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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

I believe LVT is the opposite. Tax land ignoring what’s on it. If you own land with tremendous potential but don’t improve it, that’s your loss.

Otherwise by taxing land based on what’s on it, it negatively incentivizes improving it. The nicer my home gets, the more my taxes go up.

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I was thinking it makes sense to tax land with productive assets and don't tax those without. Housing is not a productive asset so it shouldn't matter how much you fix it up. If you tax productive land there shouldn't be an incentive to not do anything as there would be nowhere to "escape" to that has a greener financial pasture. The problem I see with this route is the tax payers with productive land will start making a case for them being the only ones who should vote.

The tricky thing is it’s taxing land on what your neighbors built in their land.

If you build something that makes my land valuable, I get taxed more.

I like the incentive structure, but I think part of the incentives are towards collectivization so you and I become one unit, which may or may not be a good thing.

I think it’s probably good but I definitely agree that it’s not an obvious one and is worthy of debate.

Yeah one problem I still haven't seen solved is that when you build improvements on both neighbouring land, taxes on both of those lands will increase. It seems unfair for big developers who essentially built their own cities. I've heard something about rent system where the tax is frozen for 99 years, but this seems like an obvious rule patch that'll make LVT loses what makes it unique and relevant.

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