Doesn't work that way. A subway gets built near your property. The benefit of greater access accrues to you more than it does someone 10km away. So your LVT has to go up.

Now you can't afford the taxes, and you're forced to sell and move to somewhere with lower LVT. It's bought by someone who will put it to better use. Maybe an apartment block instead of your single family home.

Over time, every piece of land is put to its most productive use. But before it gets there, there will be some pain for the individuals who choose (or are forced) to move because they can't afford to the improvements made to the infrastructure in their locality.

> Now you can't afford the taxes, and you're forced to sell and move to somewhere with lower LVT. It's bought by someone who will put it to better use. Maybe an apartment block instead of your single family home.

> Over time, every piece of land is put to its most productive use. But before it gets there, there will be some pain for the individuals who choose (or are forced) to move because they can't afford to the improvements made to the infrastructure in their locality.

Which is why I think it makes sense that the LVT shouldn't be re-evaluated on a rolling basis. It would only be re-evaluated (or at least put into effect) when it changes owners (sale, gift, inheritance, etc). Otherwise you get bad incentives for people to vote against improvements that price them out of living where they currently are.

Corporate land ownership would likely need different rules, as the owner could theoretically be the same forever.

Over time, land is still put to it's most productive use, there is just a delay introduced that considers the human condition.

This is basically Prop 13 in California which the world outside of California conclusively thinks is stupid. It’s incredibly unfair to give people massive tax breaks for buying a long time ago. The alleged benefits don’t reflect the immense cost.

In this case you’re trying to replace the majority of all taxation with a value that doesn’t change with time. People get massive economic incentives to never move. People get massive economic incentives to resist change.

I’d rather deal with a range of options from people selling and moving to introducing liens upon the property due at sale than have to deal with the mess that is 50 year stale land values and the associated negligible taxes that result.

Nah, that won't work. Needs to be re-evaluated every 5 years at least.

I would have assumed exactly the opposite in terms of urban land being uniform in value.

10 acres that are 30 minutes from Des Moines, IA are going to be very similar in value (price people are willing to pay) compared to 10 acres that are 10 miles down the road. Rural land is generally quite uniform and more likely to be functionally the same. In an urban area, say Los Angeles, 10 acres in Malibu (an area with very high demand for property) is going to have a totally different value (again, price people are willing to pay) as compared to 10 acres 10 miles away in skid row.

The problem, that other people have highlighted, is how do you (the government/IRS/agency in charge) determine the value of each of those land areas? Letting some city planners in LA decide that those two areas should have the same LVT, or allowing them to determine what tax each should have, is gifting a lot of power to people who may or may not be qualified, and may or may not experience any sort of consequence for poor decision making/ biased value assessment/ etc.

The exact way that sort of value/tax-setting would play out would be very interesting, but the unintended consequences could end up being pretty bad.

I've always thought it was interesting that property tax assessments don't just use the previous purchase price, and instead rely on a relatively arbitrary valuation. That could be one way to more accurately determine an LVT - make it a set percent of the previous purchase price of the land, that would allow the taxes to be priced in to land transactions.

I still just don't love the idea at its core.

With a land value tax we could at least come up with pretty straightforward equations, right? Some starting value from being in town, then add something for oceanfront property, then add something some extra bump based on distance from some set of amenities provided by the community (parks, subways, etc). It is at least possible to come up with something, unlike, what, the assessor's gut feeling about how nice your house is? This seems like it is putting much more arbitrary power in the hands of some random person.

> Some starting value from being in town, then add something for oceanfront property, then add something some extra bump based on distance from some set of amenities provided by the community (parks, subways, etc).

How do you know you weren't also supposed to take the floor plan or exterior paint color into consideration? How do you account for the value lost from having obnoxious neighbors? What happens when, in the future, a nice bookstore/coffee shop is opened up down the street, or alternatively a liquor store? Ultimately, how do you know if whatever equation you've constructed is exhaustive or "correct"?

It might sound like "well then you just adjust the equation" but this wouldn't be without consequence. One outcome of getting that equation incorrect is that a home is valued at a point where the imposed tax prices out anyone from purchasing the home - it would sit empty/foreclosed for as long as it takes a local government bureaucracy to come in and attempt to re-assess its value. So you could effectively be removing houses from a competitive home buying market, which is going to increase the price of other homes until they too have priced people out of the area. Multiply that by entire zip codes, and while you're working on adjusting that equation, you could end up having a real shit show on your hands with a bunch of people being displaced or in worse financial positions.

> It is at least possible to come up with something, unlike, what, the assessor's gut feeling about how nice your house is? This seems like it is putting much more arbitrary power in the hands of some random person.

I agree with the point that a home assessment is strange and arbitrary, but you're really just saying we should replace the assessor who goes and visits a property with a group of assessor's that just come up with an equally arbitrary equation that gets blanket applied to entire cities? Why is that preferable to something like just using the previous home sale price or, honestly, just staying with the current system that we know is generally very functional?

You don't know the equation you came up with is correct, but it is at least describable, so if someone doesn't like it they can live elsewhere I guess, or argue about it at the next town hall session. If a bad equation is designed, then that's a problem, but it is a general bad governance problem that effects everyone, rather than an arbitrary lightning-strike problem like a bad assessment.

Floor plan or paint color -- the point of a land value tax is that it is based on the value of the land. Floor plan and paint color would be improvements on the property, so they would be excluded.

The current system is not very functional. Housing is not very affordable in most cities due to speculative real estate investment and under-development. I mean, we clearly get by, but just because the alternative is being homeless.

Now you've brought the horror that is prop 13 to a tax that is supposed to replace all other taxes. Things change in value, we have to account for that.

Someone came up with this delicious game:

Landowners decide for themselves what value their land has, and pay tax accordingly. But whatever they say the value is, someone else is allowed to buy it for.

It's certainly a fun game, but does that mean if I decide my property is worth $100,000, accurate or not, I am forced to sell it just because someone comes along and decides they want to buy it? Also, is this a game that happens every year to allow for appreciation?

For a realistic implementation, why not just use the fact that the landowner already decided what the value their land has when they purchased it and/or paid people to develop it. Why not just use those values?

I think you need a new value each year, otherwise of course if the economy goes well people will buy your land off you cheaply.

So you get to decide your tax each year but if you save yourself too much someone else will grab the excess value.

This game is terrible because even yearly is too slow. The property market went up 30% in my city this past year. If I set a fair price at the beginning of the year I’m forced to sell my house at a loss. Only if guess that I should overpay by at least 30% at the beginning of the year does my house remain unsold.

> Property tax is already a thing of course

Yes, but note that property taxes are extremely unpopular:

> America's most hated tax: Local property tax (42%) By far, America's most hated tax is your local property tax! It's almost ironic that your home, perhaps the single greatest source of taxable deductions on your federal income taxes, is also the greatest source of dislike when it comes to taxes in general among the American public with 42% responding that they felt it was the least fair tax of all.

Source: https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2013/11/02/americas-5...

It looks like that 42% number comes from this Gallop poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx

They have a sort of purity and logic that appeals to economists, but they're intuitively hated by everyone else.

Lobbyists, PR professionals and the people who pay them own lots of property and pay property taxes. They're far harder for the wealthy to dodge than income or capital gains taxes. Of course the public has been trained to hate them, like they've been trained to hate estate taxes, and in some years public polls would show near-majorities against progressive taxation in general.

edit: it seems obvious because of the thread topic, but property taxes are the most easily and intuitively justifiable tax. People with more property use more public services.

I'm thinking of my buddy back in Missouri -- not wealthy; not a lobbyist, PR professional, or any kind of professional -- who told me (more or less):

"It's unfair. It's the one tax you can't avoid. No matter what you do, you can't opt out. It's like you don't even own your own property. The government owns it. You never really own anything, as long as they can tax you just for existing on your own land."

That's the intuitive, everyman objection.

It is a sort of silly objection -- you can avoid property tax by having no property, in the same way that you can avoid income tax by having no income. I guess it is probably easier to evade income tax, than property tax, though.