Why are property taxes even connected to property values? Does it get more expensive to supply public services when property values go up?
A flat tax per square foot would make more sense, perhaps with a rate ray varies based on locality.
A flat tax per square foot would make more sense, perhaps with a rate ray varies based on locality.
For schools and policing and the like a poll tax is fair, but regressive. A local income tax on the other hand would rise as the cost of public services rose (since labor is a significant portion of that cost) without being regressive. That would still suffer from richer municipalities collecting more tax and hence having better schools etc. though this could be alleviated with larger (and hence more diverse) municipalities.
Now you probably want to encourage building more housing on the same land to alleviate the lack of housing (which is why an LVT is so often proposed) but local taxation first and foremost has to fund local public services, or there really is no point. You can additionally penalize leaving land undeveloped, but that should be a secondary tax (or penalty) on top of a basic one that scales with the cost of providing those services, not the primary source of funding for local government.
With a property tax system, it would be impossible to rehabilitate a municipality where property prices have dropped to ~0 (e.g. parts of the North of England, and Detroit).