Much of the profit from the economy gets ploughed into land values, so land prices increase due to growth of the wider economy. So, much like owning company stock, you do nothing yet still profit from other people's effort, except with land, there's much less risk.
100% land tax was proposed by Henry George, and I'm surprised the article doesn't mention him. The idea is simply that land, natural resources etc, belong to all of us.
Consider a newborn child in a world where all the land is owned by other people. They are essentially born a slave, having to work a substantial amount simply to pay rent to someone who does nothing but own land. This proposal effectively acknowledges that we are all entitled to a share of the earth.
Of course any proposal that advocates "tax" or "government" is going to touch certain sensibilities, but rather than imagining an evil government sucking wealth from plucky individuals, consider it instead a big shared pool of cash, and every individual has a say in how (and how much) is collected and spent - which is what government ideally is.
You are making things up - trying to see a problem where there isn't. Better think about fixing childcare, and healthcare - that's where the real crisis is.
By "afford housing" I don't mean just buying, but also renting. Rent prices reflect sale prices.
No fiscal solution could fix San Francisco housing prices, only 'fix' would be crushing Silicon Valley so it ceases to be attractive place to be.
If renting is a problem you are doing something wrong. Median gross rent in U.S. is $959 a month. That doesn't sound much for developed country to me. Buying real estate is accessible to majority of U.S. households, in fact almost every dual income household. 63.7% have it, and many who don't have it, just don't want it (for example, i am making what it takes to buy an apartment i am living in, in 8-9 months, but i am not buying because i am not a gambler). To me not buying real estate seems a rational choice, unless you have a very 'fixed' career - like, certain that you are going to stay in a place for decades. There are fewer and fewer people like that, labor market gets a lot more fluid.
Why not? We are born onto the earth, and yet under the current system it is already owned by someone else, and we have to slave to those owners just to "earn" a place to be. IMHO We are each entitled to a share of nature as a birthright, and a way to achieve that while still allowing "ownership" or exclusive access to land is to apply a 100% tax. Should one be able to own the air? Or the world's water? It's not far different to land ownership.
To begin with, is there a housing crisis in America? In my books, there is more housing per capita in U.S. than in every other country of the world save for Australia, and it is also more modern that almost everywhere else except a few countries that built out from nothing in the recent years like China (but per capita housing stock is much much lower there, and that housing is Soviet-style apartment blocks).