>In my opinion property taxes are terrible because they aren’t in the owners control at all. There’s no way to know what your tax bill will be next year and no way to control for it.

So it's no different to rent in this respect. It IS effectively rent, it just spreads the unpredictability of renting across the whole society instead of concentrating the negative downside among one portion of society.

Unimproved land is pretty fungible. If you have two empty lots across the road or even in the same area they will usually end up costing about the same.