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casslin.eth
@casslineth
should cities be for profit institutes or public good?
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
Ideally a hybrid model (note: we have a hybrid model today, because of land ownership; I'm going to argue that we should have more opportunities for individuals to make profit from shares in the city, *and* weaker property rights in land!) I think both for-profit and non-profit models have advantages. The key advantage of having an investor class is that, if the economics are designed right, they represent the interests of the class that democracies perenially exclude: people who are not yet here. Existing residents often respond to newcomers with YIMBYism, at both national and local levels, while investors are aligned to welcome newcomers. In addition to the myopic question of "do we welcome new person X and let a developer build a bigger apartment to house them", this also covers bigger-picture questions like "do we make a big thematic pivot and reimagine San Francisco's Sunset district as a new Hong Kong?". Meanwhile...
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
.... we have goals for cities that don't align with making investors happy, or making people happy in proportion to their willingness to pay investors. We want public infrastructure to work well for all income levels, we want cities to be positive-sum for the nation and the world, we have humanitarian values, we don't want homelessness "solved" with "give them one-way bus tickets to other cities", etc. And I do think that democracy is good at achieving a lot of those objectives.
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Vitalik Buterin
@vitalik.eth
So... I think it would be good for cities to have some kind of asset and even for that asset to have some governance power, and at the same time to adopt higher land value taxes, which reduces the property-ness of land ownership. The argument is that this creates better incentive alignment with the whole city's success, and land value taxes in particular give government the best incentives to affect what they can change (local public goods, which affect land value), while leaving the full value of anything built on the land in the hands of the local owner, who is the one who can affect that.
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