[epistasis]

This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax, it's typically a tax cut. Gen the increased economic efficiency helps a ton.

The only people who "lose" are speculative land bankers and exploitive landlords.

[onionisafruit]

Can you give an example where property tax changed to land value tax and a home owner was better off?

[at_compile_time]

If the rental value of the land were taxed away (replacing other, less-efficient taxes), the primary beneficiaries would be all those who can't currently afford to own their own home. The market doesn't care if you never intend to rent out the land you live on, it could be rented out and will be priced accordingly. Worse, land values are known to go up, and the market accounts for that too. You aren't just buying something you don't intend to rent out at prices dictated by how much it could be rented out for, you're also paying more for it because everyone else wants to speculate on its value.

Land value taxes attack both of these factors. The rental value is taxed away, and appreciation is also taxed away in the form of higher taxes on more valuable land.

Land owners usually clamor the other way. They want their land value to appreciate, as it does when society progresses, technology advances, and land values remain largely untaxed. As much as I favor it, land value taxation has a self-defeating quality to it. After enactment, land values fall because land ownership would be benefit and obligation in equal measure. Suddenly, every land owner has a direct incentive to get the tax repealed so that their property value can reinflate. It's one of those collective action situations where we can't have nice things because everyone wants what is better for them and worse for everyone.

I'd much rather be taxed for my land usage than my income and spending, and not spend the majority of my working life indebted to a bank because land, one of the necessities of life, is a non-depreciating asset with considerable rental value, prone to speculative bubbles. I would rather be incentivized to use my land well by a tax rate that doesn't care what I do with it, than be punished for development through property taxes that go up if I try to use the land better (not that I could if I wanted to, but restrictive zoning bylaws are a separate problem).

Any transition to LVT would need to be done gradually to prevent our finance/insurance/real-estate-based economy from cratering. This would require collaboration and collective force of will far beyond what our ossified society is actually capable of. It's more than just tax policy, it's the idea that land appreciation belongs to the landlord rather than to the society that caused it. I'm convinced that we would sooner collapse than transform something so fundamental.

[jjav]

> This is absolutely wrong, the average person owning a home would be far better off with a land value tax than property tax

Everything I've read about LVT is that it would indeed hurt individual regular people home owners the most.

With LVT the tax assessor is free to declare that your plot of land would be a lot more profitable with a highrise apartment building on it, so now you're going to get taxed as if one existed there. Even if all you own is an old shack.

[epistasis]

Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.

Those who do already have homes worth astonishingly high values.

Check out ant actual evaluation of LVT, such as Lars' Doucet's. Or places where it has been implemented (Vancouver pre 1970s, parts of Pittsburgh, etc.).

[beaeglebeach]

The LVT was relaxed in Vancouver in part because of the grandparent noted concerns of the democratic vote of the average joe in small non-profit-seeking property holdings that can't bear the (functionally regressive) tax the same as the ibanker overlords squeezing a skyscraper of tenants in faux-luxury studios dry.

[epistasis]

I think your last sentence there bears out that you have enough bias on the issue that perhaps the real concern is that it allows sky scrapers.

Since dropping the LVT, Vancouver has used restrictive permitting and extreme downzoning to keep homeowners very wealthy, but also keep a far larger number of people from having access to land in Vancouver.

In a normal city, you don't go from sprawl of single family homes to sky shapers, you have gradual addition of duplexes, then triplexes, then a smattering of small apartment buildings, and finally, only then perhaps, taller towers in a very tiny number of locations.

This is the reality of normal development that has not been restricted by zoning. That Vancouver has so restricts housing that a skyscraper is tenable in so many locations next to sprawl homes is an indictment of the lack of so many other options in between.

Certainly not a problem for a land value tax, that's a societal problem is a city ruined by exclusionary planning.

[beaeglebeach]

I have no problem with skyscraper. I'm for the abolition of taxes, which are in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer. LVT is a transfer of tax balance from those unable to improve their land, to the rich who can. LVT accelerates this balance towards the skyscraper landlord-baron.

[epistasis]

Those who hate taxes, and have investigated them, universally point to the LVT as the "least bad tax."

Now, I'm not opposed to taxes, but given the choice between taxes that increase prosperity and taxes that decrease prosperity, I'm picking the ones that make us all wealthier and remove rentierism.

If you think that all taxes are "in practice a massive transfer of wealth from poorer to richer" I'm not sure you have a solid understanding of taxation.

If you think that LVT creates "landlord barons" then you really have zero understanding of the LVT. It eliminates the rentierism that creates barons. It takes their land rents and redistributes them to productive uses. That's the entire point.

[jjav]

> Most people do not live on a plot of land where a highrise is economically feasible.

Over the whole country, you're right.

But let's be honest, the strongest advocates of LVT are not pushing to implement it in some sleepy village in the middle of nowhere just to lower taxes on the villagers.

LVT is always brought up as a solution in expensive areas as a tool to pull people out of their homes (because there is no way they could afford the taxes so they have to move out) and give the land to corporate developers to build big apartment buildings.

[epistasis]

Wrong. The most serious proposal for LVT right now is in Detroit, where it is going to be used to give resident home owners a tax break, and charge land speculators more than they are currently being charged.

My political organization that advocates for LVT is also driving through bills for social housing, not for big corporate developers.

Where do these strange ideas come from?

[jjav]

> Where do these strange ideas come from?

Here is a link to a site that is promoting LVT, so any biases they have would be in favor of LVT.

https://www.progress.org/articles/the-implementation-of-land...

Quote:

"A third possibility is for the retired persons to move to a lower-rent neighborhood, as many anyway move to assisted living or to an apartment."

We can see that it is an accepted goal of LVT to pull poorer/fixed-income people out of their homes so developers can have the land.