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.