In this episode, I'm joined by Josh Vincent to talk his work implementing land value taxes across the nation. Joshua is the President of the Center for the Study of Economics. Lars Doucet co-hosted this episode.
Transcript:
William Jarvis 0:05
Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse than the past towards a better, more definite vision of the future. I’m your host, will Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.
Well, Josh, how are you doing today?
Josh Vincent 0:44
We’re doing well. How are you?
William Jarvis 0:46
Doing? Good, doing good. And everybody. For the audience. Just want to note, we’re also joined by Lars to say a previous podcast guest to talk to Jeff today. Well, Josh, buddy, do you mind giving us a brief bio and some of the big ideas you’re interested in?
Josh Vincent 1:01
Yeah, I’m interested in the big picture economic and social justice. And the inspiration I think, for what I and a lot of other people do is the 19th century political economist, Henry George. And his motto was justice, the object taxation the means. And so I’ve tried to follow that and sort of push that out into the world. I’m the director of a 501 C three, the Center for the Study of economics, and I’m the co director of another outfit, the Center for property tax reform. And what I’ve learned over the years is how to do this social justice and economic justice, Dream envision, and actually making it come real by talking to city officials, and emphasizing tax reform, as you know, as a part of the economic social justice picture, and we think that tax reform, bringing in the Henry George idea of a land value tax works, and it’s worked all over the world. And of course, it’s an idea without honor and its own land, isn’t it always the way, but Pennsylvania with the progressive movement in the early 20th century, saw fit to permit land value tax. And it started in cities like Pittsburgh, and Scranton, and it’s been expanding ever since as far as legislative permission and adoption. So we have a bunch of towns and school districts all across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, that use this because Pennsylvania, unlike a lot of places in say, the Southwest or the southeast, or the Mountain States is kind of aging out flat on its back losing young people, the demographics are, are pretty bad. Not too much in the way of immigration. So Pennsylvania really has to look for alternatives to the usual usual. And the land value tax has fit that role, especially in post industrial steel towns and steel cities that just had the bottom drop out of everything. They got a lot of kicks to the gut when say 30% of the city’s value would be one steel mill. And then whatever company in England owned it would knock it down. And overnight, everybody’s taxes tripled or quadrupled. And so they understood when we finally came to them, Hey, you know, these, these clowns in London are holding on to all this vacant land now, and they’re not doing anything with it. So make them pay for the privilege.
Lars Doucet 3:56
One more thing when he said when he said the taxes are an tripled which taxes were those,
Josh Vincent 4:00
the other taxes, the property taxes, and which is the prime source of revenue for cities in in Pennsylvania in most of the country. So because there was no more building value, they blew up the factory, by definition, then the tax burden shifted to all the steel workers who had just been fired. So it was it was untenable. A lot of them flirted with municipal bankruptcy. And so they decided to adopt the idea of a weigh in value tax. And it was it was great because essentially, we were shifting you know, city spending responsibilities onto a holding company in in London.
William Jarvis 4:51
Very interesting. I’m curious, Josh, you know what, how did you first come to Georgia ism. You know, how did you first discover land value taxes inside, this is the thing you know, I want to spend a lot of time on and work on.
Josh Vincent 5:05
Yeah, it’s interesting in, in college, I had a history professor and I wrote a really Duff paper on socialism and how it’s, it’s gonna sweep the world in this was in the 1970s, and Socialist Workers Party and all that stuff. And a history professor, Mr. Neal, Dr. Neil said, Tell you what, there’s another social reform that was just as big as socialism. And maybe that’s something that you can look into. And so I, he suggested Henry George. So I looked into it, and I went, Oh, this makes sense. And so I became a fan. And, and guide, eventually became my stepfather. He became a fan. And then he attended the Henry George School of Social Science in New York City. And finally, after I had, you know, go on through life doing kind of thing, trying to change the world, through music, art and other things. I want on Jeopardy of all things. So, yeah, I won 55,000 bucks. This is 1991. And I said, You know what, I don’t have to, you know, knock my head against the wall anymore. And so I cast around for a little while. And I heard about the Henry George Foundation, and CSE, and I called him up said, hey, what can I do to help out? You know, I think this is really great. I was, I was like, You guys was young back then. You know, this looks really great. And you said, Sorry, I can’t talk now my assistant just quit. And I don’t know what I’m doing. So I said, Really, you need an assistant. And the rest is history, I guess. And he taught me how to do the studies. This is really, just as Das was taking off. So we’re no computers in this office, just some, you know, fairly backwards ones. And we couldn’t really crunch numbers and Doctor chord, my predecessor, he did all of his data analysis on paper with pen and pencil.
Lars Doucet 7:34
And to be clear that you’re talking about Stephen cord, right? Stephen cord.
Josh Vincent 7:37
And he did it all by hand. And we did we go to a small town, and we’d go to the city hall and sit down and put all this stuff into a loose leaf binder. And that’s how LVT was adopted back then. And so happily, I was an early adopter of the kind of technology like GIS and data analytics, that that helps us do our job and makes it a lot more automated and helps us reach out a lot more.
William Jarvis 8:10
And Josh, at the middle level, but what’s the biggest blocker to implementing LBT? Across the United States? You know, is it a political bloc? Or is it a you know, like, like, in concrete, like, concretely, if you had to pin it down to one thing, what is
Josh Vincent 8:28
first of all, anything that blocks change is people are wedded to routine. They really are. They don’t like to try anything that’s new unless it’s forced forced onto them. That’s why poor cities picked up on this first because they were in trouble. And I’m empathetic. Well, no, I’m sympathetic to people in government. Because, you know, we come and say, Hey, here’s this great idea. It’s going to help your economy, it’s certainly going to help your homeowners and small businesses. Meanwhile, they’re juggling four dozen balls at once, trying to keep the lights on. One of our cities, Claritin, Pennsylvania, the streetlights had just been turned off, because they couldn’t pay the pay for it. The traffic lights were off, they had to let go of their police department. So that’s how bad things can get. And essentially, I think it’s as long as everything Bumbles along muffles. Along is the British would say, you know, no, but nobody really sees any reason to change. There’s no impetus for change. Then after that, it’s going to be who we suspect. If I’m a land value tax, advocate and analyst is it’s going to be landowners, people that own valuable land, that don’t do anything with it. Now, if you know somebody has a vacant lot in New York City and puts up an empire state building Beautiful, great, but there’s just as many not just as many, but there are enough vacant lots right next to skyscrapers in Manhattan. And the only reason they exist is vacant lots is because there the inherent value in those lots makes it very worthwhile to hold on and pay a stipend measly a couple of 1000 bucks a year for that lot. And so there’s no reason for them to develop. And that’s where land speculation comes from. So I would say that’s number two. And number three, it’s economics. You know, when you bring up economics, it’s, it’s it’s sometimes very hard to communicate to people. So what I do is I just, I listened to people, you know, I go to the town, and ask them what’s wrong? What’s wrong in your city? You know, is there anything that really irks you? And yeah, it’s, it’s what usually irks me or you guys, it’s a neglect. It’s abandonment. It’s sort of a colonial mindset of people from outside, owning the land. And essentially, all that infrastructure and value that’s been built up is being pocketed. And, but that’s hard stuff. But if I say to a community group, what’s the big problem here on in Francisville, Philadelphia? And they’ll say, Well, it’s all these burned out houses, abandoned row homes. And I asked him that, yeah, that’s pretty bad. I bet the owners don’t live there. It’s of course not. It’s a vacant lot. So what do you think happens if a building burns down? What happens to their tax bill? And everybody knew the answer, you know, homemakers, retired workers, they said their taxes go down.
Absolutely. And what happens when you keep your house up, what happens when you all your you and all your neighbors keep the neighborhood up and stable and safe, and a happy, good, healthy place to live, and they all knew our taxes go up. Which is why in Philadelphia, a lot of people never report their building improvements, which should change, but that repeats all across the country and all across the world, really, Australia, as some of you may know, is really getting a grip, getting a handle, again, on land value taxation, because of the huge price inflation in real estate in recent, recent decades. And so they’re making a real effort to dump the really bad taxes, the stamp duty land tax, we would call the real estate transfer tax, you know, when you buy a parcel, you have to pay 10% of the value up front. It’s outrageous, and it’s regressive. So Australia, at least is learning how to dump that and go to a long term land tax that includes commercial residential and vacant properties. I think it’s surely starting to show real results. In Australia, there’s starting to turn around the the malaise of speculation, or foreign ownership of land. And that’s what we’re trying to do here. But the first thing is indolence. Nobody wants to change these habits. Our cities have been run fiscally, the same way for 120 550 years.
Lars Doucet 13:33
And one thing you said that I thought was really fascinating was, traditionally, if you read the traditional Georgia’s texts, you know, Georgia has that famous speech where he talks about what happens when the population grows, right, that population growth is this major cause of appreciating prices. And so there’s this kind of common sense notion that land value tax, it’s a solution for areas that are growing in population, but you’ve just laid out this entire example of places that are in decline. And presumably, in your view, land value taxation works just as well in areas of decline. That’s kind of surprising to some people. So I was wondering if you could talk about exactly how that works in areas of decline and not just areas of increasing population.
Josh Vincent 14:19
It’s kind of a rescue strategy. And it’s something that is implementable right now. What do I mean by a rescue strategy? Well, let’s look at Allentown Pennsylvania used to be an industrial powerhouse. And it had the infrastructure to go along with it. The infrastructure that supported a population of workers in you know, dense density and busy downtown, all that kind of thing. And roads, snow plows was expensive schools, and then the industry left they were in big trouble. So the question really is you It’s like the flip side of the group that that we work with sometimes called strong towns. And strong towns, wonders, why are we spending all this money on infrastructure, but it’s never going to pay for itself? Oh, hell, I went down, put up that infrastructure between 1920 1950 and 1970. It’s there. So you need a way to bring people in or back in to the town. And by lowering the taxes, either on buildings, which is what LVT basically is, what if you lower other taxes? Like, in Pennsylvania, we have the per capita tax, it’s an actual head tax. We have wholesale business tax, we have a retail business tax, there are so many tiny taxes, and it’s the death of 1000 cuts. And so it just doesn’t make sense in a mobile, modern economy. No, I don’t want to pay the sales tax. Okay, I’ll go to Delaware, which has no sales tax. And so tax avoidance is very easy. The only thing that is I think we know that you can’t avoid as is a land tax. Nobody is shoveling dirt into a Mack truck, you know, in the middle of the night and taking it out of Allentown and dumping it in Bethlehem doesn’t work like that. So the site value is a lot of things, but it’s population. And it’s also the infrastructure the population has put in there over the years. And if you don’t get any of that infrastructure paid for, by bringing people back in to pay taxes on the on the land, we hope, then you’re going to be stuck. So for a growing place, it’s it’s a no brainer. We have Mark Laurita with his idealistic, self, self made city in the desert. That’s going to be based on Henry George principles, you know, more more power to him? Where’s he going to get the water? You know? That’s that’s a good question. Federal government, I guess. But if you start a brand new city, it’s obvious. In fact, a lot of property assessors in, in the cities that have come out against LVT. They said, Well, you know, it’s a good idea at the start of a city. Well, almost no city or community in the world ever in history has been built, let’s go cut the ribbon, open the city, it’s an organic thing that gets built up and the value becomes inherent in the land because of number one, people want to be there the natural advantage and number two, they’ve spent money for, for this infrastructure. And currently all over the country. Maintenance and Operations is the unspoken boogeyman of what’s what’s affecting old suburbs, old cities, and up and coming experts is that we build this wonderful crap. But there’s no no plan to pay for it down the road. And the only way to pay for down the road is to have a self generating loop of revenue. And that’s what the land value tax is. So as far as a rescue plan for poor cities, it’s worked. A lot of the Pennsylvania cities, were able to move out of what is essentially municipal bankruptcy, because they were able to get more businesses back in town, they were able to get more people moving in. And as small cities became kind of a hit place to move into, they can take advantage of that.
Lars Doucet 18:54
So if you could kind of walk me through it step by step, just kind of break down the micro economic incentives for me. So like take a place like Detroit, right place that presumably needs rescuing now, you know, um, can you compare kind of the incentives of the status quo system, and then talk about how an LVT might help rescue say Detroit, the same way it did these other towns? He said that it that it helped with, you know, and so I can kind of like understand how it makes that difference, even if the population is not going.
Josh Vincent 19:24
Yeah, in the in the general sense. Detroit is interesting, because so much of the city is now owned by the government. You know, that’s that was sort of their reflexive reaction to the collapse of the auto industry, and therefore, the city, Cuyahoga County, St. Louis, same thing. In government really doesn’t have any strategies for getting that land back onto market. And it’s sort of like land banks. That’s the new flavor of the month and a land bank He’s going to collect the land that’s been abandoned, they’re going to put it together and assemble parcels. And then, but it’s like, catch and release, and then they’re going to put that land back into the same polluted stream of bad taxes, and anti capital and anti labor policies. So in the micro sense, half the city’s owned by the government, and they don’t have any clue how to get it back onto the tax rolls, even though it’s still the infrastructure still serves. And in the other context, what you’ve got is pennies on the dollar is what it costs to sit on a vacant lot. And buy land, they ain’t making any more of it. That’s, you know, one of the oldest and hoariest cliches but it’s true. In Detroit, the Savior, corporate savior of Detroit is the guy that owns Quicken Loans. And what’s he doing? He’s buying hundreds of parcels. Deutsche Bank right after the 2008 recession, they bought hundreds of almost abandoned almost worthless, lots in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, why would they buy it because the holding price is pathetically so small, there’s really no reason to do anything with it, except to sit on it in cities don’t have time for that. People don’t have time for the their neighborhood to burn down around them. Until they’re the only house left and the rest of it are absentee landlords. I think that flipping the script on absenteeism, speculate speculation is is key to the to unlocking this land. It’s locked up either by government, it’s out of ideas, or it’s locked up by people who know a great investment when they see it.
Lars Doucet 21:58
So you’re saying that when a city comes into decline, it basically gets this additional kind of headwind on it, as people just buy land. And then if the building on it burns down, as you say, like they pay even less property tax. So like, and they might as well hold on to it, because it’s so cheap, it’ll, you know, on the off chance, it’ll go up in value in 10 years, it will have been a smart investment now. And that just keeps anyone from coming back in and improving things. Is that what you’re saying?
Josh Vincent 22:26
That’s what I’m saying, especially about residential properties. Now, another thing that’s happened, I’ll use Pittsburgh is, I think, a pretty good example, when all of these steel companies went bust, and then all of the supporting industries went bust. They didn’t walk away from their land, they have good lawyers, and they have good knowledge of tax law. So most of these parcels were given to the Urban Redevelopment Authority IrDA. And I can’t think of a better phrase IrDA it’s a nonsensical phrase. So this property goes from the company to the Development Authority, which is a quasi governmental authority, and they get a nice tax break for it on their federal taxes, actually, they get the depreciation, and if it’s donated to IrDA, they have tax credits that you would not believe, because you and I will never be eligible for them. So that’s what the corporate side does the commercial side does it and on the residential side, yeah, you’re gonna hold on to it, until, you know, the market turns or more likely, a desperate state or or city government says, Look, let us buy this land from you. And and we’ll redevelop it, and, you know, turn it into a community land trust, that kind of thing. But essentially, the city is so desperate that they go scrounging you know, behind the couch for loose change, to buy these parcels that are worth not much money at all. And they pay a lot for them to get them out of the hands of the speculators. And, you know, and that’s, that that happens a lot. You know, when when we look at the numbers, they are astonishingly the same across cities, you know, the numbers of vacancies and how value is essentially kept, you know, it’s like holding your cards close to your chest. You’re a speculator, you know how much the land is worth, in a good market? So,
Lars Doucet 24:35
can you quantify that for us? You said the numbers are kind of the same. What kind of numbers are you seeing in these situations?
Josh Vincent 24:39
The numbers are a comparison of a lot of different numbers, but it’s who owns the land who owns the city. And in a place like Philly, or Detroit. It’s people that don’t live in the area in the city. They don’t have a stake in the community. If you don’t have a stake in the community, you don’t care, all you want to is, is some money to come back. And it’s great for them. Because the if there is a building on it, you can depreciate the building, just by sitting there. And you have a good accountant. But the building depreciates over the course of 10 or 20 years. And what do LLCs the residential properties? Do? They sell their LLC to another LLC. And the depreciation schedule starts all over again. Now, is this a new company? Probably not. It’s just transferring one LLC to another. And in the end, they’re they’re controlled by the same group of dentists in North Jersey, who are, you know, buying land as a speculation. So, you also look at places where the city says we’re going to rebuild the city here we take a stand. That’s, that’s the best thing that these people could hear that while you’re going to take a stand, that means the land is immediately going to increase in value. We have in Philadelphia, a plan to cap it 95 Which is the big interstate that goes through the city, terrible desecration in the 1950s. And it is today, but everybody says okay, we’re Urbanus. Now, we’re all urbanists. So all of that land around i 95, that’s going to be kept, and they’re going to put up trees and birds and chirping things. All that tapping is going to increase the land values directly, of course. And that’s, that’s where they’re going to make their killing. Also, in Philadelphia, as an example, I can use, we had a casino. And for years, there was a derelict dock appear. That used to be for freighters and for international trade, sort of the good old days for the USA. And it was valued at $10,000 on Columbus Boulevard, which is prime waterfront now. But it was valued at $10,000. Because the zoning was industrial, you know this, we’re gonna bring back industrial jobs, we’re going to the usual siren songs. But instead, the owners took advantage of zoning. And zoning is sort of the the unspoken behemoth zoning Trumps land value, it’s one of the few things that do legally, because you’re using the police power of the state to really change by by fiat, almost the value of a site. So this pier was zoned overnight to dense commercial and casino was built. But you know, and everybody was really happy. Your mother just had a nice new source of victims. And you know, there was some ancillary lien value appreciation, but that peer went from $10,000 in value in less than a month to, I think I’m right, but to about $900,000. Simply because of the stroke of a pen. And you know, if people pay attention to bond issuance, if people pay attention to urban redevelopment plans, and nobody does, most regular folks don’t, you can make yourself a killing. So, speculation.
Lars Doucet 28:43
Well, I’ll let you take the mic back in a sec here, but I got a remark, which is you mentioned zoning. Now some people say we don’t need LVT at all, all we got to do is fix zoning. And you just said that like zoning is a big deal zoning can trump land value, you know, how do you feel on the subject?
Josh Vincent 28:58
If we zoned that pier to a million dollars, which which the city did but it’s still empty. And so the property tax that falls on that up zoned parcel, okay, instead of $500 a year, no exaggeration, you’re going to be paying $25,000 a year. It’s worth it. You know, if you’ve got 300 of these self, same parcels all across the country, it’s no big deal. It’s going to show up on your bottom line to some degree. But as long as the rate on that land stays low, it can be up zoned. You can change the zoning, but it’s going to as long as you keep it vacant. It’s going to really be very doable if you’re a speculator. So the idea is to kick the market, let the market kick them in the ass. In other Words realize the actual value of that land by charging what it’s worth, you know, paying for the privilege is a phrase I use all the time, you know, great, okay, you’re sitting on 100 acres of land with, you know, the sewers and roads, etc. And you’re not paying anything for sitting on it. So that’s a privilege in, in my understanding of what the word privilege means. It’s, it’s an absolutely medieval concept. And the only way we can up in that is to enjoy the privilege, or they can pay for the privilege, you don’t want to build Knock yourself out, but you’ve got to pay for it.
William Jarvis 30:40
So it sounds like just fixing zonings not enough.
Josh Vincent 30:44
I don’t think so. Now, that makes sense. I’m sure I’m sure of it. Because if we look at the Bay Area, nothing’s affordable. And zoning has been changing in the past 10 or 15 years, but nowhere near enough, because it’s still cheap to sit on the land that you keep underused or vacant. Now, that’s an extreme case, the Bay Area, but it plays out.
Will Jarvis 31:13
What, you know, this leads to my next question. So Bay Area, you know, probably this is probably the most expensive like it city wise piece of real estate, if you just took the whole city in the world, you know, sort of American innovation. What what, you know, if I gave you, you know, a couple, let’s say, you know, 100 billion bucks, could you go in, and, you know, bribe some city officials and make this happen? And what what is, what is the price? I guess what I’m asking is, what is the process look like to implement LVT? Like, mechanically? Is it going to like City Hall, going to the town council pitching the town council getting buy in, etc, etc? Like, like, and how do you approach that?
Josh Vincent 31:54
That that’s a great question. And I take my lessons from from history, of course. And in the good old days, Joseph Stalin didn’t start out as a dictator. He started out as a punk from the Republic of Georgia, shooting a post offices and stealing money. That’s how we started. So in the positive sense, and LVT advocate is going to go to a town council or city council and start small, we’ve already done that, which is why I think it’s time to move beyond we’ve shown it can be done. Just like, I know, it’s bad humor, but you just do what Stalin did just get more ambitious. Yeah. And but the idea is that you ask, as I said earlier, you ask the people what’s wrong with your city? What, what do you want fixed. And tax policy is how we can address a lot of these problems. And so you get one council person on board. And sometimes they become, they become Georgist, it’s really strange, they start to see the solution in everything. But it’s a practical sense. They know that bringing in the land value tax is going to kick the land wasters off the land, and it’s going to give a break, to the doomed to the people who never get a break who never get anything. And I sometimes use hyperbolic words like doomed. But you know, if you go to some of these cities in the Midwest, or or wherever overseas, the general sense is Doom, because only a very few privileged people are able to control the levers. Now in the smaller cities, which is where we start, you do have to get support. But in Altoona, we had a land value tax, that was almost the ultimate in a sense, because there was no tax on buildings. But for years, they had done this over the course of 10 years, you know, shifting the tax on buildings down and down. And the city manager who is is recently deceased, unfortunately, he said, you know, no one’s gonna even notice that this is happening until about the eight fear, then you’re going to run into trouble. I said, Really, but all these homeowners are saving hundreds of dollars a year on their tax bills. He says, Don’t worry about them, worry about the people whose taxes are going to go up. They’re going to come to City Hall with the proverbial pitchfork represented by a legal firm. And they’re going to terrify the city at some point with you know, threats of action. Now, in in Altoona, it was a car dealer, but he wasn’t really a car dealer. He was a land speculator was a used car dealer. I’m not going to name his name because I did it once and they almost almost tried to sue me But it was a new car dealership that did very well for years. And then Altoona just collapsed in the bottom fell out. It used to be the world’s leading steam and steam engine repair town. Well, we don’t do steam engines anymore. So you know, the whole, the whole edifice fell. And so what he did, the car dealer is he’s kept selling cars, which is good money. And he kept buying the lots, up and down this main street, that was a feeder, into what were built later to interstate exits. And he was in between both exits. And so by the government intervening, and building these exits, what did that do it created value, and the value capture, he wanted to capture the value for himself, which is really how this works, you know, we create the value, and some schmuck comes and takes it. And so a land value tax is intended, directly intended to sort of Countervail that, and after eight years have been bud, that was his name, the Chevy dealer will give you the last name. But bud said, if you don’t get rid of this, you know, we’re, you know, I’m gonna leave town, which would have been the best thing that could have happened. But but played golf with them, you know, with the some of the council people. And that’s how, you know, that’s how things work is we know politics. And even though 80% Of all the homeowners saved over 50% a year on their property taxes. That was not that was not their concern.
Lars Doucet 36:51
So Lars, go ahead. No, probably gonna ask the same question.
William Jarvis 36:55
Yeah, like, well, let’s see the same.
Will Jarvis 36:58
Josh, how do you think about like, like, how do you reinforce these? Like, like, how do you I guess, reinforce the walls here so that you get to your a bud comes around and starts complaining or maybe even worst case, you know, it’s Steve Schwarzman. It’s like private equity. They come in, like, hey, like, we bought these times in Detroit, we’re really mad that we don’t want this anymore. And we got a ton of money to spend, you know, how do you stop that? Is it just like, you know, the Jordans movement needs to raise a lot of money and be prepared to like, go to war over these things? Like when you hit your eight, like, like, Oh, is there anything else mechanically you can do? I don’t know? Well,
Josh Vincent 37:35
that’s a great question. And I think that’s kind of why we’re here. The georgeous movement back in the day had 10s of 1000s, of energetic youthful boosters, who talked about this issue day in and day out. It had a great effect on the early part of the 20th century in this country. And as a movement, it sort of withered with the advent of, of socialism, you know, sort of socialism light in the United States.
William Jarvis 38:08
Like Lars said, the car, right. So if you can, if you can expand out, if you can move to the suburbs, you can, you know, the needs a little bit less.
Josh Vincent 38:15
Yeah, I mean, you can have an urban growth boundary like Portland, Oregon does, which actually just makes the land much all that more, much more valuable inside. And then there’s the growth boundary, and people skip it, they just go another 25 miles or 40 miles into the countryside, in form this ring of suburbs outside of the urban growth boundary. It’s, it is like Portlandia, in that sense, people making awful choices and not looking, looking ahead. So where were we I made such a great point about
Lars Doucet 38:53
So so how do we how do we so people about this up that it’s like, oh, it’s a great theory, but your your, you know, corrupt people are going to come in and they’re going to shut you down. Which to me just sounds like a general argument that works against any policy change you want to make, like, anything good you want to do is going to be resisted by some entrenched interest. Who’s going to make a buck if you don’t do it? So the question is, what is the solution look like for georgeous? Is it’s like, was it just that there was the institution was so weak, there’s no standing up to the buds of the universe? Or was it that there was something deeper at work?
Josh Vincent 39:27
I don’t think there was anything deeper at work. I mean, politics is corrupt. And it doesn’t matter what the issue is. And maybe I’m getting on another soapbox. It’s not appropriate. But the corruption of society in the United States and a lot of the rest of the world since the end of World War Two has been growing pace. And I think that one thing that gets people back is going to get people back is the continuing localization and devolution of government to lower and lower at smaller and smaller levels. You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. My vision is to go back to the future in the Middle Ages when things were going to hell and anger, Northern European cities banded together, and they started the Hanseatic League, which opened reopened a trade, but not not amongst empires or countries, but cities. And I think things are going to get a little smaller and more manageable, smallest beautiful the phrase goes. And if it’s more manageable, people can have more input. People don’t have input in a lot of decisions. And we have social media, and we have things that didn’t exist when Altoona first enacted all VT, none of that existed in 2001. So now you can you can name and shame. bad actors. And I hate to say it, but that’s often the road to success. And if there’s young people out there, they love to name and shame. You know, I read the papers. That’s what happens. So name and shame the right people. And I think things can turn around. But like, yeah,
Lars Doucet 41:23
just as a push back on that, I mean, can’t Can’t the buds of the world do the same thing? I mean, so what um, so is there more to it than that, though? Because it’s like, what stops a local car dealer from being like, here’s all these awful yimby George’s so you’re trying to, you know, he’s Lin communists, or whatever they want to call us. You know, I’m like, what makes us come out on top of something like that? Is it just that the demographics are on our side or, or what?
Josh Vincent 41:51
Demographics are definitely on our side. And by that, I mean, the people, the people side, and the sort of regimented cemented structures that have been running our country for a long time, at every every level, they’re starting to weaken. There’s pretty much it the CDC right now is a laughingstock that’s crazy. When I was 20 years old, the CDC was like church, everybody respected, nobody talks back. And now people are going. So there’s that much uncertainty in the air and Bud can count on or could count on. Nobody knowing and say what you will about social media in the internet, keeping information camp down is really difficult.
Lars Doucet 42:47
So that’s what you’re saying is that it’s less about necessarily putting someone on blast and using a capsule mob to get the job done, and more that there’s no smoke filled rooms anymore, where nobody will know what the backhanded deal was, is that kind of what you’re saying?
Josh Vincent 43:01
The smoke is clearing, we’ll always have smoke cleared room, smoke filled rooms.
Lars Doucet 43:07
But I guess we can all we can all smell it now.
Josh Vincent 43:09
Yeah. Sunlight, Sunshine is the best, you know, anti septic or whatever. Sterilization medium in light. That’s why they call them sunshine acts. And you have to take advantage of what reformers who have come before you put into place things like open records, FOIA, open data, a lot of the work that we’re doing with the Center for property tax reform, if you go and look at our, our maps and our projects, all of those were those city databases were gained through open data. In other words, I don’t have to beg the city of Seattle for their database. It’s there. It’s there for the taking. And it’s updated, thanks to API getting a little wonky. But thanks to API, it’s getting updated on a daily basis if need be.
Lars Doucet 44:06
That’s really interesting, because like in Texas, we have we don’t have that right. Like there’s the property transactions are probably all in in. In the real estate databases. What do they call that? And MLS MLS? Yeah. But like you, an assessor probably doesn’t have access to those. But Pennsylvania famously is supposed to have this like really good open data. I mean, I guess well, you could jump in on this if you want to.
William Jarvis 44:32
It does seem to be a lot better than than I’m no expert by any means. But Pennsylvania does have to say seem to have good records in that department.
Josh Vincent 44:39
Well, it’s it’s legal and I think it’s required for real estate transactions to be public, Texas, specifically in 2007. Ended the public reporting of real estate transactions. So Texas legislature’s decided to lock lock that down. And that was in 2007.
Lars Doucet 45:02
I realize it was I didn’t realize it was that recent.
Josh Vincent 45:06
Yeah, I mean, there used to be. There’s there’s a land office in the state of Texas. And it used to have every parcel on a paper map, every county, every parcel, and then it was digitized, and it’s still out there somewhere, but it’s been locked down. And so any freedom loving Texans should should get together with a class action suit. And the reason I know this is because we’ve been asked to look at Texarkana in Texarkana is Do you guys know Texarkana at all?
Lars Doucet 45:40
Bilson
Josh Vincent 45:42
super bizarre place, it was a railroad depot in the 1870s. And as you can guess, Tex Arcana is on the border of Texas and Arkansas, two different cities, ones in Texas ones in Arkansas, the Texas one has a high property tax, and it’s a much healthier community, which is what I would expect as a Linda you tax person. On the Arkansas side, most city revenue comes from the sales tax, and the sales tax falls on almost everything, including food. So there’s an idea to unite these cities in sort of, in we’ll see how it goes. This is in the opening stages. But getting the data is really tough. And it used to be easy assessment data, I mean, and it used to be pretty easy and automatic in Texas.
Lars Doucet 46:39
But we just didn’t hear the assessment data or like market transaction data,
Josh Vincent 46:43
assessment data assessment data should have sales data to it that won’t tell you, you know, who owns everything, but you’ll have a sale date. Most assessments have this. When was it sold? What kind of a sale? Was it? Was it arm’s length? You know, was it a legitimate sale? And what and the date? And who did use who sold it? And who bought it? So that stuff is out there? It’s it’s essential reading for any reformer, the explosion of LLCs. That was talking about them earlier, the explosion of LLCs is a reason why we need that kind of information out because LLCs are shell shell companies, their covers, if you see how many are based in Delaware. You know why? Because there’s great tax advantages to doing that. But it also grants a lot of anonymity in New York State. I know that in the assembly, they passed a law opening up LLC ownership to a small degree. But it’s a start. I think that’s where we are in this this whole thing along with like minded people that want a better world for everybody. It’s, it’s a start in all of life is a start. And then you start again, you start again, it just no defeat, no surrender.
Lars Doucet 48:10
It’s been interesting what you’re saying before, where you’re kind of you seem to be of the opinion that the best place to start is at the local level and work your way up. So like, it’s interesting, you mentioned the Hanseatic League. So I’m, I’m, I’m Norwegian, like my, from my mom’s from and stuff. And it’s interesting when I compare my experience as an American citizen as my experiences in a region citizen, because Norway is a very small country, they’re not part of the EU, you know. And the Houston metropolitan area has more people than I mean, there’s more Houstonians, and there are no regions in the world. And I’m not counting Minnesota. But like, what’s interesting is, is just like the level of distance between you and your government officials, at the highest level, and Norway’s much smaller, you know, in the communities are much smaller. And so, you know, I’m actually like her that there’s some interest in LVT they’re, like a government official or to is, like, contacted me after I did some writing over there. And I’m just wondering, I just bring this thing to just kind of illustrate like the question of scale. And what what is the path you see for getting LVT in America, you know, specifically with all of our layers of stuff of government, you know, with like, the Texas Supreme Court, disallowing LVT. And then also on the state level, not having public real estate transactions, you know, how to even start you just have to go to a, a favorable other state in a favorable city in that state and work your way up there. How do you see it going?
Josh Vincent 49:45
Get given the reality is that, you know, I’m one of the only employees of the center. I’m one of the only employees of the Center for property tax reform. That it’s it’s very, it’s tiny It’s it’s small. And the only way you can get more victories is to leverage the small victories. I mean, one thing that George’s will never do is, you know, pick up a gun. So in contravention of Joseph Stalin, we’re not going to go that route. We never can, you know, we’re humanistic. But the idea of proving an example to another town is I think the way forward when McKeesport, Pennsylvania, adopted LVT in 1980, the surrounding towns of Clairton and Duquesne, they started suffering relatively quickly, because this was during the steel collapse that I referenced earlier. And they started collapsing rather quickly. In other words, all the demolitions kept going on. In those towns, any business licenses would go to McKeesport because they’d only in taxes cheaper. Essentially, you make it cheaper to do life and to do business in an LVT city. And so within three years, Claritin and Duquesne adopted LVT. So you’re showing, you know, the the power of competition, you know, and I think that that’s the only way to do it, at least at this local level. But again, it’s got to be, we’ve got to aim big. And, you know, it’s sort of, I hope to pass on the torch, you know, if you will, to, you know, an activist, angry, righteously angry bunch of people who can read some lessons from what we’ve done in what Stephen Kord did, in Percy Williams before him. And a lot of other places like the shotkam Bach Foundation, and expand it. I mean, it there was a high watermark, you know, Australia had a national land tax. And World War Two put paid to that. And of course, World War one sort of put an end to to the LVT movement in the UK. But you can get back into that we look at the examples of Singapore, or Hong Kong, and they’re not LVT, per se, but they collect the economic rent of land, by hook or by crook, and they turn it into investment in infrastructure, or lower or no income taxes or business taxes. And that’s what you do. It’s we’re collecting something called the economic rent, which is a hard concept. For a lot of people. When you think of rent, you think, Oh, I pay 350 a month, you know, for my, for my locker room, my storage locker. That’s not what rent is, of course. And so I tried to communicate the idea of rent by putting it in the terms of saying, Well, this is part of the tax. Well, we know that LVT is, is truly not attacks, but you got a roll with what the people know. So
Lars Doucet 53:20
my friend people put it is that you’re either paying tax to a private entity or you’re paying it to your community. Yeah,
Josh Vincent 53:28
it goes into private pockets. And that can be demonstrated over and over, especially with the sort of ancillary movement of land value capture. There’s a very smart colleague of mine in Washington named Rick ryebeck. And he wants to change the whole terminology. And I think he’s onto something. Calling it land value recycling, instead of a tax because that’s what it is. It’s it’s a self enclosed loop. And if you look at Singapore and Hong Kong, they have that kind of loop of rent, to public services, collected back and rent. And it’s circular and it’s it’s a natural way of doing things. Is it opposed to the millions of dead ends in in Norway, Bergen was one of the big Hanseatic cities. I just wanted to point that out. I mean, I don’t think I’ve been a fan of been to Rostock than that you bow and Bremen and Bremerhaven. Did you know that Finland has a municipal lien value tax?
Lars Doucet 54:40
I did not know that one. No,
Josh Vincent 54:41
no, not Scandinavia, and I know but in a way they are. They’re not nor they’re not Norse.
Lars Doucet 54:48
Geographically how Finns will argue with you about it. Yeah, I
Josh Vincent 54:51
think they will find out who grips and they should. I never gonna call Helsinki housing befores But yeah, they haven’t municipal land value tax. It’s been around for 15 years, Estonia has a national land value right? Now I have heard of that one. Yeah, it’s it’s small. And there’s always the pressure of the landowners, right. But in Estonia, it was done for a very pragmatic reason they wanted to get rid of their Russian minority. And that was a good way to do it. So you can do bad things with LVT, I suppose, as well as good things. But that’s the interesting thing is that land is at the heart of everything in his heart of every activity.
Lars Doucet 55:40
Well, I mean, it’s like if you’re, if you’re applying it consistently, right, and you’re not just like, targeting it towards a specific ethnic group or something, you know, and that’s actually something that’s actually interesting is talking about, like the status quo, you know, you sometimes like we’ll read a paper about how property tax can be regressive, or land tax can be regressive. And at least in the studies I’ve seen, in the places, they find that it turns out to be regressive, and it like hits this community or this racial group more than others. It’s usually because the assessments themselves have are bad. Right? And I was wondering if you could speak to that, that it’s like, if you can get accurate assessments, then it becomes progressive and equitable.
Josh Vincent 56:22
Yes, it becomes more progressive, the land value tax, even the property tax can be somewhat progressive, you know, the taxing land and buildings. But we’ve done some research for the city of Philadelphia, it’s on on the website. And we asked ourselves, how can we prove LVT will be progressive. And it was actually pretty simple. We took all the taxable land value in Philadelphia split it split all the properties by quintiles and the bottom quintiles are the lowest valued land where generally poor areas or areas of minority representation, and a land value tax benefited them by several factors as far as saying 15% A year savings, as opposed to the very richest properties in wealthy Philadelphia neighborhoods, and also center city, Philadelphia, commercial districts. They paid more, and they paid a lot more. Because yeah, and I’ll send you guys out the URL out the PDF, because it’s really easy peasy. And you know, I’ve been thinking about it for years. But there’s so much to do, but Mason Gaffney said LVT is a progressive tax. Yeah, but how do you prove it?
Lars Doucet 57:52
So I I’m really interested that analysis, I’d love to see that. But just to play devil’s advocate, you know, sometimes the report said it’s like, like, particularly African Americans have more of their wealth in housing than they do in other assets. For instance, I’ve seen charts like that, that I’ve done, I believe, and so some people say that that implies that land value tax would be racially regressive, because white people have less of their wealth, like more of it’s in stocks, less of it proportionately to their total assets, stuff is in in housing, is there a response to that?
Josh Vincent 58:28
It’s the racial component is an economic component. If I took you to Plattsburgh, New York, we would have the same outcomes. But 95 96% of the city are white, they’re not black. So if you go to Appalachia, and did the same kind of analysis, the people that are going to get hosed are poor. And in our eastern cities, in our western cities, although western cities are losing black population pretty, pretty quickly. But if you look at our cities, you know, that’s it. That’s an artifact, an economic and cultural artifact of the great migration from the South to major American cities after World War Two. And in that sense, they suffered because they went to get jobs in the industrial north, and really after redlining and after the interstate Act, which demolished I think dozens of neighborhoods if not hundreds of neighborhoods, across the country. It disproportionately affected black people and black neighborhoods. We’ve been working closely with close in neighborhoods in Philadelphia that are primarily black and LVT. Turns out to be a way to save them from save is not the right word, but to give them relief from the Real Estate. Boom, that that’s that’s driving
Lars Doucet 1:00:02
your numbers. So your numbers find that, that it does actually results in a more equitable outcome for those racial groups than the status quo.
Josh Vincent 1:00:13
Yeah, or economic groups. I mean, to me, they’re interchangeable. It has to do with, you know, who’s got the green. And in Altoona, nobody, nobody owns anything except for their house. They don’t have anything.
Lars Doucet 1:00:27
I mean, is the argument kind of that it’s like, okay, so like, maybe a poor black family or middle income, black family, right, might have more of their relative wealth and housing, but less wealth overall, like, Bill Gates is the single largest private landowner of farmland in America, but probably most of his wealth is Microsoft stock, you know, so it’s possible for someone to be like richer in an absolute sense, but less of their relative wealth is tied up in housing, I guess.
Josh Vincent 1:00:56
Yeah, I agree with you. And there’s no, there’s no way or it’s very difficult for the black community to buy in to the system. Interesting. Now, maybe we should create a new system. And I would be more than happy to support that communities based on community land trusts. And also community stock holding, community shares, that kind of thing. It’s been done berkshares, and Ithaca has, you know, Ithaca bucks or something. But those are really designed for happy, hippie, small college communities. But if you translated that concept into a working class neighborhood, you can certainly create wealth, and wealth that stays in the community. I mean, the black community produces plenty of wealth, but it leaves that same night, it goes to the absentees. They work there, they work as hard as anybody else in this world. You know, the clams, claims not withstanding, they were harder than anybody else, but it’s stolen through rents at the end of the day. And so I agree with you, nobody’s gonna steal from Bill Gates, because he, he owns all the cops, so to speak. And he has patent interests, and patents and things like that, that’s protected by an army of lawyers. And that’s a damn hard thing to be. So in the black community, if the, if they’re produced, self produced, wealth stays in the community, then they’re empowered. And they can end white world supremacy, where they live by by making these changes these reforms. One of the first books I ever read was the end of white world supremacy by Malcolm X. I was eight years old. Wow. I was I was really moved by it. And it was he, he was good, anyhow.
Lars Doucet 1:03:00
Well, you got any, we’re coming up on the hour here. Do you have any more questions?
William Jarvis 1:03:04
Yeah, you know, I just I just want to recap, it sounds like, you know, like, with any movement or policy implementation, you know, history says really matters. So success begets success. And, you know, if there’s a history of things not working, it’s hard to hard to get that turn around. I do think we’re at a place where, you know, winds will start stacking up and it’ll start heading in the right direction and seeing some accelerate very quickly. But it sounds like to me, like your, your your ideas about how to implement Liberty Tax in the US are, okay, you start with, you know, what’s the easiest municipality to implement levy tax and you get a win, you get a slightly larger, slightly bigger fish, bigger municipality, you win there, and you go on up the chain until it’s San Francisco. Is that correct? Am I on the right track there? Or is there some other parts? That’s better?
Josh Vincent 1:03:53
I think, for what I do, you’ve got it. You start with the low hanging fruit to overuse a cliche. And you have this basket of fruit. And what do you do with it? You you share it with people, you share the knowledge of it with people, but for we’re working now, CPT are in New York City. And we’ve got a pretty good exhaustive analysis of land vacancy and land blight in New York. And the upshot of that is okay, so what? Well now where’s our next project Park be in New York City is following the ownership. And the ownership follows the wave of gentrification that destroyed these neighborhoods in the outer boroughs of New York City. And the first move towards reform happened with a mini pilot program that we worked on with then city controller or Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. And it was simple, but we took Every night we’d but a law was passed in the research work that every vacant lot that was residential north of 100/10 street, I mean, I’m being really obscure here, but that’s the way the law is defined. It went from a very low tax to a much higher tax. And in this pilot program, what used to raise, I think it was like $800 a year, or eight, sorry, $800,000 a year now raises about $10 million a year. Plus, there’s houses on top now. So the pilot program was tiny. And but it was spearheaded by some powerful elected officials, mostly black. In Harlem, this is South Harlem. And it was signed into law by David Patterson, who was then the governor of New York. So starting small and moving up can mean a lot of things, it can mean grabbing a town, it can mean liberating a district and giving it back to the people, there’s there’s a lot of ways legally, that it can be done without without firing a shot.
William Jarvis 1:06:16
Well, I guess, just to correlate that, you know, like, if, if I gave you like, like a large resource problem pile, let’s say, you know, it’s like $50 million today. Go crazy. Implement land value tax in the US, your goal is to get as much as many, you know, plots of land, the US covered with LVT as possible. What’s your approach there? Is it is it, you know, pick up the next easiest municipality and just move up on the list, is that correct?
Josh Vincent 1:06:47
The next best step would be to grab, like I said, a district say Washington industry, gotcha. Or some sort of self contained, you know, like a state city state, okay, like on sciatic. And if you got the District of Columbia to do this, you would be pricing out immediately to speculators, because it’s almost every level of tax except for federal tax. And there’s an alternative to that to the city instead of paying, having its citizens pay income tax, could pay what they would an income tax to the federal government by giving them a share of LVT. So if you think about it, it’s possible, we did research for the city of New London, Connecticut, to do just that. And it really turned out to be not monumental is a project. Of course, it was voted voted down by the big land holders, but but we did pass and Connecticut a bunch of laws that that permitted cities to do it. But I think that if I had 50 million bucks, I would approach the the Community Land Trust idea now, which in my mind’s eye is a little flawed, because economics has been removed from it. You pay rent, but the rent is notional. And so the rent essentially makes is so low, it makes it essentially for either preserving farmland, or preserve preserving an economically depressed area in amber. Now, if you had a community land Trust’s, that had non residential properties, that paid rent on an annual basis to the nonprofit, they own the CLT, then the CLT, would, again have a self sustaining vase on that truck. And they could also expand into a scattered site model, start buying up land. That’s what the Georgist single tax communities failed to do in the early part of the 20th century. They bought their little bit of land. And if only they had taken some of that land value and bought more land than they could have brought about justice, one plot at a time.
Lars Doucet 1:09:17
How would you how would you if you want to do it, right? How would you do it?
Josh Vincent 1:09:23
The land trust it would simply be expansion. In other words, you treat it like any part of the economy, if you have the ability for a willing purchaser to take your money for land. Give it to them. At the end, it’s a one off. And so then because you have a C three you have, theoretically something in perpetuity, and so you would retire that upfront expense pretty soon okay, that’s
William Jarvis 1:09:59
what Last. Yeah, absolutely. Large. Do you have any other questions?
Lars Doucet 1:10:05
We’ll address? No, no, I don’t think so I think this has been a really interesting conversation. I guess we could talk. I mean, we’re we’re getting kind of late in the podcast here. But I guess we should probably ask at least one question about our assessment project. If you want to, if you want to ask him a little bit about that.
William Jarvis 1:10:21
Yeah. What’s the best tech to take there? You think? Last couple minutes?
Lars Doucet 1:10:25
Yeah, just just clarify for the listeners will and I were awarded a Astro Codex 10 grant to do an assessment project in Pennsylvania, because of the various objections to George’s and one of them is that you can’t actually do assessments in real life that are accurate separating land value from building value. And my part three was an empirical analysis of the latest research papers, interviewing Ted Courtney, who’s this big famous Georgia assessor and you know, some other people and just looking at the data, it seems like you can do it, and a lot of new methods have come out over the past 10 years. But it does seem like you need good access to good data. And so we’ll talk to some people and we put together a grant that’s like, why don’t we try to reproduce some of the state of the art methods in the place in America with the best data, which people tell us is Pennsylvania, regardless of what the quality of assessments are in Pennsylvania, supposedly they have good market transaction data that’s public. So the question becomes, how do we how do we do this? Right, you know, and when, what new value can we do that doesn’t just like, reproduce redundant stuff people already know, like, how can we do a good job that brings new knowledge and into the world,
Josh Vincent 1:11:37
and it’s replicable across areas. To Leave, leave you guys with a bit of advice. Pennsylvania, or I should say, Philadelphia has really good market data. And it’s curated by several universities. I think Drexel does a really good job, Drexel University. And so they curate it. And they also do lots of time series. And for a good analysis of assessments, you have to spread it out over a period of at least three years. In, in my humble. And also there is the realtors in Philadelphia have supported land value tax for now 10 years now. And I think that they’re I think they’re rationalizing both the valuations and the reporting of data, knowing who your neighbors are, you know, knowing who owns the property, and being able to come up with patterns of valuation within kamma areas. And Philadelphia has a fair amount vacant land sales, which is should you know, sweetener. The claim is that you can’t separate land and building values. And I don’t know if you, you know it, but in early part of the last century, every city produced parcel by parcel land value maps, that were pretty accurate. And the New York City, for example, Chicago, for example, they were all on paper. It was miraculous, I have some in the archives. So this is reinventing the wheel. It’s it’s uncovering something that was covered. land value, if if you took a realtor, by the hand, any of you into any place and ask the realtor, what’s that land worth? There would be an answer pretty quickly. And it would be pretty accurate. Because their money, their cash flow, as a realtor is based on transactions and sensible transactions. That’s why the phrase arm’s length transaction is used so much. It’s a free fair and unfettered record of an actual sale, and land values are easily a part of it. And anybody that there are authorities, Dr. Mills, and mills, I would say is one that says you can’t split the two. I think that’s that’s an assumption. It’s a lazy assumption to
Lars Doucet 1:14:23
think I think I know that paper I might have been in one of my three articles. There’s just like, you can ever trust just one article entirely by itself. You know, you want to look at the whole body of a research because you can find any one paper that says anything.
Josh Vincent 1:14:37
Absolutely. And I think that using Edward Mills is is commonplace because he’s well known for a land economist, people like him, he’s believed he gives he gives good speech. And, you know, you get yourself situated like that and nobody will ever contradict you. That’s the way organization Asians in systems work as we know. But yeah, I think that Philadelphia would be a good approach. And I think we have. It’s interesting. I think that the former mayor of Philly, Michael netart, who’s on the board of the Lincoln Institute of land policy, I think he’s thinking of coming back to Philadelphia to run for mayor again. We shall see.
Lars Doucet 1:15:26
Yeah. Oh, well, we’ll give him a pet policy to run on. If he does. That’s right.
Josh Vincent 1:15:30
Yeah, absolutely. And I know that the Center for property tax reform is soon by that I mean, in weeks, if not days, releasing a an assessment survey. After having talked to assessors in cities all over the country. All I’m all I’m helping with is the proof proof writing proofing.
Lars Doucet 1:15:53
We’ll be we’ll be very interested in seeing what that has to say.
Josh Vincent 1:15:56
Yeah, that’s all well, so much, guys. Josh,
William Jarvis 1:16:03
thank you so much for coming on. Where should people find your work? Where should we send them?
Josh Vincent 1:16:08
Send them to the Center for property tax reform, one word dot O R G. And for me, urban tools dot O R G dot and unfortunately, it turned in turns out I named urban tools after a Finnish sportswear company. But I got the I got the domain. Good stuff. And and
William Jarvis 1:16:33
domain speculation,
Josh Vincent 1:16:34
fights, blogs, articles, videos, you name it. Stuff. Subject, as you know, as you all know, property is is in the blood of every American certainly in and most and most people.
Lars Doucet 1:16:52
Yeah. Well, cool. Well, thanks for talking to us, Joshua. I really appreciate it. My
Josh Vincent 1:16:56
pleasure, anytime. Love to talk to you again.
William Jarvis 1:17:06
Thanks for listening. We’ll be back next week with a new episode of narratives.
88: Land Value Taxes with Joshua Vincent