A note on Kshama Sawant’s platform for WA-9<\/em><\/p>\n Kshama Sawant holds a PhD in economics from North Carolina State University and taught the subject at Seattle Central. Her campaign platform for Washington’s 9th District calls for “national rent control” as a core plank alongside taxing the rich and confronting corporate power. That’s a strange pairing. Rent control is one of the rare policies economists across the ideological spectrum agree on \u2014 and they agree it doesn’t work. A 1992 survey of American Economic Association members found 93 percent agreement that rent ceilings reduce the quantity and quality of available housing. When the University of Chicago’s IGM Forum polled a panel of elite economists \u2014 left, right, and center, several of them Nobel laureates \u2014 on whether rent control had improved affordable housing in cities that used it, only a handful agreed.<\/p>\n This isn’t a partisan talking point. It’s closer to the one thing the profession doesn’t fight about.<\/p>\n It’s also not a field she’s unfamiliar with. Sawant’s 2009 NC State dissertation, Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy<\/em>, is a structural labor-economics study of rural India \u2014 estimating wage elasticities, modeling household bargaining, testing whether poverty compels elderly work. It’s applied microeconometrics of exactly the kind that produces the rent control consensus: price responsiveness, marginal incentive effects, the standard toolkit. And her own conclusion, in the dissertation’s policy chapter, favors formal social security and targeted income transfers for the elderly poor over any kind of price intervention in the markets they depend on. That’s the tell. When she was doing economics rather than campaigning on it, the instrument she reached for to protect a vulnerable population was a direct transfer \u2014 not a price ceiling. National rent control asks for the opposite: fix the price, and hope the redistribution follows. Her own dissertation is a case study in why economists don’t bet on that hope.<\/p>\n There’s a second problem with the platform that has nothing to do with the economics: it’s aimed at the wrong level of government. National rent control is a dead letter \u2014 it would require federal preemption of housing policy that has always sat with states and localities, and no Congress in living memory has shown appetite for it. Housing and property tax policy are made at the state and county level. Washington alone has 39 counties, each with its own assessor, each already producing the parcel-level data this kind of reform runs on. That’s a tractable unit of political work in a way “national” anything is not. If Sawant wants to actually move this lever rather than just gesture at it, the term she’s running for is the wrong one; a state legislative seat, or a campaign aimed at Olympia, is where property tax structure actually gets decided.<\/p>\n Worth flagging honestly: Washington’s own path here isn’t clean. The state constitution’s Uniformity Clause (Article VII, Section 1) requires all property within a class to be taxed at the same rate, which as currently interpreted forecloses a straightforward split-rate or land-only tax without a constitutional amendment. That’s a real obstacle, not a rhetorical one \u2014 but it’s a state-level obstacle, which means it has a state-level fix, unlike a rent control bill that would need to clear the U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n The definitive modern study is Rebecca Diamond, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian’s 2019 American Economic Review<\/em>paper on San Francisco’s 1994 rent control expansion. Using two decades of tracked tenant and landlord data, they found rent control did what its advocates want in the short run: it reduced displacement and kept incumbent tenants in place roughly 20 percent longer. But it also drove landlords to pull roughly 15 percent of the affected rental stock off the market entirely \u2014 selling to owner-occupants, converting to condos and tenancies-in-common, or redeveloping. The housing didn’t vanish; it just stopped being available to rent. That contraction in supply pushed up market rents for everyone who wasn’t already inside a controlled unit, which the authors conclude ultimately undermined the law’s own goal.<\/p>\n That’s the mechanism in miniature: rent control protects insiders at the direct expense of outsiders \u2014 future tenants, newcomers, anyone not already holding a lease. It is a transfer, not a solution, and the research base behind that conclusion is about as close to settled as empirical economics gets.<\/p>\n Run the numbers before the theory. Seattle’s land area is fixed at 83.9 square miles \u2014 it was that in 1954 and it’s that today; there’s no more of it coming. The city’s population has grown roughly 39 percent since 2000, from about 563,000 to nearly 785,000 residents, adding well over 200,000 people to a footprint that cannot expand. That’s not a hypothetical strain on the housing stock. It’s arithmetic, and it comes before any argument about price ceilings or land taxes: if the city doesn’t build enough places for those people to live, prices rise regardless of what any single policy does at the margin.<\/p>\n And the growth hasn’t been distributed across that fixed footprint \u2014 it’s been walled into a handful of places by zoning. Roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the city’s residential land was reserved for detached single-family homes for decades, and it absorbed almost none of the growth: since 1995, just 8 percent of the city’s new housing has gone into those zones, according to city permitting data reported by the Seattle Times. Nearly everything else \u2014 well over 85 percent of new units added in recent years \u2014 has been forced into a small set of designated urban villages and centers: South Lake Union, the University District, downtown, Capitol Hill. That’s where the towers are because that’s the only place the towers are legal. South Lake Union alone absorbed something like 12.5 million square feet of new development between 1995 and 2011, much of it chasing Amazon; the University District has more than a dozen highrises built or underway, most of it market-rate and student housing clustered around UW, not spread across the city’s other neighborhoods.<\/p>\n This is the supply context rent control walks into. Seattle is not a city with abundant vacant land and a mysteriously stubborn affordability problem \u2014 it’s a city that legally quarantined most of its land from new housing for a generation, funneled three decades of growth into a few square miles, and is now being offered a policy that makes building in what’s left of that footprint even less attractive. Whatever else is true about rent control, it does nothing to touch the zoning constraint that put Seattle in this position in the first place \u2014 and a Georgist approach, by taxing land according to its zoned potential rather than its current use, directly pressures the owners sitting on underbuilt lots in those same single-family zones to either build or sell to someone who will.<\/p>\n Here’s the piece that matters most, and it’s the piece Sawant’s platform skips entirely: rent control caps the price of a produced good \u2014 housing services \u2014 while leaving the land underneath completely untouched.<\/strong> Land doesn’t depreciate, isn’t built by the owner, and its value is created almost entirely by the surrounding community: transit lines, zoning upzones, schools, parks, the agglomeration of everyone else’s labor and investment. A price ceiling on what a landlord can charge for square footage does nothing to that value. If anything, it makes the underlying land more<\/em>attractive to hold and less<\/em> attractive to improve, because improvement is now capped in what it can earn back.<\/p>\n King County’s own assessment data shows how this plays out on the ground. Improvements \u2014 the building itself \u2014 are assessed separately from land, and depreciated buildings routinely get valued down toward a nominal floor, effectively assessed at $1,000 regardless of the underlying lot’s worth. A landlord facing capped rents has every incentive to defer maintenance rather than invest in a unit whose income is fixed. As the building’s assessed improvement value falls toward that floor, so does the landlord’s property tax bill on the structure \u2014 while the land parcel underneath keeps appreciating, untaxed at anything close to its market value, waiting for a better regulatory climate or a buyer willing to redevelop. Rent control doesn’t just fail to capture that windfall. It actively rewards the owner for letting the building rot while banking the land.<\/p>\n Play the incentive forward and it gets worse than a neutral standoff between landlord and tenant. Under a rent cap, a landlord’s income from a unit is fixed regardless of its condition \u2014 so every dollar spent on a new roof, replacement appliances, or a repainted hallway comes straight off the bottom line with no corresponding way to recover it in rent. The rational response is to defer. Skip the re-roof this year. Let the appliances run past their service life. Left long enough, the building’s own decline becomes self-reinforcing: as units become less desirable, turnover drops (nobody wants to give up a below-market lease to move), but so does the owner’s incentive to compete for tenants at all, since the tenants they have are effectively captive. This isn’t a hypothetical \u2014 it’s the well-documented path from rent control to slumlording. To be clear, this isn’t an argument for making common cause with landlords who neglect their buildings; it’s an argument that rent control hands them a structural excuse to do it, and strips tenants of the market leverage \u2014 the ability to leave for a better-maintained unit \u2014 that would otherwise force better behavior. People shouldn’t have to live somewhere the paint is peeling and the roof leaks. A policy that predictably produces more of that outcome, not less, isn’t a tenant protection.<\/p>\n Ground rent recapture inverts the incentive instead of trying to override it. Because the charge is pegged to what’s happening around<\/em> the parcel \u2014 a new light rail stop, an upzone, a wave of nearby investment \u2014 the landlord’s bill rises whether or not they’ve touched the building. The only way to cover that rising bill, and to actually earn a return on the parcel, is to make the property worth renting: fix the roof, replace the appliances, keep tenants instead of losing them to a better-maintained building down the block. It doesn’t ask a landlord to be generous. It removes the option to profit from doing nothing.<\/p>\n Call it what it is instead of what it sounds like. “Land value tax” reads as one more line item \u2014 this piece originally used that term, and a friendlier-sounding alternative we tried, “community investment charge,” was worse: vaguer, and it hid the ball on who’s paying and why. Neither name says what’s actually happening.<\/p>\n Land is the original means of production. Before capital, before machinery, before a single hour of labor is applied to anything, someone has to be standing on a piece of the earth. Under capitalism, that piece of earth gets enclosed, deeded, and held by whoever can afford to buy it \u2014 and its value climbs not because the owner does anything to it, but because everyone else<\/em> does: the transit authority builds a line, the city upzones the block, the neighbors’ investment and the community’s tax dollars pour in, and the landowner collects the difference for owning a fixed point on a map. That collection, uncompensated and unearned, is that means of production being privately tolled. Ground Rent Recapture<\/strong> is the plain name for taking that toll back: not a tax on income, not a tax on labor, not a tax on the building anyone actually built \u2014 a recapture of the value the public created in the land underneath it.<\/p>\n It’s also, not incidentally, a more literal application of “seize the means of production” than fixing the price of a monthly lease payment ever was. Rent control regulates a transaction between two parties over a produced good. Ground rent recapture goes after the asset itself.<\/p>\n There’s a working demonstration of the underlying principle a few miles from here, and it isn’t Seattle proper \u2014 it’s the University of Washington campus. Since the late 1990s, UW’s on-campus student housing capacity has roughly doubled, from about 4,500 beds to somewhere north of 9,000 today, trending toward nearly 9,700 once the current Haggett Hall rebuild finishes in 2027. That happened despite, not because of, standing still: Terry Hall, McCarty Hall, Nordheim Court, and Haggett Hall were all fully demolished \u2014 some of them 1950s- and ’60s-era low-rise dorms \u2014 and replaced with taller, denser buildings on the same footprint.<\/p>\n The university could do that because it controls the land outright. UW doesn’t ask its neighbors’ permission parcel by parcel; it operates under a long-range Campus Master Plan, approved by its own Board of Regents and financed through its own bond sales, that lets it treat the whole campus as a single planning problem instead of a hundred separate zoning fights. A private landlord half a mile off campus, sitting on the same vintage of aging low-rise building, faces a completely different world: design review, individual permitting, neighbor appeals, and \u2014 as the earlier sections of this piece lay out \u2014 a tax system that rewards doing nothing. Same city, same housing shortage, same era of buildings needing replacement. The difference is who controls the land and what happens when they decide to act on it.<\/p>\n Start with a date. In 1962, Seattle stepped onto the world stage: the Century 21 Exposition opened on the fairgrounds that are now Seattle Center, built the Space Needle and the Monorail to prove it, and sold the city as a place already living in the future. That same year, on the other side of the Pacific, a Norwegian town planner named Erik Lorange delivered a report to the government of a small, crowded, soon-to-be-independent port city with almost no land to spare. Lorange’s report told Singapore to secure the legal authority to compulsorily acquire private land at scale, and to lease that land back out on 99-year terms at an annual ground rent \u2014 a rent set as a fixed percentage of the land’s own freehold value. Within a few years, the recommendation became the Land Acquisition Act of 1966, and Singapore spent the next two decades buying up the ground under itself, from about 31 percent state-owned land in the late 1940s to roughly 90 percent today.<\/p>\n Two port cities, both boxed in by geography, both with real ambition in 1962. One built a fair and kept its land in the same fragmented private hands it had always been in. The other decided the land itself was the lever, and pulled it. Fifty years on, Singapore houses over 80 percent of its population in public housing built on land the state controls outright, while Seattle argues about rent control on a shrinking share of a fixed footprint it never touched.<\/p>\n Vienna’s version of the same lesson runs on an older clock \u2014 the city started buying land cheap during the economic collapse after the First World War, under the “Red Vienna” government of the 1920s \u2014 but it lands in the same place. The city now owns roughly 220,000 housing units outright, about a fifth of its housing stock, and still land-banks several million square meters of ground bought decades ago for exactly this purpose; newly zoned land is required by policy to go mostly to social housing.<\/p>\n Neither city taxes its way to affordability, and it’s worth being precise about that, because the lazy version of this comparison falls apart under the first serious pushback. Vienna and Singapore don’t run anything resembling a land value tax on privately held fee-simple parcels. Both simply own the land<\/em> and decide what gets built on it \u2014 the same lever UW pulls on its own campus, just exercised at the scale of an entire city.<\/p>\n That’s the real lesson, and it’s a bigger one than “copy Singapore’s tax code,” because there is no such code to copy: whoever controls the land controls what the land is allowed to support. Ownership is the most direct form that control can take, and Vienna, Singapore, and UW all demonstrate what it produces when it’s exercised at scale. Ground Rent Recapture doesn’t propose acquiring Seattle’s private land the way Singapore acquired its own \u2014 that’s neither necessary nor realistic here. It proposes getting the same directional effect without the acquisition: instead of the public owning the parcel and collecting the rent as landlord, the public taxes away the unearned portion of that rent from whoever does own it, which removes the payoff for sitting on underused land and leaves building \u2014 or selling to someone who will build \u2014 as the only way to keep earning a return.<\/p>\n Lorange’s own 1962 report makes the bridge explicit. His recommended ground rent \u2014 a fixed percentage of the land’s freehold value, paid annually \u2014 is structurally identical to a land value tax rate; Singapore just chose to collect it as a landlord’s rent instead of a government’s tax, because it chose ownership first. Ground Rent Recapture is a way of getting the same number without first buying the land to get it.<\/p>\n None of this required Marx. The case that ground rent is unearned and belongs, at least in part, to the public was made by thinkers a socialist audience is often taught to distrust \u2014 starting with the philosopher private property is built on in the first place, which is exactly why it’s worth citing them by name.<\/p>\n John Locke<\/strong> got there first, by more than a century, and he’s the hardest of the four to wave away, because Locke is the one who justified private property to begin with. His Second Treatise of Government<\/em> (1689) grounds ownership in labor: you own what you mix your labor with, taking it out of the common stock nature provided everyone. But Locke attached a condition to that claim that rarely survives the trip into modern property-rights rhetoric \u2014 the proviso that appropriation is legitimate only “at least where there is enough, and as good, left in common for others.” Locke was picturing an open frontier, where one person fencing a plot didn’t meaningfully shrink what was left for the next person. A fixed, built-out city is the opposite case: the land is finite, and its value climbs precisely because there isn’t enough of it left near the transit line or the good school for everyone who wants in. When Locke’s own condition for legitimate appropriation stops holding, so does the claim that landownership deserves the same protection as the property he was actually defending \u2014 and ground rent, on this reading, is the portion of ownership his proviso never authorized to begin with.<\/p>\n Adam Smith<\/strong> devoted a section of The Wealth of Nations<\/em> to ground rents specifically because they made, in his view, the best possible tax base: the landlord contributes nothing to their rise, can’t shift the burden onto tenants the way other taxes get passed through, and isn’t discouraged from producing anything by paying it, since the land was going to sit there regardless. Smith’s canons of taxation \u2014 that a tax should fall on those able to pay, should be hard to evade, and shouldn’t distort production \u2014 describe ground rent almost better than any other tax base available to him.<\/p>\n David Ricardo<\/strong> built the classical theory of rent that Henry George later drew directly from: rent arises from the differential value of one plot of land over another \u2014 fertility, or in an urban context, location and access \u2014 and that differential is created by demand and scarcity, not by the landowner’s effort. Because rent doesn’t enter into the cost of production the way wages and profit do, Ricardo argued a tax on it falls entirely on the landlord and can’t be passed forward. It is, in his framework, the one tax that doesn’t distort the economy it’s levied on.<\/p>\n John Stuart Mill<\/strong> took the argument further than either of them and gave it a name still used today: the “unearned increment.” Mill proposed taxing the future rise in land values precisely because that rise came from the growth and investment of society at large, not from anything the landowner did \u2014 and went as far as founding an organization, the Land Tenure Reform Association, built around the idea. Mill’s version is the closest of the four to a direct ancestor of a modern land value capture policy.<\/p>\n Four thinkers no capitalist would dismiss out of hand \u2014 one of them the philosophical father of private property itself \u2014 and all four land in the same place: the rent of land is a windfall, not a wage or a return on investment in land they never made, and taxing it back is the one tax that doesn’t punish anyone for producing anything. That’s the argument to put in front of the landlord lobby that will read “ground rent recapture” as expropriation. It isn’t new, and it isn’t Marxist. It’s Locke’s own proviso, applied honestly.<\/p>\n And it closes the loop back to where this piece started. Milton Friedman<\/strong> \u2014 the same economist quoted at the top calling rent control one of the most universally condemned policies in the field \u2014 was asked in a 1978 interview which tax he considered least damaging to a free economy. His answer: a tax on the unimproved value of land, which he credited by name to Henry George, calling it “the least bad tax.” The same free-market economist supplies the authority for both halves of this argument: rent control is the bad policy, and a tax on land is the good one. That isn’t a coincidence or a cherry-picked quote \u2014 it’s the same underlying logic applied consistently. Friedman opposed price controls on produced goods and endorsed a tax on unproduced value, for exactly the reason this piece has been making the whole way through.<\/p>\n To be fair to the case Sawant and other rent control advocates make: the Diamond, McQuade, and Qian findings and others like them measure long-run supply effects, not the immediate, real relief a rent cap gives someone facing an unaffordable increase today. Advocates argue displacement has costs \u2014 social, economic, and human \u2014 that a pure supply-side model doesn’t fully price in, and that rent control paired with aggressive new construction (rather than rent control alone) can blunt the worst of the tradeoff. Some researchers, including UC Berkeley’s 1998 rent control study and more recent European work in Catalonia, have found smaller or more ambiguous supply effects than the San Francisco case, suggesting local housing market conditions and pre-existing zoning restrictions matter as much as rent control itself. None of that overturns the broader consensus, but it’s the strongest version of the counter-argument, and it’s worth engaging honestly rather than dismissing.<\/p>\n Sources: Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1689), ch. 5; Alston, Kearl & Vaughan, “Is There a Consensus Among Economists in the 1990s?” American Economic Review (1992); IGM Economic Experts Panel, “Rent Control” (Feb. 2012); Diamond, McQuade & Qian, “The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco,” American Economic Review 109(9), 2019; Smith, The Wealth of Nations (1776), Book V; Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817), ch. 2, 10; Mill, Principles of Political Economy(1848), Book V, ch. 2; Sawant, Kshama Vivek, Elderly Labor Supply in a Rural, Less Developed Economy: An Empirical Study, PhD dissertation, North Carolina State University, 2009; U.S. Census Bureau population estimates for Seattle, 2000 and 2025; Seattle Times, “Rapidly growing Seattle constrains new housing through widespread single-family zoning”; Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development, Urban Center\/Village Growth Report; Seattle City Council, South Lake Union Urban Center zoning history; UW Housing & Food Services, Facts & Figures and Resource Guide 2018-19; UW Magazine, “Freshman class breaks record; dorms at capacity”; Climate and Community Institute, “Green Social Housing: Lessons from Vienna” (2025); National Library Board Singapore, “Land Acquisition Act 1966”; Purves, “Singapore’s Imminent Expiration of Land Leases,” Tijdschrift voor Economische en Sociale Geografie (2024).<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Wrong Lever: Why Rent Control Fails Where Ground Rent Recapture Succeeds A note on Kshama Sawant’s platform for WA-9 The contradiction Kshama Sawant holds a PhD in economics from …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60\/revisions\/63"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/otherwise-books.com\/threads\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The contradiction<\/h2>\n
Wrong Washington, too<\/h2>\n
What the best evidence actually shows<\/h2>\n
Where are they supposed to live?<\/h2>\n
The part rent control never touches<\/h2>\n
The maintenance death spiral<\/h2>\n
Recapturing the means of production<\/h2>\n
The UW playbook<\/h2>\n
What Vienna and Singapore actually prove<\/h2>\n
Witnesses for the prosecution<\/h2>\n
The other side of it<\/h2>\n
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