I do believe it's unfair, but my point is more about it being inefficient.
A measured and transparent expansion system would be one way to help that, although complexity would vary widely with locale (plains vs river cities).
The problem with (independent) speculators is that the city is trading a largely rational actor (agricultural land owner) with capital / a solely profit-driven actor (speculator).
My point is the latter is less inclined to compromise than the former, to the detriment of urban development.
One could make the point that aggregating speculators serve a necessary role, but I don't see much value delivered by "smaller than a planned community" types.
Furthermore, I have seen them hold up urban progress. It only takes one landowner to prevent a contiguous utility from being constructed...
Rational, in this context, means profit maximizing - both kinds of landowners should act in a similar way. If the owners compromise to less than the value of the land, sure, that's a way to redistribute the savings back to society, but it's still unfair to them. It also opens a major conflict of interest for those controlling the negotiation to get involved and grab some of that money on the table.
I much rather empower all owners to maximize the value of the land, but at the same time, have sane eminent domain regulation that prevent them for getting rich at the taxpayer's expense. So any inefficiency is the result of legislation that allows speculators to abuse the process.
Rational only means strictly profit maximizing under simple economic treatments. In this case, we're talking about improvements that boost land value, but must be agreed to / enforced on all.
Consequently, you deal with local optima, when everyone is perfectly individually greedy, no improvements can be constructed, and everything is less "good" than it could be (for the individuals and society).
A measured and transparent expansion system would be one way to help that, although complexity would vary widely with locale (plains vs river cities).
The problem with (independent) speculators is that the city is trading a largely rational actor (agricultural land owner) with capital / a solely profit-driven actor (speculator).
My point is the latter is less inclined to compromise than the former, to the detriment of urban development.
One could make the point that aggregating speculators serve a necessary role, but I don't see much value delivered by "smaller than a planned community" types.
Furthermore, I have seen them hold up urban progress. It only takes one landowner to prevent a contiguous utility from being constructed...