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Comment by throwitaway222 | Hacker News Reader

I guess here's an issue. I bought 13 acres - mostly because I hate hearing basketballs bouncing, other people's TVs, and "boom cars".

So if we're going to start taxing me at a million per year, can I start taxing those loud people a million a year so I can live in the city to pay for medical bills for my brain to go through the bouncing basketball.

Mind you, everyone else in my area has 10 - 15 acres and it's just a dead area. Just people that ran away from the city. There's absolutely no "value" in this land as no one wants to even be here and drive 40 minutes to get to a grocery store.

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One of the main points made in TFA is it's important to communicate that single-family homes outside of city centers will tend to see lower taxes if you go from property tax to LVT, because in the city most of the value in your home is the land, but that ratio flips the further you get from the city center.

Obviously this assumes a single tax-base; if you are not in the same tax base of the city, then you're probably still fine, since if everybody has similarly valued lots, the taxes will be shared similarly between them.

LVT is assessed on land value. Your 13 rural acres aren't insanely valuable and would not be assessed a million dollars a year under a Georgian model.

Ok, that makes sense to me then. I thought I was going to be taxed for unused land.

The idea here is that unused land in a city should be highly taxed, but unused land in rural areas should not.

I don't even think "unused" is helpful framing. I'd say, property taxes should be assessed on land, not productive imps. If you want to keep your expensive urban downtown land a parking lot, fine, but it shouldn't be subsidized by lower taxes than your neighbor with a high-rise.

The point of Georgism is to get rid of the 'unused' part. You're just taxed on land, full stop, based on the most valuable things that could probably be done with it right now.

Land in a city center? Hefty taxes, identical for a parking lot and a skyscraper, because the parking lot could be a skyscraper instead.

Land in a low population rural area? Low taxes, because the likely uses are homes or businesses that could be built in any other rural area.

So the idea is to make cities denser? Is maximum density use what we really want? What about industry, data centers, etc., that could be built in rural areas - wouldn't that push land value up there a lot?

The idea is to encourage more efficient use of land. In urban areas of the US that usually means more density since they aren't actually all that dense(the oft cited example being surface parking lots in downtown areas, this isn't a very efficient use). There's a lot of other baggage to make that work well, imk - better infrastructure and transit come to mind.

My concern is that the endpoint of most efficient land use might not be a great one.

Why?

Could be shoe-box sized flats or nothing even for any human living at all, for example. The most efficient land use need not be "nice".

It's just one local revenue stream, comparable to property tax. Nothing about it requires or precludes any other policy goal like making cities "nice" places to live.

If the revenue stream weren't that big, would it change the use of land much?

Maybe we can just make small, directionally correct policy changes? With slightly better-aligned incentives? Even if they are modest.

Most cities in the US aren't even near 'a little bit efficient', let alone 'most efficient'. You're worrying about what happens if the waddling baby at the ten-yard line on the football field runs out past the end zone and keeps going onto the highway.

The effect on taxes depends on the specific rules. But, with the easiest answer of basing it on market rate of land sales, industry in rural areas only increases taxes if that industry's paying significantly above existing market rate for some reason.

And if they are doing that, the taxes should go up, since there's some previously unrecognized value to the land that's driving industry to need to build there specifically and not somewhere else they can buy at preexisting market rate.

Of course, the same also applies in the other direction: if an active mine shuts down and sells for pennies, taxes for the surrounding land should go down based on that.

If it isn't considering hypothetical land uses than it isn't necessarily always pushing for more efficient use, no?

There's only so hypothetical you can go before losing the point of the whole system. We could, after all, make the whole planet like Coruscant if we really wanted, but taxing for that hypothetical would do nothing useful.

if your acres were in the middle of the city, with one lonely house surrounded by trees to stop the noise from outside, yes

Then your land would likely be priced at the nominal amount per acre x 13 since the demand for that area is low and diffuse. Not a horrible outcome, and, could encourage you to make the land "productive" to at least cover the tax. Tree farms are lovely.

What about conservation? On my land, after clearing a bit around the house for fire safety and "pest" prevention, I kept most of the native rainforest. I planted a few syntropic lines of fruit trees, but they cannot cover the land tax I already pay. All my gardening and land management at large is a money sink (unless we consider touching grass an investment).

LVT is about assessing improvements, conservation can be understood as an improvement and valued as such. For the same reasons that urban parks should have a different tax assessment than low value surface parking lots.

Isn't the idea that it's a land value tax, and not just a land tax. The land in your example is not particularly valuable. Unless I have misunderstood the idea.

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