For land and housing to be governed as the structural analysis in [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>) requires, rather than as an ordinary commodity or an ungoverned local prerogative, the framework draws up a structural-necessity inventory specific to land as the hard case where a rival site and a non-rival structural value share a single object. Each condition is necessary and the necessity is joint; what land-and-housing architecture has to deliver to count as governing the hard case correctly, rather than as extraction on one side of it or foreclosure on the other, is the whole set, not any part of it.

*Site-value capture, collectible only at transfer.* Unimproved land value is collective investment captured privately whenever it is captured at all; the remedy is to recoup it to the fund that created it while leaving the improvements a holder actually built untaxed. But the fund's entitlement to that value and the current occupant's immediate liquidity are two different things, and collapsing them produces the installation failure the structural derivation does not itself license: a person who currently lives on land they did not inflate did not create the windfall and must never be forced to hand over cash they do not have, or vacate a home they occupy, on account of it. The constraint the framework requires is precise: land-value capture attaches to the land and is collectible at transfer — sale, or inheritance — never as an ongoing cash demand against a current occupant. The fund still receives the full windfall eventually; timing shifts, the obligation does not disappear.

*Deferral-until-transfer, generalized to the floor population with bounding guardrails.* Existing jurisdictions already run a narrow version of this, typically restricted to elderly or disabled homeowners: deferred capture accrues as a lien against the property rather than an annual cash bill. The framework requires the mechanism generalized to the floor population rather than confined to a means-tested subset, together with the guardrails a universal version requires. A cap on the lien, set at a fixed share of assessed value, is required to keep deferral from consuming a household's entire equity and leaving nothing at transfer, and to keep the fund's exposure bounded. An interest rate tied to the fund's own cost of carrying the deferral, plus a modest administrative buffer, is required to keep the protection from becoming a debt trap — the same failure mode that makes predatory reverse-mortgage products dangerous — and to keep it from becoming an arbitrage opportunity for households that could pay currently but would rather invest the difference elsewhere. An occupancy-verification requirement is required to keep deferral a protection for a person's home rather than a subsidized financing tool for a landbank or an absentee investor. The three guardrails are jointly required rather than independently optional: without the cap and fair interest rate, deferral becomes a debt trap that transfers a household's equity to the fund faster than the household consented to; without the occupancy requirement, deferral becomes a subsidy for landholders who were never at risk of displacement.

*Community land trusts, running the identical recoupment logic where land is trust-held.* Where land is held by a trust rather than by individuals, the trust holds the site value permanently and residents transact only on the dwelling; resale is required to be formula-restricted, so that a resident cannot privately capture the collectively-created portion of a rising land value by flipping the unit at market price. This is not a novel mechanism; it is the actual structure permanently-affordable land trusts already run, and the reason their affordability holds over decades rather than eroding. Without the resale formula, a land trust becomes a one-generation windfall for whoever bought in first rather than the permanent structure it is required to be.

*A portable, person-attached housing allowance rather than an assigned unit.* The subsistence floor's housing line is required to be delivered as a sum attached to the person rather than as a unit the structure assigns, because reading housing as subsistence rather than assistance requires it: the amount is regionally indexed while the entitlement is universal, so that a flat national figure (which would house a person in a low-cost region while failing to house them in a high-cost one) is precluded, and the allowance is not withdrawn as the member earns, on the same no-clawback logic [§9.7](<9.7 Economy.md>) derives generally. The allowance is required to remain compatible with ownership: a member may rent at the floor or save the difference toward land and improvements they hold outright, because the land-value capture this section derives recoups only the community-created site value and leaves what an owner builds untaxed.

*Provision-cost indexing, land-value capture as governor, and elastic supply, required jointly to keep the allowance from being captured.* An allowance paid into a fixed-supply market can be captured by the holders of that supply, and the design is required to close every mechanism by which that happens rather than any single one. Indexing the allowance to observed market rent is precluded, because it announces to every holder that the floor will rise to meet whatever they charge, so the subsidy capitalizes into site values and the member is no better housed while the holder collects the difference — the partial leakage the housing-voucher record already shows. The allowance is instead required to be indexed to the *cost of provision* (construction, maintenance, and land valued at its captured rate), which cuts the feedback line at its source: a market rent running above the benchmark reads as a signal to fix supply, not a number the floor must chase. Land-value capture is required as the second governor: the rent gains a holder might chase capitalize into assessed site value, and recouping them to the fund removes the incentive to chase them. And the supply fixity that makes capture possible at all must be broken: the anti-exclusion constraint [§9.8](<9.8 Housing.md>) derives liberalizes the zoning that manufactures scarcity, and non-market construction can supply a floor-priced, non-stigmatized unit anyone may take or leave, capping what private holders can charge by competing with them rather than commanding them. Rent control is disfavored among the available instruments for the same reason: a ceiling on the price corrects the symptom after the fact, induces the shortage every fixed-price market induces, and reintroduces the distortion the positive-sum account is built to avoid, where the provision-cost index, the land-value governor, and elastic supply are required to prevent the capture rather than freeze its result.

Together, these conditions (site-value capture collectible only at transfer; generalized deferral with bounding guardrails; the community-land-trust resale formula for trust-held land; a portable, provision-cost-indexed, non-clawed-back allowance; and elastic, anti-exclusionary supply) are what land-and-housing architecture as the hard case structurally requires: each indispensable, and the floor holding only when all of them are met. [§9.8.3](<9.8.3 What is Predicted.md>) runs its predictions against that set.


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← [9.8.1 What is Disputed](<9.8.1 What is Disputed.md>) | [9.8.3 What is Predicted](<9.8.3 What is Predicted.md>) →
