Land in Detroit is cheap already. This sounds like a way for investors to build big things and not increase their tax bill.

Giving investors a greater incentive to build big things is the exact point

Yes, that's exactly the idea. We have a problem in the US where many metro areas do not have enough housing, in part because building big things is penalized by the tax code. By changing the tax code to not penalize construction, we hope to get more construction.

Maybe property tax should be inversely related to improvements, considering that improved land generates tax revenue in other ways, e.g. wage tax, sales tax, etc.

That's quite hard to measure.

Build a 200 unit apartment complex in an area with a housing problem and jobs currently unfilled ... yep.

Build a gigantic house to be occupied by a single very wealthy family .. not so much.

But how to measure the difference? The simple market value of the improvements is not going to be accurate.

A lot of property taxes go to funding schools, so...more housing = more kids = more money need to educate them. It is nice that they use property taxes from businesses as well, but to completely detach the education need formulas from tax formulas sounds really dangerous.

Surely more housing also means more working adults and more taxable income, so this could be handled with a local income tax.

Are any school districts outside of Prop 13 California funded by primarily income or sales tax? But ya, you would need to do something like that if you were to tax land rather than improvements given schools, police, and lots of infrastructure needs scale up with improvements.

A significant part of the educational budget of the US comes from federal funds and federal funds are almost entirely income taxes (some other sources exist).

Most schools receive very little funding from the federal government. Maybe the poorest school districts this makes up a significant part of their funding, but for most school districts it doesn't.

> In 2021, state and local governments in the United States collected about 630.21 billion U.S. dollars via property taxes.

> In FY 2023, the Department of Education (ED) had $271.01 Billion distributed among its 10 sub-components.

Maybe they just burn that quarter trillion, but I suspect it ends up in the districts eventually.

Here is a good breakdown of funding in CA:

https://peecs.net/2021/03/10/how-are-california-school-budge...

So federal is...7%?

The problem is that federal grants often go through the state, so some percentage of "state" may source from the feds.

Of course it's all academic in a way, because money is fungible.

The table implies funding origins via taxes (local vs. state taxes, for example). I don't think any ED money is going to CA first before going to the districts. CA is also a special case where more funding is state level (due to Prop 13).

Agreed. I’m only familiar with Texas and Texas schools are funded with property tax with some redistribution to poorer districts.

I think a local income tax is the correct way to handle it theoretically but I don’t know any specific examples.

Then you have to come up with a way to evaluate the improvements, which might be tricky and subjective

It seems easier to just have a land value tax, so you don’t specifically disincentivize development. Then, you can spend that tax money to provide services that promote the other stuff: beautify downtown and add public transit, that sort of thing.

Detroit still has more houses than people wanting to live there.

This is a great situation in which to use an LVT.

Shifting the tax burden from homeowners and productive businesses onto idle land holders means that those that drive the community will penalize investment less and use limited resources in more effective ways.

Efficiency helps the wealthy, but it can help those with less even more, as it matters more.

How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD? If there's a vacant plot next to the town hall then it doesn't really matter how many vacant houses are a 1-hour drive out, that town-hall adjacent plot is being wasted.

> How many of those houses are on the fringes, and how many are in the CBD?

Take a look for yourself[0]. This is just outside of the downtown area. Loads of vacant lots. This is theoretically prime real estate, and would be ripe for development. The problem is, it's the fucking hood and no one wants to live there. Detroit emptied out over the decades and those empty lots _used_ to be decaying crack houses. So several years ago Detroit had them leveled to reduce blight. Now they're whining that people are just "speculating" by sitting on the empty land. If there was even the slightest hint that developing this land made sense economically, someone would have done it by now. It's just too convenient to the downtown area. And yet, no one has. Perhaps there's more at play than just people trying to sit on empty land.

0: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Detroit,+MI/@42.3370378,-8...

It's a very important question to ask: how big should the investor's bill be? For labor, for durable goods, for energy, etc., the investor pays in proportion to what they have taken from others.

But what has the investor taken from the public when they build? The best possible answer, in my opinion, is the value of the land they occupy. This exclusive use of a portion of land deprived all others from using it. That is the value of the land, and there are roughly two sources of that value: proximity to all the other things that others have built, or access to natural resources, that they land owner did not build.

So that's why the land value is an appropriate object of taxation: it's a payment to us all for what we have been deprived of. A person who builds a massive structure of great value on a piece of land has built that structure, but they didn't build the land or the bounty that the land provides.

Don’t improvements in nearby plots change the value of a plot of land?

Yes, by design. One major goal is to prevent a landowner from squatting on an empty lot while their neighbors build prosperity around it. The "squatter" then cashes in, having done nothing themselves. "Everyone works but the empty lot" is the commonly used phrase.

The goal of an LVT is to insulate a landowner's tax bill from being affected by their own improvements. Its anti-goal is to insulate a landowner from changes in land use around them.

Another benefit is that it encourages more efficient use of land. Existing taxes mean that if you demolish a high density retail strip and replace it with a McDonald’s or Walmart with large parking lot/drive thru, the tax income plummets while the cost to maintain the roads and plumbing remains the same.

Just to be clear: land value taxes by themselves don't encourage more efficient use of land. Removing taxes on improvements (and on capital and labour) encourages more efficient use of land, and a land value tax can help finance those other tax reductions.

It’s just strange phrasing that improvements increase the value of adjacent land but not the land they’re on.

It increases the value of both equally

Think of it as part of a communist plan and you'll see the why and who start to make sense.

True enough. It doesn't factor in land improvements directly into the calculations, but it could be affected indirectly by whatever the market seems something to be improving the neighborhood in general.

They don't directly factor in improvements, but the improvements are generally why land value increases/decreases.

As the community grows in population, it behooves people to establish businesses to serve their various needs. This creates prosperity for all those business owners and employees who provide services to maintain and improve their homes, provide them with groceries and entertainment and restaurants and pharmacies. The provision of good transit increases the land value close to its stations; the provision of a highway to higher paying jobs increases the land value close to its exits.

The provision of good emergency services and hospitals and libraries and other amenities raises the land values within their service areas. (They don't raise the value of the buildings.)

They factor in both your improvements and all the improvements around you.

If if someone in your neighborhood repaints their house, your land becomes more desirable. This is true for you and others!

I've gone back and forth on LVT, but don't currently support it.

The problem is determining what the land is worth. If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices), then you give the government and the wealthy extraordinary power to kick people out of their residences, even ones in which the tenants built the house. Good for the collective perhaps, but terrible for individual autonomy. This could be mitigated by auctioning off longer length (~say 30 year) leases, but you can end up with huge value mismatches after 30 years of change, just like today, and I suspect there would be other unintended consequences. For example, things wouldn't be built to last, they'd be built to generate as much value as possible before the lease is auctioned off again.

And even then, you haven't really determined what the land is worth, since any rational auction participant is considering how much money can be made with the existing improvements on the property.

That being said, I hope they do try it in Detroit, since I have no stake in the city and it seems like it has more to gain than to lose from such an experiment.

Implementation is also the only aspect that makes me question LVT, otherwise I'm pretty much sold (not an unimportant aspect it is).

Wrt "even ones in which the tenants built the house": For me the baseline of implementing LVT is that ppl don't have to pay it for their primary housing (or a much lowered version of it). Is that controversial?

I think that would be the way to start an implementation - have a generous enough homestead allowance that it really only affects investors and commercial interests.

Of course, remember that apartment buildings are commercial businesses…

Also excluding homesteads destroys the public schools, because they’re often in areas that really only have houses and a Walmart or two, and if the entire property tax burden is transferred to the Walmart it’ll just close.

That addresses one issue, but I think you end up with similar (or worse) problems we have now w.r.t. housing density, where someone keeps their dingy old single story house in a valuable up and coming downtown neighborhood because they gain nothing by leaving it (at least in our current system they can sell the property for a big profit if they aren't stubborn). This might even slow down densification more, since the only way people will leave land of increasing value is dying.

Overall, I think there are so many impracticalities and second-order problems with implementing LVT that it seems like nothing more than a fantasy mental exercise.

You have the same problem with property taxes, no?

Usually that is solved by various measure to slow down the tax increases for existing homeowners - which can be good or bad, depending on whether you're a homeowner or somebody looking for a home.

No, there's a big difference. If someone bought a house and gets priced out of the house due to massive increases in value in the neighborhood and overall market, they reap the rewards of selling the house, because they owned the property. I don't believe tax increases should be slowed like they are in California -- that's a big part of the housing problem IMO.

Whereas in an LVT system, a person just gets priced out as the neighborhood increases in value with nothing to show for it, even if they spent money to build the house itself.

No, you are wrong. The two cases are analogous. Under a LVT, if their tax goes up, it's because their land became more valuable. So when they sell they get more money. And under a LVT, if they spend money to build or improve a house, then they also get a benefit when they sell for a corresponding higher price. It's just that those improvements would not be reflected in a higher tax bill.

Sell what to who? Isn't everyone a lessor under Georgism?

I don't see how having regular auctions to determine what the land is actually worth is compatible with true land ownership. You auction the land to determine the tax, someone pays more than the current lessor, then that highest bidder gets to lease the land from the government and kick out the old lessor. Where does ownership of land and ability to sell it and profit from improvements come into play?

Unless you are in the Georgism-lite camp that says no auctions, just let government appraisers put value on the land as they do today and base the property tax on that exclusively instead of the current combined property tax. In this case you still have property ownership/buying/selling, which is far superior. I think the pros could outweigh the cons in limited situations, specifically downtown metro areas. But you have to accept a lot of bad pricing in this scenario, because these are the same assessors who allow all of those single story parking lots to profitably exist in downtown metros throughout the country.

> I don't see how having regular auctions to determine what the land is actually worth is compatible with true land ownership. You auction the land to determine the tax, someone pays more than the current lessor, then that highest bidder gets to lease the land from the government and kick out the old lessor. Where does ownership of land and ability to sell it and profit from improvements come into play?

Nobody's actually suggesting randomly auctioning off people's land at periodic time intervals.

You're arguing with ghosts.

> Nobody's actually suggesting randomly auctioning off people's land at periodic time intervals

You might be surprised if you visit r/georgism.

But the point is that if you don't do auctions, you don't know how to price the LVT, and you don't actually know if the resulting inefficiencies are more significant than the core problem with taxing productive land use that Georgism tries to address.

> You're arguing with ghosts.

You're selectively arguing with a fraction of a comment.

> If you use a periodic market-based auction system (the only known way that could possibly yield accurate prices)

This system wouldn't work, because you would be measuring the property value not land value

Exactly, there's no way to separate the value of the land from the value of existing improvements.