Land value

“ Third, the resulting revenue permits utility and other services that have marked economies of scale or density to be priced at levels conducive to their efficient use.
The rental value of land arises from three sources. The first is the inherent natural productivity of land, combined with the fact that land is limited. The second source of land value is the growth of communities; the third is the provision of public services. All citizens have equal claims on the component of land value that arises from nature. ”

“ The fundamental significance of land value increases is conceded in every land, yet, with the exception of farm land values, there has apparently been no systematic attempt to discover the extent of the land value increases. Although an examination of the available facts has convinced the writer that the time is not yet ripe for an authoritative statement, the data at hand do indicate rather clearly the trend in land valuation. ”

“ That land, even of the highest type and in the largest cities, is a slow asset, is due to a number of causes, among them being the fact that land is not easily passed from hand to hand as are stocks and bonds, land involves personal or directly deputed management, where stocks and bonds do not, there is no Exchange with daily quotations giving the values of land, as with stocks and bonds; and finally the value of land is influenced by many complex changing factors, whose effects are differently estimated by different people. ”

“ But the regions about which one hears most, which are already fruit gardens and well sprinkled with rose-clad homes, command prices per acre which seem extravagant. Land, however, like a mine, gets its value from what it will produce; and it is to be noted that while the subsidence of the "boom" knocked the value out of twenty-feet city lots staked out in the wilderness, and out of insanely inflated city property, the land upon which crops are raised has steadily appreciated in value. ”

“ The tax upon land values is, therefore, the most just and equal of all taxes. It falls only upon those who receive from society a peculiar and valuable benefit, and upon them in proportion to the benefit they receive. It419 is the taking by the community, for the use of the community, of that value which is the creation of the community. It is the application of the common property to common uses. When all rent is taken by taxation for the needs of the community, then will the equality ordained by nature be attained. ”

“ He regards land values as consisting of three elements: the original natural value, the value of improvements, and the potential value. The first and third elements should belong to the community, and from them a land tax should be levied; the second is the legitimate property of the cultivator. ”

“ At the outer circumference of cities land is held as acreage, the prices per acre advancing from the normal value of farm land near cities, $50 to $150 per acre, up to market garden land, which may earn interest on $300 to $1,000 per acre, and, finally, to speculative tracts held at $500 to $5,000 per acre, whose prices are based on the estimated earnings of the land when it secures the anticipated utilization. ”

“ From the standpoint that land has no value until there is demand for its utilization, there is a theoretical gain in transforming speculative or anticipated value into actual value, but the future of all outlying land is discounted many years ahead, so that prices may drop after development. ”

“ The capital value of land, which greatly decreased during the last twenty years of the 19th century, is estimated at £3,120,000,000, and that of stock, buildings, implements, &c., at £340,000,000. The value per acre of land, which exceeds £48 in the departments of Seine, Rhône and those fringing the north-west coast from Nord to Manche inclusive, is on the average about £29, though it drops to £16 and less in Morbihan, Landes, Basses-Pyrénées, and parts of the Alps and the central plateau. ”

“ A careful inquiry is made into their "profits," but the value of the land itself is not inquired into. The value of the land may have increased three, four, or five times in the course of a century, but the owner of the soil still pays the original rate, and grows rich while he sleeps. ”

“ I may have very rich land, but it will yield no rent and have no value so long as there is other land as good to be had without cost. But when this other land is appropriated, and the best land to be had for nothing is inferior, either in fertility, situation, or other quality, my land will begin167 to have a value and yield rent. ”

“ The land was originally acquired at a certain cost, essentially for public use, and in the course of time its value, as determined by reproduction cost, usually becomes greatly increased by the development of the adjacent land by its various owners. ”

“ Among other things too numerous to mention, it will have proved that far more healthy and economic conditions can be secured on raw uncultivated land (if only that land be held on just conditions) than can be secured on land which is at present of vastly higher market value ”

“ It should be distinctly borne in mind by the reader, that uncleared land in a remote situation from markets possesses, properly speaking, no intrinsic value, like cleared land, for a great deal of labour or money must be expended before it can be made to produce anything to sell. My half-pay, which amounted to about 100 pounds per annum of Canadian currency, was sufficient to keep us supplied with food, and to pay for clearing a certain extent of land, say ten acres every year, for wheat, which is immediately afterwards sown with grass-seeds to supply hay for the cattle during winter. ”

“ In many regions where poor and hilly lands prevail, the town or county could well afford to purchase forest land, expecting thereby to add to the value of the property and to make the forests a source of revenue. ”

“ On the frontier, the wild land from the government has a value of $1.35 per acre. The railroad grant lands have been usually purchased by farmers at from $4 to $7 per acre and are now being sold at these figures. ”

“ Few now expect to make a fortune by cutting arid land up into twenty-feet lots, but notwithstanding the extravagance of recent speculation, the value of arable land has steadily appreciated, and is not likely to recede, for the return from it, either in fruits, vegetables, or grain, is demonstrated to be beyond the experience of farming elsewhere. ”

“ Where an entire farm is desired, the buildings are frequently given no value, the cost being the price of the land only. As has been stated, it is quite possible to acquire too much land as well as too little. A few acres selected from a tract of good, productive soil will usually be found a better investment than a large farm that has been abandoned because of lack of fertility. ”

“ There is a great deal of land lying out of doors. Some land is in great demand, and the real trick is to find out what that land is. You can't go out on the plains of Wyoming and give an acre of land the same value which an acre has in the Wall Street district. ”

“ As we view the policy from the year 1903 and from the midst of a populous valley, in which land values have risen from one dollar and twenty-five cents per acre to a hundred or two hundred dollars in most fertile farm tracts, and to thousands in urban centres, we can but regret that these lands themselves had not been held inviolate, and can but wish that only their rentals had been devoted to the high uses to which the nation and State had consecrated these lands. ”

“ Without regard to the original value of the soil, the gross amount of property in land is the fittest subject of taxation; and could it be made to support the whole expense of the public, great advantages would arise to all orders of men. ”

“ The present tendency should greatly increase the total amount of property income and the proportion of property income paid with each passing decade. Land values should continue to rise; as population grows denser, demand for land increases, and methods of using land are perfected. ”

“ It thus has become necessary for them to enhance the value of the land, and this seems to be the chief difficulty in the way of lowering the acreage price, to the manifest encouragement of emigration and the cultivation of the soil. ”

“ It is a beneficent incident of the ownership of land that a pioneer who reduces it to use, and helps to lay the foundations of a new State, finds a profit in the increasing value of land as the new State grows up. ”

“ Lands, L34,330,463 L49,906,866 Messuages, 14,895,130 80,726,502 The increase in the value of land is hardly equal to the reduction in the value of gold, while the increase in messuages shows the enormous expenditure of labor. ”

“ The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed. ”

“ In general, real estate consists of land, things attached to it, such as trees, buildings, fences and certain rights and profits arising out of or annexed to the land. The term land as ordinarily used includes all these things, so that when land is said to be worth so much an acre it includes all fixtures. Ponds and streams are, under this definition, land. The land not only has surface dimensions, but extends upward indefinitely and down to the center of the earth, and hence includes a right to ores, coal, oil, gas or other materials whatsoever. ”

“ At that time there were millions of acres of land that a man could go and squat on, build his cabin, and sometimes live for years upon it before the land would come into market, and with the prosperity attending such undertakings, as a general thing would manage in some way, when the land did come into market, to pay $1.25 per acre for as much as he required for the maintenance of his family. ”

“ It is a tract of land gained from the sea of about ten or twelve hundred acres, banked round in three divisions, and made arable, on which are built about twenty farmhouses, which form almost a new world. This land is the property of the government; a small sum is paid on entering, and a yearly ground-rent, and then it is the property of the purchaser for ever. ”

“ The price of public lands ranges from twenty-two cents to eighty-eight cents per acre, to those making an independent purchase. To those without the means of buying land, or of supporting themselves separately, one hundred and fifty acres of land will be provided, under the regulations of the government, in one of their colonies—to be paid for at the rate of one dollar and thirty-three cents per acre, one-third at the end of two years, one-third at the end of four years, and the last third at the end of six years. ”

“ My example has been followed by many others, and now from several miles above Mount Airy to Alto, ten miles below, are hundreds of acres planted in peaches, as many as six hundred cars being shipped out of this section in one season. I believe as a whole the growers have made money. Land has greatly advanced in price. When I first put out my orchard, ridge lands sold at two dollars per acre. Now it is worth from fifty to one hundred and fifty dollars.
It has been very gratifying to me to see an industry, in this section in which I was the pioneer, flourish and bring prosperity to the people. ”

“ It is obviously of the greatest importance to keep the prices of the public lands from all influences, except the single one of the desire of supplying the whole actual demand at a cheap rate. The present minimum price is one dollar and a quarter per acre; and millions of acres of land, much of it of an excellent quality, are now in the market at this rate. ”

“ 99so the Nation behaves well if it treats the soil and the water and the forests as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased and not impaired in value, and behaves badly if it leaves the land poorer to those who come after us. ”

“ There are laws in operation fixing the price and amount of land to be bought by any one person. One may buy 6,000 acres of first-class grazing land and 10,250 acres of second-class grazing land at very low prices. ”

“ Many persons write me that I say it is necessary to get good land near population or with cheap and assured transportation facilities—and that it must not cost more than it is worth for gardening. "I find," they say, "that such acres are held as 'lots' at wildly speculative prices" and they ask "Where can I find such land?" ”

“ With twenty millions of people, you have about one thousand millions of acres of land, inviting settlement by every conceivable argument, bringing them down to a quarter of a dollar an acre and allowing every man to squat where he pleases. ”

“ We gave the greatest land-grant ever given to an individual or a corporation in the history of the world—sixty millions of acres; when I say to Mr Hill, of course I mean the Northern Pacific. We gave outright a strip of land 2000 miles long, 20 miles wide in the States and 40 miles wide in the Territories! Worse than that: instead of giving it in a solid body, we gave every even section, so that in timber lands it carried an immense advantage over anybody else coming in from the outside. ”

“ Very well, get the land from these landed proprietors, by sale preferred, and let it out to men, not by 1000 acres, as no man can farm well a thousand acres in England; let the farms be greatly reduced, and then the land can be treated as it should be. Most of us have children, and we all know how we love and treat them. Treat the land in the same manner, feed it, and keep it clean, and you will have no cause to complain. The land of old England is as good as it ever was.
"I have serious thoughts of opening a kind of school for people who would like to make $500 a year on an acre. ”

“ Added to this outlay, large sums have been expended in boring wells, building reservoirs and establishing water stations on cattle and sheep ranges. Buying land from landowners controlling large tracts, obtained by devious means in the early stages of the country's development, is still another heavy national expense. This land, when allotted to small farm settlers, is leased. Leasing the land, instead of granting the freehold, does not augur for a rapid increase in the rural population. ”