Why the Rent is Too Damn High

Name: Why the Rent is Too Damn High
Price: 30.23 AUD
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ISBN: 9798234035691

An inquiry into land value and the common wealth

Paul Beard

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Paperback

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English

Otherwise Books
12 May 2026

Political economy; Property & real estate; Urban & municipal planning

Summary
Details

The rent is too damn high. Here's why - and it's not who you think.

Everyone knows housing is unaffordable. The usual suspects get the usual blame: greedy landlords, bureaucratic zoning, not enough building. But the real answer is under your feet. Land - who owns it, who benefits from its value, and who pays for that value - is the question American cities have been refusing to ask for a century.

Why the Rent Is Too Damn High is a data-driven argument about Seattle, but its logic applies to every city where wealth concentrates while workers get priced out. Drawing on Henry George's radical and remarkably modern insight that land value is created by everyone who lives and works in a community - not by the name on the tax bill - author Paul Beard builds the case from the ground up, with public records, parcel-level data, and 115 acres of downtown surface parking lots as receipts.

This book explains:

Why a vacant lot or a boarded-up building is the real crime - not the person sleeping in the doorway

How wealthy cities manufacture poverty through the way they tax land

Why the twin ""emergencies"" of homelessness and housing unaffordability have the same root cause and the same solution

How Monopoly - originally invented to expose the real-life game most people didn't know they were playing - still explains more about urban economics than most policy papers

Seattle has a collecting problem, not a spending problem. So does your city. Once you see it, you can't unsee it - and it will make you angry every time you drive past an empty lot.

You have been warned.

By: Paul Beard
Imprint: Otherwise Books
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm, Spine: 21mm
Weight: 526g
ISBN: 9798234035691
Pages: 394
Publication Date: 12 May 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active