[rohitb91]

Houses go down in value, land goes up in value on average, partly due to scarcity. Best example is Manhattan. Additional land is non existent, and any existing land becomes more valuable as more people and businesses move there.

[slt2021]

its not the land that has value, it is the community on that land (police, public services, schools, parks, beautiful nature, access to jobs, etc) that has enormous value.

Take Detroit for example, nothing has changed to the land itself, but the community has changed and caused land (and housing) prices to change.

the way to solve it, I think is to build better communities, help with more construction of houses, parks, and building better public services (police, fire, public education, parks&recreation, etc).

What should be the source of such funding? I dont know, but the American approach seems to be to use local funding from property taxes, but this approach only sustains status-quo, and does not help to improve struggling communities

[smaryjerry]

I would take it a step further and say that it isn’t the community services that has value at all. It is the production of the community that has value. Detroit stopped producing things so it could not trade/earn money for all those public benefits. You could raise property taxes as much as you want but if people can’t pay then because they haven’t earned money the city will just go bankrupt, like the Detroit did. A community doesn’t have to produce physical goods, it can produce services for those that do produce physical goods, or digital services. But when the community can’t produce even enough to cover your food costs, community services don’t matter. To increase value in an area there must be a surplus somewhere. San Francisco area is a perfect example of the opposite. The myriad of tech companies are able to scale on a massive level because software scaling has practically zero cost and end up with a surplus.

[imtringued]

Just charge a land value tax and scrap all other taxes.