Check out some of the events we have done in the past
2007 True Cost Economics report
Frank de Jong’s “Tools of Sustainability Tour”
Land Supply & Housing Affordability – more details
The real issue forcing land prices up are the huge economic rents available to land speculators. With Jeff Kennett’s move away from Site Value rating to Capital Improved Value (CIV) rating, land speculators can purchase land, sit on it and wait for the property to grow in value. The constant attack on State Land Taxes ensures a continuing trend for them to be weakened, sending the signal to the marketplace that hoarding land is appropriate.
On a local level, the combination of these 2 factors has seen a growth of vacant land in inner urban areas in Melbourne. We believe the reduced supply of land from this speculative trend has applied greater pressure on land prices than Melbourne’s 2030 boundary. The huge upward trend in land prices happened well before the 2002 announcement of 2030.
Challenge Camp Photos
A picture tells a thousand words!
Charlie interviews Margaret McDonald (ANGAIR)
A treehouse discovery on bushwalk
Students asking the tough questions
The Earth Share game – who wins?
The team prepares questions at the coal face
The Sunday sees Alcoa under the microscope from beyondzeroemissions.com
Quotations
Margarita Arias, Costa Rica:
Only those who have fought for the right to protect their own bodies from abuse can truly understand the rape and plunder of our forests, rivers and soils.
Aristotle (384-322BC):
The whole of the land was in the hands of a few, and if the cultivators did not pay their rents, they became subject to bondage ..
Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD):
Poverty is the mother of crime.
Cesare Baccaria:
The history of mankind is an immense sea of errors in which few obscure truths may be found.
Ambrose Bierce “The Devil’s Dictionary”:
Geonomics: Recovery of Site-Rents for Urban Density
Jeffery J. Smith, President, Forum on Geonomics
[A paper submitted to the BSA of the AIA, 2003]
Around the world, a few dozen cities collect ground rents – some of the money that people spend or are willing to spend on a location – rather than tax buildings and other economic goods. Besides raising public revenue more efficiently, these places also motivate efficient use of urban land. No longer taxed for improving their property, while prodded by a rent levy to make improvements, owners who had been speculating or procrastinating get busy and put their once under-utilized land to better use. Overall, better land use raises density in particular and livability in general – goals that other jurisdictions still long for.