CPTR Research and Articles

Privilege in the Wasted Land: How Wealthy Investors Hide Behind LLCs and Speculate on Vacant and Underutilized Land in New York City

by Stephen Hoskins

Over the past few months, we have published a series of articles which explore the presence of vacant and underutilized land in New York City and the role of Limited Liability Companies (LLCs) in the city’s housing market. Today, we publish our ground-breaking report, Privilege in the Wasted Land, which examines the factors associated with these phenomena and clearly establishes that LLC investors are over-represented among owners of both vacant and underutilized land in NYC.

Earth Rent: The Future of the Dutch Ground Lease System

by Rinske Bijl

After Amsterdam, Rotterdam is the largest Dutch municipality in terms of population. Since the 1970s, this municipality has given out almost all of its new land under ground lease conditions. One of the goals of the ground lease system was to allow the entire community to benefit from the increase in land value, instead of just the individual land owner.

In 2003, however, this objective was explicitly dismissed in Rotterdam. From then on, the increase in value of the land would no longer be collected by the community, but by the user of the land. So the council of mayor and aldermen judged, and probably not entirely coincidentally the first council since World War II without the social-democratic party PvdA. The idea was that individuals should be able to build up their own capital through land ownership and would thus develop a more intensive bond with their living environment. From that year on, private ownership of land became the new standard in Rotterdam and leasehold the exception.

In Amsterdam, too, a council without the social democrats took office in 2014, after the PvdA had been represented in the municipal council for more than a century. More than 125 years ago, Amsterdam had been the first Dutch municipality in which it was decided to issue all land under ground lease conditions. The municipality nowadays still owns about 80 percent of the land. And since its introduction in 1896, the original goal of allowing the increase in the value of land to benefit the community had never been changed.

Squandered Opportunity: The Social Cost of Underutilized Land

by Stephen Hoskins

In our previous article describing speculation on vacant urban land, we pointed out that the attention paid to vacant housing often overlooks another type of pernicious vacancy: housing units that aren’t even built in the first place. Sometimes this looks like plots of land lying vacant for decades, even in the face of exorbitant rents, earning juicy speculative profits for the owner as their land rises in value. But speculative profiteering doesn’t only occur on wholly vacant land. It also occurs on underutilized land. In this article, we examine the social harms that arise from underutilized land, consider ways of measuring it, and propose policies to discourage it.

Everybody Works But The Vacant Lot: How Speculators Profit From Our Thriving Cities

by Stephen Hoskins

As academics, advocates, and pundits scramble to explain the rising burden of housing costs in American cities, much has been written about the specter of vacant housing. A symptom of wealthy speculators, vacant units indicate that many investors are happy to park their wealth in real estate and profit from growth in land values without the hassle of actually having to build or rent-out empty units.

This narrative is often paired with calls for a tax on vacant units, which is expected to push these units into being made available for use by tenants. While there are merits to this argument, it misses the forest for the trees, as it entirely fails to identify and fix two other ways in which scarce space within our cities is wasted: through vacant and/or underutilized urban land. Just like vacant dwellings, vacant and utilized lots are held out of use by speculators when they could instead be housing many more people.

In this article, we will summarize the existing research on the causes and consequences of urban land, which primarily centers on the existence of blighted land in struggling cities.

From Eternal to Extinguished: The Reform of Municipal Ground Lease in the Netherlands

by Rinske Bijl

“On a Sunday afternoon, the city council of Amsterdam flushed 100 years of progressive policy down the drain,” says journalist Hans de Geus. “Melancholy, disappointment and a fighting spirit” prevail in the green progressive party (GroenLinks). “A historic blunder,” according to Marjolein Moorman, currently alderman for the social-democratic party (PvdA). The reactions to the most recent change in the Amsterdam ground lease system were quite severe. The tenor of these reactions was that in 2016, the system was so fundamentally changed that it was de facto abolished. In contrast, there was a euphoric mood among homeowners and right-wing parties. “It’s done,” tweeted a supporter of the liberal party (VVD) enthusiastically.

The system change had been a fervent wish of the liberals, who traditionally stand up for the interests of homeowners. Remarkable, because it had also been a liberal, alderman Treub, who had stood at the beginning of the Amsterdam ground lease system. By no longer selling municipal land, and instead giving it out on long lease, the municipality at the end of the 19th century wanted to get a grip on the uncontrolled growth of the city, stimulate the construction of houses, fight speculation, and make sure the growing value of the land would benefit the community, instead of the individual land owner.

Citadels of Privilege: How LLCs Funnel Land Rents Into the Pockets of Wealthy Investors

by Stephen Hoskins

As housing costs continue their inexorable climb upwards in cities across the US, concern is mounting about the role played by corporate investors. Referred to as the ‘financialization’ of housing, real estate is being hoovered-up by massive investment funds with names like BlackRock and Blackstone.

While attention is often paid to the institutional investors, one overlooked component of this shifting economic quicksand is the growing presence of limited liability companies (LLCs) in the real estate market. This legal structure is favored by investors looking to profit by grabbing land, avoiding the tax collector, and dodging the ire of the public eye.

In this article we’ll describe how the LLC legal structure became a favorite weapon for real estate speculators, explain how they widen inequality, present our own research into their presence in New York City (NYC), and suggest some policy tools to uproot this pernicious weed ensnaring our cities.

The Dutch Ground Lease System from a Georgist Perspective

by Rinske Bijl

Seventeen years after the publication of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, the city of Amsterdam decided not to sell any more of its land. Instead they installed a system of municipal ground lease, to ensure the community would benefit from the increased value of the land. The system has been hotly debated ever since, including by Georgists.

LVT on the Ballot in New Zealand

by Stephen Hoskins

New Zealand is suffering many of the same ills that afflict American cities. Tenants facing ever-rising rents, young people and ethnic minorities being priced out of homeownership, widening inequality driven by soaring land values, sprawling cities and congested streets. A long and bitter debate that blamed land use regulations for these problems has largely been won by ‘YIMBYs’, with several waves of upzoning producing a budding building boom for townhouses and apartments. While there are some signs that rents may be easing as a result, these problems are far from solved, and public attention has begun to look for alternative solutions.

Who Says You Can’t Have a State Property Tax?

by Joshua Vincent

Well, okay. Lots of people. One of the crowning strategies to rouse the rabble is to ream the property tax. Fair enough. But in some states like New Jersey, the property tax is unpopular, likely because the property tax is just as high as the state income, business, and sales taxes.

But some states have a lifeline for tax efficiency, equity, and progressivity. Yet because we live in strange times, state governments get the shakes regarding property tax. So instead, they throw themselves upon regressive, volatile, or inefficient taxes. Not surprisingly, these taxes hit parts of society that are powerless or don’t vote.

The property tax can trace its unpopularity to simple (and fixable) quirks in most states: the bill comes due once a year. There are legitimate concerns over what happens to people on a fixed income. The house’s value may go up, but there’s no cash flow to pay for a tax bill that goes up.

Bias in Property Assessments: Sources and Solutions

by RSF Staff

So we’re left with these dual realities: the premise of property taxes is sound, but the execution is inequitable. And for us at the Center for Property Tax Reform this brings two questions immediately to mind: First, where does bias in property assessments come from? (After all, professional assessors’ primary objective is to create valuations that are “fair and equitable,” not for some property owners, but for all of them.) And second, recognizing that many current assessments fall short of meeting the fair and equitable standard, what can we do to fix them?

It was with these questions in mind that we created our “Bias in Assessments Handbook.” The Handbook combines an extensive literature review with data gathered through one-on-one interviews with professional assessors in some of the nation’s largest jurisdictions – assessors who have personally and professionally dedicated themselves to identifying and remedying regressivity and inequities in their jurisdictions’ assessments and can speak with authority about how to do it right.