If you've lived in the community for awhile and helped develop it, some of the community's value really could have been created by you. You paid property taxes, you frequented businesses, you participated civically. Conceivably, if a bunch of rich do gooders moved to Gary Indiana and...gentrified it...they created wealth (for better or worse, obviously).

Mysteriously, the people who don’t own land can do all those useful things for the community and they don’t end up with a $2MM windfall.

Almost as if “doing things for the community” yields nothing close to the returns of “own shack and wait.”

Pure speculation and rent seeking doesn't really do anything but leach of someone's else effort. Wealth doesn't appear out of thin air, it was created somehow. In the case of Cupertino, Asian immigrants from the 80s as well as the obvious tech scene made it a desirable place to live. Not everyone just bought property and sat on it just waiting for something to happen, people had to actually make it happen.

I guess if you want to make money as a speculator/rent seeker, you look for people doing things to improve and then take a bet that things will get better than other speculators think. But you are relying on other people doing the work for you, which is risky.

I question how much of the appreciation is the 'community' volunteer efforts when shank-fest parts of Oakland and other places where negative externalities from non-owners dominate yet property owners are experiencing similar wild appreciation rates.

The most dominating recent appreciation in value is the privilege of a coveted fed induced near 0% mortgage. Owners can laugh at the next generation, damning them to essentially pick up the inflationary tab of their negative real rate loans.

The 2.75% mortgages are nationwide. Any differential appreciation is due to the locality (and for the most part not due to geographic realities but cultural/social/economic realities).

In Cupertino, 99.9999% of the appreciation is due to the ultra high-paying jobs there.

Asian immigration had a lot to do with it also, it is basically the Richmond BC of the Bay Area getting to 63%.

If you disentangle the wealth these owners have accumulated as property owners from the other things they've done in life then it makes sense. These conversations always go the same way:

"These owners become wealthy from the work of the community! They didn't create anything!"

"Nuh uh. They volunteered at that beach cleanup and are thus rightly entitled to any property wins."

It's not a new discussion. Here's Churchill talking about a century ago

https://www.landvaluetax.org/history/winston-churchill-said-...

> To not one of those improvements does the land monopolist, as a land monopolist, contribute, and yet by every one of them the value of his land is enhanced.

> You paid property taxes

Sure, back them out of the appreciation.

> you participated civically

...by voting to block development that might have reduced your appreciation. Lol.

I thought the parent made some good points that I hadn’t considered before. Why are you “Lol”-ing (I assume derisively)? Did they disrespect you in a way which justifies rudeness?

The return for participating in your community is participating in your community. The return for opening a store and serving your community is the revenue you get paid for serving your community.

Note that you can do NEITHER of those things and get far more returns than someone who does both, if you merely buy land early and sit on it. In fact you get to extract wealth from the people who do either/both in perpetuity. If they find more ways to be more valuable to the community, good news for you: you get an even bigger paycheck for doing literally nothing.

So yeah, if they did x y z things in their community, they got all the returns of x y and z… and the returns of simply owning land.

Not to pattern match too much, but the person who winds up with a shack sitting on a $2MM lot in an ultra-high COL area is almost certainly not a major contributor to community thriving.

So a speculator, they are taking a chance that the work of others will improve the community and raise their investment. Got it, morally not right, but also very risky, these people lose their shirts just as often as they make it big.

Ok, then the old couple who bought the "shack" in the 1970s and finally are selling now. Why do you claim they weren't a contributor in the community? Let's say the guy was a garbage man while their wife worked for the DMV. They raised their kids and whatever, in that shack. They never banked on it being worth $2MM, it just happened. They provided value to the community, ok, they didn't create that much value, but its not like they were camping on the land just for the appreciation.

The real problem with CA is proposition 13, which makes the cost of owning and sitting on land relatively cheap over a long period of time. But ya, that garbage man would have been forced out of their house maybe in the 90s without it, but it would make property speculation a lot less profitable because long term positions would be very expensive.

In China, this is even a larger problem because they lack property tax at all in most places, you pay your taxes up front in a land acquisition tax and then you can just leave your apartment unrenovated and market it as brand new 20 years later to make a few million dollars.

The idea of your old couple down the street is certainly romantic but almost never the case, and isn't the case here:

> Neighbors told Perez that the home was initially used as a hunting cabin.

A 1940s recreation instrument.

> It was later used by the family as a rental but became vacant for some time.

Then vacant.

Agreed that Prop 13 and China are both getting this wrong, too.

georgism intensifies…

Nah it was created by them when they voted to make housing an NFT limited by very high barrier regulatory environment. They bought in before the minting cost was wildly raised at their own direction.

In many cases in CA the non-property owning community drags the property value down because all those pesky people you made homeless through idiotic policy are shitting on your sidewalk, and rich potential buyers don't enjoy that.