Continuing my occasional series of posts on land values with titles swiped from Led Zeppelin song titles or lyrics from their albums "Houses of The Holy" and "Physical Graffiti", emailed in by Lola from Money Week/The New World: ... on 17 November, the Penang marathon took place on Penang Bridge for the last time. From now on, the annual competition will take place on the recently completed Penang Second Bridge, which, at 24km, is the longest link in Southeast Asia. The first bridge, which was state of the art not long ago, can’t handle the volume of traffic. Since the announcement of the bridge project in 2006, land prices in Batu Maung have leaped from RM50-60 per sq ft to around RM250-300 per sq ft. New apartments, which used to cost between RM250,000-300,000 each, now cost between RM700,000-800,000. And there’s a lot more to come from the infrastructure boom in this part of Asia. The article doesn't say what the new bridge cost to build, but let's pencil in RM2 billion as a reasonable guess. That means that the bridge could have been funded by collecting the land value uplift on 209 acres (one-third of a square mile) or on 4,200 apartments. The areas and number of actual or potential apartments which will benefit is of course a huge multiple of that.
So as per usual, the question is... who paid for the bridge and who will benefit most?