Why the Rent is Too Damn High (Paperback)

Paul Beard

ISBN 13: 9798234035691

Editore: Otherwise Books, 2026

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Paperback. The rent is too damn high. Here's why - and it's not who you think. Everyone knows housing is unaffordable. The usual suspects get the usual blame: greedy landlords, bureaucratic zoning, not enough building. But the real answer is under your feet. Land - who owns it, who benefits from its value, and who pays for that value - is the question American cities have been refusing to ask for a century. Why the Rent Is Too Damn High is a data-driven argument about Seattle, but its logic applies to every city where wealth concentrates while workers get priced out. Drawing on Henry George's radical and remarkably modern insight that land value is created by everyone who lives and works in a community - not by the name on the tax bill - author Paul Beard builds the case from the ground up, with public records, parcel-level data, and 115 acres of downtown surface parking lots as receipts. This book explains: Why a vacant lot or a boarded-up building is the real crime - not the person sleeping in the doorwayHow wealthy cities manufacture poverty through the way they tax landWhy the twin "emergencies" of homelessness and housing unaffordability have the same root cause and the same solutionHow Monopoly - originally invented to expose the real-life game most people didn't know they were playing - still explains more about urban economics than most policy papers Seattle has a collecting problem, not a spending problem. So does your city. Once you see it, you can't unsee it - and it will make you angry every time you drive past an empty lot. You have been warned. A data-driven argument that Seattle's housing crisis is a collecting problem, not a spending problem - with 115 acres of surface parking lots as receipts. This item is printed on demand. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability.

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Dati bibliografici

• Titolo: Why the Rent is Too Damn High (Paperback)
• Editore: Otherwise Books
• Data di pubblicazione: 2026
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 13: 9798234035691
• Rilegatura: Paperback
• Condizione: new

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Riassunto

The rent is too damn high but we’re told it’s the landlords or speculators from somewhere else while the real answer is in the tax assessor’s office. They know what land is really worth and that affordable housing is impossible without affordable land.

Thinkers like John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill understood what makes land valuable. Henry George explained what happens as an economy moves from agriculture to industry — just as economists decided land wasn’t important, even as it grew enormously in value. The value of land is created by everyone who lives and works on it…the name on the tax bill banks it.

Read this book if you want to understand how wealthy cities create poverty, why a vacant lot or boarded-up building is the real crime, not the person sleeping in the doorway.

This book explains how the game works and how to reclaim what Locke called our natural inheritance. Once you see it, you can’t unsee it, and it will make you angry every time.

You have been warned.