> They should implement a blight tax or a vacant land tax instead.
A land value tax is a much more elegant solution. For one, it doesn't introduce the problem of needing to define 'vacant land'. Is a parking lot vacant land? etc
> For one, it doesn't introduce the problem of needing to define 'vacant land'.
But it introduces, unless I'm completely misunderstanding, the need to establish a theoretical value for a plot of land that's unrelated to any sale or use value we can objectively measure today.
At best, it seems the assesment will be very wrong often. At worst, it'll be a political tool for local government to drive out whoever they want by overvaluing plots on purpose.
A lot of the land around Detroit is nearly worthless given the blight. Will it be taxed at $0 or will they say that in an alternate universe someone could build a skyscraper there so it's worth millions? Even though nobody would actually fund that work.
Taxing based on sale price isn't perfect, but at least it is much harder to game since it's based on a concrete market-clearing price that isn't up for debate.
While it's not trivial, assessing un-improved land value does not seem too different from other complicated accounting tasks that both governments and private organisations have been performing for a long time. Cost segregation studies are already a thing.
A good starting point can be the relevant part of the Georgist primer published on ACX:
There are theoretical difficulties, yes. The elegant way out is to have the person owning the land self-assess its value, set the LVT at x% of that value, and be legally bound to sell it to anyone who comes up to them offering that price.
Now how do we determine that x%? That's a good question. I think there's no way out of some empiricism even if someone did try this approach. But you can always start it low and raise it incrementally to see how it affects the land economy of an area.
> The elegant way out is to have the person owning the land self-assess its value, set the LVT at x% of that value, and be legally bound to sell it to anyone who comes up to them offering that price.
That doesn't make any sense in the context of a land value tax.
The whole point of a land value tax is that a parcel of city center land is taxed at the same rate whether it's got a parking lot on it or an apartment block.
But the owner of an apartment block would self-assess their land as much more valuable than a parking lot, not wanting to be forced to sell their apartment block for the price of a parking lot. So you'd be back to having a property tax, not a land value tax.
The x% does not value with the use of the land. An apartment block owner would self assess their land as much more valuable, and then also pay back x% of that much higher land assessment in taxes each year, yes. And if someone came by and decided that e.g. that $5 million apartment land unit would be better as a $5 million parking lot, they could certainly pay them $5 million to do so.
But they may later find out that the parking lot isn't really worth $5 million, because it's harder to make the money to justify the x% of $5 million tax you're paying on it with a parking lot than with an apartment complex. They may then drop their valuation to $3 million, or $2 million, to reduce the total amount they pay in tax each year. But then of course they may run a greater risk of being forced to sell themselves -- perhaps even back to the original apartment runner they paid $5 million to before.
> and be legally bound to sell it to anyone who comes up to them offering that price
Why? This just seems to create yet another perverse incentive structure that people have to invest time into understanding (and some into exploiting), rather than adding any actual value. Taxes mean nothing if everyone is too busy figuring out this sort of scheme to do anything valuable.
I'm glad you ask. There's a whole 100-or-so page paper on this form of taxation with enforced sale on the books which explains why this approach is in fact far less perverse than our current system (which might be degenerately modeled as a 0% system, where every good has a forced sale point of $∞.∞∞).
I'm only a few pages in, and perhaps this paper redeems itself later, but here's my problem:
> To put this problem starkly: allocative efficiency and thus an efficient
market economy is impossible in the presence of private ownership.
What the paper's early pages are saying is that study A found that things could be allocated more efficiently, and study B found that sometimes people hold out from selling things now to gain more later, therefore to increase the efficiency of global (literally) allocation of resources, people should be forced to sell things or pay more taxes to keep them.
This seems to have several problems on its face, that might be dealt with later, but still:
- This is all theory. There is no global optimum to observe, no matter how many papers might be written. Only to theorise about.
- This is relative, and time-sensitive. I might value a property at X because at that moment it's worth that much to me. It might change in the future, or depend on how markets are doing. Should I instantly sell because I have an ice cream shop and people are all eating gelato, and I can't afford the tax so I reduce the valuation to a point where some shark can grab the building?
- Perfect is the enemy of good, particularly when perfect is so poorly defined. This can get a lot worse much more easily than it can get a bit better.
> I might value a property at X because at that moment it's worth that much to me. It might change in the future, or depend on how markets are doing. Should I instantly sell because I have an ice cream shop and people are all eating gelato?
Think at the margin here. You're not saying you should instantly sell because the gelato/ice cream enthusiast ratio has increased slightly. You're saying everyone all at once decided en masse to start eating gelato instead of ice cream. Yes, as an entrepreneur you need to respond to that. That's an enormous and sudden change in not just the long- but even the short-term viability of your endeavor.
Indeed the forced price mechanic improves the short term responsivity of the local economy to such a change, because your scenario suggests a recent total upset in the established order of things. I would rather see you walk away today, from a venture that you realized yesterday was doomed to fail, with an extra $X in your pocket from the shark who bought you out than to see you driven to bankruptcy because you were the last ice cream boy in this mad, gelato crazed new world. Who knows -- maybe you'll start an ice cream stand in a cheaper, more sane part of the world with it.
I like this subthread; both of you seem respectful and clear and I'm doing my best to follow the arguments.
But I'm having trouble as a result of the choice of icecream/gelato words.
I interpreted @robertlagrant to be in the "gelato is icecream" camp (which seems reasonable to me in a "baguettes are bread" sense).
But @hiAndrewQuinn, you seem to be in the "gelato is not icecream" camp. I would call this is an arguably correct position similar to "chicken tikka masala is not Indian food," but I doubt most people holding either of these positions would consider these kinds of small differences likely to be the trigger for a business becoming unviable. So perhaps you didn't know what gelato was?
In either case, I think you two need to be using the same definitions for your illustrations to make sense. And I really want them to make sense because I want to understand :)
It's not a complicated scheme: there's a semi-fixed price you pay to the public for removing land from its use, and you can do whatever you want in order to overcome that fixed price and keep whatever profit you achieve.
In real estate property value is constantly being corrected by an actual market. Prices aren't set by bureaucrats; they're paid by people for whom that price is worth it.
This measure will be harmful. Not just due to the person being a bureaucrat who can be bad at their job and/or influenced to achieve certain outcomes; not just because the info is instantly out of date on purchasing decisions; not just because the pricing info is specific to that purchaser. But because everything like this adds more drag into systems that have enough drag already. People can't do anything useful if they're constantly coping with bad systems voted for and put in place by people who don't understand unintended consequences.
As I understand it, property tax is simple when there's been a recent sale. The complexity comes from a similar issue to land value: no recent sale. In this case it's worse because valuing the land outside of what it's used for is a mess.
But this problem already exists. Many people live in homes for 30+ years and pay property tax on the land + improvement (physical home) value. Why would it be so much harder to hypothetically value the land without a recent sale (required for a LVT) than to hypothetically value the land + improvements without a recent sale (required for property taxes which currently exist in almost every city in America)?
Because their neighbours have sold their houses recently. So using similar sales as a baseline and then factoring in a few differences between those properties and the one that is being assessed is much easier than doing that and then subtracting the built-up value.
Basically all of your data points are the built-up prices. So it is going to be easier to estimate the built-up value than the raw property value. Maybe not much easier, but definitely not harder.
Do you think taxing by sub components of land would be simpler yet? Maybe we should tax by rock content.
Or maybe a tax based on more things has nothing to do with complexity. The largest market is for land and structures. That makes it the simplest to value.
Is it common to sell the land without selling the improvements located on top of it? If that's common, it's straightforward to use that market to value the land.
At worst the assesment will be dysfunctional often and at best this can empower local governance (ideally, "the people") to decide, as you say, on what businesses they'd like to host.
Maybe that's a sign that the "city" is too big? Much of what we call Dallas is not in Dallas, they are a different city. It makes sense to have a flat rate for all of Frisco and that tax rate will be different from that of Waxahachie.
you can use equivalents in the are. burned out abandoned building on the lot? what could that lot be worth reasonably? oh, there are 9 houses down the street or 1 block over that are all worth 200k...
I don't think tax law fears complexity. You make a table and there is an entry for "parcel of land with grass taller than 6 inches and containing one or more 1980s automobile with 3 or more tires" right alongside "parking lot" or "hospital".
Of course it does. Complexity in the tax law is regressive. It lets wealthier people and businesses take advantage of more deductions and writeoffs to lower their tax burden, due to the ability to hire accountants full time to work on it. Simple taxes that are difficult to avoid (such as LVT) are best if you want a progressive tax regime.
One of the best features of LVT is that it taxes unearned increases in the value of land. While you can do any improvements you want to the property without increasing the LVT, improvements made by the city or other private interests to the area around your land absolutely will increase its value, thus increasing your tax burden.
Simpler is not only less regressive, but also more efficient. Those lawyers and accountants freed up by simplicity can then go on to contribute to the economy in meaningful ways.
One implication of what you write seems to be that every property owner is incentevized to NIMBY any improvements to the area that they don't care about. For example, if I am "child free" I will now oppose the building of schools and playgrounds on the basis that they make my LVT go up with no benefit to me.
This looks more like a way to destroy society than prudent tax policy.
> For example, if I am "child free" I will now oppose the building of schools and playgrounds on the basis that they make my LVT go up with no benefit to me.
I think the problem is, for many people, the value of their land is kind of irrelevant. If you are using land by living on it, and want to live on it because it's near your friends, family, community, place of work etc, then the value of that land to someone else doesn't really matter. Maybe when you die and pass it to your kids, it would be great if it was valuable. But in the mean time (which for most people is many decades), an increase in value only really means an increase in monthly outgoings with no financial benefit to you.
Perhaps that's the point - in order for cities to stay dynamic and fair, we need to make everyone pay something close to market value for their land - even those who bought it a long time ago. But doing so is unlikely to make those people very happy.
You can’t make everyone happy all the time. I’m a lot more okay with a situation in which a person is compelled to sell their very valuable property because they can’t afford the taxes than I am with people being unable to afford housing.
If LVT helps to loosen up some undeveloped/underdeveloped land and get it into the hands of a willing developer then that is a big win for the fight against the housing crisis.
That's the kind of fine print that would kill any popular support for LVT.
It's also a false dichotomy. We don't need LVT to solve housing. We don't even know if LVT would solve housing. On the other hand, we know exactly how to solve housing. People just don't want to.
> I think the problem is, for many people, the value of their land is kind of irrelevant.
Well that's a problem with those people if they think their most valuable capital asset is irrelevant.
It is relevant, because without LVT, the tax code is literally encouraging inefficient use of land. Housing prices consistently rising five times faster than salaries is a huge problem, and it is caused by inefficient land use.
> One implication of what you write seems to be that every property owner is incentevized to NIMBY any improvements to the area that they don't care about. For example, if I am "child free" I will now oppose the building of schools and playgrounds on the basis that they make my LVT go up with no benefit to me.
This already happens just with more economic inefficiency under a property-tax regime. People already vote against improvements that would cause their taxes to go up.
This benefit is hypothetical as long as you are not selling your land.
So, up to the point where you would actually sell your land, LVT is simply a liability. Even if eventually you sell are not guranteed to actually make the amount implied by the LVT you have been paying.
Let's think about what structures and incentives and ways of thinking we would foster here. Everyone a property speculator! That worked out so well with housing.
Meanwhile the people who just want to raise a family in peace and stability can now be priced out of their homes because their neighborhood got too "good". And that's just the goldilocks analysis.
In grim reality, city councils can use this to soft-evict anyone, anywhere without giving a reason by simply raising the estimated land value. The corruption is going to be off the charts.
The point of LVT is to punish you if you could sell for less. That is if you own a small house next to sky scrapers, if you would sell someone would snatch up your house, tear it down, and build another sky scrapper.
Which is also why I don't think it helps Detroit today as they don't have the problem problem of land that someone else would build up on
> Simple taxes that are difficult to avoid (such as LVT)
Can you explain how is it simple? Who gets to set the theoretical value of a plot of land, disconnected from all current uses? Since it's theoretical, it's very subjective. Who do we give this power to make or destroy the owners based on purely subjective speculation on what it might be worth? How do we guarantee that this entity won't abuse the power to set arbitrary tax valuations?
> How do we guarantee that this entity won't abuse the power to set arbitrary tax valuations?
We don't. They already do that with "normal" property taxes. This wouldn't change that.
Soon-to-be gentrified neighborhoods are often ignored by property tax assessors and code enforcement for many years, then one day a developer reaches out to the tax assessors and says "hey the taxable assessment values in this neighborhood should really be higher". Then the people living there have taxes raised 10-20% every year until they are forced to sell for low prices because they can't afford to hold onto their property until the gentrification is actually well underway when they'd finally see their property value actually go up.
At least, that's how it goes in Texas.
I don't think this system would be worse in that sense, probably roughly equivalent. But it makes sense to at least attempt to tax undeveloped and under-developed land at high enough rates to encourage at least some healthy amount of development. It won't be perfect, but it shouldn't be worse either.
> I don't think this system would be worse in that sense, probably roughly equivalent. But it makes sense to at least attempt to tax undeveloped and under-developed land at high enough rates to encourage at least some healthy amount of development. It won't be perfect, but it shouldn't be worse either.
I don't see how it can't not be much worse.
If the tax is based on the actual value of the property, there are two important factors:
1- You can easily prove or disprove whether the valuation makes sense. Just look at comparable sales nearby. If in a neighborhood of similar houses, ten have been sold in the past year for 200K and your very similar house receives a tax bill saying it's worth 2M, you can easily protest and win since the sales records show it's only worth +/- 200K.
2- If it really is worth 2M based on comparable sales, in worst case you can then sell it for 2M. While it's terrible to kick people out of their homes via property taxes, at least the consolation is that it's actually worth that. So you don't go bankrupt, you can sell it for that price.
With LVT the tax is supposed to be based on some theoretical projection of what it might be worth if a non-existing structure were to be there. What prevents the county from telling you that if only you built a ten story highrise there, it would be worth 10M? So now you have to pay tax on 10M.
You can't easily disprove it because, well perhaps maybe it's true that if the highrise was there it might be worth 10M. But of course the building doesn't exist so it's all speculation. Also, since the building doesn't actually exist, you can't sell the property for 10M to pay the tax bill.
> You can easily prove or disprove whether the valuation makes sense. Just look at comparable sales nearby.
In the Houston area the appraisal board just doesn’t care. They raise taxes across the board for the whole neighborhood by the same amount every year and appealing has limited effect. You cant really argue comparables because the whole neighborhood raises in lockstep by a shocking amount every year (since well before the big housing bubble)
> You cant really argue comparables because the whole neighborhood raises in lockstep
Comparables refers to actual sales of similar homes nearby. If all sales in the neighborhood have been +/- $200K over the last year, they should not be able to claim the property is worth 500K. Or they could, but should be easy to disprove.
When you get a mortgage, it's based on a theoretical value of the property as determined by an assessment.
The bank will lend you up to, for example, 90% of the assessed value. Thats how you get a morthgage on a property that maybe you already own for 20 years.
Complexity introduces additional chances of creating loopholes and allowing people with enough resources to game the definitions to avoid the LVT. More basic implementations are also preferable because they're easier to administer, with your definition (or any that depends on the current year to year usage of the lot) you have to create a whole cadre of inspectors to check on the lots to ensure compliance and check people aren't just lying on their taxes.
BRB setting up dewheelr.io, which will help you, a landowner besieged by toxic regulations threatening your eyesore vacant landbank, sorry, useful and beautiful community recycling zone. For a small monthly fee, we'll connect you with local freelance tax compliance consultants who will happily remove tyres from the vehicles until they slip through the gaps in the table in your local jurisdiction. We'll keep on top of the regulatory complexity (in fact, we lobbied to ensure that only we are allowed to, so you can trust that we know the rules), deal with the grotty human workers (we've never actually met or talked to any of them person-to-person, so we don't feel bad paying them below a living wage and withholding payment when we can get away with it) leaving you to focus on what matters most: letting that dead possum stuck in the frayed chainlink fence grow a really interesting plant in an eyesocket.
A land value tax is a much more elegant solution. For one, it doesn't introduce the problem of needing to define 'vacant land'. Is a parking lot vacant land? etc