(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.

You never know until you try.

> you’re much better off finding and working with people who are already interested in your principles

after five years in the trenches of local housing/urban policy in my city, this is my biggest takeaway. i don’t think i’ve ever even once changed someone’s mind who was a staunch NIMBY, even with a reputation as one of the most accessible and persuasive local policy advocates/writers. but I have been able to build coalitions of hundreds of people by finding people who were already mostly with me, and just shifting them from inactive->active.

there’s also a lot of power in the energy of building for the future. when we passed our big SFH elimination ordinance two years ago, we had a packed city council meeting that, numerically, had 50/50 of residents speaking for/against. but for the city council, watching a parade of retirees 65+ come up and say the same thing over and over again (“i’m not sure this is right for our city”) vs an equal sized but diverse group of people of all ages and life stages speak about all of their different housing needs and dreams for the future, the weight in the room was overwhelmingly in favor; the new zoning passed unanimously.

> But it's almost certainly the case that the only conversations that have really mattered have been with electeds themselves.

General public debates with people who disagree do matter a bit because the electeds must believe that there is a group of people who will stand up and defend them (convincingly) from pressure if they take action. A certain amount of background buzz is indirectly helpful.

But yeah, seriously attempting to convince keyboard warriors or hard opponents is a complete waste of time. There often aren't a lot of them and once someone has spent enough time on a topic to adsorb most of the arguments then there isn't any reason to expect them to change their mind later on. Persuasion is for people who haven't formed a clear stance yet and there are occasional rare wins when someone changes their mind although it shouldn't be counted on.

Which is maddening, given how much damage these existing policies are doing, and how many other zeitgeist issues (homelessness, affordability, robust economic growth etc) are downstream of this.

I wonder if this movement needs a form of performative extremism somewhere (think bridges being forcibly closed for causes), so that then the mainstream notices the sensible compromise and pushes for it. The YIMBY's have never played Overton Window games, but maybe they need to hold their nose and play it.

I haven't read anything about Georgism that would specifically argue for or against single-family zoning. I own a single-family house, I already pay high property taxes, and I pay high income taxes. I think it would be more fair to me and everyone else to drop both, and tax the land my house is on, even if that came out to the same amount of tax I paid per year. If that tax was used to provide a UBI to people who don't own land, great. And I'm fairly conservative. I don't think this aligns as a modern progressive or conservative issue.

That all being said, I find expropriation to be loathsome, and I think the movement to destroy single-family zoned neighborhoods is a species of evil that borders on satanic.

good thing we have a political party in NZ campaigning for LVT + UBI then!

Is there any evidence to support this 'land banking' and 'ghost house' theory? I've heard it mentioned but the rate of unused housing in Auckland is low from what i can see.

> we illustrate how conventional property taxes punish those who improve properties and invest in the city by providing housing and business, while those who own vacant lots or surface parking lots are rewarded for holding land out of use.

The reasoning makes no sense applied to land value tax though: people improve properties for their own profit, and the land value (on which the tax is raises) increases slower than the value of their own property so they aren't being deterred by the land value tax. People who don't invest on the other hand don't see increase in their profit while their taxes increase because the land value is being pumped up by those who invest.

Something I think most people miss is that LVT doesn’t increase directly because of the improvements. If you build a coffee house, the building and equipment are excluded from the tax. It just applies to the underlying land value.

But a popular coffee house can make the surrounding area more desirable. If that increases what people will pay for locations there, land values rise. At the same tax rate, that means higher LVT for nearby sites, and, potentially the coffee house’s own site. Gentrification by other means.

In a lot of ways, it depends on what the comparative LVT base is. If its just blocks or streets nearby -- a single happening place can push the value up. Spread out to the census tract, the city, the county, and now you can toss more and more of hot coffee shops in the same place with minor impact to the tax base.

I would think that lag, combined with the general public legibility of LVT, combined with the inertia of property transactions, would damp oscillations.

Gentrification and decay are already cycles, and maybe those cycles would accelerate somewhat; but a prediction that they would drop to below decade level would be a bold assertion.

I actually see a reverse problem.

Imagine that there's somebody who wants to build unpleasant things. Let's say there's a group "association of people for ugly and genuinely unpleasant buildings" who build their collections of ugly buildings, buying up the cheap land that becomes available as people who no longer want to live near them move out.

Well, that group is rewarded by this system.

I think the problem is really: LVT makes sense, there's no reason to tax buildings, but if it is to be fair, it must actually tax the unimproved land, and this means it can't punish people who buy things next to someone building something attractive and then not doing anything useful with it, so that particular goal, sometimes held up as one of the points of a pure LVT is not achieved.

> drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents

Land value taxes only go up if the land value (and thus the demand) is overall going up. The taxes lower desirability, but are also proportional to desirability. So, it's more like a frictional force: inherently counter-cyclical, able to slow down a property value increase but not to reverse it.

So the theory says "nobody goes to the ballpark, it's too crowded" shouldn't happen. And even imagining weird time-delays, mismodeling, etc that could cause it, everything in your scenario is directionally the same with normal property taxes. If it happened, we'd see it today.

I'm no expert on Georgism but I think there are reasonable answers to your questions.

1. "Coffee shop draws more commence drawing more affluent people pushing up LVT driving out residents faster than even the spectre of “gentrification”"

This is an impossible premise. The relationship between the cost of the LVT and the popularity are directly and inseparably linked. LVT only goes up (and stays higher) when the neighbourhood is popular. It drops (and stays lower) if the neighbourhood falls out of popularity. In real life it would reach an equilibrium, but it might encounter some volatility along the way.

This is overshadowed by many more factors than a small increase in taxes, and I would propose that an LVT is a minor factor in the popularity of neighbourhoods.

2. Similarly how do you think about new uses for land emerging? If I lease desert land for a data center because it’s so perfect for it, instead of buying it … how (and when) does it show up in LTV increases? What if I trade you some other benefit to keep it out of LVT impacting records?

The tricky part about LVT is that it requires an assessment of value prior to realisation. Popular methods include using a combination of average of realised land prices in the area, against a velocity coefficient (the general gain/loss over a period of time), modified by negatively and positively correlated correlates like proximity to public transport and parks. There are countless ways proposed to do just this so I won't retread worn ground.

In the case of the desert data centre, it is likely that the land will not increase much in value. This is by design, because we want data centres (and similar industry) to move into the middle of nowhere so that scarce land is instead used for more productive enterprise like housing for workers so they can get to work easily.

3. Are you just costing the world coordination surplus by forcing high value enterprises to distribute themselves (inefficiently) just far enough apart that they don’t drive up each other’s LVT? That’s a deadweight loss.

This is the brilliant part of Georgism, and the reason I "converted." A well designed LVT imputes the social costs (implied by their economic costs) of the use of land. It then gives the businesses the fully informed choice of how to deploy their capital. It could be that the efficiency you allude to is real, and is worth remaining on high value land. So be it. The business is the best actor to make that decision. On the other hand, if the deadweight loss is lower than the LVT, then the land should be better utilised by another company which would have better utility for its location.

Georgism aligns social costs with business interests in a way no other tax currently does. Meaning that businesses act in their best interests, and in doing so, act in the best interests of society.

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!

https://blog.landeconomics.org/p/georgism-through-land-leasi...

> one thing I've always wondered about Georgism and Land Value Tax is whether land supply is actually inelastic

It isn't actually perfectly inelastic, but looking at land reclamation (and erosion!) relative to the ease with which places to live can be added to a locale, the supply of land is relatively inelastic. Even then, that kind of misses the core of George's argument about land value.

George himself distinguished land from labor and capital by looking at it through the lens of whether the economic value of a piece of land needed to be attributable entirely to improvements undertaken on that land. This is his "all natural opportunities or forces," and those are where the constraint lies.

For land reclamation in particular, there are two things to look at: (1) the value attributable to the land reclamation effort; and (2) the residual site value. (2) is land rent, and the Georgist model really is predicated on the relationship the surrounding community has with a piece of land. As it goes, if the community's feelings toward, say, a reclaimed waterfront are tepid, that reclaimed land won't have much value (even if the land reclamation were undertaken at great expense!), and won't command high land rents.

Take the Netherlands as an extreme example of this; something like 17% of the country is reclaimed land. There's not many places you could do that.

Since unreclaimed "land" if it can be owned, can not generate any rents, it won't be taxed at all. But if all the additional value of making it usable were taxed away with a full LVT, it creates very little incentive to reclaim it and make it usable.

I think the best thing to do would be to exempt reclaimed land from land value tax for a period of time. Just like we grant monopolies for patents for a fixed value of time to incentivize sharing of the secrets.

If you got 50 years on reclaimed land without tax, it would heavily incentivize its creation.

> Cities can also lose land. Sometimes this is due to natural causes like erosion, sea level rise,

When there's a full LVT, the transactional sale price for land is very close to $0, because your land rents are taxed away. That leaves only the buildings as something that's lost to the natural disaster, so in many ways this might be far better for property owners.

It would also alleviate many of the challenges with relocation when necessary, from flooding, etc. Since the land is no longer the valuable part of the relationship estate, only the building must be moved/replaced.

You are confusing "location" and "dirt"

When georgists refer to land, they are referring to locations - not dirt.

Locations refer to the sections of physical 2D space that makes up a country. Why 2D when the world is 3D? Because parcels are allocated and segmented based on a 2D model.

Locations are best thought of as being similar to "spectrum" (what typically gets auctioned off every few years to the highest bidder) - there is a total fixed amount. Nobody made the physical space, and nobody will make more of it in the future. It all existed before life even began on this planet, and it will exist long after all of us are dead.

All that is true and I suppose there could be tax policies to encourage land reclamation, but this is more likely to run into environmental concerns. It’s literally an edge case.

Random thought, would be it be good to extend land tax to use of all common public goods. E.g. radio frequencies, mining, water, CO2 pollution. Things you own, licensed or consume that take from the common good. Obviously this need constant tweaking E.g. as new tech makes different things valuable.

There was also a community in the deep south. And I once read a case study about a town that tried it in, IIRC, New Mexico.

Full LVT never works. It always ends up shot through with exceptions and loopholes and, in the case study, inducing corruption. And it's all predictable, too, if you know anything about taxation policy and American political culture. For full LVT you'd need to start from a blank slate, not just from a legal perspective but from people's expectations about property ownership.

> I think LVT does have a history in US, e.g Pittsburgh

Yeah, I looked at the map in the article and thought, wait a minute, why is Pennsylvania not colorcoded if Pittsburgh has a land value tax? So the map is only showing states that do? I didnt know there were any states that tax land. But do remember being confused when I moved to Pittsburgh by there being two separate taxes - for land and for property.

I also think that the pittsburgh example shows that LVT is meaningless. All homeowners care about here is their total real estate tax. How it is split between land and property nobody pays attention to.

You can say that land tax might be better than income tax but it's hard to argue that both land tax and income tax is better than just income tax. This is the biggest reason why new tax modalities are considered unworkable.

It's the tax with the most positive impact AFAIK, especially when the other taxes are removed or at least adjusted accordingly.

But it probably is also a cooperation problem, thus we prefer a slow but accelerating apocalypse.

All these graduates need some value from their education after all, and if we reduce doing actively harmful things like the current tax system, others will be superior to us by transforming resources more quickly into waste.

Since the latter process is extremely profitable, and again, so many people have education in optimizing the resources->money->waste pipeline, it would be a luddite and anti-science thought to listen to the science and stop this.

Apart from that, there's a very common and profitable way of getting yield from people's everyday life while also rewarding them: cars.

Live somewhere, but everything you do requires a vehicle.

You'll see so many beautiful places.

But you also have to rant about the evil urban population that pays for your car, gas, roads, parking space and special subsidies.

It would be unlivable out there in the wilderness without this totally natural subsidization.