Challenges to Equitable and Effective Land Value Capture
Scholars and practitioners argue that local governments should capture rising land values to fund services and infrastructure, especially when the value results from public and collective action. Yet land value capture mechanisms are technically and politically challenging to implement. In this paper, we examine the four most prevalent land value capture mechanisms: (i) property and land taxes, (ii) real estate transfer taxes, (iii) betterment levies, and (iv) development charges. We propose a conceptual framework with seven design features to describe and compare the mechanisms, both across mechanisms within the same city and for a single mechanism across different contexts. Our analysis shows the superiority of property taxes as a tool for land value capture, and how contemporary scholarship advocating for development charges fails to recognize their drawbacks.
Security is on the upswing; who should get the credit?
Every three months, the Mexican National Statistics Institute (INEGI) publishes information on public safety perceptions for Mexico’s 96 most populated cities. About three years ago, in July 2022, right after INEGI published this data, the former Mexico City head of government and now president Claudia Sheinbaum, turned to Twitter to share some great news. She tweeted that perceptions of public safety continued to improve in the city thanks to her public safety and policing strategies. Several hours later, borough mayor Santiago Taboada made a similar claim (for context, Mexico City is divided into sixteen boroughs, each with its elected borough mayor). Taboada tweeted that residents of his borough ranked it as one of the safest in the country thanks to his policing model, which he called Blindar BJ or Protect Benito Juarez. For those familiar with Mexico City, Taboada’s tweet does not really make sense and is somewhat puzzling, given that security in the city is provided by the Mexico City police, an entity that was then accountable to Sheinbaum.
Intermunicipal Cooperation in Metropolitan Regions in Brazil and Mexico
Metropolises, not states, are the ones capable of saving the world from its most pernicious problems. This common theme is frequently present in the rhetoric of multi-national organizations echoed in newspapers’ headlines. Clearly, cities and metropolitan regions have advantages over other levels of governments in terms of their proximity and policy tools to face problems such as water shortage, waste management, human security, housing, urban mobility, among others. For most countries, especially in the developing world, these topics present formidable challenges into reaching sustainable models of livelihood due to the lack of intermunicipal cooperation. The real question is whether metropolitan regions are actually capable of cooperating to address these and other problems independent to the surrounding institutional context.