Today we’re launching Unitism.com — a consulting practice dedicated to a single proposition: that communities thrive when the value of land and nature flows back to the people who create it.
Around the world, the same story repeats. Cities generate extraordinary wealth, yet homes drift out of reach of the people who work in them. Wages are taxed before a paycheck is ever seen, while fortunes are made by simply holding property as its value rises. These are not separate problems, and they are not anyone’s personal failing. They trace back to a single design flaw at the base of our economies: the value of land — created by the whole community, by its roads and schools and enterprise — is captured privately instead of serving the community that created it. Because it’s a design flaw, it can be fixed.
Unitism exists to fix it in practice. We work with nations, governments, and cities on the concrete steps of that repair:
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Research and analysis. We measure land value and economic rent in real economies, model who gains and who pays under reform, study housing affordability, and project public revenue over the long term — so decisions rest on evidence, not ideology.
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Policy design. We design the instruments that collect community-created value for public benefit: land value taxation, community land trusts, natural resource revenue sharing, and the assessment systems that make them work.
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Education and training. We help policymakers, government staff, community leaders, and citizens understand these principles in plain language — through seminars, training programs, and educational materials.
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Implementation support. Reform succeeds or fails in the transition. We build roadmaps and timelines, engage stakeholders, and stay alongside our partners with monitoring and evaluation as policy becomes reality.
Behind this practice stands a team of economists, researchers, and practitioners: professors of economics, philosophy, and political sociology; PhD researchers specializing in land rents and housing systems; policy reformers building microsimulation models with national statistical agencies; urban developers; and data scientists who turn big visions into working software. What unites them is a shared understanding of how land shapes economies — and long experience putting that understanding to work.
The know-how we draw on was not invented yesterday. Indigenous peoples have long held that land belongs to no one — that people hold a right to use it, never to own it. Classical economists — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and Henry George — showed how the rent of land rises with the prosperity of society and rightly belongs to the society that creates it. Modern scholars like Fred Foldvary, Mason Gaffney, and Fred Harrison carried that work forward; Foldvary studied land cycles closely enough to predict the 2008 financial crisis more than a decade in advance. And the ideas have been tested in the real world for over a century: Denmark has taxed land values since 1902, Estonia taxes only land and never buildings, Singapore funds world-class public housing from publicly held land, Alaska and Norway pay their people a share of their resource wealth, and cities from Canberra to Allentown are shifting taxes off work and onto land right now. This is the institutional knowledge we bring to every engagement: not a theory awaiting its first trial, but a body of practice with a track record.
Unitism was founded by Martin Adams, author of Land: A New Paradigm for a Thriving World, which makes the case in full: the solution to scarcity amid plenty already exists, and it’s right under our feet. The book is the foundation; Unitism is the implementation — translating its insights into frameworks, policies, and transitions that governments can actually carry out.
And because these ideas belong to everyone, Unitism.com is more than a consultancy’s front door. The site is a public resource: plain-language guides on everything from land-use rights to housing affordability, the peer-reviewed science behind the ideas, “Common Ground”, a free city game that lets you implement various tax strategies into a city, interactive tools that let you see the economics for yourself, a glossary, and the book — free to read online.
What you build and earn should stay yours; only the value no one produced themselves should be shared. That single principle, applied with care, yields affordable homes, strong public services, lighter taxes on work, and steadier economies. We’ve seen it work. We know how to build it.
If you lead a nation, a government, or a city — or advise those who do — we’d love to talk.