Action on Empty Homes @emptyhomes

Housing land value and the United States Americans have long treated private land as nearly sacred, a stance rooted in the Fifth Amendment (no land seizure without fair market compensation) and in John Locke’s claim that the government's job is to protect “Life, Liberty and Estate.” Jefferson softened the language to “the pursuit of happiness,” but the practical result was the same: unearned land-value gains stayed with owners. Progressive era estate taxes only weakly mitigated this. The federal estate tax began in 1916 with a top rate of 10 percent and later peaked at 77 percent (roughly 1941–1976), yet it was levied only at death, applied to total estates rather than annual land rents, and was easily reduced by planning, exemptions, and step-up in basis. As a result, urban land rents largely escaped ongoing capture, leaving land an increasingly valuable asset for those who already held it while governments competed for ever-more-expensive sites instead of redirecting the rise. Internal Revenue Service. “Historical Estate and Gift Tax Rates.” IRS.gov. irs.gov/businesses/small-bus… The US government gets involved. Before the twentieth century, U.S. governments limited themselves to applying legally enforceable building codes. That changed in the 1920s. The first real government level housing intervention, one impelled by affordability concerns, came under Milwaukee’s long serving socialist mayor Daniel Hoan. Garden Homes, begun in 1921 and finished by 1923, produced about 105 units in 93 buildings on cooperatively owned land. It remains a landmark, yet the cooperative collapsed within a few years as residents opted for private land ownership. Once in private ownership these homes became less and less affordable over time. Gurda, John. “Milwaukee’s historic Garden Homes began as a cooperative a century ago.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, September 29, 2021. A few years later, In the 1920s and 1930s, Clarence Stein and Henry Wright designed projects such as Radburn, New Jersey, that responded to the rise of the automobile by turning homes away from the street towards a commonly owned park. The land under the houses was and is held collectively, in what would now be called a “bare-land condominium” form or a community land trust. This successful urban model remains important but is rarely repeated. During the Depression the federal government built three “greenbelt towns” (Greenbelt, Greendale, Greenhills) as complete communities on federally owned land. Political opposition to government owned housing land killed the program after just a few years. After the war the government sold the houses and parcels to the residents. With the greenbelt effort abandoned, Washington offered local authorities a flat $5,000 per unit to build public housing on city-owned sites instead. This number was not enough to build housing on desirable land, nor enough for any perceived “extras” so results were often spare and poorly located. Techwood Homes in Atlanta, dedicated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1935 and completed in 1936, is usually called the first. It replaced a mixed-race neighborhood but housed only white families—a segregated practice that lasted into the 1960s. Like many later projects, it deteriorated and was demolished in 1996 for the mixed-income Centennial Place. National Commission on Urban Problems. Building the American City: Report of the National Commission on Urban Problems to the Congress and to the President of the United States. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1968, pp. 108–109. After World War II, hundreds of thousands of public-housing units rose across American cities, many built in the “tower in the park” form inspired by Le Corbusier. These high-rise slabs, set on vast open lawns were meant to bring light, air, and greenery to working families. In practice the design produced long, unwatched corridors, no clear boundaries between public and private space, and few "eyes on the street". Jane Jacobs and Oscar Newman later argued that the layout failed to create defensible space: residents could not naturally supervise entrances, stairwells, or playgrounds, and the result was isolation, vandalism, and rising crime. Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis became the emblematic failure of the era. Opened in the mid-1950s with fanfare as a model of modernist public housing, it deteriorated rapidly and was dynamited less than twenty years later—an epochal design collapse that convinced many officials the whole high-rise public-housing model was unworkable. By the 1980s, in the grip of neo liberal stratagems, the federal government had largely stopped building public housing. It still left the country with more than a million units housing roughly two million people—under 1 percent of the population, though far higher in New York. That is a small fraction of the non-market stock in England (around 17 percent) or Vienna (over 50 percent). In the face of declining national support for public housing, other programs emerged. One was HOPE VI. Nearly 260 revitalization grants, totaling close to $7 billion between 1993 and 2009, tore down distressed projects and rebuilt mixed-income communities with New Urbanist design. Centennial Place was an early example. Unfortunately many housing advocates noted that fewer than half the original residents returned or received housing vouchers, and that scarce public land returned to private ownership in the process. The later Choice Neighborhoods program tried to embed new housing more carefully in existing neighborhoods, yet income segregation continued to rise nationally during this fifty year period suggesting policy objectives were not met. More affordable-housing support later took the form of Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, a direct cash subsidy to tenants that began in the late 1970s and now helps more than two million U.S. households pay rent. The program is far from universal: waiting lists are long, many landlords simply refuse to accept the vouchers, and the payment standards often fall short of average rents across the region. Because the subsidy is pegged to local market rents, the money that does get spent flows through to landlords, putting upward pressure on high density land prices. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit does the same through the corporate tax system: developers receive credits worth up to 70 percent of project cost in exchange for temporary affordability. The program has produced tens of thousands of units a year, yet costs run higher than pure private construction, and affordability requirements usually end after 15 or 30 years. Congressional Research Service. “An Introduction to the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit.” RS22389 (updated). When looking at government support for housing its useful to compare housing transfers to the largest government transfer to homeowners. The primary home “mortgage-interest tax deduction” once cost the Treasury about $60 billion a year (now closer to $25–50 billion after 2025 Big Beautiful Bill tax changes). It mainly benefits higher-income owners and is widely judged to raise house prices rather than ownership rates. By comparison, the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit costs roughly $14 billion a year for temporary affordable units, while Section 8 vouchers cost over $30 billion a year yet still feed market rents and land values. Joint Committee on Taxation. Estimates of Federal Tax Expenditures for Fiscal Years 2025–2029. JCX-45-25. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Publishing Office, 2025. Across a century of U.S. interventions, from Garden Homes and the greenbelt towns to towers-in-the-park, HOPE VI, Section 8, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit, public money has repeatedly entered the private land market without permanently removing land from speculation. The result is a small non-market stock, temporary affordability, and subsidies that often raise rather than restrain the price of urban land.

Housing, Land Value and Great Britain Britain confronted the same costly land-rent problem earlier than most other nations. After World War I the government promised “homes fit for heroes,” launching its first large program of council housing. By 1979 those homes accounted for 42 percent of the national stock. But then Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy program allowed sitting tenants to purchase their houses and flats at steep discounts; roughly 2.5 million units were sold. The most desirable town houses left the social stock first, while flats sold more slowly. A large share of the sold homes later passed into the hands of private landlords. About the same time, local authorities lost the legal power to build new rental housing directly, and housing associations took over the role of building non market housing, yet the overall social stock continued to shrink. Council housing itself has fallen sharply and now makes up only about 6 percent of the total stock in England. Private renting roughly doubled, rising from about 10 percent to 20 percent of the stock, most of it free of rent-control laws. Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government. Dwelling stock estimates, England: 31 March 2025. GOV.UK, 21 May 2026. Land Rent capture happens, then fails. After the Second World War the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act nationalized the granting of land-development rights and imposed a 100 percent betterment charge on the jump from existing-use value to development value. Later Conservative governments weakened or repealed the charge, but for a crucial decade after the war local authorities could still buy land at use value and thereby avoid embedding land-price inflation into new housing schemes. That brief window produced a large share of Britain’s social housing and new towns. The Garden City Movement Ebenezer Howard’s garden cities offered an altruistic community focused path. At Letchworth and Welwyn, his completed community projects, the land was held in common and leased to residents, so that any rise in land value stayed with the community rather than enriching individual owners. For a time the system worked. But pressure from residents who wanted full freehold title eventually proved stronger. Parliament later allowed the sale of freehold homes on subdivided parcels. Once the land itself could be bought and sold, the original affordability advantage eroded. A Letchworth house that had sold for £85,000 in 2000, still on leased land, later listed for £347,000 after the freehold was released—an object lesson in how quickly community ownership of land value can be undone. Purdom, C. B. The Building of Satellite Towns. London: Dent, 1949 (and later editions). Britain’s experiments in council housing, post-war land-value capture, and garden-city leaseholds all showed that social ownership of land can restrain speculation and keep housing more affordable. In each case, however, political pressure eventually restored freehold rights, returned land to the private market, and allowed the unearned increment to reappear as higher prices. (image: map of Welwyn Garden City.