Great article, except for an unexpected reminder of how "gamedeveloper.com" just totally thrashed the history of "gamasutra.com"; the link in their own article to their own past article is broken.
Finding all my gamasutra.com bookmarks nuked one day with the rebrand still makes me salty.
Rant aside, this is what it tries to link to about 2/3 through the article:
I made the wild statement oh so many years ago that if America wanted its people to own houses, it could fix the current system by implementing a land value tax that only kicks in on your second property and multiply by the number of properties you (or your business) owns in one city/county/state.
For instance, In King County, WA, property taxes are 1.1%. If you own one 1 million dollar property then that's $11,000/year you have to pay.
Set land value tax to 1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1). Say you own 2 1 million dollar properties in King County. That would be 1.1% of $2,000,000 property taxes, or $22,000/year. Plus an additional $11,000 for the first one, for $33,000/year.
Fine.
But then if you buy a third one, then it goes $33,000/year property taxes PLUS (1.1% * (number of properties you own - 1) = $22,000 * 2 = $44,000, or $77,000/year to own three 1 million dollar properties.
It would quickly and effectively destroy any rent profit available, and make holding the properties for investment purposes an exponentially untenable position.
If they rolled out this tax over a 7 year period there would be plenty of time for the market to gently deflate as conglomerates and corporations divested their investment properties.
Wouldn’t this change unduly benefit familial real estate holdings? Each property could be owned by a different family member that (in)formally agrees to pool profits from rents in order to accumulate wealth and equity, so that they can move up the value chain and diversity holdings while not necessary living in the sole home they actually own. They could also claim their single home as a primary residence while renting out the rest of the property and actually living elsewhere. LVT just seems prone to being manipulated and gamed to the benefit of rent-seekers to the detriment of those it purports to benefit, those who are currently priced out of the market but desire to own a home as a primary residence for the stability it adds over renting/leasing.
Your application of land value tax only to subsequent homes owned otherwise avoids many of the other issues I’ve seen with land value tax, however. Most naive hypothetical applications of land value tax without your caveat tend to gloss over or ignore my main concern with LVT, that it leads to poorer homeowners being priced out of their own homes by unserviceable tax liabilities, when those same poor folks might otherwise most benefit from homeownership.
I believe that would be straining at flies while letting camels pass.
The issue isn't with groups of people each using their single exemption to own a second property while avoiding land value taxes.
The issue is single corporations using billions of dollars of land value as backing for loans to purchase houses at prices citizens can't afford in order to bilk them out of rent for the rest of their lives.
A land value tax with a single owner exemption would solve the larger problem.
It seems like a good fix for games with magic systems would be to allow players of appropriate wizarding classes to build portals on available land that go from one place to another. Your towns can stretch infinitely in player controlled non-euclidean spaces. The wizards might charge and compete with one another for tokens that allow passage through various portals. Players could trade and buy tokens to eventually do the equivalent of walking from Gerlach Nevada, through an alley in New York, across a road in LA, take a ferry from San Francisco up to Sausalito and pop into Gerlach Wisconsin, or whatever the appropriate local variant might be. Portals might require regular maintenance, the carrying of materials between sides without use of a portal to keep them running. Degradated portals could appear visibly damaged and do fun things like teleport people to the wrong location, or even locations otherwise unavailable to the main map, making an industry of building and ruining portals, with long distances costing the most but opening availabilityto the largest number of liminal spaces.
That's just repeating the problem - or even making it worse.
Land is still finite, so there will be competition for portal locations. Connectivity is valuable, so land with easy access to a lot of portals will raise in value: who wants to walk through 20 portals when you could also reach your destination in 1 or 2? This means there is a very strong incentive for the formation of a portal monopoly or cartel.
Anyone in control of a central portal hub is able to make a lot of money by opening a new portal from that hub to a far-off location. That far-off location was previously worthless, but the presence of a portal suddenly makes it extremely valuable. And being able to charge people for portal passage makes it even worse: Not only can you profit from land speculation, you're now basically charging rent on the land you sold too!
The only way to really work around this is to have essentially infinite land, accessible from a single central portal. But as the linked article mentions, that's quite immersion-breaking.
This train of thought reminds me a lot of Peter F. Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga, in which wormhole technology is discovered by a duo not unlike Jobs and Wozniak, and commercialized, and arguably monopolized. As a result, this leads to considerable differences in opinion about the proper usage of wormhole technology in the setting between the two founders and in the wider society.
In Stoneworks Minecraft server, because the game world is to big (still finite though), people often use Nether for travel. Nether is the alternate "hell" that is mapped onto the Overworld and 1 block in there is equivalent to 7 blocks in Overworld. You can get in and out of there with Nether portals. But while attacks on civilian players are forbidden in Overworld, Nether is fair game. That makes it a tradeoff between speed and safety.
Proves once again Minecraft is the greatest game ever created.
FFXIV just added a lottery and zoning rules, which IMO are the most boring ways to fix it.
Arguably it came with the expected trade-offs zoning laws have in real-life, in that zones intended for their equivalent of guilds are often empty/dead now since there are not that many active guilds, and "legacy" wards that still have personal housing and guild housing intertwined are a lot more active and diverse.
It works in real life too: https://gameofrent.com/