[igorkraw]

There are people (free market people, not communists) who'd argue the idea of owning land as a private person and extracting rent/speculation is folly itself and who'd argue you should either pay much higher taxes (Georgism) or they you should only be able to lease land from the community around you.

Free market capitalism doesn't work well (in terms of social welfare) with natural monopolies, and land could be called the ultimate natural monopoly.

[radu_floricica]

Eh, that's an extreme position. Mostly we say that property taxes should be around half the land rent value, i.e. around half the value the property generates without taking into account what's built on it.

This has the rather obvious difficulty of having to estimate the yearly value generated by the land itself, which is a topic too large for me (but solvable), while having a large number of advantages. It aligns incentives very very well, and that's hella important. If a municipality develops an area with proper regulation, infrastructure and various services, the land value grows which gives them extra income. It has a much more direct invest->income dynamic.

It also incentivizes owners to be a lot more aligned to the interests of the community around them. You want to have a home with a large yard in the middle of the city, instead of developing it more in line with the location? You can, but you'll pay for it.

It also forces owners to align to the community around them continuously. If currently you own a piece of land which is way underdeveloped, the only moment when anybody even cares about this is when it's being sold. As opposed to having to adjust each year to current land value and land taxes - you're not forced to do something about it, but it's surely on your mind a lot more when you see taxes grow.

Ah, and it fixes NIMBY, and dramatically lowers rent. Apartment buildings are very efficient, so they'll be favored exactly where they make sense - in crowded, high-value land areas.

[imtringued]

Baden Würtemberg doesn't give a damn about the complexity of the assessment, they already have to assess land value for estate taxes. The assessment argument is actually complete rubbish. The assessment rules for the rest of Germany are significantly more bureaucratic. Assessing building value is an even bigger nightmare because you cannot automate the majority of assessment work. You also don't have to asess every single building. You can asess the value of bigger plots of land spanning multiple properties and allow an appeal process for special circumstances.

[pessimizer]

Why half? Is that just an arbitrary number?

[radu_floricica]

Theory says 100%, half is just a realistic target.

[michaelt]

> There are people (free market people, not communists) who'd argue [...] you should only be able to lease land from the community around you.

At first this sounded like an extreme point of view to me - then I realised how often I've heard people saying there's nothing wrong or exploitative about being a landlord. We, as a society, see nothing wrong with people spending their entire lives living on rented property.

[imtringued]

The landlord can't exploit you, only the land owner can. It just turns out that they are usually the same person. In the case of the homeowner they are not.

Also, if we consider taxation exploitative then we should limit it to resource based taxes like land value tax.