I thought the parent made some good points that I hadn’t considered before. Why are you “Lol”-ing (I assume derisively)? Did they disrespect you in a way which justifies rudeness?
The return for participating in your community is participating in your community. The return for opening a store and serving your community is the revenue you get paid for serving your community.
Note that you can do NEITHER of those things and get far more returns than someone who does both, if you merely buy land early and sit on it. In fact you get to extract wealth from the people who do either/both in perpetuity. If they find more ways to be more valuable to the community, good news for you: you get an even bigger paycheck for doing literally nothing.
So yeah, if they did x y z things in their community, they got all the returns of x y and z… and the returns of simply owning land.
Not to pattern match too much, but the person who winds up with a shack sitting on a $2MM lot in an ultra-high COL area is almost certainly not a major contributor to community thriving.
So a speculator, they are taking a chance that the work of others will improve the community and raise their investment. Got it, morally not right, but also very risky, these people lose their shirts just as often as they make it big.
Ok, then the old couple who bought the "shack" in the 1970s and finally are selling now. Why do you claim they weren't a contributor in the community? Let's say the guy was a garbage man while their wife worked for the DMV. They raised their kids and whatever, in that shack. They never banked on it being worth $2MM, it just happened. They provided value to the community, ok, they didn't create that much value, but its not like they were camping on the land just for the appreciation.
The real problem with CA is proposition 13, which makes the cost of owning and sitting on land relatively cheap over a long period of time. But ya, that garbage man would have been forced out of their house maybe in the 90s without it, but it would make property speculation a lot less profitable because long term positions would be very expensive.
In China, this is even a larger problem because they lack property tax at all in most places, you pay your taxes up front in a land acquisition tax and then you can just leave your apartment unrenovated and market it as brand new 20 years later to make a few million dollars.
