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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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It’s just looks like a constant gotcha with no desire to understand what is going on.

Yeah.

The real estate deal had nothing to do with Georgism.

If the leases have actual value as in the real estate went up in value and someone would rent it for a higher price you occasionally see the leases resold for profit to (Red Lobster in this case) a new business (in this case an expanding restaurant chain) but most of the time the landlord takes a big L and has a pain point of figuring out what to do with the property.

I see a similarity between them:

Georgism incentivizes maximizing profit over real-estate by increasing the rent. Low income usages can't pay the rents. Some implementations (??) make the land owner set the price they're taxed on and they'd be forced to sell to any purchaser at that price.

But here someone bet the land was under-utilized, bought the company with the goal of selling hte land to someone who can make more money with it. I'm not sure about the implementation of whether the previous owners of Red Lobster knew this was the plan and were okay with it.

Overstated it seems. Hyperion commented on this take, do you have a similar view to them?

The firm who bought the real estate almost certainly took a giant loss on the deal.

People who buy NNN leases are buying cash flows tied to the leases betting that Red Lobster will stay in business and pay rent for probably something like 30 years. The buyers of these are much more like a mortgage bank than they are a land speculator. These are basically now junk bonds in default where the owner of the leases now own a bunch of restaurants without tenants they are going to need to spend a lot of money renovating (Tenant improvements) to recover any value.

I don’t know how many times I need to say this but in the real estate world these things are not “owning” real estate the same way a normal person would think about it.

These are the same people who would buy bonds backed by Pepsi but Pepsi just went bankrupt and your trying to figure out what you can liquidate to recover some value.

I think Georgism is silly. Private markets are always trying to redevelop properties into better use cases that increase rents. I think Georgism fails because develops largely profit by pushing for projects that will increase the value of their land and therefore increase rents. By taking away that profit developers have less incentive to be boost land values.