This is true, but it's minor. The main one is this:
> Property taxes also distort incentives. If you improve your property, then you pay more tax. Property taxes can discourage you from using your land to its highest and best use.
In particular, it's what happens after the incentives are distorted. It becomes unprofitable to increase the housing stock, so housing becomes more expensive, so people have to pay more for it. This can be a huge amount of money and it's deadweight loss.
> Land taxes offer the opposite incentives. They encourage you to make your property better.
It's not that they encourage it so much as that they stop discouraging it. You don't pay any less LVT if you develop your land, but you also don't pay any more.
> Land taxes would arguably help a lot of the housing crises.
This still depends on zoning. It doesn't matter how profitable it would be to have a 4-plex on your lot when building one is prohibited by zoning. And fixing the zoning would have the larger benefit, because in the places that matter, that's already the constraint, which LVT on its own can't get you out of.
Of course, we could do both.
There's no way that this occurs with actual property taxes at the levels they are in the US. Sure, an improvement may result in higher property taxes which go into effect before the value of the improvement begins being realized, but overall effective property tax rates in the US range between 0.37% and 2.22% per year; this plausibly could make uses where the value would be realized entirely in direct-use by the owner unviable, but there is no way it makes any use where the value is realized through commercial exploitation (whether productive or rent) unviable, even with something of a delay in realization. Including things like densifying housing for rent or sale.
Yes, abstractly it might be a problem with property taxes, if you had a system where property taxes were the principal tax in society. Of course, the only people who even propose real estate taxes as the primary tax are…Georgists arguing for a heavy LVT replacing other taxes.
> It’s not that they encourage it so much as that they stop discouraging it
No, especially if they are heavy (as LVT proponents often propose), they don’t merely “stop discouraging” improvements, they make them necessary, because land uses that don’t provide a substantial fraction of the income potential of the land become unviable. In fact, land ownership by people who don’t have capital for both improvements and to stay afloat until those improvements bear fruit becomes unviable; a heavy LVT is an efficient way to assure acceleration of the concentration of land ownership.
Why not?
Suppose you could invest $100,000 to create housing in an area where that would have a 5.5% ROI, compared to a 5% ROI for some non-housing alternative investment with equivalent risk. Then you're going to build housing. Add a 1% property tax and you're going to invest the money in the other thing instead until local rents increase to raise the housing ROI.
> No, especially if they are heavy (as LVT proponents often propose), they don’t merely “stop discouraging” improvements, they make them necessary, because land uses that don’t provide a substantial fraction of the income potential of the land become unviable.
That doesn't actually change the math.
Suppose you could spend $100,000 to construct more housing on your property and then, in the local housing market, the additional housing would have a net present value of $90,000, e.g. because local rents are already low. Then you're not going to do it, because you'd just lose $10,000.
If you suddenly owe a lot of land value tax, you're still not going to do it, because losing $10,000 more doesn't help you pay the extra tax.
Whereas if you could spend $100,000 to produce something with a net present value of $200,000, you were going to do that either way.
The weirdest thing about LVT is that if you got rid of the disincentive to build from property tax (and, of course, restrictive zoning) then the "land value" would crash because if rents were higher than construction costs then construction would happen until they weren't. At which point housing scarcity would be low and collectable rents would be predominantly attributable to construction costs, and only higher in cities to the extent that higher density structures have a higher construction cost per unit area.
But the same thing happens just by getting rid of property tax and restrictive zoning, doesn't it?
Housing was guaranteed in the old Soviet Union, but if you didn’t cooperate, the housing was in the gulag.
Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it. Gold, for example, requires human labour to be dug up. Bitcoin requires humans to run machines. The Mona Lisa requires humans to paint. Land behaves differently.
> Land is quite unique. It is the resource with the weakest argument that humans produce it.
I mean, not really. What about water or oxygen? What about carbon taxes insofar as they're related to the inherent value of the earth's climate? There are plenty of resources that don't require any human effort to produce, but that doesn't make them better suited to taxation. It just seems like an entirely arbitrary distinction to make.
In today's world, where access to a city can dramatically change one's earning potential far far more, they are even more relevant.
The issue is both about the scarcity of access to a resource, such as the economy of a city, but also about where that resource comes from. With urban land, that resource is not the product of the individual land owner, but rather all the other land owners that made the city so prosperous and with so much opportunity.
Yes, it is (or, at least important subsets of land are.) If it wasn't, it would have zero value. Nonzero market value requires, and therefore proves, scarcity.
This makes me wonder, do roads pay land tax? I think railway tracks do but I'm not sure about roads.
Personally I think more of the spectrum should be like 2.4GHz, 5 GHz (and soon 6GHz?). No auctions. No owners.
Rather, the tax on the land of the roads is an accounting mechanism to ensure that the land is being used for greater economic efficiency, rather than, say, a way forward wealthy people who live far away to get the public to subsidize the transport to their large mansions.
Obviously I'm assuming an equal monetary value of paintings vs land; my point is not about how many acres equal how many paintings but about the impact on other people that taking $1M of paintings vs $1M of land out of circulation has.
With respect to your second point, I think that taking each out of circulation has different effects. I would guess that most assets have a value of about what they're worth (i.e. the price mechanism works). I think Georgism is at least a valuable paradigm, and would be in favour of at least some pseudo-Georgist measures, such as only taxing land, to encourage higher-value uses rather than land+structures, and taxing all sorts of land at the same rate.
I'm not convinced; after all these collections are often already in public ownership. If there was something more beneficial to the public to be done with them, one would hope that would already be happening.
The point here is to maintain a society and some things must come first, namely material things which paintings are not. Of course, art history shows us time and time again the vital importance of material sustenance in creating and preserving works of art. If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible.
>"If you really care about art, you have to care about the material foundations that make rich and meaningful social livelihoods possible."
I care about all the tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, and I think that many paintings are worth a lot more than most 10k acres. The paintings also have the benefits of being able to contribute to shared experiences all over the world, and fulfilling more challenging needs.
Income tax can be shifted to capital gains, of corporation tax can be shifted to other domiciles etc.
I'm not sure that meshes with the way it's actually described in the article. They give examples of a small piece of land worth $2M and then another plot in a different location that's worth far less, purely due to proximity to other improvements on the land (i.e. being prime real estate in a city) rather than something inherent to the land itself (e.g. fertility/use for growing crops).
And even then, something like fertility isn't really all natural any longer, given how it's impacted by so many farming practices (fertilization, tilling/no-till, crop rotation/nitrogen fixing crops, etc.).
Resource extraction (e.g. oil) seems a lot closer, though the actual labor of it vs. the resources of it are another thing. I do see more reason there why the benefit ought to be largely public--and to some extent it is in, e.g., Alaska via the Alaska Permanent Fund.
But I think that labor, improvements and whatever the intrinsic value might be are a lot more tied together than seems to be accounted for by the theory. Otherwise why is the intrinsic value of Manhattan's land not measured in some number of beads, with everything else being due to improvements (including those made by neighbors)? And yes, I do realize that beads actually were money for a time due to a lack of actual currency, but still.
> All these advantages attach to the land. On this land — and no other — they can be utilized. For here is the center of population: the focus of exchange, the marketplace, the workshop of industry. Density of population has given this land productive power equivalent to multiplying its original fertility a thousandfold.… The most valuable lands on earth, those with the highest rent, are not those with the highest natural fertility. Rather, they are lands given a greater usefulness by population density.
It doesn't _absolutely_ disincentivize these things unless they are operating at a loss. It certainly disincentivizes "economic activity" like opening an at-grade parking lot in a bustling city-center in order to minimize the property tax you pay while the land appreciates in value more than it disincentivizes opening a parking garage there (assuming there's actually enough parking demand to pay to build and maintain).
(I don't entirely disagree with you--it seems like this would shunt some investment away from investments that need expensive land. It's less clear to me whether that is good, neutral, or bad.)
George goes to great lengths to distinguish these factors of production. They are fundamentally different.
Land taxes are great because there is less of a deadweight loss. Governments need money to operate. All else equal, we should get governments the money they need without wasting people's time to comply with complicated tax laws.
Humans also generally agree that progressive taxation is a good idea. Rich people should pay more to fund the government. Rich people own a lot of land, so they'd pay a lot of land tax. Poor people generally don't own any land and wouldn't be subject to this tax. Land taxes align well with what a lot of people think is fair.
Compliance costs with many other taxes are quite high.
...and physically evicts the previous tenant.
Which is not to say that the outcome would be fair, but whether it is or not would depend upon how these organizations are regulated and run.
Also, LVT don't fix zoning as the value of your land is based on what you can make from it. If your land is zoned for only single floor parking, nobody is going to buy it for more than they can earn through single floor parking so the land won't be that valuable thus it won't have a high land value tax.
Fairly bold assertion. I'd say most humans don't even really know what progressive taxation means.
> Rich people should pay more to fund the government.
A static tax regime (i.e., taxes calculated by a simple fixed percentage of wealth or income) leads to the same outcome. E.g., in a 10% fixed tax regime, someone making $10k/a pays $1k in tax and another person making $1mm pays $100k in tax, meeting your desire to have the rich pay more--no progressive taxation required.
I would argue that in 21st century the definition of rich is actually „achieves most of his income through sources which are not subject to income tax”.
Progressive income tax mostly hurts well qualified proffessionals nowadays (people actually working for that income) and as such is detrimental to economy at large.
I really don’t get that people talk about rising income inequality all the time, but actually noticing it (i.e. very strong minority holding many assets) suddenly doesn’t make sense.
The question I'd put back to you is why it's useful to have a single, universally agreed-upon definition of "rich"?
I think it's better to say that land is sort of a one-off that is treated differently from every other asset than to try to compare it to other kinds of wealth.
In theory. IMO the practical biggest issue with property tax is that it is usually spent locally, keeping rich neighborhoods well funded and poor neighborhoods poor.
Exactly. They tax wealth created by nature and/or the community rather than wealth created by individuals. The land Trump Tower sits on isn't valuable because Trump owns it. It's valuable because all of New York surrounds it.
A $5 million fleet of cars is wealth (mostly) created by human hands. Those human hands ought to decide what happens to them. Right?
There's also raw materials, but they would be subjected to a georgist tax too.
Yeah, but pretty much all private wealth is built on top of thousands of years' worth of accumulated community knowledge. The startup you founded wouldn't be worth anything if not for electricity, computers, and the internet.
A wealthy man gets a $270 red light ticket. (This is the one where turning right on a red light is illegial. It seems like they arbitrarily decide which intersection to enforce?). The wealthy man casually mentions it over din din. Goes to sleep, and has the help drive his spawn to private schools. Yea--I live in a county filled with rich people, and they are obnoxious on so many levels.
To the poor man it might be part of his rent.
So yes--if I ran things; The wealthy would pay more at DMV, bail, patent fees, incorporation fees, etc., and especially property taxes. You want a third mansion so you don't have to look at your neighbors---get ready to pay Zuck.
I would love to see Jay Leno pay a $100,000 speeding ticket.
(I believe they are trying this in Sweden?)
No... They aren't "trying" anything; it's been standard practice for decades, probably over half a century. Not just for speeding tickets, but many fines in general. And not just Sweden, but most of the Nordic countries, plus Germany.
EDIT: some support: https://www.progress.org/articles/the-implementation-of-land...
Land immediately adjacent to a golf course or park is often valued higher. Land immediately next to railroad tracks or industry, not so much while the discount drops off steeply just a few blocks away.
Water rights, drainage, soil quality, contamination, roadway access all matter a great deal for more commercial land.
I'd argue that the factors you've listed are relatively easy to factor into an appraisal.
Property taxes, in comparison, are really hard to compute. Each jurisdiction has different rules. There are different valuation methodologies. If you add a 2 car garage, what the useful life. What depreciation schedule should be used. How should inflation be accounted for.
I agree with your comment generally and am not sure what part of the original comment doesn't make sense to you.
EDIT: Reread my original comment and see your point now. I phrased the "easy" part too strongly. I mean "easy" in relative terms... compared to what's being done currently, but agree the wording wasn't great.
As an aside, I've often been surprised how little some of these features get valued. For instance, I've looked at neighborhoods where one side of the street backs to other houses and the other side backs to parkland. The nicer side is generally more expensive, but it's not a huge effect, and often homes on the bad side go for more money (because of the building itself).
Mark to market. If you sell your home, then that value is the fixed price of the home until the next sale event.
And don't you think it's funny: we can't have rich people moving here because that would drive up land taxes, and we can't have poor people moving here because that would drive down the total resale value. I guess people should only be allowed to live among their exact socioeconomic equals ...
> this wouldn't happen very often
Then, I suppose we would have no reason for the term "gentrification", if it's that damn rare.
No, it's really easy to wave your hands and come up with a number that you claim is "the value of the land". But since that number is not based on actual sales of the land in question, it's just hand-waving. Not to mention that if you ask five different economists to do the estimating, you'll get more than five different answers. Much of the article that prompted this thread is trying to deal with this problem: there are so many widely varying estimates of land value, and no compelling reason to believe any one more than the others, because none of them are based on actual sales of the land whose value they're trying to estimate.
> since that number is not based on actual sales of the land in question, it's just hand-waving
Actual land is sold in a lot of markets. That sets a great benchmark for "comparable transaction" types of valuation analyses which tend to be the most reliable.
If one acre of land is sold, there is a great baseline for the whole surrounding area.
I passed all 3 CFA exams and agree it's not an exact science, but as far a valuation analyses go, this one is pretty easy. Valuing something like intellectual property, goodwill impairment analyses, 409a valuations are much harder.
But much more land with improvements on it is also sold, and that's the land that all these hand-waving formulas claim to be determining the "value" of--not the total value of land + improvements, but just the value of the land itself.
It likely wouldn't work with real estate, but low cost motorsports has a simple solution to this problem. If there is a $1000 limit on the value of the car before all the standard safety additions, then the owner has to accept $1000 from any other competitor for the car. This massively disincentives anyone from undervaluing their race car as it will simply be purchased for way less than it's worth. In real estate this would just result in wealthy people snapping up anything they thought was even slightly undervalued. Maybe value purchases can only happen when challenging a valuation with strong court-backed protection for the owner to ensure the valuation has been applied justly.
I'm not sure I agree with this, since construction costs are subject to a lot of government interventions that distort the market.
> The toughest part is making sure the process isn't corrupted
Exactly.
>There would be an annual value assessment for each plot of land
It seems the OP has better examples of how it would be done than that link.
Maybe that's just me...
That said, it is done for property insurance, so I think your point that it's already done stands.
>
> That said, it is done for property insurance, so I think your point that it's already done stands.
I dunno how useful that will be - my insurance is based on how much it would cost to rebuild the house if it burned down.
This lead to the comedic result that what I paid for the house at the time was about half what the insured value was. My property tax is calculated on the selling price, though.
To avoid frivolous bids, bidders must place funds in escrow before making a bid which is then returned to the bidder if the owner refuses the bid or fails to respond within some number of days.
All bids are reported to the public although bidders can be anonymous.
Suppose there is a plot of land which (from some omniscient point of view) would offer maximal benefit to society if a four-plex were developed on it. The point of a LVT is that, under a LVT, a four-plex would be developed on it, not because anyone forces it but just because that's what's in the landowner's best interest; whereas under the current system (in which the structure is also taxed) the landowner might find it more profitable to build a duplex instead. The deadweight loss is the loss to society when the landowner builds something that's in their best interests but not society's.
That's hard to prove for any specific piece of land, since we don't know what the omniscient-view "right" use of the land is. But if you accept the idea that there is an optimal use, and you you trust the whole idea of free market price discovery, it's reasonable.
There’s a very good reason. Sales of buildings plus land happen all the time, whereas sales of just land are virtually non-existent in a lot of the places with the most valuable property (e.g. Manhattan). Without real sales to tether the analysis you are just guessing.
b) You may not be confident in your ability to distinguish the value of the land from the value of the structure, but your insurer is. If you want to know e.g. how much your home's value would improve if you finished out the basement or built a garage, they will go through it with you on the phone. Sure, it's something of a guess, but a very educated one.
Also if you know a building would cost $X to replace, but the plot with it sells for $X+$Y, you have some real information, not just guesses!
I agree.
> Land taxes offer the opposite incentives. They encourage you to make your property better.
But it doesn't make the converse true. At most, you can say that high enough land value taxes encourage making real estate generate more revenue, to pay the tax. But given the current economy's tendency to optimize everything legible and whisk away the surplus upwards, it's dubious whether being pushed harder into the economic grindstone is "better".
For a rural example, well separated houses on a few acres are much nicer than ticky-tack suburban panopticon developments (or even worse an HOA). It's hard to prevent the latter from occurring over time due to the economic gradient (eg parents die and kids want the most money possible, so they subdivide), but we shouldn't be pushing it through policy.
It does work that way, though. Except it's not exactly 'better', but rather 'more economically productive', which may or may not be better depending on your value system and the specific cases that arise.
> For a rural example, a single house on several acres is much nicer than a ticky-tack suburban panopticon (or even worse a HOA).
Arguably nicer, yes, but the suburban hellscape is definitely a lot more economically productive.
> Economically it's hard to prevent the latter from occurring over time (eg parents die and kids want the most money possible, so they subdivide), but we shouldn't be encouraging it through policy.
This feels like an orthogonal issue to me, that US-style suburbia is bad. Though honestly the rural living you describe is probably no better. Oh sure, it's nice in some ways, but there's problems a plenty there too: it's more destructive for the environment per capita, and it causes problems with the intersection of the social contract and social services.
For an example of that last bit, look at the struggle with rural high speed internet. Arguably necessary for economic activity as well as educational purposes, but it's much more expensive to wire up and service super low density areas, and yet people in those areas have less money, not more. So you end up with either a) left to the free market, they have shit internet access, or b) people in urban and suburban areas subsidize them getting better internet, even though for most people there it's an explicit choice to have that lifestyle (as opposed to, say, the urban poor).
And it's not just internet: most infrastructure and services are harder to deliver in rural areas, and you can end up in shitty situations because of that. Even if you accept that it's fine for adults consenting to it, what about kids who grow up with fewer opportunities?
Neither dense suburbs nor rural suburbs are defined by economic productivity, because they're residences. If this shifts with work from home, their focus will still be on quality of life rather than packing people in as close as possible for more "specific revenue".
> the rural living you describe is probably no better
If you have to drive everywhere anyway, do you also want to be looking through your neighbor's windows? I do miss being able to walk many places (city living), but that isn't the density tradeoff I'm talking about here.
In general your arguments seem to be extrapolating from comparing urban to rural/suburban. Comparing rural and suburban directly, I don't find your points compelling. Going from houses on 1/2 acre lots to houses on two acre lots is one half the linear density. The costs of transportation and utilities increase a little, but aren't going to double - once you're rolling or trenching, going a little further is easy.
Furthermore I'm currently in a quasi-rural area with gigabit muni fiber, so I don't buy that argument either. Whether there is the political will to build out modern Internet access or suffer the extractive oligopoly depends entirely on the politics of an area.
> what about kids who grow up with fewer opportunities?
IMO kids in suburbia are the most caged in. Having to be driven anywhere sucks, but that's a given for both areas under comparison. Once you get past the nadir of suburbia, the increased space helps - kids in rural areas can go play outside, wander in the woods, build stuff, fly drones, etc.
Our experiences color our views. I grew up in rural towns (<800 people) to cities of 15K people(! :-) ). Lack of services, lack of opportunities (library? yeah - 1 room of books from 1950), wandering in the woods was cool until about 12ish? then it was "yeah, I saw that tree yesterday..", not to mention I'm not sure how many parents these days would be comfortable letting their kids wander around - especially in 'desolate' areas ... Also, these were 'mill towns' so one employer basically employed everyone.
I ran as fast as I could when I was 18.
oh - and btw, pulling utilities can be quite expensive - 'going a little further' isn't always easy (or even possible).
So while a 'quasi-rural' (suburb with larger yards? :-) ) might be your idea of heaven, it doesn't necessarily translate well across the board.
In short, what people want/like or what is 'better' is pretty hard to get a consensus on.
Suburbs are certainly not my ideal of "heaven". I feel like I'm being argued with by younger people still in the phase where they're in love with the city, extrapolating my points into general indictments of density. They're most certainly not. All I'm pointing out is that once you're already past needing to drive everywhere, having the space to actually do things and be left alone is much nicer than being packed up on your neighbors.
I'm actually an empty nester, and I took my car off the road like 2 years ago cuz I never use it. I put in a server room, electronics workstation, basic woodworking, and a bunch of 3d printers. Couple that with being in a small 'city' now (500K people) and I really like the balance. Plenty of space in the house (1700 sq ft), no huge yard to maintain, can get pretty much anything delivered, no septic/well to deal with. I'm very happy with how its working out for me. On the other hand, I think I only have a 7500sq ft lot (1700 of it covered by the house), so others would probably consider it small - especially if you want a pool in the backyard.
Cost proportional to area doesn't even make sense for utilities or roads (average distance only goes up as the square root), never mind straightforward per-resident costs such as public school or trash disposal.
The rural lifestyle is heavily subsidized by productive urban Americans -- telecom, housing, hospitals, roads, electric networks, and on and on.
https://www.downsizinggovernment.org/agriculture/rural-subsi...
Schools/hospitals/trash disposal/wastewater treatment - heavily proportional to population, with a negligible increase per area due to convenience - O(1).
Distribution (telecom, electric, trash hauling, water, sewer) - Picture a square town with a single N-S route and one E-W route per row of lots - O(L)
General transportation - The average distance between any two points also goes up linearly - O(L)
Roads themselves - probably the closest thing proportional to area, but that's not even true as in less dense areas it's easier to drive further in the wrong direction (say further east before being able to cut north). O(L^1.5) ? In the absolute worse this is O(L^2), but what else is?
Note that based on lot sizes I'm basically talking about denser or less dense suburbs here. Suburbs are their own hellhole regardless of density, but I've seen many developments with neighbors right on top of one another in areas that are otherwise more spread out. Despite the increased density, those developments are straight residential (no stores, restaurants, or even parks to walk to), and thus gain little from the increased density besides the developer packing in the maximum number of economic rent streams.
And tying this back to Georgism - what does that look like if you're a neighbor to one of these developments? The town increases their valuation to pay for the per-resident cost. Then it declares that your land is worth a similar amount. So you're either stuck paying the same real estate taxes as a multiple family development, or selling your house so another development can be built.
As for the land value economics of multi-family development in rural areas: it just isn't that important IMO.
However your described scenario seems like a great way for the rural area to become economically relevant by gradually building up a functional amount of density.
Cities themselves are obviously centers of commerce and concentrations of wealth - but it's nonsensical to extrapolate this feature as applying to slightly denser suburbs. If someone lives in the suburbs and commutes into the city to work, then all their "productivity" happens in the city. And obviously the more workers you can fit into a given area, the more work gets done (cf factory housing).
Furthermore, cities are inherently more interconnected and thus the activities there are more legible to the system, whereas rural work is less so - eg a couple working full time plus and hiring maids/contractors/etc to take care of their home creates a lot more cashflow than a rural couple DIYing.
Not necessarily. They could well be paid for by any other taxes. Income taxes, etc. There's no rule to state that certain taxes have to pay for certain expenses.
So, if you want to disentangle the price of the land from the price of the building, then you're back to appraisers and accountants... and deadweight loss.
And:
> A land tax wouldn't impose an additional tax to the landowner for improving the value of their land.
How would it not? Do you just keep the land price from 1874 as the "value"? Or do you use the current price of raw land? What's the current price of raw land in Manhattan?
Yes, because we're talking about the land -- really, more like the geographic space than the literal land -- and not the buildings.
> Because if you're going to buy the land - no matter what you intend to do with it - you get the land with the existing building.
Okay. And?
> So, if you want to disentangle the price of the land from the price of the building
For property tax purposes I think it's already common to value both the land and the buildings and then sum them up for the total property value.
But here's a building across the street from Central Park in Manhattan. What's the land price? When was the last time that a vacant lot sold in Manhattan?
I mean, I guess you can go by the cost of the last place that sold with a building on it, and the buyer tore down the building. (Subtracting out the cost of the teardown.) When was the last time that happened across the street from Central Park?
So in the places that the land is already heavily used, this is not all that easy to do.
> virtually all economists agree that land value tax has zero "deadweight loss"–a fancy word for a drag on the economy that makes certain activities no longer profitable
Property taxes tax the land + the building. Building taxes are complicated to assess. They require tax assessments, appraisers, tax code, accountants to compute depreciation schedules, etc. The deadweight loss of property taxes is the economic loss of having resources devoted to filling out property tax filings. Appraisers and accountants would do other productive economic activities if they didn't spend all their time filling out tax forms.
Property taxes also distort incentives. If you improve your property, then you pay more tax. Property taxes can discourage you from using your land to its highest and best use.
Land taxes offer the opposite incentives. They encourage you to make your property better.
Land taxes would arguably help a lot of the housing crises. Landowners have to pay a lot more taxes if they want to convert a lot with a single family home to a 4-plex. A land tax wouldn't impose an additional tax to the landowner for improving the value of their land.