Bill Gate's Farmland Empire Makes The Case for The Land Value Tax

Originally posted on Quora September 16, 2022

William Gates, through his holding company Cascade Investment LLC, has become the largest private farmland owner (and landlord) in the country having amassed 270,000 acres. For perspective that’s 422 square miles which is more land area than cities like NYC and Chicago. While theories about his intentions abound one thing is certain: farmland, like other types of realty, is a speculation asset absent any intention to till it yourself. As long as the wealthy can capitalize on the scarcity of nature in the selling and rental prices of land, people like Gates, Ellison and Zuckerberg will continue to gobble up thousands of acres for their own personal possession and profit. This reality is lost on people obsessed with the number of digits in these figures’ net worth estimations instead of the number of real resources monopolized by these figures. Billionaires everywhere are a product of inflation primarily through cheap credit lent from central banks and secondarily through real estate speculation augmented by that cheap credit. Shares issued by a publicly traded company can grow indefinitely with market demand and can be bought for pennies on the dollars these days. Real estate cannot grow indefinitely with market demand; the number of parcels zoned for residential, commercial, industrial or agricultural use are fixed in most jurisdictions, usually only changing with enough political clout, and there is a definitive finite amount of land metros can sprawl over. Realty ownership is also much less accessible than stocks both in terms of price (you cannot buy it for pennies on the dollar) and institutional barriers (you can’t just set up an Etrade account).

At least one of his vacant tracts in Arizona has been set aside for potential future development as a “smart city” that could include 80,000 homes along with office, retail, industrial and logistical buildings. The 25,000 acre tract called Belmont is due West of Phoenix near the city of Buckeye, AZ which has experienced a population boom of over 900% in the past 2 decades and is now bigger than Flagstaff and Yuma. In 2019 and 2020 Gates issued 5,600 R1 housing permits. The lion’s share of the property, 13,330 acres, will be set aside for residential use while 3,800 acres will be set aside for industrial space, an additional 3,800 for office and retail space, 3400 for parks and green space and 470 acres for schools. It has yet to be determined where he will get enough water to support hundreds of thousands of residents. Even if Gates doesn’t build a corporate dictatorship like Lanai, Hawaii he’ll realize a windfall from the westward expansion of the Phoenix metro.