Optimum development in many areas isn't necessarily a large mid-rise or high-rise. For most areas, the maximum that the roads and other utilities could support would be dense townhomes, triplexes or quadplexes. Outside of the very highest-demand areas, the LVT would mainly encourage land owners to build additional units on under-utilized square footage or build up a bit. Increasing housing in an area necessarily requires access to capital - so that's what should be provided.

It's not perfectly fair to everyone; it would enrich current landowners. But lower-income/wealth individuals would also benefit because they'd get access to more affordable housing in the areas that they need to live.

But making you and I pay a different amount of LVT on the same exact piece of land definitely makes it a worse idea in my view.

I think it's funny how every LVT discussion eventually comes back to some inclusion of other factors to adjust the taxes or provide exemptions, which starts to defeat the claimed purpose of a Land Value Tax.

LVT is a concept that sounds amazing and novel in a vacuum, but starts to look less ideal in the real world. The people who think about it enough start to include factors like structure value and different exceptions for how the land is being used, which starts to look a lot like existing tax code in most places.

A LVT could thus accidentally wind up like a window tax in that it could wind up discouraging efficient improvements to human conditions out of a misguided attempt at improving perceived fairness.

I can't think of how a private, but still public-access, park survives without a rich benefactor eating the losses, even today.

The only claim here is that if you own land which makes you $1000 in income and pay $2000 in taxes for that underutilized land you'd probably prefer to sell up.

Which has to be the least controversial part of LVT.

>Which gets at another LVT problem that is glossed over in discussions: Everything assumes that selling properties and moving is cheap and easy. If grandma's forever home is surrounded by apartment complexes when she's 85 years old, her taxes would become unaffordable because she's paying her share of those apartment complex value taxes. She would just pick up and move, which we're supposed to assume is cheap and easy.

We're seeing the net result of your desired policy right now where retired boomers sit on 4 bedroom houses with 3 empty bedrooms while anything resembling this type of family home is unaffordable for actual families.

Personally I think I preferred it when retirees were given tax incentives to sell up and downgrade to a smaller property, because even though moving day is stressful, not easy and costs money, it's not worth sacrificing an entire society over trying to avoid it.

In my experience there is often an assessment process that is essentially just made up. And when properties do sell, the sale price is always a "surprise" relative to the assessed combined value of the property.

In a sense the question is "What in particular makes you confident that the estimate accurately reflects the price of the land" but in a deeper sense what does the concept of "price of the land" even mean in practical terms? How would you know that the answer is right even if you were omniscient? And given the practical divergence from whatever theoretical standpoint, does then this value serve the same objectives as a "true" LVT?

The closest I saw was one study that compared the model to a human generated data set, which is just kicking the can down the road. The article semi-concludes

> I think it's quite plausible but not a slam dunk. That said, if the objection is, "valuing land separately from improvements is fundamentally impossible, and we can never get better at it, so we shouldn't try," I think that's plainly ruled out.

I do not agree with this assessment -- you can create a bunch of models and show that the models have good intra-model agreement, but the fundamental point has not been touched.

Mostly there are just pearl clutchers complaining about how elderly cash poor people sitting in large old houses on expensive land they've lived in for 20 years would be financially nudged into downgrading.

The real roadblock for LVT is not in the slightest bit technical, but simply that it would undermine a lot of privately held oligarchic wealth.

These are the dipshits conspiring to shape our future, control our destiny and create the Machine God in their image. They make the billionaires messing around the big owl at Bohemian Grove look positively tame and... rational.