(author here) Another thing I've noticed is that you never know how or what will happen until you try. I was following legislation in one state and learned that literally dozens of people from all kinds of organized opposition came out to testify against a proposed bill and it quickly died in committee, exactly the kind of brutal pushback that demoralizes people against trying. Then, Jackson Arnold's experience in Kentucky was almost the exact opposite. He approached a local government official, who got excited about it but needed a state enabling law. The official in turn got in touch with a state republican, who basically went "seems fine," and inserted it into a giant omni bill, and it sailed through the legislature. Now they're working on local implementation.
Land means location in this context. Filling in seabed (which are literally termed "water parcels" as a term of art) to make dry land is technically improving it. The straightforward policy recommendation is therefore to exempt reclaimed land from taxation (perfectly in line with a policy of not taxing improvements) for e.g. the first 50 or so years (well past the investment horizon) and begin taxing it as conventional land thereafter -- this comports with George's philosophy for how to handle edge cases like e.g. landscaping that start off as improvements but over a long enough time horizon eventually become regarded as part of the permanent landscape.
Alternatively, reclaimed land is usually a state initiated enterprise in most cases. In those situations, the land can simply be leased out by the state. This is literally what NYC did with Battery Park city!
But you can multpliy location by building up (there is some energy and time inefficiency in having to go up and down but in theory you can also build multiple layers of transportation), so how that works?
The standard reform we actually pitch is a revenue neutral swap for existing property taxes. The tax we are reducing is the building tax, shifted onto land instead.
Well Mamdani's pied-a-tierre tax was specifically a real estate tax, levied on the real estate of people who don't have residency in the city. It's a marginal tax in the grand scheme of things, but unlike the billionaire wealth tax, it actually works, because the real estate can't move. And the owners can't just threaten to leave because they've already left, that's why the tax hits them.
Lars here. I run the Center for Land Economics with Greg (we wrote the OP blog post). We are not maximalist single taxers.
Henry George was obviously a Single Taxer, but "Georgism" has a generally broader meaning than that. Some Georgists are single taxers, but not all, including Greg and I.
When we talk to elected officials, we don't even talk about Henry George all that much (I did in the ACX article series because it all started with the progress and poverty book review). We mostly speak of "Land value return" and our focus is mostly on pragmatic revenue neutral tax shifts to LVT.
I wouldn't say it's coordinated. This is an old article, published in June. A lot of people came to the land economics blog from the ACX article that ran today, someone likely saw this one and then posted it to HN.
Not all assessors do this accurately, especially in California, but there are many that do. This article includes a section on land valuation which summarizes and links out to various other articles about various approaches
> In its ideal form, this tax would capture and redistribute the annual rental value of land; that is, the recurring value of the land excluding the value of any buildings or other improvements on top of it.
> but you see the same basic patterns everywhere. Land in the city center is worth much, much more than outlying areas.
The calculation of the "unimproved value" always perplexed me.. it seems like you're not taxed for the things you build on your land, but instead for the things other people built around your land. After all, why would property in a city be valuable if not for all the high rises, subways, and office buildings?
It, in effect, turns out not really to be a land value tax at all. It turns out to be a tax on the most valuable thing that _could_ be built there because that's what gives land it's value.
So you're completely correct, the value of the land changes with what's around it because it opens up new options for what someone might build there.
this is the idea - if theres a lot of value around you, you should build to make sure you are meeting the bar of whats around you in terms of economic activity.
if you build even more and get more out of the land than whats around you, you essentially get a lower tax rate until your neighbors catch up.
if you lag behind, you pay a premium in taxes to not develop
You never know until you try.
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