Georgists Valued Land in the 1900s

This is the second article in the series Mass Appraisal for the Masses. Here’s a link to the previous article. While we moderns look to computerized geospatial analysis to solve the thornier aspects of land valuation, Georgists writing one hundred years ago, lacking all our modern innovations, claimed that valuing land was no great trouble at all. What was their secret? Research the art of land valuation around the turn of the last century and you will find the “Somers System” of land appraisal, named after its inventor, one William A. Somers, an employee of the Manufacturers’ Appraisal Company. Early documentation comes mostly in the form of terse pamphlets, but in the late 1920’s company president Walter Pollock sat down and published a full walk through in meticulous detail. Pollock’s book, co-authored by University of Pennsylvania economics professor Karl Scholz, has long been out of print. Fortunately it’s in the public domain and you can download and read the whole thing fo ... Read full article.