The article goes into the advantages of a land value tax over other types of tax, including a property tax:
The big question land value taxes help answer is: How can a government raise funds without distorting choices and possibly leaving people worse off? If you tax income, it provides a disincentive to work. If you tax property, it provides a disincentive to improve the physical buildings on top of the land. Sometimes the tax is intentionally disincentivizing an activity — think carbon taxes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions or so-called “sin taxes” on tobacco. But there are also taxes governments want to levy to pay for valuable services without changing behaviors too much (or at all).
>>The main argument that I see against land value taxes is that land doesn't generate any income by itself, which forces people to pay money in situation where they might not have any income to do so.
Those people should be selling their land. We should not have a scarce natural resource sitting idle or under-utilized. From the article as well:
In small towns, vacant lots contribute to decline — and if there’s no valuable structure on a property, its delinquent landlords likely only pay a nominal property tax. This both lowers tax revenue and hurts neighborhood quality for everyone else.
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In Allentown, Pennsylvania, the system worked! According to a 2019 Strong Towns article, after the city adopted an LVT (through a split-rate system that still kept some property taxes in place) in 1996, “construction returned to the city: the number of taxable building permits surged past neighboring Bethlehem, market investment returned and capital improvement reappeared in city budgets. ... The losers in this trade were absentee owners of vacant lots, who had to shoulder much more of the burden.”
Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) is quoted touting the benefits of the tax: “The number of building permits in Allentown has increased by 32 percent from before we had a land tax.”*