uncertainty provides an incentive to wait in parked cars in the meantime until the perfect opportunity comes along. Rather than rushing to build there right now. And this effect is made far stronger because of reason number two, which is that current property taxes directly disincentivize building... For example, just take a look at this rate based on the assessment of the center for Land Economics. This local low income housing unit pays around $2 per square foot. In Texas, meanwhile, industrial warehouses pay only $0.76. But this a vacant lot that's just $0.17. And this massive parking lot based on less than a cent per square foot. Exactly two and a times less Texas than the low income housing unit. This difference in taxes is so extreme that it may make total sense for the parking lot owner to just keep this ultra valuable land as a parking lot until the perfect opportunity comes along to build on it. The basic idea of the land value tax is therefore to punish this behavior not rewarded in the most popular formulation of the Land Rights Act. It would essentially replace property taxes with a split next rate, a low rate on the structures, and a higher rate on the land. So land value tax basically exempts the building portion of a conventional property tax from taxation and increases the tax rate on the land. And if you reduce the tax on property enough and raise the tax on land enough, then according to the laws of supply and demand, something magical will happen that can change the fate of thousands who cannot afford to pay rent in major cities. American parking lots. Canadian vacant lots. Empty. London apartments. Empty. Sydney villas on prime land. Many of them will all be replaced with affordable homes, such that the regular working people can once again live in these unaffordable cities, at least in theory, because, as we have seen, the idea of land value taxes has moved popular for decades.
### 落地屏障与现代技术解法：估值算法与政治博弈 尽管英国在20世纪初、匹兹堡在20世纪大部分时期，以及当今的丹麦、爱沙尼亚、澳大利亚部分州乃至美国肯塔基州和弗吉尼亚州都开展过探索，且现有研究普遍显示地价税能促进住房建设、降低空置率并遏制城市无序蔓延，但该政策在全球的大规模落地长期受制于两大实操难题： 1. **土地独立估值困难**：与依据成交金额按比例征收的增值税或所得税不同，房地产交易数据反映的是地块与建筑物的总价值。将土地纯价值从地面附着物中精准剥离在技术上极度复杂。英国1910年《人民预算》（People's Budget）试图推行地价税时，因官方无力计算罕见交易地块的价值，转而强令业主自行申报并施以罚款，最终导致海量法律诉讼，政府耗费的诉讼成本甚至超过税收所得，致使改革抱憾流产。 2. **中产阶级选民的政治阻力**：现代民主社会中，中产阶级的主要财富通常沉淀于自有房产及附带的土地价值中。然而辛辛那提的模拟测算显示，推行双轨制地价税的最大受害者其实是长期持有闲置地皮与大型停车场的投机地主；不仅公寓租客能享受住房增加带来的红利，连拥有单户独立住宅的中产家庭，因建筑物税负免除带来的节税效益往往也大于地价税支出，并不必然成为受损方。 在技术层面，现代数据科学为估值难题提供了可行解。丹麦税务部建立了高度数字化的公共数据库，每两年通过**批量自动估值**（Automated Mass Appraisals: 利用统计学算法与空间大数据对区域内土地批量进行估价的系统）对全国土地重新核定基准；韩国政府则通过**代表性样本基准地块**（Representative Plots of Land）法，作为推导全国房地分离估值的锚点。在大数据时代，结合建安成本、交易与租金数据，精准拆分土地价值的技术门槛已被大幅攻破。
Original English But if it's such a great idea, why do land value taxes never get implemented? I mean, it's not like land value taxes have never been tried before. Britain tried it in the early 20th century, during the peak of the Georges movement. Its work around a split rate tax for most of the 20th century and today Denmark, Estonia and several Australian states collect land value. Texas. And just this year, Kentucky and Virginia passed legislation allowing cities to implement split rate taxes on both the structures and land. So what can we learn from these experiences? Well, unfortunately, less than you might hope because, well, there haven't been many solid studies done on that. Yes, there are some studies and they do seem promising linking a land value tax to increased housing construction, lower vacancy rates and reduced urban sprawl. But many of these studies suffer from a lack of reliable data, meaning that we cannot know for sure. Still, the limited evidence that we do have is, in my opinion, promising enough to say that land taxes do indeed seem like more than just good in theory. They probably work in practice as well. So then why aren't more places trying them? In our research, we kept coming across two major practical problems that have prevented land value taxes from being consistently implemented and replicated across the world. The first problem is a valuation problem. The basic idea of a land value tax is to tax land separately from the structure and improvements on top of it. But how do you consistently isolate the value of land from everything else? Because if we simply look at sales data, it doesn't tell us anything about what the buyers actually paid for it. Did they pay for the land mostly, or for the stuff that's on it? And this makes land value taxes significantly more difficult to implement than income taxes or value added tax, which are just a simple percentage of transaction values. On the other hand, like wealth taxes, land value taxes, forced governments to make complex calculations to separate the value of the land from everything that's on top of it. And this complexity is precisely what doomed Britain's attempt to implement a land value tax through the famous 1910 People's Budget. You need to implement it. The government found it so difficult to calculate the value of land, of properties that had rarely ever been sold, that they forced land owners to do it themselves or be fined 50 pounds. And this turned out to be a major mistake, because it allowed land owners to fight the tax in court, and after a legal battle that cost more than the entire tax, helped collect, the British state lost and gave up the dream of a land value tax. Now, the second problem that we consistently came across is a political problem. You see, middle class voters usually have their wealth stored in their homes and by extension, in the land underneath it. Land values of residential properties have increased a lot during the last decade, especially in major cities. So a middle class, home owning voters holding back largely taxes? Or is it that land value taxes are just too difficult for governments to implement? In other words, our land tax is doomed to fail. The good news is, I don't think so. Yes, land is tricky to value in isolation from the structures and tunnels built, but today, with modern techniques, it should be much easier than in early 20th century Britain. Take Denmark, one of the few countries that currently has land in Texas. While it was not easy to set up, their Ministry of Taxation, eventually was able to set up a massive, highly digitized public database to run automated mass appraisals. Revaluing every piece of land in the country every two years. And if that sounds too expensive, countries can always try to follow South Korea's example, whose government uses so-called representative plots of land as a benchmark to split land and property values in the entire country. Fundamentally, any data scientist will tell you that it's just a data quality issue, like if you collect enough information on construction costs and you collect enough information on sales and rents, like there's any number of methods ancient and modern, that can get this out. In other words, while the data issue may have held back land value taxes in early 20th century Britain. Modern techniques should make it very doable for governments to replace property taxes with a split structure that values land separately. So is it instead a political problem that middle class homeowners, a powerful voting bloc, will inevitably block land value taxes in all democracies? No, not necessarily, because, well, a shift from property to land value taxes will produce some winners and losers. It's actually not middle class families who are likely to suffer. For example, in Cincinnati, the center for Land Economics has modeled how a shift from property to land value taxes would change the final bill of different types of properties. And the biggest losers by far, are owners of vacant lots and big parking services. Meanwhile, while the biggest winners would be renters in bigger buildings, crucially, even middle class families in single family homes would still win from the proposal compared to property taxes, making it much more likely that the proposal will pass. So actually, I think it's pretty likely that as the housing crisis continues, we will see more and more states, cities and perhaps even countries adopt land value taxes.
### 地价税的现实边界：为何它不是灵丹妙药？ 即便地价税在理论与算法上均成立，它能否独自终结住房危机？现实维度的观察给出了更为冷静的结论： * **核心承载区缺乏可挖潜空间**：在住房危机最为严峻的超级都市（如纽约、旧金山和华盛顿特区），并不存在像中西部城市那样连片蔓延的地面停车场或未开发荒地，空间资源早已高度稠密。 * **政府行政审批与公有土地阻滞**：在多伦多等拥有大量空置用地的城市，深入调研显示，相当一部分土地并未掌握在私人投机者手中，而是卡在官僚行政审批流程中，甚至本身就是政府机构持有的公有土地，单靠针对私人的税收调节难以破局。 * **韩国首尔的实践启示**：在韩国首尔，商业土地与地面建筑物已被长期分开计税。在首尔极少见到地面停车场或大面积闲置空地，地下车库几乎成了标准配置，土地利用率处于极高水平。然而，首尔市民依然长期饱受住房负担过重的困扰。 上述证据充分表明，地价税固然是一柄激活低效用地的有效杠杆，但绝非能够包治百病的灵丹妙药。要从根本上化解全球性住房困境，地价税必须与更系统的空间规划手段形成组合拳：包括**破除限制性分区法**（Zoning Reform: 放宽建筑容积率、高度与用途管制，允许高密度多户住宅开发）、大力增加公共保障性住房供给，以及在核心大都市饱和时规划营建卫星新城。
Original English But will that be enough? Can land value taxes actually fix the housing crisis? Sadly, I don't think so for two reasons. First, if we look at the parking issue, we can see that actually many cities do not have these sprawling parking zones like New York, Washington and San Francisco and D.C. these cities are actually the ones that have the worst housing crisis. Meanwhile, in cities with a lot of vacant land like Toronto, it turns out that a lot of that land, when we looked into it, is actually held hostage by bureaucratic issues from people that should profit from the land value tax, that is, from the government itself. The government itself is holding back development of this land. Finally, in Seoul, South Korea, where they do tax commercial land separately from structures on it. I was recently there and I did see some of the predicted effects almost exclusively. I don't see homes, no surface level parking really, only underground parking lots everywhere, almost no vacant lots. I was really amazed at how efficiently they use their most valuable land. Yet the inhabitants were still complaining about housing affordability crisis. So I don't think that land value taxes are a magic bullet. They can absolutely help. But to truly solve the housing crisis, I think land value taxes should be combined with other measures that help to build more homes where they are needed, like public housing, building new cities maybe if existing ones get too popular, and of course, less restrictive zoning regulations. But yeah, these are my thanks. Let me know if you also think that the land value tax could play an important role in fixing the housing affordability crisis, but that it's not enough to fix it on its own. And if you want to dig deeper into the fascinating world of land value taxes, I highly recommend you to check out the following three articles from our advertising sponsor, The Economist. First, for a general overview of the history of land value taxes and the practical problems of implementing them, I would start with this article from 2018. Next, go check out their take on Detroit's currently stalled bid to be the first American city with a land value tax and finally finished with or evergreen look from 2014 on why land value taxes are so popular yet so rare as this analysis show, The Economist delivers insights that truly help you to see the bigger picture. And this is why I highly recommend you subscribe to The Economist, which now offers an exclusive 35% discount for money macro viewers. Whether you prefer their daily journalism in The Economist app or you are like me and enjoy getting up on the global economy over the weekend with a nice cup of coffee and the print edition, you'll always stay on top of the latest global developments and support journalism that values factual information, integrity and an independent point of view, so do not miss out. Click the link in the description or dump comment below or head over to economist.com/money Macro to claim your exclusive 35% discount today.