However, the same is generally true for land value taxes. The people who stand to lose most from land value taxes are large land owners who for whatever reason are sitting on unimproved or under-improved property.
Often, property just sits because the owner expects the value to continue rising, and wants to make sure to flip the property for as high a price as possible. There’s no pressure to immediately do anything useful with the property, so in extreme cases you end up with 50% parking lots. This image of Denver in the 70s would never occur with a proper land value tax: http://1p40p3gwj70rhpc423s8rzjaz.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/wp-... A hard core libertarian might argue that all those property owners should have the right to build parking lots if they want to, and it’s nobody else’s business. In my opinion though, a city where blanketing downtown in parking lots is the rational behavior has a pathologically broken city planning / tax system.
Yeah, it’s too bad that under a land value tax some individual homeowners who really like the tiny house they bought 40 years ago for $50,000 now need to sell it for $1,000,000 because they can’t afford the tax anymore. But these folks are actually pretty rare, and they just received a giant cash windfall, so they probably won’t get too much sympathy. If they really want to stay, they can surely take out a loan against the property, as evgen suggested.
There are plenty of other folks in our society who get screwed much worse, and are more worthy of public attention and concern.