It's a good concern to bring up.

The market will help to a certain extent, because land in the countryside is not going to be assessed (and therefore taxed) nearly as highly as land in the city center. "Vacant lots" out in the countryside are great, but in the city they are a scourge.

That said, the government will need to step in to protect urban and semiurban greenspaces/greenways, because LVT would indeed encourage development of those. (Extreme example, Central Park would be assessed as worth billions of dollars and taxed many millions a year).

I think, ideally, local and state gov'ts would either buy or grant tax easements on urban green areas. If done right, LVT could then incentivize developers to either use the land for buildings, or turn it into a greenspace, avoiding the gross middle-ground of parking lots and other low-value and use.

We specifically had to sell the third generation farm due to. 10x increase in taxes one year.

We were under utilizing it and now its a hospital among other things.

So...happy ending ?

I have no right to complain but most people like to maintain the status quo. I was fortunate but my kids will not know what farm like was like.

Farms are nothing but death and misery. You're lucky you got to be on the owner side of that. Lots of kids work their entire lives on other peoples farms, often for $0 or any upside, and end up having nothing. I think the right call was made.

Is there much of that in private hands? You can't develop land in a vacuum, you still have to do something profitable with it and transport the result to some market.

In the EU there are "set-aside" payments to encourage farmers to do this, and national parks and other restrictions to protect the more valuable habitats.

The strongest incentive to develop land exists for land which has a high value owing to its location.

Land out in the countryside would not be hugely taxed under this system.

But it'd still be taxed.

Any good LVT in my mind would robustly employ "conservation easements", which lower/waive taxes on land that is preserved for environmental protection. These are a common tool of land trusts today, and IMO they would fit great alongside LVT.

It's taxed now as well (in almost all jurisdictions). It's just also taxed on the buildings that sit on top of it (that latter portion of which provides a disincentive to development).

Understood, although not much of a disincentive. I think I have an aversion to just taxing what people own. When it's a building, at least that is related to services they're likely to consume; it's not just "we want a cut".

I think that's the jib though - in a lot of countries you don't really "own" the land. You and the government(s) get to just agree that it's your responsibility for a while.

LVT cleans up this incentive some by putting taxes in place in areas where the land is more valuable. I think Georgists would argue for doing that _and_ removing property taxes, specifically so you aren't taxed for the things you own.

But... you are being taxed for things you own.

I'd prefer to have more direct spending on services than we have, so the money isn't proxied off a building, or how many windows you have, or whatever harebrained scheme local bureacrats might invent. So you just pay X a month to have trash taken; X for sewage, etc etc. But I'd say that moving to just taking money in a way entirely unrelated to service consumption is going in the wrong direction.

Is there somewhere where land isn’t taxed? I am in Canada and all privately held land is taxed.

Land taxes in the US pay for services like fire and other emergency responders.

The discussion is about shifting more of the burden on those profiting so greatly off the land they own.

I'm not sure that matters. If you're holding your land to cash out on it in the future, it's going to get developed regardless. Whether the land remains undeveloped for an extra few decades seems like it makes little difference either way. Plus, not every property will be paved over edge to edge. Suboptimal locations will probably get developed into something which doesn't turn the land into something that completely destroys its ecological value.

> If you're holding your land to cash out on it in the future, it's going to get developed regardless.

Unless those you cash out from buy it because of what it currently is.

I think you'll find very few buyers who don't plan to build anything substantive who are willing to pay multiples of what you purchased the undeveloped land for. If you bought a plot of land for $100K and sell it for $250K thirty years later...you've barely beaten inflation.

This is unfortunately true.

Land in a suboptimal location would have a much lower value and lower taxes presumably.

This is targeted at that parking lot in San Francisco that really should be an underground parking lot with 1 story of retail at the ground floor and 4 stories of housing above it.