Leon Phat           

It's the number one issue in San Francisco. It's wallet-seizing if you're a renter. It's breath-taking if you're a rent-getter.

And it affects all California. The bare minimum of making a living in this state is paying the high price of land to plant your home and family and business here.

The high rents in California--and San Francisco in particular--must consist of two things. One must be the price of land, which is what real estate agents mean by "location, location, location." The other must be the price of the buildings themselves.

If it's the high price of buildings that accounts for the high rents in San Francisco, then we should rejoice for the carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and engineers who are making big bucks constructing those buildings. But the truth is that it isn't high wages in the building and design trades that accounts for escalating rents. The replacement cost of buildings isn't soaring.

That leaves the rent of land to account for the high rents. It is the high price of land which makes San Francisco and the Bay Area the high rent district of Northern California. The proof of this is simple to find. In your mind move any building in San Francisco to Modesto and what happens to the rent? It falls precipitively, of course.

If housing rights advocates, urban planners, and do-gooders are going to meaningfully address the high rent crisis, they must address the high price of land.

Rent control doesn't change the price of land, it simply means that master lease holders can charge sub-tenants the market rent of land.

Restricting the construction of housing can lower the sales price of land in that a developer won't pay as much for a parcel that she can't build as much on, but it makes the price of that land go up for the renter as she competes with other renters for reduced availability of housing.

The only thing that will reduce the price of land is to reduce speculation in land. But when all speculation in land is eliminated, the normal price of land will remain. That's because there is not an infinite amount of land. Not even in Modesto. Not even in Texas! Wherever two or more people desire to occupy the same place, it is precisely there that land will command price. It's not an ideology. It's a natural phenomenon. The price may be as simple as two people agreeing to share the same parcel or as ugly as two peoples willing to batter one another to control the Mexican-California border. In between it's the dollar price of rent paid to the land owner.

San Francisco land prices would be high even in the absence of speculation.

So what to do?  Read the column to the right!

Because land values are

COMMUNITY

S o l u t i on!

S o l u t i on!

Give yourself this: the right to use this world as your own.

Don't take as your own what others have made. Don't take the houses they've built or the businesses they've nurtured. Don't take the money they've earned.

But do take the world as your own, and do so without taking anyone else's right to use this world.

How do you accomplish that? By taxing the ownership of land at a rate equal to the income potential of that land, and using that tax revenue to pay for social goods such as schools, fire and police protection, roads, public transportation, etc.

Taxing the land rent potential of the San Francisco Bay Area would raise enough revenue to exceed the budgets of all of Northern California at the local, county, state and federal levels, combined. Add in the land rent potential of Sacramento, Redding, Modesto, and Stockton and there's a nice surplus.

And along the way of taxing all that land rent you'd eliminate land speculation. And eliminate private income from merely owning land. And oblige land owners to pay high wages to get workers to not simply rent their own land for their own livelihood getting.

Treating land as a commonwealth diverts land rent into public infrastruc-ture, kills land spec-ulation, and raises wages.

And that's PHAT!