[notahacker]

In reality, I think the scenario plays out a bit more like this:

A bunch of poor people buy some cheap land with very low taxes because its a run down scruffy mess with no facilities.

The land stays a run down scruffy mess with no facilities because the local property owners have strong financial incentives to keep it that way

Incremental increases in the land value tax would make low income landowners hungry long before the land rose in value enough to make anyone millionaires, and land isn't exactly easy to sell quickly, especially not if it's marginally-less-shitty-than-before land with an uncertain future.

[onlyrealcuzzo]

In reality, it works like Los Angeles and The Bay - and everyone who (owned) and gets priced out ends up with a massive windfall at some point.

How massive depends on how long they stay into the boom.

Again, no one ever loses (financially) from prices going up.

All you get are options (financially).

If your home is direly important to you, and being close to family is important, too - you still have options.

1) Sell and move in with family and use your gains to help offset their property tax

2) build an ADU in your backyard / convert your garage to an apartment - and use the rental income to pay your fair share of property tax - plus have the majority left over for spending

3) continuously cash-out refinance to pay your property tax + your previous cash-out

No owner loses (financially) from property prices exploding.

[notahacker]

Los Angeles and the Bay Area provides massive windfalls to property owners because the State of California's tax system is not based on the Georgist principle that 100% of the "unearned increment" of land value appreciation should be taxed away.

And in the case of the Georgist system being discussed, a typical poor person who is living on a typically tight budget and typically doesn't own very much of their home equity has very strong financial incentives to avoid unaffordable tax rises. Sure, they still have "options" to pay that bill, just like unemployed people also have "options" to sell and move in with family, take on lodgers or refinance, but if the consequence of house price rises from are that you have to choose between sharing, moving or paying refinancing costs on your house it's definitely not a windfall. And they're not finally priced out of an area when it's a million pound plot attractive to developers who want to build condos, they're priced out of their still-very-undesirable area as soon as the LVT bumps up 20%, perhaps because some well meaning citizen planted flowers instead of syringes in the local park.

The other option, of course, is to try to keep your house in line with your cost of living by attempting to thwart all attempts to generally improve the area. I think it's pretty obvious a lot of people will choose that...