Why the Rent is Too Damn High

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 doorway

• How wealthy cities manufacture poverty through the way they tax land

• Why the twin "emergencies" of homelessness and housing unaffordability have the same root cause and the same solution

• How 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.