Land Value Taxation in Vancouver: Rent‐Seeking and the Tax Revolt
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract At the beginning of the 20thcentury, Vancouver obtained international acclaim as a “single‐tax” city. Supporters claimed that land value taxation was responsible for the spectacular growth of the city. Even critics believed that it had produced a building boom and declining rents. Yet, over several decades, the system was scaled back and ultimately ended in 1984. This article argues that the property tax revolt can be understood with Mancur Olson's model of collective action. Property owners are better organized than other parties impacted by housing policy because they have financial resources and a salient economic concern in housing. Thus, the special interests of property owners in higher values and unrestricted use prevailed over the interests of tenants and prospective buyers. While the property tax revolt was often articulated in the progressive language of ability to pay, when confronted with progressive counterarguments, it collapsed into explicit arguments for rent‐seeking.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".