California

Overview

California occupies an outsized place in Georgist history relative to any Georgist policy it has actually enacted. Henry George arrived in San Francisco during the Gold Rush and wrote Progress and Poverty (1879) there, drawing the book's central question from what he watched land values do as the city grew around him. Georgists returned to the state's ballot repeatedly over the following decades; the California single-tax campaigns of 1916–1930s mark the movement's electoral high-water mark anywhere in the United States. Six decades later the state produced the opposite landmark: Proposition 13 (1978), the country's canonical property-tax revolt, which froze assessments rather than shifting the tax base toward land and remains in force today. No jurisdiction in California has ever enacted a land value tax; the state's Georgist significance since 1978 has been historical rather than legislative.

George's California

Henry George reached San Francisco in 1858, worked for years as a journalist and editor, and later described the moment that crystallized the argument he spent the next decade developing into Progress and Poverty — checking his horse on a rise overlooking San Francisco Bay and watching poverty deepen even as the city visibly prospered around him. The book was finished in a San Francisco workroom in 1879. George's California years, his break from newspaper work, and the primary sources for how the book was written are covered in full on his own page.

The idea he articulated there returned to California politics a generation later. The California single-tax campaigns of 1916–1930s — led first by Luke North, whose 1916 initiative won 31% of the statewide vote, and later by the Stanford lecturer Jackson H. Ralston, whose 1938 "California Plan" (Proposition 20) was the movement's last major ballot campaign nationally — are covered in full on their own page, including the vote totals and the campaigns' influence on local assessment practice at the time.

Proposition 13 and the Assessment Regime

Proposition 13 (1978) is the reason any present-day estimate of California land value has to explain why the state's own property tax rolls cannot supply one. The measure caps the property tax at 1% of "full cash value" and defines that value as the price paid at purchase, adjustable no more than 2% a year until the property next changes hands — acquisition-value ("welcome stranger") assessment. A parcel that has not sold since the 1970s or 1980s is still assessed close to its sale-era price, compounded by a couple of percent annually, while an identical parcel across the street that sold last year is assessed at its full current market price. Because a county assessor's "land value" entry for most parcels reflects when the property last changed hands rather than what it is worth today, summing that column statewide does not produce a land-value estimate — it produces a measure of how long California's parcels have sat unsold. The mechanism, its lock-in effects, and the horizontal-inequity literature it has generated are covered in depth on the Proposition 13 page.

What California's Land Is Worth

In 2026 the Center for Land Economics, a Georgist-aligned research nonprofit co-founded by Greg Miller and Lars Doucet, published its own estimate of California's total land value, dated June 2026 on the report itself, as part of a report arguing for a land value tax over a rival ballot measure.[1] The report's headline figure — $8.14 trillion — is the organization's own estimate, built from a parcel-level pipeline rather than drawn from any official source, and should be read as that: a proponent's calculation, not an independently verified government figure.

The pipeline works around Proposition 13 rather than through it. For each census tract and property category, it estimates current market value from actual 2023–2026 sales, then extracts a land-share ratio — the fraction of a recently sold parcel's price the county assessor attributes to land rather than building — and applies that ratio, rather than the assessor's stale absolute land value, to the market-value estimate. The report's reasoning is that Prop 13 distorts assessed dollar amounts but leaves an assessor's land-versus-building split intact for parcels that have recently changed hands, so the ratio survives the distortion even though the absolute figures do not. Summing the assessor's land-value column directly — the naive approach — yields $3.96 trillion, which the report rejects as an artifact of decades-frozen assessments rather than a market estimate.[1]

The organization checked its figure against two other methods. Applying FHFA's tract-level residential land-price rates (Working Paper 19-01, a Federal Housing Finance Agency dataset derived from mortgage-backed-securities appraisal data) to California's parcels produces $8.76 trillion.[2] Projecting every historical sale in the dataset forward with a county-specific price index produces $10.12 trillion, the highest of the three.[1] The report treats the convergence of the three figures as evidence the headline number is not an outlier, though all three draw on overlapping parcel and sales data rather than wholly independent datasets.

The report states three biases in its own method, all pushing the $8.14 trillion figure down: it uses the median sale price within its January 2023–January 2026 window rather than the most recent price, understating a market that has been rising; it applies a land-share ratio drawn from recently sold — disproportionately newer-construction — parcels to the entire parcel universe, understating the land share of older, unsold properties; and it excludes tribal, federal, state, county, school-district, conservation and timeshare parcels entirely, on the grounds that their sparse sales and large acreages produce unreliable values under its method, rather than assign them a number.[1] On this basis the report calls $8.14 trillion "a floor on California's land value, with the true number almost certainly higher" — the organization's own characterization.[1]

The report frames this figure against Proposition 40, the "One-Time Wealth Tax for State-Funded Health Care Programs Initiative" that qualified for California's November 2026 ballot.[3][4] Proposition 40 would impose a one-time 5% tax on the net worth of billionaires who were California residents on January 1, 2026, payable in installments of 1% a year over five years with a surcharge for spreading payments, excluding real estate, pensions and retirement accounts; ninety percent of the revenue would be earmarked for health care.[3] The California Legislative Analyst's Office — the nonpartisan state body, not the Center for Land Economics — estimates the measure "probably would collect tens of billions of dollars" spread across several years, cautions the exact amount is "very hard to predict" given uncertainty over how billionaires and courts will respond, and separately projects a possible ongoing loss of under $1 billion a year in income-tax revenue if wealthy residents leave the state.[3] The more precise $20 billion-a-year figure the Center for Land Economics compares its own estimate against does not come from the LAO; it comes from the measure's own supporting expert report — co-authored by economist Emmanuel Saez along with three law professors, and written by "some of the experts who drafted the initiative" — which models the tax raising "$100 billion" over 2027–2031, or "$20 billion/year."[5]

Against that $20 billion-a-year figure, the Center for Land Economics calculates that a 0.25% annual tax on its own $8.14 trillion estimate — or about 0.2% on the higher $10.12 trillion time-trended figure — would raise a comparable amount, and argues a land base is harder to relocate than roughly 250 individual taxpayers, several of whom the report says had already changed tax residency ahead of Proposition 40's cutoff date.[1] That comparison is the Center's own advocacy framing: it rests on treating its own land-value estimate as reliable enough to found a specific proposed rate, made in service of an argument for land value taxation over the measure actually on the ballot, not on any official assessment of what a California land value tax would raise.

Assessment

• The estimate is triangulated, not independently audited. All three of the Center's methods draw on overlapping parcel and sales data (Regrid parcel records, county assessor sales, FHFA rates); their agreement shows internal consistency within one organization's pipeline rather than confirmation by an outside party. No government agency or peer-reviewed study replicating the $8.14 trillion figure has been located.
• The Prop 13 diagnosis holds independently of the exact figure. Whatever California's land is actually worth, the case that summing the assessor's land-value column understates it — producing $3.96 trillion against a market-based range several times larger — follows directly from how acquisition-value assessment works, and is consistent with the mechanics described on the Proposition 13 page above.
• The organization has an institutional stake in the comparison. The Center for Land Economics is a land-value-tax research and advocacy nonprofit; the report was written to argue for an LVT against a specific rival ballot measure. Its claim that billionaire relocations and a modeling error have eroded Proposition 40's assumed $2 trillion tax base by nearly half is attributed by the report to a separate 2026 paper by Jaros, Rauh and coauthors that has not been independently checked for this page.
• No jurisdiction in California taxes land value differently from buildings. The 0.25% figure is arithmetic against the Center's own base estimate; it is not a rate that has been introduced in the Legislature or placed before voters. The report itself notes that using California's existing assessor infrastructure for a land value tax would still require redoing the Prop-13-depressed valuations the state has left unrefreshed for decades — the same assessment gap, not yet closed by anyone.

See Also

• Henry George — wrote Progress and Poverty in San Francisco
• California Single-Tax Campaigns (1916-1930s) — the movement's electoral peak in the United States
• Proposition 13 — the 1978 property-tax revolt and acquisition-value assessment regime
• Center for Land Economics — publisher of the 2026 land-value estimate
• The Price of Residential Land for Counties, ZIP Codes, and Census Tracts in the United States (FHFA WP 19-01) — the Tier 1 dataset behind the estimate's FHFA triangulation check
• New Estimates of Value of Land of the United States (Larson 2015) — the BEA's national land-value estimate, for comparison to California's share of it
• United States — the country-level hub linking California's Georgist history to the other US pages
• San Francisco — the city where George wrote Progress and Poverty and where Prop 13's lock-in effects are most pronounced

Sources

1. Lars Doucet & Greg Miller, "Land, the Wealth We Can Actually Tax: California's land, the proposed Billionaire Wealth Tax, and a better way to fund the state's future," Center for Land Economics (report dated June 2026 on the page itself). landeconomics.org — full report read directly; used for the $8.14 trillion / $8.76 trillion / $10.12 trillion / $3.96 trillion figures, the parcel-pipeline and land-share-ratio method, the three self-stated conservative biases, the "floor" characterization, and the 0.25%/0.2% rate comparison to Proposition 40 (B-claim: an original empirical estimate with a fully disclosed method; Tier 2 — the Center for Land Economics is a Georgist research and advocacy nonprofit per sources/audit/people-tiers.json; cited throughout as the organization's own proponent estimate, never as independent confirmation).
2. Morris A. Davis, William D. Larson, Stephen D. Oliner & Jessica Shui, "The Price of Residential Land for Counties, ZIP Codes, and Census Tracts in the United States," FHFA Working Paper 19-01 (2019; published in the Journal of Monetary Economics, 2021). fhfa.gov — the federal dataset the Center for Land Economics' report applies to California parcels to produce its $8.76 trillion check figure; see the wiki's fuller treatment of this paper (A-claim: federal-agency working paper; Tier 1).
3. California Legislative Analyst's Office, "Proposition 40: Imposes One-Time Tax on Certain Taxpayers. Initiative Constitutional Amendment and Statute," Analysis for the November 3, 2026 Ballot. lao.ca.gov — official nonpartisan ballot analysis, fetched and read in full; used for the measure's mechanics (5% one-time tax on billionaires resident January 1, 2026, due 2027, payable over five years with a deferral charge, real estate/pensions/retirement excluded, 90% earmarked for health care) and the LAO's own fiscal-effect estimate ("tens of billions of dollars" over several years, exact amount "very hard to predict," a possible ongoing decrease of under $1 billion a year in income-tax revenue) (A-claim: official primary source; Tier 1).
4. California Secretary of State, Official Voter Information Guide, "Proposition 40." voterguide.sos.ca.gov/propositions/40 — used to confirm the measure's qualification for the November 3, 2026 statewide ballot (A-claim: official primary source; Tier 1).
5. Brian D. Galle, David Gamage, Emmanuel Saez & Darien Shanske, "Expert Report on Proposition 40, the California 2026 Billionaire Tax: Revenue, Economic, and Constitutional Analysis" (July 2026 revision). eml.berkeley.edu/~saez — fetched and read directly; used for the measure's own "$100 billion" over five years, "$20 billion/year" revenue projection that the Center for Land Economics compares its land-value-tax rate against (B-claim: a report commissioned by and co-authored with the measure's own drafters, not an independent estimate; Saez is a Tier 1 academic economist per sources/audit/people-tiers.json, but the report's institutional standing is that of the measure's own supporting analysis, not third-party review).