When we think of New York City today, we think of a bustling city with towering skyscrapers and an incredible supply of high quality amenities. It’s the hub of much of the United States of America’s progress, from the arts to the sciences. This incredible progress is reflected in the city’s enormous population of about 8.1 million as of 2024.
However, there is a serious problem, New York is incredibly expensive. The city has costs of living so high that, in 2021, a staggering 36% of all households did not make enough income to cover their basic needs.

This is reflected in the harsh reality that the average apartment in New York City has a monthly rent of about 4,000 dollars, totaling up to $48,000 in annual costs just to live in the city.
The issues lies in how the city handles the price of its land. The non-reproducible nature of land allows those who own it in NYC to simply profit off society’s desire to live in New York through raising land prices, rather than providing the housing needed to satisfy that demand.

This reflects itself in the fact that New York City’s property tax is just 0.98% of a piece of real estate’s total value, of which the land portion is lower than the rate given, as the city’s property tax unfortunately adds the buildings New Yorkers create in the tax bill as well.

The backwards incentives resulting from this scheme makes it more profitable to under-utilize land to the detriment of the city than to build housing to help the city grow.

As a result, New York City’s population has declined in the aftermath of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Clearly, there must be a change, one which will push the city from simply profiting off its existence as the Big Apple, and instead push it towards building itself up for sustained greatness.

Luckily for New York, they’ve gone through this before and have gotten out of it as well. All they need is to take a page from the man who implemented a dose of Henry George’s ideas to save the city just over a century ago, governor Al Smith.

The Single Tax movement, which had held a strong place in political thought for much of the late 1800s and early 1900s, was heavily weakened by the onset of the First World War.

The movement had been down, but it wasn’t out, and the sheer determination many early Single Taxers had to pass Henry George’s reforms would show itself at a particularly special time for the city where George had ran for mayor twice, dying in his second attempt.
Throughout the 1910s, New York City had been undergoing a cost-of-living crisis similar to what is seen today, and it was choking the city’s growth. The problem was so bad that then governor Al Smith called a session in the state legislature to find a way to help the city.

Almost immediately the Georgists jumped into action, petitioning for Smith to have the city’s property tax be changed to exempt, as Gaffney puts it, “new housing construction (but not the land values) from the property tax from 1920 until the end of 1931.

The petitioning seemed to have stuck with Smith. Despite being part of the same Tammany hall-dominated Democratic party which had shut down George’s 1886 mayoral run with the United Labor Party, he ultimately gave the nod to the Georgists and passed their wishes.

From 1920 to 1931, New York’s new and improved property tax would exempt a portion of the city’s building values, while still fully targeting the land value.

Furthermore, as Gaffney points out, “Georgist thought and activism had made NYC assessors up-value land in the tax base, and down-value improvements, by recognizing depreciation and obsolescence”.
The full result of this was exactly what the city needed and what the Georgists desired. During the roaring twenties which followed Al Smith’s reforms, New York City built a staggering 740,000 housing units. In contrast, between 2012 and 2023, New York built only 240,000 units, 500,000 less units built for a population around 3 times the size.

Setting the incentives right in reducing profiting from land while increasing profiting from labor helped transform New York into the giant it is today.

In summary, the answer to New York’s modern problems may be found in the lessons of the past. New York City today needs to simply shift its source of revenue from the work of its people to the economic rents of its valuable location, paired of course alongside sensible zoning reforms.

By setting the incentives right to make production more profitable than hoarding what is non-reproducible, New York City can fix the problems stifling its growth and grant itself a boon in the form of a socio-economic boom, just as Al Smith and the Georgists had done for the city in the fateful year of 1920.
(The sources which inspired this post: The Resurgence of New York City After 1920 by Mason Gaffney and How New York Solved its Housing Crisis by Charles Johnson Post)