[kiba]

Land prices are subject to speculative bubbles as well. The only way to get rid of speculation in the real estate market is to drive the price of land down to zero by taxing it.

You also need a lot of money to purchase land, so this effectively allows banks to make a lot of money on overly inflated price of land.

Land by itself doesn't generate wealth, only improvements on top of it does. Only problem is that we tax improvement along with the land, leading to the perverse incentive that building anything increases your tax burden. We call them property tax.

[toomuchtodo]

We're getting into the weeds, but the goal is usually to own your home free and clear by the time you retire, reducing your income needs from retirement to death by not having a non discretionary housing payment. The wealth in most homes cannot be tapped until sold, death, or stripping the equity (HELOC or reverse mortgage) and hoping you die with zero.

You can sort of think of a house as an I bond you can live in [1], and the return is the equity gains (historically). You need lots of money to buy land because demand outstrips supply, there is a shortage of ~4M housing units in the US, and the pipeline for building new housing was permanently impaired after the 2008 global financial crisis. We will never build as fast as we used to as we go into structural demographic labor shortages in the US; the value of existing real estate is ancient embodied construction productivity and material costs, similar to how oil is ancient sunlight.

[1] The Rate of Return on Everything, 1870–2015 - https://www.frbsf.org/wp-content/uploads/wp2017-25.pdf | https://doi.org/10.24148/wp2017-25

[kiba]

Drive down the price of land to zero via taxation and you cannot use that home to reduce your income need from retirement. It will force them to sell the property to make way for further development, since the cost of land is no longer so high that you need to borrow money from the bank to purchase land, only to pay the ongoing taxes.

[toomuchtodo]

Do you believe this is likely to happen? If so, when? 5 years? 10 years?