The "person forced from home bought 30 years ago by rising taxes" bit must include "and collects a profit from the increase in value of home."

Property taxes pegged to market value are an incentive for liquidity in the real estate market.

Very true, but in the context of an LVT, it shows a possible downside: if it's high enough, you're taxing away the majority of the site value, and so these people don't even have the silver lining of a big increase in home value to cushion them when they move.

Well by design, LVT discourages having land be the majority of your home's value. E.g. Single Family Homes are fine in the outskirts of the city where land is less valuable, but LVT encourages building up the more valuable parts of the city (e.g. downtown, next to the subway station).

In both cases (SFH on less valuable land, condos on more valuable land) the land shouldn't end up being the majority of the value, since with condos the land value is effectively split among all units in the building.

Yes, I was agreeing with that and pointing out that the defense of "at least they have the gain in home value" wouldn't apply to the high LVT case. Whether it's good for pricing to work like that is a separate question.

Well, this hypothetical woman isn't collecting any profit while she still owns the home. Equity is useless until you sell.

This sort of "logic" was used to justify efforts like Prop 13 in California. It creates a massive windfall to incumbents and little more. It also ignores the most basic of solutions to solving this "problem", if it even is a problem:

You can provide land tax subsidies or rebates to targeted individuals (eg the disabled, the retired) without providing massive tax breaks to everyone else.

What's more, this system makes it impossible for, say, retired people to downsize or move because that resets their tax base to a much higher level on their new property (in the Prop 13 case).

IMO it's more efficient to allow a means-tested tax deferral until sale, at a low interest rate.

Genuinely curious, I thought the purpose of LVT was to split the current valuation into land and improvements and move most of it to the land. It is not intended to increase taxes on land that is already being used effectively. I think the bigger issue with LVT is figuring out what the right values are for taxing land vs improvements. As a first pass, I would aim to keep taxes the same just split it more like 80 (land) and 20 (improvements). This at least forces undeveloped property to be turned into a money making project very quickly.

There was a proposal in Chicago to put a cap on how quickly your taxes could go up relative to what you originally paid for your house. The motive was explicitly to protect homeowners in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods.

I assume there would be limited capacity for abuse just so long as the break only applies to your primary residence.

That's Prop 13, and it's one of the worst public policies in the United States.

The tax break wouldn't be so bad if it only applied to primary residence, was means-tested, and couldn't be passed down to children. Regardless, though, homeowners tend to be more well-off than tenants; they shouldn't be receiving tax breaks in the first place.

California did that 40 years ago and just look at how affordable California housing is now. Also public schools' ratings have tanked due to shrinking property tax revenue.

Prop 13 empowers NIMBYs to vote to kill new construction, strangling supply and pushing prices up, without facing any of the consequences of those rising prices.

This is 'The Poor Widow': http://kaalvtn.blogspot.com/2013/01/a-poor-widow-bogey.html (entire site is interesting)