[doctorpangloss]

Is it? I can tell you now, I have no difficulty asserting that the value is near zero for the depreciating, crumbling houses on top of most of the land in the Mission in San Francisco. All the appreciation, which means nearly all of the sales price, of a typical home here, is the land.

BuT rEnNoVaTiOnS. Listen, I’m not trying to give you a comprehensive answer. I’m just trying to show that it’s not by far the biggest difficulty, not in the places LVT is most impactful, such as cities with extremely high vacancies like San Francisco.

[Alupis]

The problem you're glossing over is what value should be assigned to the land.

If some land developer wants to build a new arena next to your plot of land - boom you're value just skyrocketed.

If the same land developer backs out of the deal - boom your land is worth less (or is actually worthless).

Your taxes depend on exactly when the assessment was made... and even professionals cannot agree on valuation (as we're seeing in some high profile cases right now).

Even for the same plot of land two people can value it radically differently.

> extremely high vacancies like San Francisco

This is a relatively new phenomenon.

[harimau777]

Wouldn't that apply to existing property tax systems or any tax where the value it is based on is only assessed periodically?

[Alupis]

Yes, and it's been long bemoaned about how people game that system and how unfair it has a tendency of being. Which was one of the points I was raising.

There is no objective valuation for anything really... particularly when it comes to more-or-less unique, speculative properties such as land and/or improvements.

The only reason everyone mostly agrees on, say a car's value is there's a lot of cars exactly like it that have been sold recently in whatever area you are in. Yet, every plot of land is mostly unique and has a tremendous amount of potential, debatable factors when it comes to value.