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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nobody's actually suggesting randomly auctioning off people's land at periodic time intervals.
You're arguing with ghosts.
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.
This system wouldn't work, because you would be measuring the property value not land value
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.