Leon Phat           

• More housing
• Better housing

Q. What happens when you make people pay full price for use of something?

A. They use it fully or decide not to borrow it.

It's the same with land. The more land owners have to pay for the use of land, the more fully they will use that land. Or put the other way around, the less community-generated land rent the land owner gets to keep, the more he has to do to actually earn income. That means he has to build. Build More and Better housing.

And as for commercial rental and lease space, if real estate king-pins received less locational rent, they'd have to fill up their office and work and residential buildings to earn income. In other words, they'd compete with one another to fill up their buildings, meaning prices would come down. 

At present, having largely paid off their real estate, and with only a puny rent (property tax) paid for the land value added by community, building owners can afford to hold on to valuable land, often with largely vacant buildings.

Leon Phat will implement a Land Value Tax, which will collect approximately 90% of the potential rent of every parcel. He will do this to retrieve the community-generated value of value for the community. This will simultaneously leave land owners with less unearned income and generate revenue for district services such as youth and senior programming, health services, community arts and technical programs, etc. 

Land values are community

Are you incredulous that 7 billion people aren't enough to build housing for each other, or skeptical that there are dads and moms who can't build decent homes for their kids?

Leon is. So why do so many moms and dads continue to live in sub-par housing? Is it mostly because they're lazy?

Leon doesn't think so. He thinks that all that moms and dads need is an equal opportunity to use land to build on. Leon thinks that so long as land is treated as private property in terms of its income potential, there will be speculation in land ownership, which puts the squeeze on non-land owners. He also thinks that so long as most of land rent goes to private parties rather than to the public, just that long will public revenue have to be raised by taxing work. Taxed if you build a house. The building materials get taxed, too. That's foolish!

And meanwhile land owners get to keep most of the rent of the land they didn't make . . . and which the growth of community gave added rent potential to!!!!

How unconservative is that? Giving away to private parties that which was made by community!

 Let's get the phat back!