Land Rent and Housing Policy: A Case Study of the San Francisco Bay Area Rental Housing Market

Abstract

In the San Francisco Bay Area, where residential rent is among the highest in the United States, an analysis of data from several sources demonstrates that high rent cannot be accounted for by higher quality, higher operating costs, or higher construction costs. At least one-third of the total rent paid is land rent. Despite increases in real incomes, very-low-income tenants in the Bay Area today have less income remaining after payment of rent than tenants did in 1960. High land rent is a long-term feature of the Bay Area rental market that results mostly from its geography, the density of its urban centers, and a strong economy, rather than from regulatory barriers to new multifamily construction. Deregulation is not a sufficient response to the effects of land rent on low-income tenants. Government should subsidize non-profit housing organizations, particularly land trusts that remove residential land from the market. Taxes on land rent would be a particularly appropriate funding source.

Cycles of Investment: Bicycle Infrastructure, Gentrification, and the Restructuring of the San Francisco Bay Area

“…Culturally, the bicycle is ascendant as well, encoding the cycling body with the signifiers of an ecologically responsible and cosmopolitan lifestyle, and increasingly as a selling point for urban space, with arguments for the economic value of bicycle infrastructure now commonplace in advocacy circles (Snyder, 2013a). Yet the region is also beset by a profound housing affordability crisis (Barton, 2011;Metcalf, 2013), driven by a new wave of growth in the information technology sector. San Francisco is experiencing its most extreme effects; its meteoric real estate boom threatens to expel the last remaining holdouts of the city's poor, and squeezes even its middle class, which is increasingly decamping to more affordable environs in Oakland.…”

Evaluating spillover effect of non-grain production on land rent: Empirical insights from Jiangsu, China

“…On the contrary, the rental amplification is only 63.45 yuan/mu when government guided price is lower than the market price. The results questioned the findings of Barton (2011) and Zhang et al (2019). As revealed in their studies, guided price set by the government tends to serve as a floor price, which is always higher than the market price.…”

“…Demographics of farmer household are captured by farmer's gender, age, educational background, family labors, and off-farm employment (Lanjouw, 1999;Tratnik et al, 2009;Holden and Tilahun, 2021). In addition, land rental contract characteristics, such as land leasing (Vejchodská et al, 2022), lease term of land (Deng et al, 2019), and village traits are expected to have an impact on the land rent as well (Feng and Heerink, 2008;Barton, 2011;Appiah et al, 2020). Different from the basic production factor, land rent is not only determined by market equilibrium, but also partially controlled by the state.…”

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