I don't buy it.

In NZ we pay property rates based on a combination of land and improvement value. It's been this way for a very long time. Removing the improvement portion and focusing only on the land value portion can only be a simplification - not a complication.

Official estimates of land value are common in many jurisdictions and nothing new.

Indeed, in fact when it was up to the people, they preferred the Unimproved Value method.

See for example https://landvaluetaxguide.com/new-zealand-experience/

"In a general observation Keall states;

Wherever Land Value Rating applies it has been adopted by poll of ratepayers, representing a lot of work and profound social concern. Wherever Capital or Annual Value Rating applies it has been imposed by Government or Councils, contrary to the express wishes of the ratepayers in almost every case.15

With certain exceptions16 local LVT, assessed through the LV system, was preferred where democratic choice was allowed, but this choice was removed in1988 by the Labour government, which revoked the democratic polls that had kept the local LVT in place for more than 130 years."

(Australia)

I received my notice from the land valuer general yesterday (for unimproved land value).

Looking at building costs for my area and what other houses are going for in the street, the valuation looks spot-on.

> being able to determine the unimproved value of the land

X = Unimproved land value

A = How much it would cost to build the building

B = Improved land value

A+X = B, solve for X, you get X = B-A.

We can measure A based on the building's floorplan and labor costs for similar size houses.

We can measure B using the same methods we currently use for figuring out land value for tax purposes (or if you don't like those, whatever improved method you might have in mind, e.g. last fair market sale price plus inflation rate since last sale date).

You might argue that "the cost of a thing doesn't represent its true value" but I'd classify that as a separate debate. Tax codes are generally written as if costs actually do represent value. E.g. a company's value according to its accounting books is often quite different than its market cap, but we generally tax companies based on their accounting books. (Even market cap has its downsides as a measure of value. My personal conclusion is that the notion of "value" itself gets awfully fuzzy, heuristic and imprecise outside of tautological corner cases like "1g of gold is worth 1g of gold".)

How much it would cost to build the building and the value of the land after improvement is not the same, for instance there are plenty of properties in St. Louis, Chicago, Gary, etc where the value of the property is less than the cost of building the structure on it. Does that mean the unimproved land value is negative?

Yeah, you'd need to include some kind of correction term for an A > B situation.

Building value can be negative, if the costs of renovation or demolition would be greater than the value of the land.

But building value could also be positive, but less than the cost of construction. Basically "It works fine and it's worth something, but if you built it today, the value you could sell it for wouldn't cover the costs."

Basically you need to design a formula for a requirement something like: "We need to proportion the improved land value between the building and the unimproved land. The building 'should get' 10% - 90% of the value. We start with cost, if that's near the middle of the range we accept it, but toward the ends of the range we modulate it (either with hard cutoffs or softer asymptotic blending)."

Then you need a separate case for where the building is negative value. In that case you could probably get by with an inspection and cost estimates for renovation / demolition.

You could also discount a building based on its age, say 1% per year up to 70%. This represents the fact that Joe's house would cost $200k to build today, but if you did that you'd get a house that's 0 years old. Joe's actual house is 60 years old, so to guesstimate the value of that 60-year-old house we take $200k and subtract 60% to get $80k. (The 30% minimum represents the fact that even a centuries-old house in good repair has some value.) Again, after the discounting you'd apply modulation to make sure it's 10% - 90% of the total value.

More likely the cost of building the structure needs to be adjusted for depreciation and/or cost of bringing it up to code. If a building costs more to fix up than starting from scratch, or effectively just needs to be demolished, clearly it's the building's value that's negative.

Although, there's no reason unimproved land value can't be negative, the land just needs to be burdensome.

The issue is that we're sorta back on the same issue as before where we need to estimate the value of the unimproved land except now it's (in my opinion) even more complicated. In this case, the structure doesn't need adjustment due to anything physically wrong it's just that no one is willing pay the theoretical value for it in that location. Think of an expensive anime wrap on a car, the wrap cost 2k or whatever but I don't care I really only want the car.

Good point on the value of unimproved land being negative, I was thinking of a different edge case. In the situation of "burdensome" land, maybe it does make sense for there to be negative value land with an associated tax credit if the owner is compelled to do something to remediate?

It is entirely possible and is not infrequently done. There are certain cases where it's fairly common. One is when there is a need to establish the value that a piece of land had at a certain time in the past before an improvement was made (e.g., to determine what tax liability existed at that time, or how assets were distributed among partners or heirs). Another is when someone needs an appraisal that separates the land and the improvements in order to convince someone to give them a loan to do something with the land that will involve getting rid of whatever's already built on it. This can happen for instance when there is an "underutilized" piece of land (e.g., a one-story building in a dense urban area).

It's true that determining the value of the unimproved land is not an exact science, but that is true of real estate appraisal in general.

I understand that it is more complicated and has wider error bars than property values, but is it really so difficult or need to be so precise that its effectively impossible?

Impossible is not the right word for your question. It’s not impossible, but is it worth it? Is it feasible? Does it introduce too much room for inefficiency or fraud?

Isn't the value of the land of a property [1] basically determined by the full value (land + improvement) of nearby [2] properties? Isn't that why people desire buying a certain piece of land, because of what it is connected to - close to nature, close to market, far from noise, etc.

You do have a lot of price signals about the value of nearby private property, and you can also estimate the price of public land (parks and major roads) by using data from across the whole country to determine how much people want to live close to, say, a park. Then come up with some formula to aggregate that into a single value for each land.

I would hope that someone does this at least as a theoretical exercise to see what the estimated values would be, and whether we can find a formula that is reasonable for almost all properties.

[1] I am talking about residential and retail properties. Not farm or mining type land.

[2] Close/far in both the topological and the geometric sense.

"relies on being able to determine the unimproved value of the land.

This is impossible."

1) my property tax includes 2 line items, land and improvements. So clearly not impossible.

2) it's also irrelevant. (Land value) tax just has to be plausible and reasonably consistent. Property taxes are contested all the time and are based upon interpolations and extrapolations of recent sales when possible. All that is required is that the taxing authority comes up with something that the owner pays.

It doesn't seem like it should be terribly hard to calculate the improvement in that as the article notes they were already taxing people on imputed rent.

Achievable rents would be one of the factors among others that one would use to calculate the value of a building.

I think LVT is a pretty terrible way to find government, but most states already have a property tax and assessment process. I have to pay property tax in California.

Part is a land value tax for my land, and part is a wealth tax on unrealized gains.

The tax would change the value a lot. Much less complicated to set a tax based on what one is allowed to do with the land. Taxing farms would hit mostly poor people.

This critique assumes that because land parcels are not perfectly fungible, it is impossible to determine unimproved land values with sufficient accuracy for taxation. However, this is an overstatement, and several counterpoints undermine the argument:

1. Property Tax Systems Already Differentiate Land and Improvements

Nearly all property tax systems already distinguish between land and structures. While not perfect, assessors routinely estimate land values separately using standard appraisal techniques, such as sales comparisons, income capitalization, and residual valuation.

Many jurisdictions with split-rate taxation (e.g., Pittsburgh, Harrisburg) have successfully implemented higher land taxes without insurmountable assessment issues.

2. Market Transactions Provide Usable Data

While land parcels are not perfectly fungible, land is frequently bought and sold. Vacant land transactions, teardown sales, and comparable properties provide pricing signals that allow for reasonable estimates.

Even when improvements are present, sales can still reveal land values through statistical analysis. Techniques like hedonic regression and Computer-Assisted Mass Appraisal (CAMA) leverage large datasets to isolate land value.

3. Land Value Is Already Implicit in Market Prices

The value of land manifests in rental and purchase prices. Two identical buildings in different locations will sell or rent for different prices, with the difference attributable to land value.

Land residual analysis (subtracting improvement value from total value) is a well-established method used by appraisers and economists.

4. Perfect Accuracy Is Not Required

No tax system relies on perfectly precise assessments. Income taxes, sales taxes, and corporate taxes all involve estimation and compliance issues, yet they function well enough for governments worldwide.

Even if some inaccuracies exist, a Land Value Tax (LVT) still improves economic efficiency by discouraging land speculation and incentivizing productive land use.

5. Technological Advances Improve Assessment Accuracy

Geographic Information Systems (GIS), machine learning models, and mass appraisal techniques are making land assessment more precise.

Many cities and countries, including Denmark, Estonia, and parts of Pennsylvania, have successfully implemented LVT systems.

6. The Alternative Is Worse

Even if land assessments involve some degree of uncertainty, it’s still preferable to the distortions created by property taxes on buildings, which discourage construction and improvements.

Current property tax systems often undervalue land, leading to inefficiencies and speculative hoarding.

Conclusion:

The claim that it is “impossible” to determine unimproved land value is empirically false. While perfect precision is unattainable, the same is true of all tax assessments. Practical methods exist to estimate land value with sufficient accuracy, and jurisdictions that have implemented LVT-like systems have demonstrated their feasibility.

The real question is not whether it can be done at all, but whether the benefits of LVT outweigh any challenges in assessment—historical evidence suggests they do.

Would, at the very least, need a carve-out for your primary domicile + a lockout period.

It sounds rife for yucks. Imagine making a megarich person mad online and they buy your house out from under you. So you move to another one. They do it again, and again, putting you in the delightful position of playing chicken with their vindictiveness and your ability to pay your own property taxes.

Moving is colossally inconvenient, and extra horrible when you're forced to do it.

Can't imagine local supermarkets being able to endure the inevitable bidding war on their properties from walmarazon.

Good points. It still might be possible to put in limits that make it workable: Maybe the sale only goes through after 5 years and the money is held in escrow until then. Maybe an individual/organization can only exercise the option once per 20 years.

The most obvious solution to this is to do away with land ownership entirely. If the land is state owned and the value of a lease on it is auctioned to the highest paying renter, the market price of the land is precisely the same as the tax paid on it.

that seems like a super clean solution as long as nothing ever gets built, but the problem is the same: it's not a question of how much the land is worth, it's a question of how much the unimproved land is worth.

everything gets messy as soon as you start improving the land, because the improvements are not easily removed from the land. if the state owns the land but i own the skyscraper i built on it, what happens to my skyscraper when the state auctions my lease off to somebody else? the whole point of a land value tax is that the value of land changes after things have been built on it (and around it), and you need to capture that change in value.

Buildings are constructed with borrowed money. Attach said debt to the land, rather than the person building, and payments on it are a part of the lease. If you build a sky-scraper, you only pay for it while you occupy the land. Then if someone outbids you for it, they have to pay the debt.

How does this differ from an investment then? Debts attached to people can be recovered through their assets, but if the only "asset" is a temporary government lease on some land there's nothing to recover if it falls through. Furthermore, this leads to so many conflicts of interest it's not even funny, whats to stop someone from taking out a huge loan and paying their own construction company to do the work at a premium?

It can't fall through, because the debt is on the land and not a person. The land doesn't run out of money. There will always be a buyer for the building who will then have to pay down the loan. If there isn't a buyer for the building, then the building is worth less than the loan and even in the traditional case of the banking issuing the loan to an individual, there would not be sufficient recovered capital to repay the loan.

TL;DR the lender loses money iff the value of the building is less than the money they loaned to build it (true in any system).

> whats to stop someone from taking out a huge loan and paying their own construction company to do the work at a premium?

That's called embezzling. Are you familiar with corporate law? The "limited liability" in "limited liability company" refers to the fact that the owners of a company are not liable for the debts owed by said company. One can, in principal, take out a large loan on behalf of a company you own, pay it to yourself as salary, then declare the company insolvent and pocket the cash. Laws exists to prevent this and could be extended to fraud under the new system.

>even in the traditional case of the banking issuing the loan to an individual, there would not be sufficient recovered capital to repay the loan.

This just is not necessarily true, and more importantly runs into the issue that now lenders will not lend to people and land that they believe cannot be be positively valued for the entire term of the debt. In real life if you buy a home on a 30 year mortgage, the lender does not need to care much if it could be less valuable in 20 years, only that it retains enough value to be worth the rest of the loan if it needs to be seized.

As for embezzlement, go try to get a loan as a new LLC without assets, or revenue, or personal collateral. The reality is that under your proposed system, no bank would ever take the risk of loaning money to a plot of land. Forget fraud and embezzlement, there's zero mechanism for preventing flat out bad management from ruining a plot over and over again if you don't attach debts to people.

so then it isn't just that the state owns the land, but for all practical purposes the state owns the land and the buildings on it. nobody ever owns any property anymore, and all property is only leased from the state.

i don't know that i'm even necessarily against this idea, but it's a long ways from just being a land value tax at this point.

Why would I pay to improve the land if next year someone can simply outbid me and take the land off me?

Long-term leases exist for this function.

Often 99-year leases (e.g., Hong Kong to the UK).

In practice, the tenant can typically break the lease with minimal consequence as the landlord (the government) can generally find new tenants, and diversifies risk over many landholdings.

That removes any benefit of confiscating all land and leasing it out while still retaining all the society destroying consequences of this idea. Basically at this point it's just a proposal to confiscate all land and resell it, for fun I guess.

It prevents land speculation, as bidding leads to higher rents, rather than asset inflation.

This is an important part of the system. People won't construct buildings unless they feasibly believe that they can also provide the highest return on investment for said buildings and therefore pay the highest rent on the land. If you are unable to produce the greatest value with a piece of land, why should you be allowed to hoard it away from someone who can do something better with it? That said, this theory obviously falls short in practice, but equally obviously, there exist many practical remedies to that problem. Lease values can be adjusted based on the value of surrounding leases, then negotiated down by an auction if the owner believes they've grown to high, rather than periodically re-auctioned. Down payments can force bidders to internalise the cost of displacing existing business. Existing lease holders would clearly be given an advantage in the bidding process if they choose to initiate it.

Edit: I should add that the simplest way to handle this is to attach the debt used for building to the land instead of the land-owner. That way there is no loss for auctioning off the land after building.

So I rent somewhere cheap, take out massive loans, pay my brother to build a house (with a large profit), then leave the debt with the land and don't bother next year?

The LVT solution to this is valuing the unimproved land. I.e. if someone were to buldose the buildings and infrastructure actually on the land, how much would it cost to rent it.

This works fine on a lot-by-lot basis, we tend to know the value of land in cities. It starts falling when you buy a large amount of land. The value of land in Manhattan is very high obviously. Remove the empire state building and that plot is still worth a lot of money.

The value of that lot is the surrounding infrastructure - transport, power, proximity of people, etc.

If one company owned the entire island as a single lot though, the unimproved land would be very low. If two companies owned the land, the unimproved value suddenly balloons.

That still doesn't answer the question "Why would I pay to improve the land if next year someone can simply outbid me and take the land off me?". Why wouldn't this world's Blackrock swoop in the instant a profitable lease comes up for auction?

> Why would I pay to improve the land if next year someone can simply outbid me and take the land off me?

You wouldn't pay. The building would be financed by debt and the debt would be attached to the land. You'd only pay the interest on that debt for as long as you maintain the lease on the land.

> Why wouldn't this world's Blackrock swoop in the instant a profitable lease comes up for auction?

Two reasons: Firstly, Blackrock could hypothetically do this in real life but they don't because they don't have the money. And secondly, from an ideological perspective they would have no motivation to. You are still thinking in terms of "owning land" and the idea that it's better to own more land. Under the new system, you can't own land, only rent it. Hence you want to minimise the amount of land you are leasing. If Blackrock gets the lease, they will lose money on the down payment, then lose money on the rent unless they can find something productive to do with the land. Any business they set up won't be competitive as they'll be paying more in rent than the surrounding businesses. Overpaying on rent is a strictly money-losing affair.

Even if I don't pay in money, I have to pay in time and effort. Does the bank lend me that too? Furthermore, no Blackrock cannot do this in real life because in real life you are not0 _required_ to sell a thing to anyone.

Let me outline this simple hypothetical

I lease a plot of land with a parking lot on it. I spend a year of my time building a quadplex on it, financed by a loan, and get tenants in. After all my expenses, I am making 10k a month in profit! Next year rolls around, tell me what stops Blackrock from taking the lease by offering the value of the lease+9.5k per month and making their money in quantity? Down payment doesn't matter because they have so much more in assets than me that they can make use of a plot of land that generates less profit than I need to live on.

Well then Blackrock would only make $500/month in profit. This is good, you found an actor willing to pay higher taxes for the same land and thus contribute more to the public purse.

The issue is that the value for all land in all cases trends towards zero. If you start making a profit you have to give the government all or most of it, if you lose money you just abandon the plot since the debt isn't attached to you. There's zero reason to ever do anything.

This is obvious? This seems like a terrible solution.

Lease durations are important here; if you're like England and have 99 year leases instead of freeholds or something, then that's great, it's basically ownership, but you get no unit pricing signal until the next 99 year renewal rolls around.

Practically speaking, from a Georgist perspective, ths isn't even useful because it doesn't convey anything about the unimproved value. What if you make improvements to the land, like build a house or something? Do you have to knock it down when you leave? Is the government the only entity that can build houses?

What do you do when Elon Musk decides he doesn't like you and outbids you on every parcel you try to get a lease on?

Individually unit price signals are indicated as infrequently as once a century. In practice the individual units turn over more frequently, and aggregate price signals are available as other units turn over far more frequently.

On turnover, it's interesting to note that real-estate mobility has fallen markedly in the United States in recent decades. Whereas ~20% of individuals moved in any given year from 1948 through the early 1970s, that figure has fallen to about 7% in the 2020s:

<https://paulkedrosky.com/americans-are-less-mobile-than-ever...>

That translates to a move every 5 years to roughly every 15 years, or three times the residency.

Ironically, among the factors contributing to this is being "stuck" by a mortgage, e.g., a house that's under water (more owed than the unit can be sold for), particularly in states without non-recourse ("walkaway") lending laws. This isn't the only factor, but it does contribute.

Removing private land ownership might well improve this situation.

Poison the land to reduce your tax basis.

That would be illegal.

> What do you do when Elon Musk decides he doesn't like you and outbids you on every parcel you try to get a lease on?

What does he do when he runs out of money for the down payments? Rich people can already price people out of industries in our existing economic system.

> then that's great, it's basically ownership

The entire point is to get rid of ownership, but there is no need to renew the lease at all. Just increase it based on increases in surrounding leases. Then allow the value to be negotiated down through voluntary renewal.

> What if you make improvements to the land, like build a house or something? Do you have to knock it down when you leave? Is the government the only entity that can build houses?

You build the house with debt, the debt stays with the land. If you leave, then the person who comes in after you has to pay for the construction of the house.

Rich people can price others out of industries, but in this scheme the ONLY seller is the government and sales are mandatory. In your scheme, Elon Musk can outbid you on your lease, there's nothing you can do about it, and you don't even get the proceeds from it.

First of all, this isn't a problem with voluntary renewals as I mentioned earlier in another thread (voluntary renewals is where the price is adjusted based on averages for the local area and only renewed if the owner thinks it's too high, down payments also discourage people from over-zealously renting when renewals happen). Secondly, the entire point of Georgism is that people who are under-performing are priced out of hoarding land. The only situation where it makes sense for Elon Musk to overpay on rent to force someone out of their land is when that person is a competitor of his, and this is illegal under existing anti-trust law. Otherwise, him outbidding owners on the lease is the whole point of the system.

I wish I lived in your world where wealthy people didn't try to ruin the lives of others for petty reasons.

My world has no wealthy people. It doesn't stop at government ownership of land.

Oh that sucks, I thought you were one of the fun homegrown econ crackpots with weird new ideas rather than just rehashing the same old insane theories.