Yeah, that's stupid and it's not how LVT works. The opportunity costs are the same.
> It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
Formulated like that, it sounds pretty silly.
Singapore has a system that works fairly well in practice and is pretty close to some form of theoretical optimal for this. Let me describe a cleaned up version:
Basically, the government owns all the land and leases it out for something like 30 years at a time to the highest bidder. No imputing, the auction sets the price. The winner pays up front in cash, so the government doesn't have to be in the business of judging creditworthiness. Leases are freely tradable while they run.
(The main way to optimise this further would be to held the auctions 10 years before the lease starts, so that the old leaseholder has enough time to make plans, and some other nice theoretical properties.)
It's based on market value now. The LVT schemes usually talk about deriving it from the potential usage. This specific LVT talks about differentiating between "good" and "bad" uses even further. So it does seems to be imputing value based on potential usage.
"The land value tax is the same no matter what you do with the land. Land value taxes don't care what you use the land for."
Their whole point is to force higher density usage because the tax is high.