We can have one without the other
This post draws on a four-part case study series produced by the Africa Urban Lab with support from the Progress and Poverty Institute, covering property tax reforms in Addis Ababa, Freetown, Lagos, and Tanzania Mainland On the morning of August 20, 2021, Tanzanians buying prepaid… Read More »The Hardest Tax to Collect Is the Best One: What Four African Cities Teach Us About Property Taxation
Not An Easy Task: Using Private Profits to Pay for Public Benefits Planners and municipalities around the globe have designed and used zoning and density regulatory tools to intensify land development and increase land value. We call this global trend the treatment of land as… Read More »Public Benefits and Private Profits: Negotiating Public Private Land Development and Equity in New Taipei City and New York City
Implementing a land value tax (LVT) would require accurate and efficient assessments of land value across all properties in a city. Colleagues from the National Center for Smart Growth, Center for Open Geographical Science, and I investigated the potential to estimate land value using a… Read More »Modeling Land Values in Baltimore
The night I got my first lesson in Colombian property law, I was seated at an Italian restaurant on the edge of Provenza — Medellín’s famously raucous party district. On the street outside, Provenza was doing what Provenza does — karaoke, clinking glasses, the low… Read More »I Went to Medellín for the Party and Found Henry George
Visitors to Puerto Rico’s south coast inevitably come across the PR-127 former petrochemical corridor, among the world’s largest petroleum complexes in the 1960s. Commonly referred to as La CORCO—a name derived from the anchor industry, the Commonwealth Oil Refining Company, the zone encompasses approximately 3,500… Read More »Progress, Poverty, and Petroleum: Reclaiming the Common Inheritance of the World’s Largest Petrochemical Zone
Carmen didn’t just save one thousand jobs; she built a bank. When a severe austerity policy at her husband’s employer threatened to slash her family’s income—along with that of more than 1,000 of his colleagues, Carmen (not her real name), a community activist in Playa… Read More »The Invisible Bank of Carmen: The Power of Reciprocity
Societies have long grappled with the question of how to share (or not) the wealth derived from natural resources. Some, like the United States, have embraced systems that allow much of that wealth to fall into the hands of a few private citizens. Others, like… Read More »What Henry George (and Norway) Can Teach Us About Governing the Digital Economy
Tom Daniels, Crossways ProfessorDept. of City and Regional PlanningUniversity of Pennsylvania IntroductionThe research project on the California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation (SALC) program combined the broader exploration of how the SALC might serve as a national model—both to preserve farmland from conversion to development and… Read More »Methodology and Findings for the ‘California Sustainable Agricultural Lands Conservation Program: Evaluating the Use of Cap-and-Trade Funds to Promote Climate Mitigation and Adaptation.’
“On a Sunday afternoon, the city council of Amsterdam flushed 100 years of progressive policy down the drain,” says journalist Hans de Geus. “Melancholy, disappointment and a fighting spirit” prevail in the green progressive party (GroenLinks). “A historic blunder,” according to Marjolein Moorman, currently alderman… Read More »From Eternal to Extinguished: The Reform of Municipal Ground Lease in the Netherlands
The stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones. Don Huberts After the COVID-19 dip, global oil use has rebounded to 100 million barrels per day and is projected to rise to 104 million bpd by 2026 with no peak in sight. Coal… Read More »Leveling the Energy Playing Field
