Who Owns the Uplift? Housing and Land in the Post-Neoliberal Field

Every school in the post-neoliberal field now has a housing programme, and several now govern one. Abundance upzones; Market Humanism and the Politics of Care build public housing; the Green New Deal retrofits it and builds the transit beside it; the anti-monopolists sue algorithmic landlords; the post-liberal right buys mortgage bonds, bars institutional buyers, opens federal land, and restricts immigration. We show that each instrument acts on one object — the value of location — through one of four channels: the rent a site commands, the rate at which that rent is capitalised, the growth expected of it, and the density permitted upon it. Absent a charge on land value, the uplift is capitalised at announcement into the wealth of whoever holds land at that moment, and three feedback loops make the leak compound: a price treadmill that raises the cost of each successive tranche of public building, a credit loop that turns uplift into collateral, and a homevoter loop that turns uplift into opposition to the next round of supply. We define a self-defeat ratio — the share of an instrument's direct benefit to its target that capitalisation takes back — and show that it can exceed one: Britain's Help to Buy raised London prices by more than the present value of its own subsidy, and housing vouchers cost low-income households as a group more in higher rents than they paid out; rent control, for its part, has left the renters outside it worse off. The Progressive Land Value Tax of GWP18 completes each instrument rather than replacing it. It recovers a fixed share of every increment of rent for the public, damps the sensitivity of land prices to credit and to the policy rate, rewards the conversion of permitted density into occupied homes through its per-occupant exemption, and shrinks the stake that turns homeowners against growth. The abundance school's own think tank already recommends land value taxation, but as an item of local public finance; we show why it must be national and must arrive with the instruments it completes. The converse also holds, and we state it: the land tax is sufficient only where zoning does not bind. The field has drafted the housing programme of the decade. The land tax decides who is paid for it.