New York City
The single largest concentration of measured urban land value in the United States — roughly $2.5 trillion citywide — and the site of Henry George's own 1886 run for mayor.
Overview
New York City holds the largest measured concentration of urban land value in the United States. Estimates compiled by Albouy et al. (2017) put New York's total urban land value at roughly $2.5 trillion, and a separate study of Manhattan alone — Barr, Smith & Kulkarni's land-values index built from nearly 3,600 vacant-land transactions between 1950 and 2014 — put the value of Manhattan's developable land at $1.74 trillion in 2014.[1][2] Both figures are cited in Lars Doucet's Land Is a Big Deal as evidence that, in the country's densest and most productive real estate markets, most of the value of "real estate" is really the value of location — i.e., land rent — rather than the buildings on top of it.[2]
New York is also the site of the highest-profile electoral test the Georgist movement ever mounted: Henry George's 1886 campaign for mayor on a land-value-tax platform, in which he finished second, ahead of the third-place Republican candidate, a young Theodore Roosevelt.[3]
New York has twice served as a live natural-experiment site for Georgist-adjacent policy. From 1921 to 1931, the city exempted newly built housing — but not the land under it — from local property tax, under a law championed by Governor Al Smith to address a postwar housing shortage. The 1920s became the largest building-permit decade in city history: more than 740,000 housing units were built between 1920 and 1929, about 22% of the city's current housing stock. A contemporaneous Bureau of Labor Statistics analysis found new-housing permit value rose 246% in the exemption's first year, far outpacing comparison cities without an exemption (Philadelphia's housing-permit value rose only 3.1%); a later Georgist retrospective by Mason Gaffney found New York's 1920–1940 population grew 32.7% against 13.8% for other major New York State cities, though both sources caution that the exemption's causal share versus concurrent falling material costs and easier credit was not isolated by a modern econometric study.[4] More recently, New York's January 2025 Central Business District Tolling Program — the first cordon-based congestion charge in the US — was evaluated in a 2025 NBER working paper using a generalized synthetic-controls design: CBD road speeds rose 11%, with spillover speed gains outside the cordon too, and driver welfare (before any revenue recycling or environmental benefit) rose by at least $14.3 million per week, with little-to-no detected effect on air quality or foot traffic.[5]
Significance
New York illustrates, at extreme scale, the basic Georgist claim that a large share of urban wealth is location value created by the surrounding community — density, transit, agglomeration, and public investment — rather than by any individual landowner's effort. The city's land-value concentration makes it a natural reference point in debates over how much revenue a land value tax could plausibly capture in a major US city, though New York City itself has not adopted a land value tax and continues to tax land and improvements together under its existing property tax system. Its two policy episodes bracket the Georgist toolkit at city scale: untaxing new buildings while leaving land on the rolls (1921–1931) and pricing a congested commons directly (2025's congestion charge) — both consistent with, though neither a clean controlled test of, the underlying land/rent-based logic.
See Also
- Henry George — ran for Mayor of New York in 1886 on a land-value-tax platform
- 1886 New York City Mayoral Election — the campaign itself, in depth
- Land Is a Big Deal — the book that compiles the citywide and Manhattan land-value estimates cited here
- New York City's 1921–1931 Tax Exemption for New Housing — the decade NYC untaxed new buildings (but not land), and what the boom does and does not prove
- The Short-Run Effects of Congestion Pricing in New York City (Cook et al., 2025) — the first causal evaluation of the CBD Tolling Program
- Land Value Tax — the policy George's campaign proposed for the city
Sources
- Jason Barr, Fred Smith & Sayali Kulkarni (2018), "What's Manhattan Worth? A Land Values Index from 1950 to 2014," Regional Science and Urban Economics — used for the $1.74 trillion 2014 Manhattan developable-land estimate. Free PDF (Rutgers repository)
- Lars Doucet (2022), Land Is a Big Deal, Ch. 13 — the discovery source; used for the ~$2.5 trillion citywide land-value figure (citing Albouy et al. 2017) and the framing of both figures as evidence that urban real estate value is predominantly land value. Wiki summary
- Christopher England (2023), Land and Liberty: Henry George and the Single Tax Movement — used for the 1886 mayoral campaign context. Wiki summary
- Mary Conyngton, "Effect of the Tax-Exemption Ordinance in New York City on Housing," Monthly Labor Review 14(4) (1922); Mason Gaffney, "The Resurgence of New York City After 1920" (UC Riverside working paper, rev. 2001) — used for the 1921–1931 building-tax-exemption figures and the honest caveat that causation versus concurrent factors was not isolated (B-claim). Wiki summary
- Cody Cook, Aboudy Kreidieh, Shoshana Vasserman et al. (2025), "The Short-Run Effects of Congestion Pricing in New York City," NBER Working Paper 33584 — used for the 11% CBD speed increase, metro-wide spillovers, and the ≥$14.3M/week driver-welfare gain (B-claim; working paper, not yet peer-reviewed). Wiki summary