Absolutely though Prop 13 hurts liquidity in California though. There's a lot of factors, nobody can agree on them, so we're stuck with this massively overheated market.
However, these windfall gains can be recycled into public coffers via the tax system and lighten tax burdens on productive activity.
As a nice bonus, it would make it much harder to be an idle landlord in a prime area... the physical equivalent of a patent troll.
How do you define "fairness" in this context?
* Edited to less confrontational question.
In fact, by effectively being a tollbooth operator upon the prerequisites for economic development they are an active hindrance. Land titles are necessary, but it is not necessary that they keep the land rent, only the improvement values that they are responsible for.
Seattle is catching up with the other big cities, but it's still lower cost. Especially given how new the buildings are.
But tech is where the demand comes from. The median home price in Santa Clara county is almost $1.3M, and ~20% of residents can afford that price. Those are tech workers.
Supply has been steadily decreasing for years and years, so I don't see that problem getting solved. Therefore I think we'd need to see a significant drop in the tech industry for prices to slow down.
One of the reasons we got the dot-com bubble, even though the Fed was aware of it, was that they were more afraid of instability from the emerging markets than a domestic bubble. That fear was certainly justified, but nonetheless the dot-com bubble was still enormous.
But California also has a unique factor, proposition 13. [3] This drastically disincentives people from moving. Palo Alto has the lowest property tax rates in the state.[4] Why move when you will pay significantly more monthly. This is especially pertinent to retirees. So no one moves which destroys market liquidity. Combine this with NIMBYism, an over abundance of protected lands, rent control, affordable housing measures and piss poor public transportation, and you get the shit storm that is the Bay Area housing market. Tech is simply a convenient excuse. There’s a reason California is building a bullet train between SF and LA, but no public transportation from the east bay to the peninsula which would help an enormous number of workers and the environment. Despite lofty rhetoric, people vote their self interests.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/bank-of-japans-50-billion-quest... [2] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-09-11/wtf-chart-day-boj-... [3] https://medium.com/@michaellevinson_64108/landlords-and-heir... [4] https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/12/01/high-priced-californi...