It will discourage hoarding. Unproductively using land in high value locations that are growing is currently rewarded - with asset appreciation.

If it is discouraged - with taxation, that land will be yielded to more productive use.

Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it. Either we can let that revenue stream fill up government coffers or it can go into private pockets. It's our decision.

> Nobody creates land but somebody gets to "tax" it.

Well put. If I suggested privatising air and that you needed to pay the owner to breathe it, that would be seen as ridiculous, and rightly so. Meanwhile, land is an equally natural resource and equally essential to human life, but private land is just accepted as "the way it is".

This isn't a reasonable comparison because air is almost completely fungible; it's automatically redistributed throughout Earth by the magic of physics. Not only that, it's not scarce.

People in fact do pay for 'special' air in the form of air purifiers, air conditioning, heating, etc.

Land is both scarce and unsubstitutable.

Land taxes won't lower rents but probably won't increase them either, as rents are set by supply & demand. The cost for renting out a space over keeping it empty is minimal. Meanwhile the tax revenue can be used to subsidise rents (for example).

IMO land ownership is a big negative externality, as others can't utilise that land and land is a finite resource. As with all negative externalities, they should be taxed heavily.

That's not how prices are set on a finite good:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gD_dZvPwAj0

Land is finite but for all practical purposes, housing is not. Even in NYC, there's plenty of room to build up and that's exactly what's happening.

In most places there are a lot of restriction on building houses, so i would argue that housing is more finite than land. If you have planning permission in the UK, your land will be worth a lot more than land without.

Land value tax taxes the unimproved value of land.

If you build a 5 storey house on it you pay the same amount as the guy next door who has an asphalt car park.