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Comment by flenserboy | Hacker News Reader

In actual use it would, in most cases, ensure that people would not, could not have long-term ownership of land passed down from generation to generation. There would be significant social downstream effects & likely upheaval caused by this, & that would be compounded by the deleterious results of forcing more & more people to live shoulder to shoulder in the name of that maximum density you mention. No system of taxation is going to be perfect, or even nearly so, but some significantly increase the likelihood of abuse & unintended consequences of bad ideas allowed to run wild. All this without the need for malicious or corrupt action on the part of those in charge of the system, though it strikes me that a system such as the one proposed here would treble the power of officials to strike at groups & ways of life with which they disagree.

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Someone once remarked that American society is anti-Georgist, in that land speculation is actually seen as the only honorable engagement with real estate.

Having un-utilized land in your family generation after generation codes as noble, but economically this is much worse than owning an AirBnb or a vacation home or being a Chinese investor who collects vacant luxury condos, or any of the other boogeymen of housing discourse. These people hold one unit off the market, and in the meantime they maintain it or finance its construction. The landowner builds and holds wealth for nothing but parasitism.

So you're against someone who gets 100 acres, plants a house in the middle of it, & lives there simply because they want to, & they don't want to have to put up with the existence of neighbors? That's not parasitism — that's doing with one's property what one wishes to do. The economy is not the universe.

They are welcome to do so, but it would probably be cost prohibitive to do that in a highly desirable area. I’m not sure what the hangup is.

You are amazingly blasé about that fact that this would be using taxation to prevent people from using their own property as they see fit. This is utilitarianism run amok.

We prevent people from using their property as they see fit all the time via zoning. It is in fact mostly those with generational wealth that use this power.

Most people don't care about zoning, but they really do care about zoning changes that affect them.

Being told you can't live in your house anymore because it is now zoned commercial gets people riled up, and being told the same because it's now too expensive does the same.

It's a hot-button issue but you can defuse it by putting safeguards in, though they're not always successful - see eminent domain scandals.

Actually this entire construction is wrong: currently people who improve their land get penalized by higher taxes. If there are only land value and not property taxes, we are in fact increasing your freedom to make changes to your land without penalty.

Your argument ignores that changes to neighbors' property would then cause an increased burden to a land owner. This would not seem to be an improvement for freedom

It’s a finite resource. 100 acres of land being barely used should certainly come with a cost. Of all of the things that could be taxed, this one actually makes the most sense.

People aren't objecting to taxing 100 acres of Manhattan at rates that are associated with the value of the land there, people are upset about the idea that they could buy something, and then through no fault of their own, it becomes worth more and they have to sell because they can't afford to pay. Sure you get a ball of money as a consolation price, but you still had to move on.

But this is more of a straw man than a real objection; as there are various and sundry ways to resolve this (for fixed income, you can have property tax deferral until sale-after-death, you can have homestead exemptions, etc etc).

> buy something, and then through no fault of their own, it becomes worth more and they have to sell because they can't afford to pay

I fail to see why that’s a problem. Those taxes go to fund local services (like schools, police, fire, etc.) whose costs likely scale when the local cost of living and land values scale. Buying land doesn’t mean you should get to lock in the price you pay for these services for perpetuity.

Detroit is a city. They already try to encourage high-density living through the types of zoning they have. I don't see a fundamental issue with aligning their taxes to better facilitate their development goals.

Similar arguments would go for rural municipalities that might want to encourage multi-generational agricultural living, for example, if that's what you're getting at.

Huh? You have to pay property taxes now and those could end up being too high for subsequent generations to afford. That happens all the time and is a common reason why property gets subdivided. This is simply a question of whether the value of structures on that land should be included.

If anything a pure land value tax should be more predictable than a property tax, I got hit with a major property tax increase and looked into it, the town had calculated the new property tax based on an incorrect square footage and number of bedrooms for my house. After filing an appeal and going to court I got it fixed, but that was a more capricious process than if it was simply based on the value of the land under the house.

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